The Kremlin is dictating Russian culture once more – and it’s neo-Soviet and anti-Western

It’s suddenly gone icy-cold in Russia’s arts relations with us and the US. Last year’s Russia-UK Year of Culture just snicked under the wire before the political chill started building up ice in all sorts of unexpected places. The international acclaim for the epic Russian film Leviathan, up for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, was sneered at by the feverishly nationalistic culture minister Vladimir Medinsky. Recently he denounced the film as ‘perfectly calculated to pander’ to western views of a bleak modern Russia, and he has previously proposed that only movies properly celebrating today’s Russia should be allowed either public funding or a release.

Director Andrei Zvyagintsev has been a victim of the new ban last summer on ‘mat’ (Russian slang) and his great film has had to be dubbed and bleeped in any Russian cinema showing it. The fact that the last Russian Oscar-winner was in 1995 and that it’s seven years since a Russian movie even got Oscar nominated has got under the skin of two absolutely opposed camps.