The rupture in Russian politics and culture

Author: Viktor Erofeyev

We have all heard of the Napoleonic wars, named after the French emperor. Now we shall talk about Vladimir Putin’s war, simply because there is no other term for it. Putin will go down in world history as the Russian commander-in-chief who, for no apparent reason, attacked Ukraine and launched a full-scale war there, full of bloody battles and paradoxes.

The first paradox is that Putin forbade his subjects to call the war in the centre of Europe a war, but ordered it to be described instead, somewhat frivolously, as a “special military operation”. Those rare daredevils in Russia who have the audacity to call it a war are subjected to all sorts of repression. George Orwell is known to have been the sarcastic master of totalitarian fantasies, but even he would have failed to scale the heights of such a reversal of reality. Judge for yourself. According to Russian state television, the devastation of Mariupol is the work of the Ukrainian army. And Bucha is even more preposterous. According to the same broadcasters, it is a theatrical production, with the corpses of Ukrainian civilians (killed by Ukrainian soldiers themselves) laid out in the streets, most likely arranged by some clandestine Western stage directors. If this is the case, those same stage directors are quite simply men of genius. But do the Russian people believe these stories? And here we have the next paradox – the vast majority of the Russian people trust Putin and in everything that happens at his command. Essentially, Putin is the first people’s president in the history of Russia. The vulgarly emotional rhetoric of this one-time street urchin from an underprivileged Leningrad family makes him “their own”.

According to Putin’s original plan, the war was supposed to be over in a matter of days and to end with the capture of Kyiv and the replacement of the Ukrainian government with pro-Russian puppets. And here again we encounter a paradox. The Ukrainian army, weak compared with Russian tribal might, albeit strongly motivated, succeeded in defending Kyiv. The Russians retreated. Why? The simple reason is that the Kremlin security officials had been reporting to Putin what he needed to hear: Russians would be greeted in Ukraine with garlands. Flowers even appeared in staged television coverage at the start of the war, but quickly disappeared. The war has dragged on. Paradoxically though, Putin is now telling the public that the war (that is, the special military operation) is going according to plan. This has to be an exceedingly ingenious plan! Apparently, it includes the planned death of eight Russian generals and the prearranged refusal to return to Russia the corpses of a significant number of fatalities – they continue to fill Ukrainian refrigerated train carriages. Is it even worth bringing them back? After all, if it is admitted that they have died in action, the state will have to pay out seven million roubles to each family – otherwise they are simply considered missing in action and no pay-out is necessary.

You will scream: “This is nonsense! Putin has gone mad!”

Why in the end did Vladimir Putin go to war with Ukraine? He was convinced that if he did not, Ukraine, with the support of NATO, would attack Russia. Where did he get this idea? There are two different answers. The first is about cunning. Putin sees his divine destiny in returning Russia’s borders to those of the Soviet Union in order to restore its superpower status before sitting down with the Americans at the negotiating table and carving up the world. In short, Yalta II. In order to achieve this, he declares the goal of the war to be the “denazification” of Ukraine, even though not a single high-ranking neo-Nazi has been named. According to the Kremlin, President Zelensky is a clown surrounded by (unnamed) neo-Nazis, and these neo-Nazis are backed by Europe and America, which have also become neo-Nazi entities. You will ask: how is that? The answer is quite simple: everybody has turned into a neo-Nazi since everybody hates Russia and has become a Russophobe (because Russia under Putin has been rising from her knees and is growing strongly!) and they are eager to divide Russia’s natural resources among themselves. You will scream: “This is nonsense! Putin has gone mad!” And Putin replies: “It is Europe that has gone crazy.”

The second reason for the monstrously bloody war is Putin’s fear that Ukraine will end up in NATO and will be a threat to Russia, because NATO missiles launched from the Kharkiv region will be capable of reaching Moscow in a matter of minutes. However, the paradox is that the two traditionally neutral countries, Sweden and Finland, deeply disturbed by Putin’s barbaric war, have turned to NATO to ask for acceptance into their club. This should not have been unexpected, and if Kyiv had been taken immediately, probably no one would have made a squawk. But this is no longer the case. And since, as Putin claims, he has a planned operation that goes on and on, it was fatally naïve of him not to consider the desire of the Nordic countries to join NATO. As for the new line of contact between NATO and Russia, the length of the Finnish-Russian border is 1,300 kilometres, from which Saint Petersburg can be reached during winter in a leisurely cross-country skiing jaunt.

To summarise: paradox upon paradox, and if the war drags on, Switzerland will also decide to become a NATO player. But the main paradox of Putin’s war is that it cannot have a happy ending. Putin thought this war up, took virtually sole responsibility for it, and if he wins, he will want to go further. Where to? Well, for example, to Kazakhstan. Or he will decide to “denazify” Poland – voices crying out for this can already been heard in the Kremlin. But Poland is a NATO country! So what? Putin is not averse to taking risks. After all, Ukrainians, according to Putin, are the same as Russians, but he is not afraid to destroy them while liberating them from the neo-Nazis who were conceived in his head. If Putin wins, the party of war in Russia will destroy the entire fifth column – everyone who thinks against Putin’s grain. If Putin loses the war – no, Putin never knows how to lose anything. Victory is the principal word in his vocabulary. But still, if he feels that something is going wrong, he will pull from his trousers a tiny little nuclear bomb and drop it somewhere in Ukraine.

Then, of course, everyone will be scared and what should we do? Perhaps this will be the point at which Switzerland will consider it essential to join NATO and Putin will be given Yalta II by the Americans. Or, instead, the Americans might scurry to look for Putin in his bunkers to have a final one-to-one chat with him, presenting him as the new Gaddafi for whom Putin at one time had felt so sorry. You will ask: is there a more optimistic scenario? Well, this question can only be put to one player that currently maintains pro-Russian neutrality and to which Putin gives serious consideration. That player’s name is China. But so far China has stayed silent.

What will happen to those who dare to speak up about the war?

Those who are not silent are the persecutors of Russian culture. The blow to the finest theatres in Moscow is a natural extension of the special military operation, which, in its search for enemies, found them deep in the cultural underbelly. Not only were the ideological positions of theatre directors a target, so were their dreams of future productions. Beneath the mask, a position so familiar to me, punishment came via the non-renewal of contracts, a rocket attack of hatred, fear and cowardice. There are real victims. Among them, first of all, was the Gogol Centre. It had been created by Kirill Serebrennikov, but the Moscow Department of Culture renamed it the Gogol Theatre, a label reminiscent of its senile past.

What will happen to the shows and actors of the Gogol Centre who dare to entertain their own (different from the official) opinions about the war in Ukraine? What will be banned? Who will be expelled? In terms of the scale of the onslaught on culture, our authorities are already akin to the Bolsheviks and their coup. They might even go one better than the memorable persecution of the enemies of the state. That time they came up with the category of pro-Soviet “fellow travellers” – whereas what is needed now is not mere loyalty but dog-like devotion. One absolutely horrendous victim of the shelling turned out to be Iosif Raikhelgauz, the long-term director of the School of Modern Play Theatre on Trubnaya. The entire Moscow theatrical world knows Iosif as an inventive stagecraft master who devoted his whole life to creative art. One has to be a truly aggressive ignoramus to raise a hand against such a master. And finally, the legendary Sovremennik: interfering with the creative matters of such a theatre is an unforgivable iniquity.

Who took these devastating decisions and why, essentially an affront to and humiliation of culture, and which replicate the dark days of tsarism and communism? One can make various assumptions.

Most likely, this is a rehearsal for the great spectacle entitled The Successor. Repressions against the entire liberal camp, including the aforementioned theatres, represent the palpable desire of the security forces to prevent another historical thaw which would be unlikely to spare them. The party of war finds in culture breaches of the peace, not particularly stable as it is, fragile and at some point capable of gathering into a storm. According to the Chekists, the Successor X, who will eventually appear for purely biological reasons, should continue the policy of the “besieged fortress”, and theatre, if it is a real theatre, is an open platform striving for dialogue by its very essence. In our country, culture traditionally opposes the lawlessness and impunity of the upper classes. It can be broken or bought, but then it will cease to be a culture.

Censorship dresses itself up in all sorts of formal objections

The theatres also came under fire for a purely formality on account of failing to comply with wartime laws. There has been no official war for more than a hundred days now and wartime laws are becoming more and more stringent. In order to shut down an exhibition or a theatre, censorship still dresses itself up in all sorts of formal objections, but soon it will be possible to act with impunity. The desire to curry favour with the president, who suggests that songs should be composed about his valiant liberators, is growing by leaps and bounds. The history of the country has been turned into a carousel.

But in addition to obliteration, there is also a recruitment method – there are many professionals in that business among the elite. This presents a famous person with an unbearable choice: leave their post, give up their life’s work, or collaborate. It is a form of torture, essentially sadistic torture. The directors of the theatres above have apparently rejected the deal – and have been punished, although a soft rollback may occur or is already emerging. For example, Dmitry Astrakhan, a fairly well-known director, obviously not an enthusiast of the war, was appointed to replace Raikhelgauz, but we shall see what will happen to him and whether a failure (if any) of professional ethics has taken place. In Soviet times, an equally talented director, Anatoly Efros, was appointed to supplant Yuri Lyubimov at the Taganka Theatre. He preserved the theatre, but the aftertaste of his acceptance of the proposal to replace Lyubimov lingered.

But there are also straightforward examples of genuine or ostensible surrender. The recent case of Mr Hermitage, aka Piotrovsky, is a valuable intermixture of villainy and camouflaged defiance. Losing his brainchild museum is plainly not a joke. Clearly no person is perfect and is sometimes prone to compromises, which our homeland has long been teaching us. That is why when the director of the country’s greatest museum talks in an interview with a government newspaper about the imperial nature of the Russian mentality and the war as national self-affirmation, it is unclear whether he is secretly mocking the authorities, playing along with them, or – under the guise of surrender – he is simply talking about things that are closer to Chaadaev than to the president. Whatever the case, he said it. The liberals first voiced their outrage; then after a while forgot about it. Both his post and the collection, on the age-old humanity of art, were saved and kept under Mr Hermitage’s wing.

No matter how events on the cultural front continue to develop, it is clear that we are dealing with a fracture of our culture, with its deconstruction. Some are for, others are against, others again are undecided – a familiar picture of Russian reality. But when it comes to wartime laws, in the heads of those in power diversity of opinion turns into a call for its elimination. If you want to be silent, be silent, but do not demand public money and support from the Department of Culture. Those who are deeply disillusioned will be labelled “foreign agents” and fine fellows like Mr Hermitage will be protected and buttered up. It cannot be otherwise in our tsardom-state. Shame about the fine theatres though.

Viktor Erofeyev is a Russian writer.