12  “Great Russian culture”

Abstract

Be warned: it is a culture of deception that steals or murders the cultures of its neighbors to make itself greater. On the “Great Russian Culture”.

Myth

Russia has a superior “Great Russian Culture”

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Truth
  • Russia is killing the culture in its colonies and appropriating the culture of its invaded neighbors.
  • The true culture of Russia consists of corruption and lies, violence and fear … and even fascism.

The Ukrainian culture has indeed long been overshadowed by Russian influence and thus overlooked by the international community. While such names as Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and Tchaikovsky are widely known in Western society, prominent Ukrainian figures like Taras Shevchenko, Lesya Ukrainka, or Mykola Leontovych are hardly recognizable in European countries. Moreover, East European studies focus mainly on Russian history, language, and culture, and only the full-scale Russian invasion “catalyzed the long-overdue review of the role and place of Ukrainian studies abroad”, resulting in 160 Ukrainian studies centers in about 30 countries worldwide.1

12.1 Trojan horse

Russia maintains a “Great Russian Culture” as Trojan Horse to expand its empire to “Great Russia” (Eurasia). One example is the Russian House in Berlin, which spreads Putin propaganda despite EU sanctions.2

12.2 Jailing & Killing

Russa has a long tradition to jail and kill non-russian culture. This creates the illusion that Russia has more culture than Ukraine and its other colonies.

The Soviet regime suppressed Ukrainian nationalism, leading to the persecution of intellectuals, artists, and political figures who advocated for Ukrainian independence. The peak of these persecutions is known as the “Executed Renaissance” or “Red Renaissance”.3 4 5 This term is used to refer to Ukrainian intellectuals in literature, philosophy, art, music, theater, and cinema of the 1920s and early 1930s who faced arrests, deportations, imprisonment, and execution during the Great Terror of 1937–1938.

This tendency was promoted in the following years, known as the persecution of dissidents.6 Many Ukrainian intellectuals were imprisoned, tortured, and killed even in the late decades of Soviet rule, among them are Vasyl Stus, Vasyl Symonenko, and Alla Horska, who have become symbols of anti-Soviet resistance in the post-Stalin periods.

Fortunately, nowadays, no one has any doubts that Joseph Stalin was a brutal and murderous dictator. With Stalin being considered the embodiment of evil, other Soviet rulers often seem to be less repressive and more liberal.

However, Stalin’s successors did not change the general Soviet policy framework, although they followed more subtle and indirect approaches to downplay the role of national languages. In particular, Nikita Khrushchev implemented a strategy to eliminate non-Russian languages from primary and secondary education by enacting a new law granting parents the authority to choose whether their children would attend schools with instruction in Russian or their native language. Designed to appear democratic, this law aimed at further assimilation, as Russian speakers enjoyed benefits in higher education, political and economic institutions, and cultural life. As a result, in 1987, Ukrainian-language schools accounted for only 16% of educational institutions in national and regional capitals, while 12% were mixed (predominantly Russian), and the majority, 72%, were Russian-language schools. Notably, cities such as Chernihiv, Donetsk, Simferopol, and Luhansk had no Ukrainian schools at that time.7

Some prominent examples of persecuted Ukrainians:

12.3 Appropriating

Another technique for making Russian culture appear larger than it is is the appropriation of non-Russian culture: anyone who wants to make a career in the Russian empire must speak Russian and be prepared to see themselves as a Russian cultural creator. Examples:

12.4 Pushkin’s empire …

Pushkin is considered the (great) national poet of Russia, however, he is the poet of the evil empire and he is - for centuries - a symbol for the suppression of Polish (Adam Mickiewicz) and Ukrainian (Taras Shevchenko) culture (and particularly their national poets):

The complete lack of respect for human life, along with the most docile obedience on the part of the Empire’s subordinates, is at the core of Mickiewicz’s vision of Russia. The poem ends with another dead body: a servant left out in the cold and forgotten by his owner. And with a thought, also typical of Mickiewicz’s stance towards Russia: ‘Poor nation – thus I mused beside his grave / Who know but such heroism: of a slave!’.
…
In writing these and other patriotic, anti-tsarist poems, Shevchenko would pay the ultimate price. He died in 1861, in St. Petersburg, having been arrested in Ukraine again for ‘fomenting unrest in the nation’. He was only 47, with every reason to feel hopeless about Ukraine’s future, subjugated by the Empire.
…
Perhaps unsurprisingly, from the late 19th century, the official face of this Russification was… Alexander Pushkin.
…
Pushkin, formerly a liberal with democratic sympathies as well as author of anti-tsarist poems (including ‘Freedom’ and ‘To Chaadayev’), had composed such works as ‘Poltava’ (1828), which glorified Peter the Great’s defeat of the Swedish-Ukrainian forces – a military victory that paved the way for the subjugation of Ukraine.
…
Overall, a skewed Pan-Slavic myth of a Mickiewicz-Pushkin friendship was being officially endorsed once again, which succeeded in eclipsing the reality of their complicated relations, as well as fundamental political conflicts between the two poets, their work and posthumous public presences. The friendship myth has likely also contributed to the blurring of a much closer spiritual and political affinity of Mickiewicz and Shevchenko – the two truly greatest Slavic poets of freedom.8

So don’t fall to russian Propaganda.

12.5 … is a fascist empire

As Russian forces bombarded Ukraine last year, an officially distributed video showed Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov reciting lines from Pushkin’s “To the Slanderers of Russia”, a poem fulminating against Western supporters of Slavs rebelling against Russia … Small wonder some Ukrainians now refer on social media to “Pushkinists” launching missile attacks on their cities. 9

We must quote the beginning of the poem, in which the genocidal war against Poles and Ukrainians is explained as an internal slavic Military Special Operation from which the West should stay out:

To the slanderers of Russia

What are you clamoring about, people’s vitias?
Why do you threaten Russia with anathema?
What has angered you? The unrest of Lithuania?
Leave it: it is a dispute between Slavs,
A domestic, old dispute, already weighed by fate,
A question which you will not settle.

For a long time now
These tribes have been at enmity with each other;
and more than once their side or ours has fallen.
either their side or ours.
Who shall stand in this unequal contest:
The sourpuss or the faithful lich?
Will Slavic streams merge in the Russian sea?
Will it run dry? That’s the question.

Leave us alone: you have not read
These bloody tablets;
You do not understand, you do not understand
This family feud is alien to you;

Pushkin 1831

While it is common knowledge that this is an imperialistic poem – the freedom-loving Shevchenko was decidedly critical of Pushkin’s poem10 – it is less known, that this poem qualifies as fascist language. According to German fascism expert Klaus Theweleit (Theweleit (1987), Theweleit (1989)), treating humans as “mass”, as “Slavic streams” that bloodily “merge in the Russian sea”, is fascist imagery that Pushkin introduces here:

After seizing power, the Nazis tamed the floods and let them flow inside their rituals. Streams became dams, and much more … The flood had a name now: “Entry March of the Banners” (encoded stream). The threat of inundation had been eradicated. But even without the danger of sinking within it, the flood remained exciting, fascinating. Its ominous aspect had been removed by those formations, by transforming streams into “columns,” by converting the flowing “feminine” into a rigid “masculine.” Where did the excitement come from, then? What made that “broad, red, surging stream . . . sacred”?

Klaus Theweleit (1987, Vol. 1)

As a theory of fascism, Male Fantasies sets forth the jarring—and ultimately horrifying—proposition that the fascist is not doing ‘something else,’ but doing what he wants to do. When he throws a grenade at a working-class couple who are making love on the grass, he is not taking a symbolic stand against the institution of heterosexuality. When he penetrates a female adversary with a bullet or bayonet, he is not dreaming of rape. What he wants is what he gets, and that is what the Freikorpsmen describe over and over as a ‘bloody mass’: heads with their faces blown off, bodies soaked red in their own blood, rivers clogged with bodies. The reader’s impulse is to engage in a kind of mental flight—that is, to ‘read’ the murders as a story about something else, for example, sex … or the Oedipal triangle . . . or anything to help the mind drift off. But Theweleit insists that we see and not ‘read’ the violence. The ‘bloody mass’ that recurs in these men’s lives and fantasies is not a referent to an unattainable ‘something else,’ and the murders that comprise their professional activity are not mere gestures.

Foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich (Vol 1)

12.6 Great Russian lie

Finally, the tale of the great russian culture is a lie that was designed to distract us fom the fact, that russian culture is violence, not poems, for centuries:

I don’t know of any metaphors that can make my words more appealing or less shocking. Metaphors don’t work against men with machine-guns. No poetry can protect you when a tank hits your car and crushes you and your family. award-winning poet Halyna Kruk in her speech at the Berlin Poetry Festival in June 202211

12.7 Violent culture

Russia’s culture is not only smaller than many believe, it is also a culture of alcoholism (Chapter 74), learned helplessness, torture (Chapter 104), nationalism and even fascism (Chapter 53).

12.8 Great poo culture

Russian artist sinks to new low by making sculptures out of POO to celebrate the year of the rooster. The Irish Sun (2017)12

12.9 See also

The chapters on Ukrainan culture (Chapter 13), on warcrimes against Ukrainan culture (Chapter 94), on Ukrainian language (Chapter 44) and on russian language (Chapter 45).

  1. Koval, N., Gaidai, O., Melnyk, M., Protsiuk, M., Tereshchenko, D., & Irysova, M. (2022). Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar Studies in the World: Problems, Needs, Perspectives. Ukrainian Institute. Retrieved May 2, 2024, from https://ui.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/ukrainian-and-crimean-tatar-studies-in-the-world_eng.pdf↩︎

  2. Russisches Haus in Berlin verbreitet Putin-Propaganda trotz EU-Sanktionen. (2024, November 29). Berliner-Kurier: https://www.berliner-kurier.de/berlin/zwischen-ballett-und-sprachkurs-russisches-haus-in-berlin-verbreitet-putin-propaganda-li.280330↩︎

  3. Executed Renaissance: The Erasure of Ukrainian Cultural Heritage in the Times of the Soviet Union. (2020, November 22). Retrospect Journal. Retrieved May 2, 2024, from https://retrospectjournal.com/2020/11/22/executed-renaissance-the-erasure-of-ukrainian-cultural-heritage-in-the-times-of-the-soviet-union/↩︎

  4. Mikołaj Gliński (Mar 3 2022) The Executed Renaissance: The Book that Saved Ukrainian Literature from Soviet Oblivion. https://culture.pl/en/article/the-executed-renaissance-the-book-that-saved-ukrainian-literature-from-soviet-oblivion↩︎

  5. Victoria Amelina (31 March 2022) Cancel culture vs. execute culture. Why Russian manuscripts don’t burn, but Ukrainian manuscripts burn all too well. Eurozine. https://www.eurozine.com/cancel-culture-vs-execute-culture/↩︎

  6. Prokop, M. (n.d.). Dissident movement. Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Retrieved May 2, 2024, from https://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CD%5CI%5CDissidentmovement.htm↩︎

  7. Kravtsiv, B. & Kubijovyč, V. (n.d.). Russification. Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Retrieved May 2, 2024, from https://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CR%5CU%5CRussification.htm↩︎

  8. Mikołaj Gliński (Oct 31 2022) Inventing Anti-Imperial Poetic Discourse: Adam Mickiewicz and Taras Shevchenko, with Alexander Pushkin in the Tsar’s Shadow. https://culture.pl/en/article/inventing-anti-imperial-poetic-discourse-adam-mickiewicz-and-taras-shevchenko-with-alexander-pushkin-in-the-tsars-shadow↩︎

  9. Timothy Garton Ash (23 August 2023) Putin, Pushkin, and the decline of the Russian empire. Behind Ukraine’s rejection of Russia’s revered poet is a much bigger story of imperial decay. https://ecfr.eu/article/putin-pushkin-and-the-decline-of-the-russian-empire/↩︎

  10. Manning, C. A. (1944). Shevchenko and Pushkin’s to the Slanderers of Russia. Modern Language Notes, 59(7), 495–497. https://doi.org/10.2307/2911316↩︎

  11. Halyna Kruk (2022) Metaphors don’t work against arms, or why poetry doesn’t help. https://tvoemisto.tv/en/news/metaphors_dont_work_against_arms_or_why_poetry_doesnt_help_133896.html↩︎

  12. WHAT STINKERS Russian artist sinks to new low by making sculptures out of POO to celebrate the year of the rooster. (4 Jan 2017) The Irish Sun. https://www.thesun.ie/news/383736/russian-artist-sinks-to-new-low-by-making-sculptures-out-of-poo-to-celebrate-the-year-of-the-rooster/↩︎