Ukraine shouldn’t cancel Russian culture

Kyiv National Opera House (Photo: iStock)

Nigel Jones

Ukraine shouldn’t cancel Russian culture

It is entirely understandable that the barbaric attack on Ukraine launched a year ago by Vladimir Putin
has sparked enraged reactions among Ukrainians as they endure Russian missile strikes and await
Putin’s much anticipated spring offensive.

Attacking the culture of an enemy nation has a long and ignoble history, and it rarely ends well

But in spurning and destroying Russia’s incomparable musical and literary culture the long-suffering
Ukrainians are hitting out at the wrong enemy.

The Times reports that Kyiv Opera House is deleting the music of the Russian composers Tchaikovsky
and Prokofiev from a ballet, The Snow Queen, that is currently in rehearsal. The work’s director Serhii
Skuz calls Tchaikovsky ‘a symbol of Russian culture and Russian aggression’ and cites that as the
reason for cancelling him. 

At the same time, books by great Russian authors like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev are being
withdrawn from Ukraine’s bookshops and libraries to be pulped and recycled, and a statue of the
Russian Empress Catherine the Great in Odessa has been removed and hidden in a museum basement.

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This extension of the war on the battlefields to an attack on culture is completely comprehensible in
view of the agony that Russian aggression has inflicted on Ukraine over the past 12 months. But it
sends the wrong signal to both friend and foe.

Sadly, attacking the culture of an enemy nation has a long and ignoble history, and it rarely ends well.
Britain, too, was guilty of such cultural vandalism when the music of German composers was banned
in both world wars (although the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony were later broadcast as
symbolic of the Allied ‘V for victory’ slogan).

The worst example of cultural warfare was carried out in 1934 on Berlin’s Opernplatz by the Nazi
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels who organised a mass bonfire of books by Jews and other
writers that the Nazis disapproved of, including Freud, Marx and Thomas Mann. An earlier German
author, Heinrich Heine, had correctly prophesied ‘those who burn books will end by burning people’
and so it proved.

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The distinguished Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim bravely rose above cultural warfare in 2001
when he defied the unofficial Israeli ban on the music of the anti-Semitic German composer Richard
Wagner – Hitler’s favourite composer – by conducting Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde before an Israeli
audience. Though some walked out, most stayed, and Barenboim was warmly applauded for his
courage.

However strongly Ukrainians feel under the heat of Russia’s attacks, they need to know that it was one
man and not a country who ordered the destructive assault on them last February, and that Vladimir
Putin represents the worst, not the best, of Russia culture. They should not stoop to his level.