The editor-in-chief of PostPravda.Info, Petr Kashuvara, asked me to address a difficult question: how should we relate to Russian culture today, from the perspective of the war that Russia is waging against Ukraine? I am writing primarily for a European and American audience – Ukrainians, I suspect, need no additional explanations. They already understand everything. This is not an easy subject to write about. I grew up in Siberia and for many years contributed to Russian culture through my philosophical work. Now I have consciously chosen the side of Ukraine. As I began drafting this article, news arrived of a missile strike on a residential building in Ternopil: around a hundred wounded, thirty-three killed, six of them children. At such a moment, it is difficult to reason calmly – but I will try nonetheless.
The Ukrainian Position on Russian Culture in Light of the War
After all the crimes Russia has committed, any representation of it – in sports, science, or culture – is unacceptable to Ukrainians. In the context of a war of annihilation, no other attitude could have emerged. A different question, however, is how Europeans, who continue to live normal and peaceful lives, should relate to Russian culture. History has known many states that waged wars of extermination and committed monstrous crimes, yet we do not reject the cultures of those societies.
Cultural creativity requires freedom, and the Russian state has, throughout its history, remained in conflict with culture, compelling creative people to serve state ideology. At best, one was offered a choice between obscurity in poverty and state recognition; at worst, between freedom and the Gulag. As a result, many tried to adapt to the authorities, sacrificing both creative freedom and personal conviction. In this way, culture became ideologically mobilized – transformed into an instrument of war.
One can draw the following analogy. Every person is a unique individual, yet if Russia drafts him into an army sent to kill Ukrainians, he will be regarded as an enemy. Since Russia is waging an ideological war and has mobilized Russian culture for that purpose, attitudes toward that culture in Ukraine will likewise be hostile.
Soviet Culture as an Instrument of Ideological War
Even in peacetime the Soviet Union lived in a state of ideological war, and school education was fully subordinated to its aims. Teachers expected from us not so much an understanding of the artistic design as the ability to extract the “correct” ideological subtext: to explain what views a character expresses and what position the author takes. Today the ideological concept has changed – instead of Soviet culture we now have Russian culture – but the essence remains the same. Russia uses this concept as ideological weaponry in the war against Ukraine. In turn, Ukrainians reject Russian culture, and this is a fact of the logic of a war for survival. However, I see a path in destroying this ideological weapon itself through the deconstruction of the concept of culture.
Culture is a space for the creative self-realization of the individual based on the highest values. A society in which everything is regulated only by social norms unrelated to cultural values is the society of our closest relatives in the animal world – chimpanzees. If we live only in accordance with social instincts, we will return to a primitive state.
During my school years, it seemed to me that the Soviet system instilled higher values that restrained the primitive social instincts of students. But already in the upper grades I realized I was mistaken. The Soviet system did not offer values; it offered ideological directives intended to manipulate social instincts. By the time I entered the philosophy faculty, I understood that these directives would not allow me to teach philosophy or publish my own works.
For me, philosophy is the embodiment of personal life experience addressed to what is eternal and universal. I sought this in Russian, German, Indian, Chinese, and other philosophical traditions. However, the Soviet system allowed only Marxist philosophy, effectively prohibiting any other way of thinking. Writers, artists, film directors, and scholars in the humanities experienced a similar conflict with the Soviet system. Many compromised – and in doing so killed their own talent.
When we watch brilliant films or read outstanding literary works of the Soviet era, we usually do not think about the difficult struggle that creative people waged against the norms of Soviet society in order to preserve small islands of free cultural space. Very often this struggle ended in defeat, and then authors mutilated their works, adapting them to ideological directives. Genuine cultural creativity exists in the dimension of “the personal – the universal.” The Soviet system, however, saw in culture only “socially significant” content, thereby substituting culture with its imitation in the form of an ideological construct.
The Ideological Concept of Russian Culture
The collapse of the Soviet Union opened for me the possibility of teaching philosophy and publishing. Censorship was banned, and access to cultural heritage was free. In those years I believed that Russia would become a normal democratic country – like Poland or Ukraine. But when, in the first parliamentary elections, a party of imperial and chauvinistic orientation won, I realized that the prospect of fascism was entirely real. When the first Russo-Chechen war began, it became clear that we had to fight with all our strength to prevent the rise of a fascist dictatorship. And when the second war began, I understood that we had lost, and that Russia no longer had a future.
In the early 1990s, the Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed enormous respect in society for having survived and preserved the religious tradition during the years of Soviet rule. However, I noticed that each generation of students regarded the ROC a little worse than the previous one, and within twenty years deep respect had turned into total rejection: young people increasingly saw that the Church was offering not religion but religious ideology.
Similar changes occurred in my own attitude toward Russian culture. At first, I perceived it as a space of free creativity untouched by communist ideology. I considered Russian nationalists who justified their imperial claims with the idea of a “great Russian culture” to be fringe figures. Ten years later it turned out that my understanding of culture – as existing in the dimension of “the personal – the universal” – had itself become marginal, while an ideological, imperial understanding of Russian culture had solidified in the public consciousness. Today this ideological construct has become a weapon of war against Ukraine and, in the long run, against all of European civilization.
Deconstructing the Concept of Russian Culture
For Ukrainians who are resisting both military and ideological aggression, any form of representation of Russia is unacceptable. But how should representatives of other European nations, who are not currently at war, relate to Russian culture? – It is obvious that any cultural programs that in one way or another represent present-day Russia as a state must be curtailed: the activities of Russian cultural centers (“Russian Houses”), the Russkiy Mir Foundation, Rossotrudnichestvo, Rosconcert, and similar institutions. But is that enough? – I believe that a consistent deconstruction of the ideological concept of Russian culture in the public consciousness is also necessary.
It is impossible to carry out such a deconstruction without losses, and this means that we will have to stop speaking about a Russian cultural tradition. However, this should in no way affect one’s personal attitude toward creators, toward the authors of cultural works. It is simply that this attitude should not depend on ideological directives or on any particular conceptualization of culture. For this, it is enough not to evaluate a writer or artist from a social or political standpoint and to stop searching in their work for the “correct” or “hostile” ideological position.
From the perspective of the Soviet school, I am committing the principal sin: I view cultural creativity in the dimension of “the personal – the universal,” without looking back at its ideological burden or its social significance. Perhaps in the conditions of the ideological war unleashed by Russia, someone might even accuse me of “desertion.” But only in this way can one avoid resembling the enemy – defeat the dragon without becoming a dragon oneself.
I do not expect a cultural creator to be a teacher of life, a moral exemplar, or a bearer of the “correct” ideological stance. Creators are people just like everyone else: with their weaknesses, prejudices, and selfishness. Their only difference is that they wage a struggle for a space of personal creativity, free from the dictates of social instincts. And not all of them manage to preserve this freedom. Many compromise with the demands of power or society, and thereby destroy their talent. Nothing can be done: such is the thorny path of all cultural creativity within society.
And since a misanthropic dictatorship has become established in Russian society, one that imposes its own understanding of “Russian culture,” it follows that this understanding must be abandoned – including for the sake of preserving the very possibility of free creativity. As for the contradictory nature of any particular figure of Russian culture – let each person decide for themselves how to relate to it.
Read too: Putin’s New Imperial Project – Assimilation of Ukrainians and the Canceling of Ukrainian Heritage
