Cultural innovation project thrown out in favour of centres for patriotic and spiritual education

An official project to develop centres of cultural innovation in Russia has been thrown out by the Ministry of Culture’s Working Group for the Development of Cultural Centres, who have replaced the initiative with a project to develop regional cultural centres focussing on fostering patriotic and spiritual education of residents of small towns. Head of the working group, film director Nikolay Burlyaev, said that the initial idea behind the concept for the Cultural Innovation Initiative (CII) was “mistaken”, accusing officials of “yielding to rather strange people who want to create a kind of ‘culture of innovation’”.

In a statement to Izvestia, Burlyaev noted that a culture of innovation “does not exist in nature”, drawing parallels between the CII’s initial premise, which “dealt with the creation of a new passionate Russian, an agent of change, who will carry out political reforms”, and the Maidan protests in Ukraine. The new project will promote traditional values and focus on folk traditions, according to Burlyaev, and will integrate its activities with the Russian Orthodox Church, whose goals include “nurturing a harmonious identity on the basis of traditional spiritual and moral values of national culture”.

But the curators involved in the development of the CII, now no longer working on the project, say they received no official statement from the Working Group that the project had been cancelled. Katya Girshina from the Strelka Institute for media, architecture and design, who was one of the curators of the CII project, told The Calvert Journal that she discovered the project was cancelled from a report online.

“We were never told about this development,” Girshina said. “Burlyaev commented to Izvestia about it and we found out through reading the article.”

Commenting on the importance of engaging with contemporary culture, Girshina expressed concern over the way in which contemporary culture is being played off against its traditional counterpart. “What is strange and controversial about what’s happening is that contemporary culture is now being put in opposition to traditional culture. Normally these two things should never contradict one another. Contemporary culture grows from the history and roots of traditional culture, and even when it’s not closely linked to traditional culture, contemporary culture is not a bad thing.”

Concerns over the increasingly narrow parameters set for Russian culture have come to dominate debate in recent months. Last December, an official cultural policy approved by the government detailed in explicit terms the prominence that heritage and tradition should have on culture in Russia today, provoking outcry from a number of cultural figures who consider the document as evidence of a return to the cultural officialisation of Soviet times.

However, for Anna Aleko, director of the department of culture of Primorsky Krai, the initial concept of the CII signified a capitulation to the dominance of western culture. “I am opposed to modern art being supported by budget money,” she said. “In fact, we should not focus on European and American culture, nor start to live according to western patterns of behaviour which are alien to our country.”

“What is strange and controversial about what’s happening is that contemporary culture is now being put in opposition to traditional culture. Normally these two things should never contradict one another”

But contemporary culture’s engagement with politics, noted as inappropriate by Burlyaev, is in line with traditional cultural practices, according to Girshina. “Even Pushkin engaged in politics and the political discourse of the time. Contemporary artists are the people who reflect on the current situation, society and politics. It would be impossible to stop this … contemporary artists choose different things for themselves; some are very politically oriented and deal with political issues; others deal with other questions, many of which are universal and have existed throughout history.”

The idea of creating cultural centres in small and medium-size cities was announced by Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov in 2012, who proposed establishing Houses of New Culture — a project based on the Soviet practice of the mass construction of Houses of Culture, centres that facilitated recreational activities and hobbies. According to Aleko, who noted that the title “Centre for Cultural Innovation” is no longer suitable for the project, there are now plans to organise a “House of Friendship” for the development of Russian national and spiritual culture in the Primorsky territory instead of a centre of contemporary art.