How can the West help Russians to defeat Putinism?

Watching Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is a Christmas tradition for many. But this year, people are being urged to stay away: Ukraine’s culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko published an open letter earlier this month asking the West to boycott Tchaikovsky and wider Russian culture until the war in Ukraine is over. ‘This war,’ he said, ‘is a civilisational battle over culture and history’. 

He’s right: since February, the Russian state is doing its best to annihilate Ukrainian culture in every possible way: banning and seeking to destroy the Ukrainian language, artists, authors and music. But how far should we go in response? Is a crackdown against Russian culture a wise idea, or does it play into Putin’s hands?

The Kremlin has, of course, long weaponised Russian culture in an attempt to enforce its dominance on the global stage. Examples include the state-sponsored doping programme for the country’s Olympic athletes and the convenient erasure of the non-Russian heritage of its cultural figures (Tchaikovsky himself had Ukrainian roots; the great-grandfather of the poet Pushkin was an enslaved man kidnapped as a child from what is present-day Sudan).