The smaller stage of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow during a performance of the opera “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” on March 28. (Nanna Heitmann/Magnum Photos for The Washington Post)
Russian musicians, actors, writers and others who oppose the war are being exiled, while Putin compels artists remaining in Russia to demonstrate allegiance.
By Francesca Ebel and Mary Ilyushina
The Washington Post
July 29, 2024 at 6:35 a.m. EDT
MOSCOW — Not even the famed Bolshoi Theater has been spared President Vladimir Putin’s wartime push for Russian culture to prioritize patriotism over artistic freedom.
Several Bolshoi stars have fled the country. The theater no long tours in Europe and America. And its longtime director resigned last year and was replaced with a staunch Putin loyalist, after publicly admitting that its repertoire was censored to remove works by directors or choreographers who criticized the Ukraine invasion.
The Bolshoi is hardly the only iconic Russian institution under pressure. The longtime directors of Moscow’s Tretyakov and Pushkin fine art museums were also replaced.
Musicians, actors and writers who oppose the war are being hounded into exile or driven underground — while artists remaining in Russia are compelled by the government to echo a new nationalist zeal in their work. Those who actively voice support for the war are rewarded with fame and fortune. Movies or music glorifying the army or upholding patriotic values receive hefty government subsidies.
President Vladimir Putin’s push to re-engineer his country as a militarized superpower in conflict with liberal Western values is sterilizing Russia’s once-vibrant cultural landscape, artists say. By demanding that the new turbocharged patriotism pervade everything from fine art exhibits to rap music to ballet performances, the Kremlin is stifling creativity and squashing free expression.
The changes represent the starkest shift since the 1930s, when the Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin, adopted socialist realism as its official cultural doctrine — requiring artists to depict and promote Marxist-Leninist ideals in every form of their work.
“I am afraid what we are witnessing now may be the end of Russia as we have known it, the end of the cultural phenomenon that is associated with the term ‘Russian culture,’” the acclaimed Russian detective novelist Grigory Chkhartishvili — better known by his pen name, Boris Akunin — said in an interview from London, where he now lives.
Russian detective novelist Grigory Chkhartishvili — better known by his pen name, Boris Akunin — lives in exile in London. (Cyril Zannettacci/Agence VU for The Washington Post)
“Everyone has a curator,” the critic said. “We are fully returning to the 1930s era of control and censorship.”
A department within Russia’s Interior Ministry, known as Center E — named for its official task of countering extremism — plays a crucial role in the state’s control over the arts and often sends agents to sit among spectators at performances, according to musicians and directors.
For this article, The Washington Post interviewed more than a dozen writers and artists whose lives and work have been upended by the sweeping changes. Most who agreed to speak did so on the condition of anonymity because of the risk of retribution.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the state’s grip tightened, with tough laws barring any criticism of the war.
“The theaters themselves all of a sudden rushed to sign nonaggression pacts with the likes of the prosecutor general’s office, seeking immunity, staging plays for the soldiers and their kids,” said Nikita Betekhtin, a prominent Russian director who compiled a list of dozens of theaters that put the military’s Z symbol on their facades and playbills to cater to the authorities.
In 2022, the Yermolova Theater company in Moscow boasted on its website that it had signed an agreement “on mutual creative cooperation” with the Investigative Committee, Russia’s most powerful law enforcement body.
Betekhtin departed Russia in May 2022 after two of his plays were canceled; he now directs plays in Berlin. “Center E and FSB are incompatible with culture, but as they try to control it, we see all these Kafkaesque processes,” he said.
At the Bolshoi, home to the storied ballet company, the longtime director, Vladimir Urin, was replaced by Valery Gergiev, a Putin loyalist who also runs the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. Urin had supported Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014 but signed a petition opposing the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Gergiev, by contrast, has long been an unequivocal supporter of Putin and had an engagement at La Scala in Milan cut short when he refused to condemn the war.
Russian conductor and Mariinsky Theater director Valery Gergiev at an award ceremony at the Italian Embassy in Moscow in 2019. A loyalist of Vladimir Putin, he also took over the Bolshoi Theater in 2023. (Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)
Standing with Putin at a Kremlin awards ceremony in May, Gergiev said that while the Bolshoi and Mariinsky perform Mozart and Verdi at times, their emphasis must be on Russian composers: Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff, Glinka and Tchaikovsky. “The power of these greatest creators — it is absolutely unstoppable, it has no barriers, it has no borders,” Gergiev said, echoing Putin’s expansionist rhetoric.
Some Bolshoi dancers support the war through an internal Telegram group that raises money for soldiers. But with virtually no access to the major theaters worldwide, their careers are stagnating.
“Their global reputation is diminishing and now the theater has been forced to become more political,” said Alexei Ratmansky, a choreographer and director whose work was censored.“If you don’t prove that you’re on Putin’s side, your position is questioned.”
Museums also feel the tightening grip. Zelfira Tregulova, who since 2015 had overseen a refresh of the staid Tretyakov, was ousted following a complaint over the gallery’s “destructive ideology.” Her successor is a woman with links to the FSB.
A few weeks after Tregulova left the Tretyakov, Marina Loshak, who headed the Pushkin Museum for a decade — and whose daughter and nephew are journalists designated as “foreign agents” — announced she was “moving on.” Other museum chiefs, such as Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, publicly support the war.
Theater director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, who had criticized the war, were arrested in May 2023 for staging a play, “Finist, the Brave Falcon,” that prosecutors alleged “justifies terrorism.” They were convicted this month and each sentenced to six years in prison.
Also in spring 2023, arrest warrants were issued for a Ukrainian Oscar-nominated film producer, Alexander Rodnyansky, who had lived and worked in Russia for decades, and a prominent theater director, Ivan Vyrypaev. By then, Rodnyansky and Vyrypaev were out of Russia.
The Kremlin denied a request to interview Putin for this series. In a statement to The Post, the Culture Ministry confirmed that promoting patriotism is an official goal.
“Today culture is the most important resource for the socio-economic development of the entire country,” the ministry said. “Traditional values of our society are transmitted through the images in cinema, theater, music and other areas of creativity for Russian and foreign audiences. And one of the tasks of the Ministry of Culture is to create conditions for more and more works of art to appear in various genres and forms, which will favorably influence the worldview and life attitudes of the younger generation.”
The statement added: “The Ministry pays special attention to projects that emphasize spiritual, moral and patriotic values, as well as the cultural sovereignty of the peoples of Russia.”
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