Vladimir Putin has accused the west of discriminating against Russian culture, comparing the treatment of Russian cultural figures with that of the “cancelled” Harry Potter author JK Rowling.
At a televised meeting on Friday with leading cultural figures, Putin said the west was “trying to cancel a whole 1,000-year culture, our people”, citing cancellations of events involving Russian artists in protest at the invasion of Ukraine.
“They’re now engaging in the cancel culture, even removing Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninov from posters. Russian writers and books are now cancelled,” Putin said.
A number of events involving Russian cultural figures who have expressed backing for the war have been called off, including concerts by the award-winning Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, a friend and supporter of Putin, who was part of the meeting on Friday.
Some events involving dead Russian cultural figures have also been abandoned, with the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra removing the Russian composer Tchaikovsky from its programme, a decision that was widely criticised by western cultural figures.
Putin said in his address that the last time such a campaign had been waged against “unwanted literature” was when Nazi supporters burned books in the 1930s.
He went on to compare the treatment Russia had received with the controversy surrounding Rowling’s comments on transgender people. “Recently they cancelled the children’s writer Joanne Rowling because she – the author of books that have sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide – fell out of favour with fans of so-called gender freedoms,” Putin said.
Rowling on Friday distanced herself from Putin’s comments by sharing an article about the jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny on Twitter. “Critiques of western cancel culture are possibly not best made by those currently slaughtering civilians for the crime of resistance, or who jail and poison their critics,” the British author wrote, adding the hashtag #IStandWithUkraine.
Putin has in the past repeatedly expressed his disdain of western “liberal” values, comparing cancel culture with the coronavirus. When asked last year by a Russian journalist about Rowling, Putin said he “adhered 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 address on Friday gave another insight into the “distorted” view the Russian leader had of the west. “Putin uses the information he receives from advisers and then creates his own reality of the west,” Kolesnikov said. “He hears about some extreme examples that happen in the west and then convinces himself that this is the trend. He doesn’t like the nuance.”
Kolesnikov said Friday’s meeting with the Russian cultural elite was meant to show the Russian public that the west was waging a parallel cultural war against the country, four weeks after Moscow’s invasion into Ukraine. “Putin wants to tell Russians that they are under siege, also culturally. In his eyes the west is in a relentless war against traditional Russian values,” he said.