Russia, the persecutor of Russian culture

In the libertarian Serbian public, Putin's persecution of Russian artists and Russian culture remains almost unnoticed, it does not cause any universal outrage, and in fact it is not thematized.

Touch everything, just don't have the freedom of creativity. This could be the slogan under which the prohibitions and cancellation of Russian culture are being talked about everywhere. Powerful texts have been written on the subject, television shows with learned guests have been broadcast, and the defense of freedom of thought and creation is in full swing. We are such people, we can do without daily necessities, we would even give up bread if necessary, just to preserve the right of artists to create in freedom. However, in the intense discussions on this unpleasant topic, barely three or four examples are mentioned, among which there are even failed attempts like the one at the University of Milan. There, the university administration tried to cancel the course on Dostoyevsky, but the higher management of this institution immediately prevented it.

The paucity of specific examples could lead a skeptic to think that the banning of Russian writers, composers, painters and their works is not such a widespread phenomenon, and that anti-Russian hysteria did not take such a massive turn, as is rumored. Miraculously, the libertarian public, which is unusually sensitive to bans, does not pay attention at all to a large country where Russian artists are regularly banned, and even more than that - censored, arrested, harassed, persecuted, put under house arrest and abused possible ways. Russian artists are really subjected to repression, and for years, and this is rarely, sporadically talked about in our country, as if nothing is happening.

Warrants and arrests

The country where Russian artists and cultural activists are exposed to the most radical persecution is Russia. Let's cite just a few characteristic examples, so that it doesn't sound like we're talking in vain. At the beginning of June, a warrant was issued in Russia for the popular science fiction writer Dmitry Glukhovsky, because he wrote what he thought and did not want to repeat official lies about the war in Ukraine (which cannot even be called a war, it is punishable by law, it is allowed to say special military operation only).

At the end of March, the artist and musician Aleksandra Skochilenko was arrested in St. Petersburg. Her crime is that she performed an artistic action in which she replaced price tags in a supermarket with pieces of paper with information about the war in Ukraine. On one of them it was written that the Russian army bombed the theater in Mariupol where several hundred people were hiding from shelling. Skočilenko is still in prison awaiting trial, the other day Amnesty International declared her a "prisoner of conscience" and requested her immediate release.
The reasons for persecution are not uniform, as one might think, on the contrary. The Russian state bans, censors and satirizes creative freedom on a variety of grounds. In mid-June, the painter Julija Cvetkova was put on trial for the paintings in which she painted the female genital organ. The prosecutor asked for three years and two months in prison for painting an inappropriate part of a woman's body. For the Russian court, it is "spreading pornography". On the same basis, they could judge Rubens, Degas, Picasso, Rodin, Schiele, Gauguin, Modigliani, Klimt and hundreds of other artists. And the famous painting The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet should be banned by law, when the painter got away with it and went unpunished, because - as the prosecutor said - "it harms the health, moral and spiritual education of minors".

Lawsuits and some poisoning
In Moscow, on June 12, two painters, Anton Maljgadzharov and Denis Mustafin, were arrested for carrying a banner with the inscription "Today is not my day" near the building of the Ministry of Defense (on Russia Day). After 15 days of detention, on leaving the detention unit, the artists were arrested again, although they did not carry any banner. Mustafin commented on the new arrest by saying: "Today is not my day." In June of last year, the artist Pavel Krisevich was arrested for a performance on Red Square, he has been in custody for a year, without trial or punishment, against all laws, including Russian ones. In Perm, the police arrested 83-year-old painter Ivan Koretnikov for participating in anti-war demonstrations, and then the court sentenced him to pay a fine of 30,000 rubles. Koretnikov was convicted for carrying placards with inconvenient inscriptions addressed to governor Mahonnin: "Mahonnin, how many funerals were there in our region?" and "Mahonnin, how many Perm soldiers are lying in graves?"

Director Kiril Serebrenikov spent years under house arrest, based on a staged trial. He was forbidden to receive visitors. Director Alexey German Jr. asked Putin to have mercy, because Serebrenikov might never see his parents again. Putin showed no mercy, so Kirill Serebrenikov's mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's, died without saying goodbye to her son. One of the most translated Russian writers, Vladimir Sorokin, was repeatedly persecuted. In 2002, because of the novel Blue Fat, he was accused of pornography, a months-long campaign was conducted against him, and in the end, Putin's Youth Youth publicly burned his books in front of the Bolshoi Theater. In 2017, Putinoids accused him of extremism, cannibalistic themes and a hostile attitude towards the values of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Writer Viktor Šenderović was also arrested in 2007 for carrying a banner with the inscription "Freedom to Kasparov". According to literary critic and writer Dmitri Bikov, slightly more radical methods of cancellation were applied - he was poisoned in April 2019. The failed assassination attempt, according to research by The Insider and Bellingcat, was organized by the same FSB officers who poisoned Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza.

Banned songs

In many cities across Russia, the performance of songs by various Russian musicians, for example the popular pop singer Zemfira, has been banned. Recently, in Saratov, a cover band played several of her songs at the opening of the tourist season, which angered the mayor and city officials. After a short deliberation, the list of prohibited music was expanded. In addition to performing songs from enemy countries (this includes all songs in English), all Russian bands that do not support aggression against Ukraine, have political themes or mention war in their lyrics are on the ineligible list.

Zemfira, the "Russian Janis Joplin", was targeted because she publicly opposes the war in Ukraine. She made a music video for her old song "Don't Shoot" with footage of destruction in Ukraine and anti-war protests in Russia. Then she immigrated to Paris, where with her partner Renata Litvinova she recorded a Russian version of Pete Seeger's anti-war song Where have all the flowers gone, and then a new song Meso, about the destruction of Mariupol. Those Russian women are really fearless women, they record songs in the Russian language in the rotten West, in the midst of anti-Russian hysteria and the cancellation of Russian culture.

The case of the Pussy Riot band from 2012 caused somewhat more attention in our liberal public. After the performance in the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow, where they sang the song-prayer to the Virgin Mary, drive Putin away, three members of this band were arrested. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Ekaterina Samutsevich were each sentenced to two years in prison. What the poet Vujica Rešin Tucić said on a similar occasion: "Poems are what is not allowed".

Unnoticed repression
These are just some examples of the permanent war that the Putin regime is waging against Russian culture and Russian artists. In this respect, today's Kremlin does not differ much from the past, only the methods have become somewhat milder in the meantime, in accordance with the times. In the golden age of repression and censorship, unfit writers, intellectuals and artists would simply be put in the Gulag or shot. In the libertarian Serbian public, Putin's persecution of Russian artists and Russian culture remains almost unnoticed, it does not cause any universal outrage, and in fact it is not thematized. Unlike those few cases of cancellation of Russian culture in the West, in which no one was arrested, convicted or poisoned, no one's books were even burned.

To be honest, the Serbian cultural elite and the public as a whole should not be blamed too much for not paying attention to the repression in Russia, they have also missed major crimes against culture. For example, almost no one noticed the shelling and burning of the Sarajevo City Hall, although this operation was carried out at their expense. If for 30 years libricide and culturocide that happened in the immediate neighborhood have escaped their attention, what would they know today about the regime's persecution of culture and artists in distant Russia.