One-sided, suspicious, naive: Nina Khrushchewa’s Salzburg lecture

New York political scientist Nina Khrushcheva gave a complicated and deeply problematic speech on the opening of the Salzburg Competition on Friday. The director Markus Hinterhäuser had invited the great-granddaughter of the chief of the Soviet social gathering Nikita Khrushchev for this speech as a result of, as “a critic of Putin, she additionally strives to deal with Russian tradition with respect” .

The speaker’s announcement was accompanied by a quote from an earlier opinion piece during which Khrushcheva took a stand for Russian tradition simply 4 months after Russia invaded Ukraine. Even again then, she expressed misunderstanding in regards to the dismissal of conductor Valery Gergiev by the Munich Philharmonic. Nevertheless, she didn’t point out that Putin’s confidant, Gergiev, had refused to sentence Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Her criticism of the estrangement of relations between Western tutorial establishments and universities in Russia was equally evident. Right here, too, she didn’t say a phrase about the truth that Russian college directors had supported Putin’s “tough however needed choice” – with the deadly justification that “Russian universities have been a pillar of the state -never”.

Within the identify of the Russian nation

In Salzburg, Nina Khrushcheva criticized the so-called anti-Pushkin regulation, which got here into drive in Ukraine final 12 months and permits the removing of monuments to representatives of Russian and Soviet imperial ideology. On the similar time, she apologized to Ukraine for Putin’s aggressive warfare and acquired spontaneous applause. In her speech, she recognized many well-known folks in Russian literature from Akhmatova to Tolstoy to Nabokov and on the finish she shouted one thing in regards to the “transcendence of artwork” that reveals the way in which for folks.

Khrushcheva’s speech was one-sided, suspicious and naive. One-sided as a result of it portrayed Pushkin as an harmless sufferer of violent Ukrainian nationalism and remained silent on the truth that the Russian nationwide poet had defended the tsarist subjugation of the Caucasus and the abolition of the Polish revolution in his poetry.

The speech was suspicious as a result of Khrushcheva put her on her knees linguistically – which, apparently, doesn’t seem within the printed model – “within the identify of the entire Russian nation”. The nation that agreed to Putin’s promise of normalcy and sees the warfare in Ukraine as a needed evil? That nation that does not even have the braveness to refuse to assist its lukewarm president on the polls? That nation whose finest minds have fled overseas, imprisoned or murdered?

And eventually, the speech was naive as a result of Khrushcheva gave Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn as prime examples of revolutionary artists who, apparently, mirrored “warfare and tyranny”. Khrushcheva put Dostoyevsky’s well-known dictum “Magnificence saves the world” on the coronary heart of her views. Not a phrase is alleged about Dostoyevsky’s chauvinism, his anti-Semitism and his vocal assist for the growth of the Tsarist Empire. She portrayed Solzhenitsyn in a really romantic method, which seems to her solely as a critic of the Soviet Gulag. No point out was product of how Solzhenitsyn praised Putin’s Nice Russian ambitions and denied Ukraine’s proper to its personal statehood.

No secure place

Khrushcheva makes use of an outdated, delicate argument from the Russian intelligentsia: Russian politics is soiled and merciless, however Russian tradition is everlasting and holy. What she fails to see is that there is no such thing as a secure area for artists, dwelling or useless, beneath Putin’s tyrannical rule. All artwork is political in an authoritarian system. At present in Russia you possibly can communicate brazenly towards aggressive warfare like theater artists Zhenya Berkowitsch and Svetlana Petritschuk – each had been sentenced to 6 years in camps originally of July. Or, just like the profitable creator Gusel Jachina, you possibly can stay silent – she has to observe the closing of Russian society with silent horror.

Works by Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich are carried out on the Salzburg Competition. Actually, Russian artworks can nonetheless be produced within the West at present. However it’s mistaken to evangelise blind magnificence with regards to Russian tradition. Everybody Khrushcheva ought to know this: the one factor she needed to say about her well-known great-grandfather within the Salzburg speech was his ardour for opera. She may even have talked about the truth that Boris Pasternak needed to forgo the Nobel Prize in Literature beneath Nikita Khrushchev beneath the strain of an unprecedented smear marketing campaign and died quickly after, exhausted.