I’ve only just read this incredibly powerful open letter by Leviathan director Zvyagintsev, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other slowpokes out there like me.
Everyone should read this, so if you missed it—here it is in full.
Everything in it matters, but especially the bluntly stated point about public money, which the Kremlin uses to bribe and blackmail:
Director Andrey Zvyagintsev on whether the state has the right to interfere in an artist’s work
The day after Konstantin Raikin’s desperate, profound, and extraordinarily important statement on censorship, our president’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, responded. Allow me to respond as well. It is perfectly obvious that censorship has entered the country’s cultural life in full force. Only a liar or an ignoramus could deny it. Banning a play, banning an exhibition, banning the publication of a text—all of this is censorship. It is simply astonishing how easily terms are now being swapped out. No one even blinks. We say, “This is censorship,” and they say, “This is a state commission.” And then they tell us not to “confuse the terms.” Can you name even one opera house, or even a dozen films, created without state involvement? The situation in our economy and culture is now such that there are none. Which means that, following the press secretary’s logic—according to which “if the state gives money... it commissions a work of art on one subject or another”—practically all of Russia’s cultural life today is enlisted in the service of the authorities. And who are these people doing the commissioning? Aristarkhov and Medinsky? Or perhaps Yarovaya, or Peskov? Are they the ones who will formulate the commission? Yes, there are officials to whom the supreme power has delegated responsibility for running the Ministry of Culture and other профильные agencies. But they did not create the Bolshoi Theatre or Satirikon (the Moscow theater led by Konstantin Raikin), just as they did not develop the laws of poetics and aesthetics or shape the movements and trends of modern cinema and theater. How, then, can they “commission art”? In our country there are millions of people, each of whom chooses a profession, studies for years, and hones their craft to become a master of it. Teachers know how to teach, doctors know how to heal, artists know how to create. And then suddenly statesmen appear and begin teaching and “treating” them all over again. Who endowed them with flawless qualifications in every sphere of human activity? When will officials finally understand that their job is to organize and support people’s work, not hand out their own “commissions”? Government interference in the professional affairs of any specialists is often absurd, but interference in the affairs of artists is a hundred times more absurd. This is a profession whose very essence is free creation—that is, the birth of something new, something not yet known even to the artist. When an official assigns an author a theme and controls its “proper” realization in a work of art, he strikes with deadly accuracy at the most intimate thing in the profession: the mystery of the creative process. Peskov says, without doubting the correctness of his judgment, that since the state pays the artist, the artist must therefore serve the will of the state. If you remember, there is a vulgar joke: “He who buys the girl dinner gets to make her dance.” That is roughly how the authorities understand art. These people have decided that they know what the people need, and with the people’s money they commission their own pitiful hackwork. As a rule, the results are works of extreme narrowness—both in craftsmanship and in their constricted view of the subject, whatever the subject may be. Through such “commissions,” officials castrate creative thought, forcing the artist to turn his stylus into a coarse artisan’s chisel. No, it is not the artist who owes the state; it is the state that owes support to the artist. The authorities are obliged to nurture genius, to encourage the free search of the people’s talented representatives, because that is how a nation becomes conscious of itself, matures, improves, and is enlightened through these insights—insights that sometimes wound the public, sometimes bewilder it, but always create that tension of meaning which the soul and mind of the viewer, reader, or listener need as desperately as water in the desert. Looking at the freely flowing body of a work born of a free mind, the viewer sees, as in a reflection, himself as free and unfettered, because, as is well known, an artist cannot help but sing the song that lies mute on the lips of his people. Instead, the authorities encourage talentless, dreary lies about human beings, lies that have flooded both television and movie screens. In doing so, they estrange a person from his true, complex self. That is what their “state commission” leads to. Mr. Peskov declined to comment on Raikin’s words about the monstrous antics of people publicly smashing sculptures and dousing photographs with urine. In doing so, he confirmed Konstantin Arkadyevich’s point: the state prefers not to notice any of this. The reason, alas, is obvious. The activity of these public organizations breeding like rabbits, these immoral guardians of morality, is the real state commission—even if the “offended” act from their own convictions. Because today’s state has just such a commission: to make the country average, uniform, isolationist, and obedient like a herd. Aggressive extremists always have a keen sense for this kind of “state commission.” Now to the main thing that struck me in Peskov’s statement. In truth, I have heard much the same position more than once from Medinsky and from another hero of Raikin’s fiery speech—Mr. Aristarkhov. The key feature that testifies to the immorality of our authorities is this: they are utterly convinced that the money they administer belongs to them. They have forgotten—or with astonishing ease erased from their minds—the simple and obvious fact that it is not their money, but ours. Shared money. The money with which they “commission” their propaganda pieces has been taken from the people. And among the people there exists such immense wealth of opinions and desires that no government could ever fully guess it. Once, I happened to debate this very subject with Mr. Medinsky, and what struck me was the sincere conviction with which he believes that it is they who give us money. The simple fact that this money is just as much mine as it is his never even occurs to him. To anyone eager to commission something from an artist, I can offer the following suggestion: sell your house or your car, and with the proceeds commission, say, a play. Or ten plays. If there are willing takers—and there certainly will be—they will put on stage whatever it is you want. But as long as you are carrying out the people’s will while receiving a salary from the people’s money, as long as you are citizens of this country just like us, help free artists do their work instead of obstructing them. Hear them at last: they do not want your “commissions.” They do not want to have dinner with you, and they do not want to dance with you. And one last thing. My son just turned 7 a few days ago. He does not know who Putin is. Because he lives in the happy country called childhood. At least I believe he has absolutely no need to know who Putin or Zhirinovsky is, what the “Yarovaya package” is (a set of repressive anti-terror laws), or what Milonov’s and Mizulina’s laws are. We have not had a television in our home for many years. This September he started first grade. By the end of the very first week, when I asked what they were studying in class, my son answered: “In Moscow there is Red Square, the Kremlin, and the zoo, and we also have President Putin—he is good and kind.” That is what a state commission really is: ideology instead of objective knowledge, propaganda alongside learning to write squiggles. Lao Tzu said: “The best ruler is one whose existence the people barely know of. Slightly worse are those rulers who demand that the people love and exalt them. Worse still are those rulers whom the people fear.” Another translation is even harsher: “In a well-governed state, the subjects do not know the name of their ruler.” We are going in circles. Familiar shadows rise again and plunge us once more into a bad, somnambulistic sleep in which we dream our fear.