Putin at an exhibition by Stefan Beck

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In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil sang of "arms and a man" (Arma virumque cano). Month in and month out, The New Criterion expounds with great clarity and wit on the art, culture, and political controversies of our times. With postings of reviews, essays, links, recs, and news, Armavirumque seeks to continue this mission in accordance with the timetable of the digital age.

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Dec 01, 2007 09:28 PM

Putin at an exhibition

by Stefan Beck

As New Criterion readers are probably aware by now, Michael Weiss has become the go-to guy for analysis of Soviet history and the current Russian scene. (I don’t suppose there are many people his age who can boast that they’ve enjoyed a pleasant one-on-one with Robert Conquest.) Not to be missed is this dispatch from the Weekly Standard, in which Weiss recounts the chess champion and dissident Garry Kasparov’s latest act of defiance against Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia.

“No matter what happens, get Kasparov.” So shouted one riot officer Saturday during the violently disrupted Dissenters’ March in Moscow, according to David Nowak of the Moscow Times, one of the few newspapers left in Russia that doesn’t have its reporting redacted by the Kremlin. When Nowak asked another officer why “seemingly peaceful bystanders” were being hauled off the streets at random and arrested, he was told, “Do you want me to [expletive] beat you with a baton?”

Welcome to life under Vladimir Putin, in which political opposition is met with swift and arbitrary punishment, and not even a tendentiously arrived at 70 percent approval rating is enough to satisfy executive confidence.

You would never know, judging by most of the U.S. media coverage of Garry Kasparov’s arrest and subsequent jail sentence of five days, that the Dissenters’ March was actually part of a multi-city spate of protests undertaken by Russians fed up with bullying dictatorship. It speaks well of Putin’s propaganda, which brands all of his opponents as part of a monolithic sodality of crackpots and “jackals,” that the Other Russia Coalition only organized two of the rallies held over the weekend—those in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Several others were independently staged in Nizny Novgorod, Tomsk, Orel, Pskov, Ryazan, Tula, and Kaluga.

It won’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention that Putin, shamelessly opposed to free political expression, isn’t a huge fan of free artistic expression, either. As the Times reports, Russia recently censored a state-sponsored exhibition of Russian art in Paris, and one “gallery owner, a rabble-rouser specializing in art that tweaks the increasingly powerful Orthodox Church and also the Kremlin, was severely beaten by thugs later year.” Much of the art being censored is quite poor—you can see one example of adolescent provocation if you follow the link above—but in Russia, moreso than in the West, it’s the thought that counts. The bear in the gallery is rampaging like a bull in a china shop. Luckily, some Russians are courageous enough to step in with the tranquilizer darts:

There are signs of a backlash. In late October, a television debate program pitted Viktor Yerofeyev, a prominent Russian author, against Mr. Mikhalkov, who with a few others wrote a fawning letter, supposedly in the name of tens of thousands of artists, asking the president to stay in power beyond the constitutional limit of his term in March. “Have you heard of cult of personality?” Mr. Yerofeyev asked him.

Mr. Mikhalkov fumbled. Mr. Yerofeyev won the program’s call-in vote by a large margin, an event almost unheard of on today’s Kremlin-controlled television.

If you can call any television debate show a touchstone in recent Russian cultural history, that was certainly it. The show’s rating went through the roof. Dozens of writers and artists signed petitions lambasting Mr. Mikhalkov for presuming to speak for them. A battle line over culture had clearly been drawn.

Keep an eye on the Cabal: If we’re lucky, Weiss will weigh in on this cultural catastrophe. In the meantime, let’s hope that the commendable Kasparov and the Other Russia Coalition see their way clear of the Deep Blues.

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