Vladimir Putin has accused the West of discriminating against Russian culture and compared its treatment of Russian cultural workers to that of the “cancelled” Harry Potter author JK Rowling.
At a televised meeting with cultural leaders on Friday, Putin said the West was “trying to annul an entire 1,000-year-old culture, our people,” citing the cancellation of events featuring Russian artists in protest of the invasion of Ukraine.
“They are now engaging in the demolition culture, even removing Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff from posters. Russian writers and books are being canceled now,” Putin said.
A number of events featuring Russian cultural figures who have expressed their support for the war have been cancelled, including concerts by award-winning Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, a friend and supporter of Putin, who attended Friday’s gathering.
Some events featuring deceased Russian cultural figures were also canceled and the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra removed Russian composer Tchaikovsky from its programme, a decision widely criticized by Western cultural figures.
Putin said in his address that such a campaign against “undesirable literature” was last waged when Nazi supporters burned books in the 1930s.
He went on to compare the treatment of Russia to the controversy surrounding Rowling’s comments on transgender people. “Recently they banned children’s author Joanne Rowling because she – the author of books that have sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide – has fallen out of favor with fans of so-called gender freedom,” Putin said.
Rowling distanced herself from Putin’s comments on Friday by sharing an article on Twitter about jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. “Criticisms of Western break-up culture may not be best voiced by those who are currently slaughtering civilians for the crime of resistance, or imprisoning and poisoning their critics,” the British author wrote, adding the hashtag #IStandWithUkraine.
Putin has repeatedly expressed his disdain for Western “liberal” values in the past, likening the abort culture to the coronavirus. When asked about Rowling by a Russian journalist last year, Putin said he had “held on to the traditional approach — a woman is a woman, a man is a man, a mother is a mother, a father is a father.”
Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Moscow Center said Putin’s speech on Friday provided another insight into the Russian leader’s “distorted” view of the West. “Putin uses the information he gets from advisors and then creates his own reality of the West,” Kolesnikov said. “He hears about some extreme examples in the West and then convinces himself that this is the trend. He doesn’t like the nuances.”
Kolesnikov said Friday’s meeting with Russia’s cultural elite was intended to show the Russian public that four weeks after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the West was waging a parallel culture war against the country. “Putin wants to tell the Russians that they are under siege, also culturally. In his eyes, the West is in an unrelenting war against traditional Russian values,” he said.