The Silencing of Russian Art

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in the winter of 2022, the rock group Bi-2 was on a nationwide tour. The group, a stalwart of the Russian music scene for more than two decades, is known for its nostalgia-drenched sing-along anthems, whose lyrics are often both rebellious and literary. At a concert in Yekaterinburg in March its two front men, Shura and Lyova, who are both in their fifties, had proclaimed “No to war!” “We thought we could affect the process,” Lyova said.

A few weeks later, in the Siberian city of Omsk, Shura and Lyova walked into the concert hall to find a large banner with a capital “Z,” the symbol of support for Vladimir Putin and the invasion, hanging on the wall behind the stage. “This is fucked up,” Lyova recalled thinking. The musicians draped a black cloth over the banner, but the venue’s director demanded that they take it down. Officials from the regional administration warned that if they didn’t comply the concert wouldn’t happen. Fifteen minutes before showtime, the event was cancelled.

Other venues began cancelling Bi-2’s shows. One was suddenly undergoing renovation. Another said that it was reimposing pandemic-era restrictions. Concert venues blamed local authorities; local authorities pointed to officials in Moscow. The musicians had connections in the government—at one point, Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the foreign ministry, expressed her support—but they couldn’t track down the person or office with the authority to lift the shadow ban. Igor Rubinstein, the band’s media manager, told me, “Every person would say, ‘It’s not me, try this other guy.’ No one wanted to take responsibility.”

Bi-2’s members soon learned that they had landed on a list of undesirable artists, which had circulated among regional administrations and cultural departments. “Officially these lists don’t exist,” a concert promoter, who was forced to remove Bi-2 and a half dozen other bands from the lineup of a rock festival that summer, said. “They don’t have any legalistic basis.” Rather, he went on, they functioned as “indications of undesirability.” A producer described seeing a color-coded list—black, yellow, and red—with dozens of musicians and other performers on it. “It was like an intern prepared it,” the producer said. In some cases, first and last names were mixed up; other entries listed band members who had left their groups years earlier. “The whole thing looked awfully unserious,” the producer told me. “But the consequences were as serious as it gets.”

Bi-2 was facing the prospect of several million dollars of lost revenue and was edging close to bankruptcy. The band couldn’t pay its roadies and technicians. It had to get back out on tour. “Eventually it became clear that all roads lead to one office,” Rubinstein said.

That office belonged to Sergei Novikov, whose formal job title in the Putin administration is head of social projects. Novikov is in his late forties, with a soft, boyish face and a thinning wave of brown hair swept to one side. He began his government career as a loyal aide to Sergei Kiriyenko, a political operative who, in 2016, was appointed first deputy chief of staff to Putin, taking on responsibility for domestic politics and state ideology. The invasion saw Kiriyenko assume the portfolio of Russia’s newly annexed territories. A source told Meduza, an independent Russian news site based abroad, that his powers made him “Viceroy of the Donbas”—the region in eastern Ukraine at the locus of Russia’s war aims. Novikov became, according to Meduza, the “chief censor of cinema, theatre, and music.”

Novikov is known to be a lover of classical music. He plays the cello and has directed several operas, including a 2016 production of “Rusalka,” the story of a scorned maiden and the daughter she protects, which Novikov presented as an anti-abortion allegory. (“Love, betrayal, repentance—these are themes that everyone can understand,” he said at the time.) In 2021, his interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s “Iolanta” played at the Royal Swedish Opera. The concert promoter had heard that Novikov aspired to one day take over as the director of the Bolshoi Theatre. “He was not so much driven by a simple love for music,” the promoter told me, “but rather a desire to be close to the powerful and mighty.”

In the meantime, Novikov’s wartime tasks included editing the script of a television pilot to soften the implicitly gay identity of one of the characters. Novikov also insisted that the character’s name be changed; the show’s writers had unintentionally given the character the same name and patronymic—Sergei Vladilenovich—as Novikov’s boss, Kiriyenko. Novikov found time for more ambitious endeavors as well. According to internal Kremlin documents obtained by the investigative outlet the Dossier Center, Novikov proposed making a Marvel-style action movie based on the life of an especially vicious Russia-backed militant commander in the Donbas. Novikov also had an idea for a comedic series set among the personnel of a hotel in Donetsk, an eastern Ukrainian city that has been occupied by Russia since 2014. An acquaintance of Novikov’s told Meduza that he exemplified a “managerial style of art criticism. . . . ‘I’m at the top, so I understand what’s good and what’s bad.’ ”

A director told me about an hour-long presentation that Novikov had given to members of Moscow’s theatre élite, during which he showed slides that included the flight times of missiles from NATO bases to Moscow and charts on levels of public support for Putin and the so-called special military operation in Ukraine. The message, the director said, was, “Keep your opinion to yourselves. No one’s asking for it.” The promoter said, “Like with many people in power, the war allowed him to take off his mask.” Or, this person went on, “maybe to put one on. It’s hard to tell the difference.”

Shura and Lyova arranged a meeting with Novikov. “We wanted to clear up the uncertainty,” Lyova said. Shura went alone to see Novikov at his office in the Presidential Administration Building. A couple of hours later, he called Lyova. “It was like looking at a person with empty eyes, without any emotion or empathy,” Lyova recalled Shura telling him. Shura said that Novikov treated him with disgust, carrying himself like a kham—a jackass. “So, you want to play concerts in Russia again?” Novikov asked. He offered a menu of penance: “Go and perform in the Donbas or visit hospitals with war-wounded.”

Whatever the band did, it should be public. The Kremlin needed the image of Bi-2, a beloved rock group with millions of fans, supporting the war effort more than it cared about an actual Bi-2 concert for troops stationed in Donetsk. (In an interview with Meduza, another musician who spoke out against the war described being told by authorities that, if he wanted to tour again, he should make a public donation to an N.G.O. working in occupied Ukraine. “The punishment is not that I have to help the children,” he said. “The punishment is that I have to publish it on social media.”) Shura left the meeting with Novikov stunned and disappointed. The next thing he did, Lyova told me, was buy a bottle of Cognac to “disinfect” himself.

During the next few months, each time Lyova flew in or out of Russia he was detained and questioned for hours. Eventually, in late 2022, he left the country for good. “People close to the state told me it was time,” Lyova said. Shura followed soon after. They became part of an exodus of Russian artists who were unable or unwilling to accommodate themselves to the new climate of censorship and state control. But many more stayed. “I knew that in Europe I’d soon find myself washing dishes,” one successful director told me. Countless cultural figures made visits to Novikov’s office or cut deals with the Kremlin to keep working. “Before the war, artists of all kinds made compromises as a way of securing fame, riches, success,” a prominent cultural critic in Moscow told me. “Now you make compromises simply in order to do your work at all.”

In Russia, state power and high culture have long existed in a pained, but seemingly inexorable, symbiosis. Stalin willed into being socialist realism, a hagiographic style that crept into art forms like music and painting. Its loyal practitioners were rewarded with apartments and food parcels; those who veered from the official aesthetic line faced ostracization, public condemnation, arrest, or even execution. Stalin, who personally approved many of the arrest lists, kept up with poetry and opera. His distaste for Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”—“Muddle instead of music,” Pravda declared, in a hit piece rumored to be written by Stalin himself—put Shostakovich in a state of yearslong terror, waiting for an imminent arrest that never came.

Putin’s ruling system, with far less artistic or intellectual pretense, views the cultural sphere as it does any other sector: a subordinate dominion, which should submit to the state’s needs and interests. The economics of cultural production make it so artists of all genres often have little choice; public theatres in Russia, for example, rely on state funding for two-thirds or more of their operating budgets. “Theatres are big organizations, with large buildings and troupes, that simply can’t be profitable,” the director told me. “If you want to stage just about anything, that means immediately confronting the dilemma of state funding.”

These days, it’s easier to know what isn’t allowed than what is. Topics understood to be delicate include, according to one influential figure in the Moscow museum world, “anything about the war—this war, or really war in general.” (The exception is heroic narratives about the Second World War which glorify Soviet victory.) In 2023, as part of the Kremlin’s effort to present the war in Ukraine as a front in a broader struggle against Western degeneracy, the country’s Supreme Court designated the “international L.G.B.T. movement” as an “extremist organization,” effectively criminalizing any mention or portrayal of gay people or subjects. Last year, the Duma outlawed so-called propaganda of drugs—meaning any references to drugs are out, too. “Nudity, the Orthodox Church,” the museum source said, continuing the list of things understood to be banned. Beyond that, it gets murky. “We somehow feel that we should avoid subject matter that is deflating to morale,” the museum source said.

In Moscow, the city’s cultural department signs off on all proposed exhibits. The museum source told me of one planned exhibition that wasn’t approved because its subject matter was deemed, in the words of one municipal bureaucrat, “too depressing.” In the end, the exhibition’s organizers were able to persuade city officials that the show was not a political risk, and it ultimately went ahead. But more often cultural directors nix questionable ideas before they even reach that stage. “Officially we don’t have censorship,” the head of a regional cultural space told me. “And that’s true—there’s no actual code of what you can or cannot do.” Instead, the person said, “we have self-censorship.”

A gallerist in Moscow told me of an exhibit that would have featured paintings of human-like puppets, with some limbs missing. The artist didn’t mean to imply anything about war or violence, but in the run-up to the opening the gallerist reconsidered. “Someone could see this as a statement about the war,” the gallerist said. “Or maybe someone would get triggered by such content and complain to the authorities, accusing me of offending their feelings.” Days before the planned opening, the gallerist called it off: “With no clear guidelines, and thus no sure idea of when you’re violating them, of course it’s simpler just not to show something.”