3 September 2015
To Russia, with Love
by Neil Tidmarsh
This week, Vitaly Milanov has been making headlines again. Mr Milanov is the St Petersburg city councillor, member of Mr Putin’s ruling United Russia party and Orthodox Christian activist whose “anti-gay propaganda law”, forbidding the promotion of gay and lesbian lifestyles to minors, was passed by St Petersburg in 2012 and by Russia as a whole a little later.
His latest proposal is that Russian children from the age of four should be enrolled in a compulsory, state-sponsored movement which would teach them patriotism and protect them from harmful western influences (from the internet etc) which he claims are spreading disrespect for Russian culture and society among the young.
Why such sensitivity? Russian heterosexuality is robust enough to withstand gay propaganda (whatever that may be); and Russia’s cultural achievements are so epic and monumental that they are sure to survive any amount of disrespect from outside its borders.
And why should any non-Russian want to disrespect Russian culture? The Science Museum in London is about to celebrate the Soviet space achievement with the exhibition “Cosmonauts; Birth of the Space Age”, which the museum’s director says “will be to science history what the great Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum was to archaeology.” And the whole world loves Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, venerates Checkhov and Tolstoy. This week, Classic FM ran a version of its “Hall of Fame” over the three days of the Bank Holiday weekend. They mashed together the votes from all twenty of the last two decade’s polls to produce the Ultimate Hall of Fame – and the Russian Sergei Rachmaninov came out at number one, his Piano Concerto number 2 in C minor the most popular piece of classical music in this country. Russian composers bagged eleven of the top fifty spots, with pieces by Rachmaninov also at numbers 27, 29 and 36; by Tchaikovsky at numbers 28, 38, 47 and 49; by Dmitri Shostakovitch at 39; by Rimsky-Korsakov at 32; and by Prokofiev at 45. It’s all on the internet; go on, Vitaly, have a look.
Gay propaganda… Tchaikovsky… At this point, inevitably, the Russian ruling Right’s sensitivity and defensiveness about its culture and society become a little less of a mystery as its conflicted nature emerges. Tchaikovsky, the most famous Russian composer, of whom Russia is justifiably proud and who the world understandably loves, was homosexual; here the ruling Right’s patriotism and its homophobia are in a head-on collision. Other great Russian artists such as Turgenev and Dostoyevsky were anti-authoritarian liberals (and were punished and exiled for it); here the ruling Right’s patriotic pride in Russian cultural achievements is in a head-on collision with its anti-liberal authoritarianism. Contradictions sexual, political – and racial? Russia’s greatest poet, Pushkin, who is even more of an icon of Russia than Shakespeare is of England, was a man of colour – his maternal great-grandfather was African – and yet racist violence has been growing in Russia in recent years as ultra-patriotic extremists insist on the holy purity of Russian blood.
Tchaikovsky wasn’t just gay, but a gay martyr. In 1979, the Russian scholar Alexandra Orlova claimed that his death was suicide by poison, ordered by a private court of his law-school peers to prevent a scandal in aristocratic circles. This theory remains controversial and disputed by some, but has been widely accepted. Nevertheless, much of Russia is in denial about any of this; in 2012, a government-backed film about Tchaikovsky made no mention of his sexuality; there were allegations that script re-writes had been ordered, to edit out any suggestion of homosexuality. Earlier this year, a fictional interview with Tchaikovsky published in a pro-government newspaper had the composer declaring “I am sometimes overcome by the crazy desire to be loved by a woman’s touch”. Of course, it’s the music itself which really matters in the long run. But in the meantime the culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, has denied that there is any evidence to support the idea that Tchaikovsky was homosexual.
The culture minister Vladimir Medinsky made headlines of his own a week or two ago when he called for the return of Sergei Rachmaninov’s remains from the United States, to be re-interred in the country of his birth. Rachmaninov fled Russia in 1918, his aristocratic background guaranteeing persecution by the revolutionary Bolshevik government. In 1931 his music was banned and belittled in the Soviet Union after he signed a letter to the New York Times criticising the Kremlin. He died an American citizen in Beverly Hills, California, in 1943. His relatives in America oppose the Russian culture minister’s proposal; his great-granddaughter Susan Wanamaker told the BBC “We completely support Sergei Rachmaninov’s last wishes, that he is buried next to his wife and his daughter at Kensico Cemetery in New York. We have no plans to go against his wishes. So he will remain there.”
Tchaikovsky taught Rachmaninov, who admired and even idolised him artistically. The younger composer is very much the musical heir of the older composer. He loved the country of his birth, captured it vividly in his music and missed it terribly in exile – but would he want to be returned to a Russia where the truth about his mentor is still a matter of controversial debate and now might even be condemned as illegal propaganda?
