Mikhail Piotrovsky: Cancel culture is a hysterical phenomenon

The first: culture is our competitive advantage. Any movement against it is, to use modern parlance, unfair competition.

The second: culture is an important factor for the stabilization of society. The Union of Museums of Russia is fighting for the preservation of culture in the provinces, trying to halt on a local level optimization, cutbacks and so on. We need to have the “shoots” of culture springing up everywhere. When the opportunity for cultural life exists everywhere, there will be no need for anything second-rate or alien.

In the foreign press there have been quite a lot of publications about the Hermitage lately. The first phase is “Why is the Hermitage not protesting?” The second is more serious: “The Hermitage is an enemy because it advocates and actively imposes Russian culture. It is, moreover, an imperial museum. It advocates Russian culture along with its tsars. That needs to be countered.”

The third phases is coming now, when people start to attentively look into the way that the Hermitage revealed Russia to the world. When “the gates were thrown open” we showed many things. Our museums told about Russia’s greatness. It emerged that Russian museums have their own centres in various places. Exhibitions follow one upon another. Today people are surprised at how many exhibitions we have abroad. There always have been so many. No other country did anything like it. After us, they have gone down that road – France, the UK… Exhibitions are a means of telling about oneself, Cultural self-affirmation.

We are a powerful soft force. So much has been done that now we are being accused over it. That is a reaction to Russia’s advance. The talk is of a confrontation.

Today a process of cancel culture is underway in the world. It was born in Europe, where people rushed to repent of their sins. They have spattered a statue of Voltaire with red paint, accusing him of ties with slave-traders, taken down a statue of Columbus, called for objects to be returned from museums to their places of origin. Finally, they grasped that they had gone down a blind alley. Suddenly, the opportunity appeared to shift the blame onto us. We proved to be a convenient target. Everyone forgot about the blameworthy Columbus, Voltaire, Queen Victoria and the rest. Now the Bolshoi Theatre is bad, the Hermitage is bad, Tchaikovsky is flawed…

Cancel culture is a hysterical phenomenon. I see in it a manifestation of the psychosis that arrived after the pandemic. In our history we have had more than one cancellation. After the revolution, tsarist Russia was cancelled. They partly cancelled War Communism, then the New Economic Plan. In the post-Soviet era, idols were cast down and had mud thrown at them. In that respect, we have great experience. Whether we are immune to cancel culture, time will tell. I very much hope that we are.

That kind of immunity can be strengthened only by an active cultural offensive. Meaning, I would say, forcing culture on people. The way they once did with the elimination of illiteracy. Forcibly imposing culture is also a tradition. There was a time when people were dragooned into taking guided tours. At some point it was decided that everyone was educated enough. The Covid era has shown that’s not the case.

There is a good word “inclusion”. It embraces a lot of things – making culture accessible to children, to the deaf, the blind, those who have difficulties, those who are far away, those who lack the education… For that reason, I continue to speak about bridges of culture, about culture as a medicine. About a need to activate people’s perception of culture.

The borders are closed, but over the two years of Covid, we grew used to a multitude of difficulties, We have the latest technologies. They allow us to overcome borders. We cannot be stopped. We should and will tell about ourselves, in foreign languages as well. The opening ceremonies of exhibitions are being broadcast everywhere, as are our guided tours… Everything that we were doing in the past two years is now acquiring a new significance. There should be no borders for oneself or others. Everyone will watch something that is good.

Recently there was a round table at the Council on World Culture of the presidium of the Academy of Sciences. The topic was whether Russia is Europe. There are two important principles. The first is that the EU is not the whole of Europe. The second is that Russia is more than Europe because it has an eastern face.

It is a good time to remember about Peter the Great’s precepts in the year of his 350th anniversary. Peter cancelled the culture that went before, forcing everyone to live as in the West, but he managed to retain a balance. He did not lose a sense of his own merits, did not succumb to complexes. He did not go shouting that we are the best in the world, but he understood that we are better. He carried out reforms so as to be an emperor and not merely a tsar.

The Hermitage began the year with the opening of a Gallery of Peter the Great and will end it with a huge exhibition of his costumes. The Moorish Hall of the Winter Palace is the setting for a series of exhibitions in the anniversary programme. They are important for an understanding of what Peter’s balance in his reforms was like.

The exhibition “Exotic and Lavish China” has just opened. Its showcases contain some amazingly beautiful things. They were brought as gifts to Peter. He himself bought luxurious silks that were then used to make Russian banners. Rooms were hung with lovely Chinese fabrics. Peter wore a silken dressing-gown. He was the first museum-keeper. Items were not only collected, but also recorded in drawings and catalogues were made.

Ahead is an exhibition of sculpture from Peter the Great’s collection, sculpture that he purchased. It is a topic that also includes diplomacy. There is an interesting tale attached to the Taurida Venus. The statue was found in Rome. The Pope forbade its removal from Italy. The correspondence still survives in which Peter proposed an exchange of the sculpture of a pagan goddess for the relics of Saint Bridget, which were in Sweden. At one time, it was believed that the exchange did indeed take place. A different version emerged, however and is now accepted by everyone, Negotiations were conducted with Peter on allowing Catholic missionary preachers to travel to China overland. He gave permission, and the Italians gave us Venus. Admittedly, the preachers did not enter China: the Chinese Emperor would not let them. A model for the way Peter operated with a Western orientation.

Another exhibition is “Russian Easter” in the Small Church of the Winter Palace. For Catholics the chief festival is Christmas, for us it is Easter. In the Year of Peter the Great, an exhibition of this sort is also an occasion to reflect on the Emperor’s relations with the Russian Orthodox Church. He demolished previous practice and created an ideological weapon of the secular authorities.

We also just opened an exhibition of Robert Nanteuil’s prints. In the Twelve-Column Hall there are some remarkable engraved portraits from the time of Louis XIV. That is the France upon which Peter orientated himself. He adopted luxury and wealth from there. He ordered attractive outfits for himself in France. There he was received in the Academy of Sciences, not simply for the sake of form, but rather for the study of the Caspian Sea. From France he brought back the idea of Versailles. Previously, it was customary to speak of the carpenter-tsar, straightforward, craftsman-like… But he conceived the wish to build his own Versailles and built one even better.

Today Peter is for us a role-model. There are not that many of those in our history. People have always orientated themselves on Peter. The Hermitage preserves all the items associated with Peter. They were safeguarded in tsarist times and in the Soviet era, and in the post-Soviet period. In my view, Peter is a symbol of post-Soviet development. In a symbolic event [the city mayor] Sobchak exchanged the bust of Lenin for one of Peter. The city was not simply given back the name of the capital of the Russian Empire. It was given back Peter’s name.

In Kazan, an exhibition of Flemish painting is running. There are paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Snyders… That is the Europe that Peter brought us. We are not cancelling it, but showing it, adopting it, making it our own. That is appropriation.

In Vyborg there is an attractive exhibition about the furnishings of European castles. Lorenzo Lotto’s Madonna della Grazie with all its history is going off to Vladivostok. Frank Duveneck’s Venetian Fruit Market will be travelling to Kaluga. Imperial might is added to the European choice by an exhibition in Omsk devoted to Russian rulers’ ceremonial appearances on horseback. In Yekaterinburg we will be showing the 19th-century Russian portrait.

A conglomerate like that is our response to any cultural cancellations from outside. Also to suggestions from within to cancel everything and keep to ourselves on an isolated island. That island does not suit us. If international exchange is absent, we will make greater use of the latest technologies. They are attractive. They served us well during Covid and will do so now. We need only to muster them properly.

There are various ways of existing in the clouds. We have the Celestial Hermitage project, an exhibition of NFTs… A few days ago, the Hermitage hosted a conference on lighting. Despite everything, it was international, as we had planned. Nobody travelled here, but, thanks to modern technologies, those who wanted to participated and spoke.

Now we need to speak of cultural sovereignty, which is not the same as isolation. Cultural sovereignty is a sovereignty of openness. If you are open, it means you are sure of yourself, you have a sense of your own dignity. We are not cancelling anyone and will not do so. We do not have an inferiority complex. Our cultural activity is indomitable.

Peter the Great orientated himself on Louis XIV. He travelled to France later, though, when the boy Louis XV was king. Peter went to visit him and, to the astonishment of those present, lifted and held in his arms the whole French state.

This material was published in the Sankt-Petersburgskie Vedomosti newspaper, №76 (7159) on 27 April 2022 with the headline “Cancel culture is a hysterical phenomenon”