Banning sports stars and musicians fits the Kremlin’s narrative that the war in Ukraine is a war for national survival.
Wimbledon’s resolution to ban Russian tennis players, adding the global no. 2 Daniil Medvedev, is crazy about Russophobia. This implies that Britain sees all Russians as complicit in the movements of the Russian state and Vladimir Putin’s attacks in Ukraine. This follows several European countries that have discontinued visas for Russians. Grip that abandons its proclaimed liberal values and behaves like the pale shadow of the Russian leader himself.
Russian civil rights scholar Dmitry Dubrovsky has been declared a “foreign agent” through the Russian state, putting him at risk of imprisonment and worse. He was in Prague with his circle of relatives at the time of the invasion of Ukraine. Your permit expires next month, but all the countries in which you have applied for residency, including Britain, limit your stay to a few weeks or order you to return to Russia to reapply.
It is one thing for UNESCO to “postpone” Russia’s ridiculous reception to the World Heritage Committee, when that country has destroyed historical sites throughout Ukraine. But the West should deny a safe haven to those fleeing the Russian dictatorship. During the Cold War, Western Europe and the United States opened their arms to many Russian intellectual, cultural and sporting figures, seeing them as a force for mutual understanding and prospective reconciliation. Shostakovich and Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and Rostropovich, Kasparov and Akhmatova were celebrated in the west. In the darkest hours of Russia, the usual guardians of European civilization and freedom were celebrated.
Economic sanctions against Russia are all the rage, their escalation penetrating deeper and deeper into the arts, scholarship and sport. The Bolshoi Ballet was cancelled at Covent Garden, the Cannes Film Festival refused to settle for official Russian delegations and a Cardiff orchestra banned Tchaikovsky. Previous cancelled performances by Russian piano virtuoso Alexander Malofeev, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal allowed Daniil Trifonov to perform last month; however, the open-air pickets greeted their audience with symptoms proclaiming, “I bought a price ticket = I killed a child. “as insufficiently condemning.
Art directors don’t seem to realize that the fact that Russians are attacking their president threatens them, their careers, and their families. The hysteria echoes Graham Greene’s reminder that dachshunds struck the Great War because they were the Kaiser’s favorite dog.
The end of the Bolshoi tour this summer in London stripped thousands of other people of the magic of Russian dance and disadvantaged the artists of the work. Just like the disappearance of the opera scene of Anna Netrebko and Valery Gergiev. It doesn’t matter if they are for or against Putin, the idea turns out to be good: they are Russians. British Culture Minister Nadine Dorries is even rushing to board Boris Johnson’s war bus, claiming that the arts are her “third front in the Ukrainian conflict. “Ban Prokoviev from the Proms?
Sanctions have militarized the policy of gestures. They seek to universalize the filthy violence of war. Only the murmur of a declamatory name and a victim of selection matters, the immaterial consequences. threat to the user. Estonian conductor Paavo Järvi pushed for him to abandon his musicians from the Russian Youth Orchestra who “felt confused, torn, surprised and as opposed to this war as I was. “What’s the point of punishing them?
If art is about opening minds and stimulating argumentation, then the last thing it does is refuse to have interaction with the enemy, with disagreement. Those who deplore Putin’s censorship of his critics use every channel to overthrow it. They partner with those reviews, provide contact, friendship, hospitality, and visas. However, all they provide is ostracism.
There is no evidence that cultural sanctions have any effect on Putin’s decisions in this war. When the Cardiff Philharmonic cancelled the 1812 Overture, it also cannot believe that Putin was crying with remorse for bombing Kiev. good people, but it reinforces her much-vaunted thesis that the West is organizing an aggression not only opposed to her but also opposed to everything Russian. They are proud people, he says, who now deserve to protect the homeland from the entire West. .
Western sanctions are based on the thesis that Putin and his entourage are susceptible to misfortune and public opinion. It is true that they manipulated the media to paint the war as a war of Russian survival, but the more the West seeks to erase Russian culture, the more credible this depiction will seem.
We seem to have lost confidence in the ability of culture to galvanize politics. He no longer supports the arts as a conversation, a means of human contact, or even a way to tell Russians what is going on in Ukraine. Where communication and hospitality are needed, all that is presented is the hateful Kafkaesque attitude of fashionable Britain towards foreigners.
Simon Jenkins is a columnist for The Guardian