Russia’s use of art as totalitarian soft power

Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine Putin has consistently spoken to domestic audiences in the language of derzhavo, or, empire and stately might. To that end, the Kremlin has shut down independent media and the press, actively imprisoned or exiled Putin’s critics, and shown a cruel callousness towards non-Russian populations. Among other ways, Putin’s elites have been justifying these measures through the visual arts in ways that communicate visions of national eternity and strength. If totalitarianism relies on the creation of a single reality, then how does art support monolithic ideas of unified togetherness?

 

During the early summer 2013 in Moscow’s Tverskaya Street and Kamergerskii Pereulok – streets not far from the Kremlin – approximately twenty reproductions of late nineteenth century paintings appeared in large format on apartment building walls. Among others, these included reproductions of Ilya Repin’s Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and Barge Haulers on the Volga, Fyodor Vasilyev’s Thaw, Vasily Vereshchagin’s At the Doors of a Mosque, Leon Bakst’s Portrait of Serge Diaghilev, with his Nanny, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkina’s Madonna of Compassion Who Moves Evil Hearts, and Vladimir Borovikovsky’s Pavel.

 

As noted by my Moscow friends, many of them political artists, these were not the kind of images critical of Russia’s dermokratiia (“shitocracy”) – a play on the Russian word for demokratiia (“democracy”) – but rather of a strong Orthodox belief system, mixing together conservative authoritarianism, messianism, and patriarchy. Although these images did not cohere into a single genre, in harking back to a time that in contemporary Russia is now imagined as one of supposed national unity and historical greatness, their public appearance suggested that Russia’s mission to act as self-appointed katechon should be carried out by many means possible – historical, political, military, and artistic.

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"Like so many other signs connected with the Putin elite’s desire for empire today, in contemporary Russian politics the Cossacks have made a comeback."

 

Of the many images displayed on Moscow house walls, Ilya Repin’s (1844-1930) late nineteenth century painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (1880-1891) is one of the more famous. Born in today’s Ukraine close to Kharkiv, Repin trained at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, where he also began to move in a circle of influential critics and artists. Animated by a deep enthusiasm for folk culture and the historical past, Repin often strove to eliminate what he perceived as an unfortunate distance between himself and his subjects. He even invented a turn of phrase – okunut’sia, to plunge into, to immerse – that would define his desire to eliminate the distance between artist and life. Thousands of people travelled to see his shows. His enduring popularity is marked by the fact that his monumental paintings continue to resonate in Russia today.

 

Historically, the Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks shows a group of seventeenth-century Cossacks in the process of drafting a mocking and insulting letter to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV during the period of the Third Polish-Ottoman war (1683 – 99), a war in which the Cossacks fought to preserve their independence from both the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. When Repin painted the scene more than two-hundred years after it had supposedly occurred, conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Coalition, led by the Russian Empire, still smoldered.

 

The painting relies heavily on cultural detail. There are the breathing, laughing, smoking, and robust-looking male bodies that populate Repin’s painting. There are sabers, daggers, and rifles glimmering in fragments and jutting out of sashes. There are the intricate details of the fabrics, and the shaved heads with the long forelock or chub. As one of my friends commented, this is an image that could have come straight out of Ukrainian writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol’s 1845 historical-romanticized novella Taras Bulba, which tells of a bloody revolt led by the Zaporozhian Cossack Taras Bulba and his two sons against Catholic Poland and for Orthodox Christianity, empire, and czar.

 

Like so many other signs connected with the Putin elite’s desire for empire today, in contemporary Russian politics the Cossacks have made a comeback. Celebrated in tsarist Russia for their independence and might, and suppressed in the Soviet era for their supposed backwardness and traditional orientation, in the tumble of perestroika (restructuring) they emerged again as a cultural and a military force. Especially within the Putin regime, they began to signify a living link to Orthodox Slavdom and Russia’s historical claim to the ancient Rus.

 

At the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi uniformed Cossack militia members fired teargas at protestors and members of Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist and art collective known for its provocative musical performances and lyrics. During the 2018 World Cup Cossack groups were incorporated into Russian police forces to suppress anti-Putin protests. Given that Cossack communities live nationally-divided in Ukraine and Russia, they are also politically divided in today’s war. However, significant segments side with Russia for glorifying and promoting the Orthodox imperialist past and even indicating that it might support Cossack claims to territory and organizational-autonomy in southern Ukraine after the war.