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Putin�s Last Realm to Conquer: Russian Culture



By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: December 1, 2007
MOSCOW � The fight is long over here for authority over the security services, the oil business, mass media and pretty much all the levers of government. Vladimir Putin�s Kremlin, notwithstanding some recent anti-government protests, has won those wars, hands down, and promises to consolidate its position in parliamentary elections. But now there is concern that the Kremlin is setting its sights on Russian culture.

James Hill for The New York Times
The director Nikita Mikhalkov was persuaded to film a Putin election advertisement and a birthday tribute to the president.
Just a few weeks ago, the Russian culture minister censored a state-sponsored show of Russian contemporary art in Paris. Criminal charges have been pressed during the last couple of years against at least half a dozen cultural nonconformists. A gallery owner, a rabble-rouser specializing in art that tweaks the increasingly powerful Orthodox Church and also the Kremlin, was severely beaten by thugs last year. Authorities haven�t charged anyone.
At the same time, the Kremlin is courting some big-name cultural figures like Nikita Mikhalkov, the once-pampered enfant terrible filmmaker of Soviet days, today a big promoter of Mr. Putin.
There are signs of a backlash. In late October, a television debate program pitted Viktor Yerofeyev, a prominent Russian author, against Mr. Mikhalkov, who with a few others wrote a fawning letter, supposedly in the name of tens of thousands of artists, asking the president to stay in power beyond the constitutional limit of his term in March. �Have you heard of cult of personality?� Mr. Yerofeyev asked him.
Mr. Mikhalkov fumbled. Mr. Yerofeyev won the program�s call-in vote by a large margin, an event almost unheard of on today�s Kremlin-controlled television.
If you can call any television debate show a touchstone in recent Russian cultural history, that was certainly it. The show�s rating went through the roof. Dozens of writers and artists signed petitions lambasting Mr. Mikhalkov for presuming to speak for them. A battle line over culture had clearly been drawn.
These are not Soviet times, it�s worth remembering, and artists, actors, filmmakers and writers here can do and say nearly whatever they want without fear of being shipped off to a gulag. Stepan Morozov and Aleksei Rozin, who play Michael Bakunin, the 19th century anarchist, and Nicholas Ogarev, the poet, in the Russian production of Tom Stoppard�s �Coast of Utopia,� were backstage one recent night extolling how free and lively Russian theater was.
Theoretically, so long as the center of power remains unaffected, anything is allowed on the margins, where serious culture mostly operates (Russian pop culture seems not to ruffle any feathers, or maybe it doesn�t want to, and television is firmly under the Kremlin�s thumb).
Even so, some prominent artists and writers, cognizant of a long, dark history of repression that Russians know only too well, and especially wary of the grip the church is gaining on the state, have been expressing deep anxiety about the government�s starting to encroach on artistic freedom the way it has taken on other aspects of society.
�They�re creating, quickly, a kind of Iran situation, a new-old civilization, an Orthodox civilization,� Mr. Yerofeyev said at his apartment the other evening, from inside the classic thick plume of cigarette smoke that still seems to engulf every Russian intellectual. �The climate has totally changed. What was allowed the day before yesterday now is dangerous. They don�t repress like the Soviets yet, but give them two years, they will find the way. That call-in vote was a shock to the authorities, who thought everything was stable and prepared for the elections.�
Well, Iran�s clearly over the top, but Mr. Yerofeyev is not alone in expressing fear. �Our future is becoming our past,� the well-known novelist Vladimir Sorokin told me. His books, a few years ago, were destroyed and stuffed into a big papier-m�ch� toilet bowl devised by some ultra-nationalist youth groups. Mr. Sorokin�s most recent novel foretells a Russia that has fallen into an ancient state of authoritarian rule. �We are returning to Ivan the Terrible�s era,� he predicted, speaking about the church and the general inward-turning, anti-Westernism afoot.
Mr. Mikhalkov, on the set of his next movie, which is a military base outside Moscow, responded to these predictions with disdain: �Listen to what�s on television and radio now and tell me, what limitations do you see?� He tried not to look exasperated. Artists are perfectly free, he said. �My view is simply that the modus operandi of Russia is enlightened conservatism,� meaning hierarchical, religion-soaked, tradition-loving.
That�s certainly the official line. Then again, it�s said that Russia has never dealt with its past the way Germany has, and indeed when the Kremlin culture minister tried to halt the exhibition of contemporary Russian art in Paris this fall, calling what he considered the offending works in it a �disgrace� to Russia, he was just echoing old-school Soviet rhetoric and bringing exactly that onto the country, disgrace. The show opened anyway (apparently some high-level French government intervention saved the day), but not before dozens of works were pulled, including one, �Era of Mercy,� by the Blue Noses group showing two Russian policemen kissing in a birch grove.