The reopening of the Russian Pavilion on the Venice Biennale in early Could 2026 was met with heavy criticism – and rightly so. The pavilion, critics argued, features as an instrument of Russian gentle energy and even hybrid warfare, normalising Russia’s struggle in opposition to Ukraine whereas undermining European sanctions and assist for Kyiv.
The official defenders of the pavilion dismissed such criticism as an try to censor artwork and tradition. Within the phrases of Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Biennale is ‘not a courtroom, however a spot of dialogue and peace’. In keeping with Mikhail Shvydkoy, the ‘Presidential envoy for worldwide cultural cooperation’ and, as such, the commander-in-chief of Russia’s cultural forces, artwork serves as a bridge between societies and stands above politics, even in wartime.
Each arguments relaxation on the identical assumption: that Russian tradition could be separated from the Russian state. Allow us to dwell on this declare. The issue shouldn’t be merely that Russia now invokes the autonomy of artwork whereas hundreds of artists have fled the nation due to political censorship and lots of of others have been imprisoned.
Extra troubling nonetheless is the narrative that Shvydkoy and Buttafuoco have helped assemble. In keeping with this narrative, Russia is defending the liberty of artwork, whereas different nations – above all Ukraine – are attacking ‘nice Russian tradition’, for instance by eradicating monuments to author Mikhail Bulgakov and poet Alexander Pushkin from public squares. Russian state media lament that Russian tradition is being ‘cancelled’ around the globe, whereas insisting that it’s apolitical, embodying common humanist values that retain their validity always and beneath all circumstances – together with throughout a struggle of aggression.
It’s exactly this declare I need to problem – not by cataloguing the imperialist and chauvinist statements of Russian writers, which others have already carried out, however by exhibiting how the Russian state persistently turns tradition right into a weapon and deploys it, fairly efficiently, in hybrid warfare. The Venice Biennale is a living proof.
This mechanism – the reforging of cultural ploughshares into swords – is a part of Russia’s lengthy imperial historical past. It produces an amalgam during which the harmless face of artwork disappears behind the grimace of political energy, whereas that very same energy presents itself to the world sporting the Apollonian face of artwork.
There’s an anecdote from the annus terribilis of 1937: the 12 months during which Stalin’s regime annihilated lots of of excellent artists from Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia and plenty of different Soviet republics – together with Russia itself. The 12 months 1937 was additionally the centenary of Pushkin’s loss of life, celebrated throughout the Soviet Union with extraordinary pomp. In keeping with the story, Stalin is offered with designs for a monument to the poet. The primary depicts Stalin studying Pushkin. ‘Traditionally appropriate,’ he remarks, ‘however politically flawed. The place is the Basic Line?’ The second reveals Pushkin studying Stalin. ‘Politically appropriate,’ Stalin replies, ‘however traditionally flawed. Comrade Stalin hadn’t written any books again then.’ When the monument is lastly unveiled, it presents the one model that’s each traditionally and politically appropriate: Stalin studying Stalin.
The amalgam of poetic and political energy, which the anecdote takes to its absurd conclusion, is completely exemplified by the historical past of the Pushkin bust within the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.
Thorvaldsen and Pushkin in Tbilisi
Pushkin was the primary poet in Russia to be honoured with a monument. The most effective-known, Alexander Opekushin’s bronze statue in Moscow, was unveiled in 1880, adopted by the St Petersburg monument in 1884. By 1917, one other thirty-three Pushkin monuments had been erected throughout the Russian Empire.
The Tbilisi bust was among the many earliest. It was financed by personal donations, the principal benefactor being B.V. Rossinsky, town’s chief of police. Rossinsky imposed two circumstances. The primary was that the monument stand in a small backyard named after the poet on the central Paskevich-Erivansky Sq. – in the present day’s Freedom Sq.. Ivan Paskevich was a Russian Discipline Marshal and Viceroy of Poland, infamous for brutally crushing the Polish and Hungarian uprisings.
Rossinsky’s second situation was that the monument be modelled on Bertel Thorvaldsen’s bust of Tsar Alexander I. The Danish sculptor was one of the vital celebrated artists of his age and portrayed a lot of Europe’s topped heads. What Rossinsky didn’t know was that Pushkin had not solely held a deep aversion to Alexander I, however had additionally written a biting epigram about Thorvaldsen’s bust of the Tsar.
In To the Bust of the Conqueror (1828–29), Pushkin pointed to the ‘bilingualism’ of imperial illustration. What appeared to the viewer as a mistake – the coexistence of irreconcilable feelings, an offended forehead and a smiling mouth – was in reality its governing precept. Sixty years later, Pushkin himself embodied that precept. As an imperial official, the previous insurgent had come to symbolize the empire nearly as absolutely because the Tsar. The face of the Emperor and the face of the poet started to oscillate till they might scarcely be distinguished: the poet grew to become the Tsar’s cultural double. Collectively they shaped an imperial amalgam.
This shift of the poet in the direction of the imperial pole was ruthlessly exploited by the federal government through the centenary celebrations of Pushkin’s beginning in 1899, when the Tsarist state promoted a picture of Pushkin because the loyal topic and favorite of Nicholas I. Whereas the Tbilisi bust fused the face of the poet with the face of imperial conquest, Pushkin gave Russian tradition a face that the empire may proudly current to the skin world.
The symbolic capital that the Tsarist Empire had invested in Pushkin was remodeled by Stalin right into a cultural weapon in opposition to dwelling artists. The Russian classics have been deployed to intervene straight within the literary lifetime of the Soviet current. Lifeless writers grew to become aesthetic yardsticks by which the liberty of dwelling artists was measured and constrained.
The cultural hero, whether or not Pushkin, Gorky or Mayakovsky, grew to become the consultant of state energy, making creative freedom and autonomy all however unimaginable. On the identical time, these figures have been recast as imperial lecturers of the opposite nationwide cultures of the Soviet Union, elevating Russian tradition whereas and diminishing the remaining.
Russia’s cultural genocide in Ukraine
The amalgam of state and tradition acquired a brand new operate beneath Putin. Russian tradition now now not served merely to legitimise the empire, or as a weapon in opposition to creative freedom; it grew to become an instrument of hybrid warfare.
This brings us again to Venice. Russia is waging not solely a navy struggle in opposition to Ukraine’s civilian inhabitants, but additionally a cultural genocide: Ukrainian artists are being killed; museums, archives, theatres and cultural monuments are being intentionally destroyed; the cultural reminiscence of a whole nation is being systematically focused. In opposition to this background, the Russian Pavilion fulfils its true political operate – to affiliate Russia’s worldwide presence not with struggle crimes, however with a supposedly timeless excessive tradition.
The exhibition’s leitmotif – ‘A tree rooted within the sky’ – invokes the traditional image of the arbor inversa. Its two epigraphs – one a quote from the compulsory Pushkin, the opposite from the thinker Simone Weil – inscribe Russian tradition right into a common horizon. The musical performances, bringing collectively artists from Mali, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil alongside performers from Tuva, Buryatia and Komi, learn as a staged updating of Pushkin’s Monument: ‘My fame shall unfold all through nice Rus’, / and each individuals in it shall identify me: / the proud descendant of the Slavs, the Finn, / the still-wild Tungus, and the Kalmyk, pal of the steppes.’ What seems apolitical is in reality a homage to Russian imperial tradition.
Imperial conquest as an ethical maxim
What the Pavilion conceals beneath flowers, music and the vocabulary of common tradition is laid naked within the St. Petersburg exhibition ‘Russian Crucial’, which opened nearly concurrently. The place the Pavilion cultivates the impression of an artwork indifferent from politics, this presents artwork brazenly as an instrument of empire, political mobilisation and symbolic warfare. The exhibition levels the continuity of the Russian imperial undertaking, tracing Russia’s navy historical past ‘from the emergence of the Russian state to the current day’.
Right here, the Pavilion’s universalism is deserted solely. Rather than Kant’s categorical crucial stands the ‘Russian Crucial’, which elevates imperial conquest into an ethical maxim. The Russian Pavilion in Venice and the exhibition on the St. Petersburg Manege are due to this fact not opposites however two faces of the identical amalgam: right here the seemingly apolitical face of Russian tradition; there brazenly imperial and martial.
Guests to the Manege are greeted by a monumental set up: a big steel-helmeted soldier’s head set right into a red-framed construction, its eyes decreased to glowing slits. In keeping with the curators, it’s based mostly on the monument to ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ Alexander Matrossov, designed by the Soviet sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich – the artist behind the Soviet Soldier-Liberator in Berlin, The Motherland Calls in Volgograd, Mom Ukraine in Kyiv, and Swords into Ploughshares on the United Nations in New York.
But greater than Vuchetich’s Soviet monuments, the visible language of the Manege set up recollects the political aesthetics of the late Weimar Republic. Throughout public dialogue of the exhibition, consideration was drawn to the 1929 mobilisation poster UND DU? – the work of the artist Ludwig Hohlwein, who would later be part of the NSDAP.
There too, a soldier’s head is monumentalised, the face hardened right into a masks, the gaze obscured beneath the helmet, the person remodeled right into a superhuman determine. Extra essential than the formal resemblance, nonetheless, is the shared political logic. In each photographs, militarism, imperialism and violence are offered as responses to an alleged risk to the nationwide neighborhood. The aggressor is forged because the sufferer; aggression turns into self-defence.
The St. Petersburg exhibition textual content stresses that the Matrossov monument was demolished in Dnipro in 2023 on the orders of the Ukrainian authorities. On the very second when Russia is waging a genocidal struggle in opposition to Ukraine, it casts itself because the sufferer of an alleged cultural destruction, mobilising its personal inhabitants by artwork. This inversion of sufferer and aggressor lies on the coronary heart of the narrative that the Russian Pavilion in Venice tells in a special aesthetic register. Tradition is once more enlisted to make that inversion seem credible.
In opposition to this background, the reopening of the Russian Pavilion shouldn’t be a gesture of dialogue, however the symptom of a harmful European self-deception. Anybody who needs to keep away from that self-deception should perceive how Russia turns tradition right into a weapon. As a result of exactly the place it invokes creative freedom, it solutions the liberty of others with terror and violence.
It isn’t others who’re ‘cancelling’ Russian tradition. Russia itself is destroying its personal tradition – by reforging it right into a weapon of struggle.
