During the first world war, there were society ladies in London whose proud anti-German war work was to stroll in the park each day and throw stones at dachshunds. With that German name, and because the poor creatures were the preferred pets of the Kaiser, they were a perfect target (and so conveniently positioned, almost at ground level). It was essential, after all, to do one’s bit.
Stories of this ritual sausage-dog-abuse could be nothing more than urban myth. But a myth resonant enough to have lasted down the years as a vivid metaphor for the silliest possible response to a war, designed only to make the perpetrator feel good.
Never — never — would I suggest an equivalence between vertically challenged lapdogs and fine artists or performers from Russia, and I apologise in advance for any offence to them. (Or indeed to the dachshunds.) But that ridiculous story keeps popping into my mind whenever I hear of yet another cancellation or sanction by a western arts organisation against an artist who simply happens to have a Russian name, or to hold that nationality, even if they have no other affiliation to the current regime in Moscow.
Those in official positions — members of state companies such as the Bolshoi, or the senior staff of state museums, say — are quite different: they, and bad luck on them, are supported by their country and representing their country, just as Olympic athletes or Eurovision contestants are, so of course they are non grata for the duration. The same goes for rich Russians who have donated to our arts institutions with money that seems tainted by its unsavoury provenance and links to Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Those exclusions go almost without saying. And as for artists who’ve spoken out in favour of the regime — well, ’nuff said. But when the cancellations are purely on the basis of nationality — as with piano competitions in Ireland and Canada, say — that’s surely just a knee-jerk reaction. Is it anything other than virtue-signalling? Unless the real reason is that competitions and award-givers are worried that a Russian might win, and they’d be seen to be giving a prize to the enemy. Not a good look.
The film world is in turmoil over this. When a war of words broke out at the European Film Academy over the blanket exclusion of Russians from their awards — on the grounds that almost all Russian-made films are state-funded or state-approved — it seems only to have made things more complicated. The Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, maker of the fine post-truth black comedy Donbass, resigned over the ban, saying: “We must not judge people based on their passports.”
But Denis Ivanov of the Odesa International Film Festival is among many who argue for a full-on Russians-out policy — in the equally laudable belief that all culture is political — and he introduced a whole new level of complexity into the debate when he took a counter-swipe by calling his Moscow-educated fellow countryman “a person of Russian culture”.
Perhaps the only thing to do in a spat between two virtuous parties is to leave them to it. In this muddle, many film festivals have declared that they will vet each Russian entrant individually — which surely paves the way for a lot of special pleading. And some worrying language is creeping in. The devil is in the sub-clauses in Film at Lincoln Center’s statement, which declares its support for “all voices in the film community critical of Russia’s actions” — meaning, presumably, that if a film-maker hasn’t expressly come out against the war, they will be nixed.
This is where the sticking-point seems to come. We know what penalties all naysayers face. The sight this past week of the brave, hopeless gesture of TV journalist Marina Ovsyannikova with her handwritten sign of rebellion, lurching behind the prim newsreader, was heart-wrenching. She has reportedly been punished with only a fine (for the moment, while the eyes of the world are still on her): she could yet face years behind bars for her few seconds of protest.
And what about the principles we’re so quick to pride ourselves on? Removing people from jobs, cancelling their exposure and their livelihoods because of their political or other opinions, or their failure to declare allegiances — isn’t this exactly the stuff of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or what Senator Joseph McCarthy did to suspected Communists sympathisers in the US in the 1950s? Or indeed just what the Russians would do, have done for centuries (and therefore probably couldn’t care less when we do it now)?
We condemn sanctions against the arts and artists when it’s done by others to others, to people we think of as free spirits who are in a camp we approve of — yet we’re remarkably quick to do the same thing when we think we’ve got right on our side. It’s a difficult point, but nobody said principles were going to be easy or comfortable.
Meanwhile . . . there’s a growing strength of feeling among Ukrainian artists, and among many in the west who are trying to help them, that this debate is taking up all the oxygen: why all this brouhaha about the Russians, when it’s the Ukrainians who are suffering most and should have our best attention? Another good point in a bad world.
Jan Dalley is the FT’s arts editor
Email Jan at [email protected]
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