Aiming away from history and culture
DURING the present war in Ukraine, the cultural and sporting worlds have been keen to follow the example of governments and corporations to impose their own sanctions on Russia. Scores of fixtures, exhibitions and collaborations have been affected. These span the cancelled residency of the Bolshoi Ballet at the Royal Opera House and the exclusion of Russia from the Eurovision song contest. The list of broken exhibitions and engagements is getting steadily longer.
No one is under any illusion that these measures have the teeth of economic sanctions or the destructive power of armaments. Indeed, for those who impose them, their superficially gentle character is actually part of the appeal. These are not sanctions aimed to hurt or kill, but to shame. They stand as a measure of popular revulsion at this conflict and the actions of Putin’s military machine in the name of the Russian people. In these regards, they strike Athena as both appropriate and proportionate.
That said, they do turn some of the musicians, artists, sportsmen and women affected into innocent victims of this war. Their discomfiture is a pale shadow of that experienced by the no less innocent civilians of Ukraine who find themselves hiding in shelters to escape bombing or leaving everything behind as refugees. Even so, at a personal level, it is regrettable and worthy of sympathy. Many of them have no involvement or responsibility for what is going on. Nor, if their possessions and families remain in Russia, can they easily join in the public condemnation of what’s going on.
Cutting ties with cultural organisations in Russia is a painful present necessity.
However deeply this war cuts, we must have the means to heal the wound
Athena is much more ambivalent, however, about sanctioning Russia’s historic culture. The recent cancellation of an all-tchaikovsky concert by the Cardiff Philharmonic, for example, may well be justifiable in response to the sensitivities of the moment, but drawing the past into the present is never a helpful thing to do. Added to which, will such moves discourage concert planners more widely from programming Russian music in the future? Might theatres feel obliged to eschew Chekhov’s plays or art galleries be nervous of displaying works by Kandinsky (who spent his childhood in Odessa, a reminder of Russia’s close historical ties with the country it now invades)?
Such changes would greatly impoverish our cultural life in the long term. Even more importantly, they will surely stand in the way of recovery after this terrible episode. Indeed, however deeply this war cuts into the political and economic sinews of Europe, it’s in everyone’s interest that we have the means to heal the wound. Cultural exchange—athena confidently predicts—will have a crucially important role to play in that recovery. In as far as we can, therefore, let’s try to keep the past out of this cultural embargo. We can’t afford to make history a casualty of war.