Social Europe

  • EU Forward Project
  • YouTube
  • Podcast
  • Books
  • Newsletter
  • Membership

Don’t cancel Russian culture

Nina L Khrushcheva 1st July 2022

Refusing to engage with Russian culture will not change Putin’s calculations, let alone impel him to withdraw from Ukraine.

Before he wrote The Brothers Karamazov or Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death by the czarist government for allegedly participating in revolutionary activities, sent to a Siberian prison camp and forced to perform military service in exile. Nonetheless, it was after returning from Europe, where he spent years living in freedom, that Dostoevsky wrote, in A Writer’s Diary, that ‘everyone’ has ‘secretly harboured malice against’ Russians, that Russians ‘were followers and slaves’.

With many, if not most, cultural institutions in both Europe and the United States having effectively ‘cancelled’ Russian artists and culture, Dostoevsky’s words ring truer than ever. As Ian Buruma recently noted, Russians are now increasingly thinking that the Kremlin might have been right all along: Russia really is a ‘besieged fortress’, forever misunderstood and undermined by a hostile west.

Of course, there is something of a chicken-and-egg question at play here. The west’s rejection of Russian culture is a response to the launching by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, of a brutal ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. But that operation, Putin claims, was a response to western hostility—in particular, America’s efforts to turn Ukraine into ‘anti-Russia’. According to the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, the goal is not to eliminate Ukraine, ‘a dear and friendly nation’, but to prevent it from serving America’s ‘anti-Russian agenda’.

Tchaikovsky removed

Even Russians who do not fully buy the Kremlin’s Ukraine narrative are aghast at the readiness with which the west turned on all things Russian. After World War II, schools continued to teach the German language, orchestras continued to perform Bach and Mozart to full houses and people continued to read Goethe and Thomas Mann. All of German history and culture was not stained by the crimes of the Nazis.

Yet, since Putin launched his war on Ukraine, the Munich Philharmonic orchestra has fired its Russian chief conductor, Valery Gergiev, and the New York Metropolitan Opera has severed ties with Russia’s Bolshoi Theatre. Russian musicians have been excluded from international competitions. Some orchestras have even removed Tchaikovsky from their concert programmes.



Don't miss out on cutting-edge thinking.


Join tens of thousands of informed readers and stay ahead with our insightful content. It's free.



Another great Russian author, Vladimir Nabokov, described the tendency to dismiss a culture as a form of vulgarity. While cutting ties with Russian universities might seem less vulgar than smashing German stores on Nevsky Prospect in St Petersburg, as Russian nationalists did in the 1910s, the underlying sentiment is the same.

Caution urged

Even in Ukraine’s case, the dismissal of Russian art and culture seems to be based on flawed logic. Of course, if anyone is justified in rejecting Russia, it is Ukraine. But the decision to eliminate Russian literature and language from school curricula is not nearly as straightforward as ‘throwing out’ everything that ‘somehow connects us with the Russian empire’, as the Ukrainian deputy minister of education and science, Andriy Vitrenko, put it.

The Ukrainian film director Sergei Loznitsa has urged caution in cancelling Russian artists, partly because what makes something ‘Russian’ is not always clear. He was expelled from the Ukrainian Film Academy over his stance, but he makes a good point. In fact, the education ministry’s approach to Nikolai Gogol highlights this ambiguity.

Though Gogol was born in Ukraine—and his Ukrainian stories will be allowed—he wrote masterpieces like The Overcoat and Dead Souls while living in St Petersburg and Rome. These works will thus be banned from Ukrainian schools, depriving the country’s students of great art by a genius many Ukrainians claim as their own.

According to the Ukrainian education ministry, students would struggle to understand these works, not least because the ‘historical context’ is ‘complicated and distant’. But do Ukraine’s young people not deserve more credit than that? After all, they have been reading Russian literature for generations. And if it were true that Ukrainian students could not grasp complex or distant historical contexts, would they not also struggle to read Balzac, the Brontë sisters, Cervantes and Chaucer?

Vitrenko says Ukrainians have no need for ‘heavy works’ describing the ‘suffering of the Russian soul’. But surely the power of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace lies in their insights into the human condition, not just the Russian one. In any case, refusing to engage with Russian culture will not change Putin’s calculations or force him to withdraw his forces from Ukraine. What it will do is cut off a potential source of information about his objectives and motivations.

Tragic ending

In Nikolai Leskov’s short story ‘The Tale of the Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea’, Czar Alexander I orders his servant to find a Russian capable of improving upon a small mechanical flea the czar had brought back from London. Tula’s blacksmiths work for days, to no apparent avail. But one—‘Lefty’—eventually shows the czar that the Russians had managed to fit the flea with horseshoes, using tiny nails Lefty had forged. It was a masterful achievement, but what was the point?

Invading Ukraine does not serve Russia’s national interests. (A reasonably modern country in a globalised world cannot solve its problems by force.) But, like Alexander I in Leskov’s story, Putin has a point to make: Russia is a great power, capable of achieving things others cannot. Peter the Great—whom Putin has invoked in his effort to justify the Ukraine war—made a similar point in the 18th century, by reclaiming from Sweden the ‘Russian lands’ on the Baltic coast.

Like so many Russian works, Leskov’s story ends in tragedy. After astonishing the czar and the English alike, Lefty engages in a drinking competition with a British sailor in St Petersburg which ends with him being sent to a hospital for unknown people, owing to his lack of identification. There, Lefty dies, with little to show for the point he so impressively made. Perhaps Putin, too, should be reading Russian literature more closely.

Republication forbidden—copyright Project Syndicate 2022, ‘Don’t cancel Russian culture’

Nina L Khrushcheva
Nina L Khrushcheva

Nina L Khrushcheva is professor of international affairs at the New School in New York and co-author of In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones (St Martin's Press).

Harvard University Press Advertisement

Social Europe Ad - Promoting European social policies

We need your help.

Support Social Europe for less than €5 per month and help keep our content freely accessible to everyone. Your support empowers independent publishing and drives the conversations that matter. Thank you very much!

Social Europe Membership

Click here to become a member

Most Recent Articles

u4219834670 4977 8362 2b68e3507e6c 2 Europe’s Far Right Copies Trump—And It’s WorkingPaul Mason
u421983467645c be21 1cdd415d1c01 2 America’s Systemic Chaos Strategy: Europe Must Forge a New PathMario Pianta
u42198346ae 124dc10ce3a0 0 When Ideology Trumps Economic InterestsDani Rodrik
u4219834676e9f0d82cb8a5 2 The Competitiveness Trap: Why Only Shared Prosperity Delivers Economic Strength—and Resilience Against the Far RightMarija Bartl

Most Popular Articles

u4219834647f 0894ae7ca865 3 Europe’s Businesses Face a Quiet Takeover as US Investors CapitaliseTej Gonza and Timothée Duverger
u4219834674930082ba55 0 Portugal’s Political Earthquake: Centrist Grip Crumbles, Right AscendsEmanuel Ferreira
u421983467e58be8 81f2 4326 80f2 d452cfe9031e 1 “The Universities Are the Enemy”: Why Europe Must Act NowBartosz Rydliński
u42198346761805ea24 2 Trump’s ‘Golden Era’ Fades as European Allies Face Harsh New RealityFerenc Németh and Peter Kreko

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Spring Issues

The Summer issue of The Progressive Post is out!


It is time to take action and to forge a path towards a Socialist renewal.


European Socialists struggle to balance their responsibilities with the need to take bold positions and actions in the face of many major crises, while far-right political parties are increasingly gaining ground. Against this background, we offer European progressive forces food for thought on projecting themselves into the future.


Among this issue’s highlights, we discuss the transformative power of European Social Democracy, examine the far right’s efforts to redesign education systems to serve its own political agenda and highlight the growing threat of anti-gender movements to LGBTIQ+ rights – among other pressing topics.

READ THE MAGAZINE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

WSI Report

WSI Minimum Wage Report 2025

The trend towards significant nominal minimum wage increases is continuing this year. In view of falling inflation rates, this translates into a sizeable increase in purchasing power for minimum wage earners in most European countries. The background to this is the implementation of the European Minimum Wage Directive, which has led to a reorientation of minimum wage policy in many countries and is thus boosting the dynamics of minimum wages. Most EU countries are now following the reference values for adequate minimum wages enshrined in the directive, which are 60% of the median wage or 50 % of the average wage. However, for Germany, a structural increase is still necessary to make progress towards an adequate minimum wage.

DOWNLOAD HERE

S&D Group in the European Parliament advertisement

Cohesion Policy

S&D Position Paper on Cohesion Policy post-2027: a resilient future for European territorial equity

Cohesion Policy aims to promote harmonious development and reduce economic, social and territorial disparities between the regions of the Union, and the backwardness of the least favoured regions with a particular focus on rural areas, areas affected by industrial transition and regions suffering from severe and permanent natural or demographic handicaps, such as outermost regions, regions with very low population density, islands, cross-border and mountain regions.

READ THE FULL POSITION PAPER HERE

ETUI advertisement

HESA Magazine Cover

With a comprehensive set of relevant indicators, presented in 85 graphs and tables, the 2025 Benchmarking Working Europe report examines how EU policies can reconcile economic, social and environmental goals to ensure long-term competitiveness. Considered a key reference, this publication is an invaluable resource for supporting European social dialogue.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Ageing workforce
The evolution of working conditions in Europe

This episode of Eurofound Talks examines the evolving landscape of European working conditions, situated at the nexus of profound technological transformation.

Mary McCaughey speaks with Barbara Gerstenberger, Eurofound's Head of Unit for Working Life, who leverages insights from the 35-year history of the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS).

Listen to the episode for free. Also make sure to subscribe to Eurofound Talks so you don’t miss an episode!

LISTEN NOW

Social Europe

Our Mission

Team

Article Submission

Advertisements

Membership

Social Europe Archives

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Miscellaneous

RSS Feed

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

BlueskyXWhatsApp