The reopening of the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in early May 2026 was met with heavy criticism – and rightly so. The pavilion, critics argued, functions as an instrument of Russian soft power and even hybrid warfare, normalising Russia's war against Ukraine while undermining European sanctions and support for Kyiv.
The official defenders of the pavilion dismissed such criticism as an attempt to censor art and culture. In the words of Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Biennale is ‘not a court, but a place of dialogue and peace'. According to Mikhail Shvydkoy, the ‘Presidential envoy for international cultural cooperation' and, as such, the commander-in-chief of Russia's cultural forces, art serves as a bridge between societies and stands above politics, even in wartime.
Both arguments rest on the same assumption: that Russian culture can be separated from the Russian state. Let us dwell on this claim. The problem is not merely that Russia now invokes the autonomy of art while thousands of artists have fled the country because of political censorship and hundreds of others have been imprisoned.
More troubling still is the narrative that Shvydkoy and Buttafuoco have helped construct. According to this narrative, Russia is defending the freedom of art, while other countries – above all Ukraine – are attacking ‘great Russian culture', for example by removing monuments to writer Mikhail Bulgakov and poet Alexander Pushkin from public squares. Russian state media lament that Russian culture is being ‘cancelled' around the world, while insisting that it is apolitical, embodying universal humanist values that retain their validity at all times and under all circumstances – including during a war of aggression.
It is precisely this claim I want to challenge – not by cataloguing the imperialist and chauvinist statements of Russian writers, which others have already done, but by showing how the Russian state consistently turns culture into a weapon and deploys it, quite successfully, in hybrid warfare. The Venice Biennale is a case in point.
This mechanism – the reforging of cultural ploughshares into swords – is part of Russia's long imperial history. It produces an amalgam in which the innocent face of art disappears behind the grimace of political power, while that same power presents itself to the world wearing the Apollonian face of art.
There is an anecdote from the annus terribilis of 1937: the year in which Stalin's regime annihilated hundreds of outstanding artists from Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia and many other Soviet republics – including Russia itself. The year 1937 was also the centenary of Pushkin's death, celebrated across the Soviet Union with extraordinary pomp. According to the story, Stalin is presented with designs for a monument to the poet. The first depicts Stalin reading Pushkin. ‘Historically correct,' he remarks, ‘but politically wrong. Where is the General Line?' The second shows Pushkin reading Stalin. ‘Politically correct,' Stalin replies, ‘but historically wrong. Comrade Stalin hadn't written any books back then.' When the monument is finally unveiled, it presents the only version that is both historically and politically correct: Stalin reading Stalin.
The amalgam of poetic and political power, which the anecdote takes to its absurd conclusion, is perfectly exemplified by the history of the Pushkin bust in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.
Thorvaldsen and Pushkin in Tbilisi
Pushkin was the first poet in Russia to be honoured with a monument. The best-known, Alexander Opekushin's bronze statue in Moscow, was unveiled in 1880, followed by the St Petersburg monument in 1884. By 1917, another thirty-three Pushkin monuments had been erected across the Russian Empire.
The Tbilisi bust was among the earliest. It was financed through private donations, the principal benefactor being B.V. Rossinsky, the city's chief of police. Rossinsky imposed two conditions. The first was that the monument stand in a small garden named after the poet on the central Paskevich-Erivansky Square – today's Freedom Square. Ivan Paskevich was a Russian Field Marshal and Viceroy of Poland, notorious for brutally crushing the Polish and Hungarian uprisings.
Rossinsky's second condition was that the monument be modelled on Bertel Thorvaldsen's bust of Tsar Alexander I. The Danish sculptor was one of the most celebrated artists of his age and portrayed many of Europe's crowned heads. What Rossinsky did not know was that Pushkin had not only held a deep aversion to Alexander I, but had also written a biting epigram about Thorvaldsen's bust of the Tsar.
In To the Bust of the Conqueror (1828–29), Pushkin pointed to the ‘bilingualism' of imperial representation. What appeared to the viewer as a mistake – the coexistence of irreconcilable emotions, an angry brow and a smiling mouth – was in fact its governing principle. Sixty years later, Pushkin himself embodied that principle. As an imperial official, the former rebel had come to represent the empire almost as fully as the Tsar. The face of the Emperor and the face of the poet began to oscillate until they could scarcely be distinguished: the poet became the Tsar's cultural double. Together they formed an imperial amalgam.
This shift of the poet towards the imperial pole was ruthlessly exploited by the government during the centenary celebrations of Pushkin's birth in 1899, when the Tsarist state promoted an image of Pushkin as the loyal subject and favourite of Nicholas I. While the Tbilisi bust fused the face of the poet with the face of imperial conquest, Pushkin gave Russian culture a face that the empire could proudly present to the outside world.
The symbolic capital that the Tsarist Empire had invested in Pushkin was transformed by Stalin into a cultural weapon against living artists. The Russian classics were deployed to intervene directly in the literary life of the Soviet present. Dead writers became aesthetic yardsticks by which the freedom of living artists was measured and constrained.
The cultural hero, whether Pushkin, Gorky or Mayakovsky, became the representative of state power, making artistic freedom and autonomy all but impossible. At the same time, these figures were recast as imperial teachers of the other national cultures of the Soviet Union, elevating Russian culture while and diminishing the rest.
Russia's cultural genocide in Ukraine
The amalgam of state and culture acquired a new function under Putin. Russian culture now no longer served merely to legitimise the empire, or as a weapon against artistic freedom; it became an instrument of hybrid warfare.
This brings us back to Venice. Russia is waging not only a military war against Ukraine's civilian population, but also a cultural genocide: Ukrainian artists are being killed; museums, archives, theatres and cultural monuments are being deliberately destroyed; the cultural memory of an entire country is being systematically targeted. Against this background, the Russian Pavilion fulfils its true political function – to associate Russia's international presence not with war crimes, but with a supposedly timeless high culture.
The exhibition's leitmotif – ‘A tree rooted in the sky' – invokes the ancient symbol of the arbor inversa. Its two epigraphs – one a quote from the obligatory Pushkin, the other from the philosopher Simone Weil – inscribe Russian culture into a universal horizon. The musical performances, bringing together artists from Mali, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil alongside performers from Tuva, Buryatia and Komi, read as a staged updating of Pushkin's Monument: ‘My fame shall spread throughout great Rus', / and every people in it shall name me: / the proud descendant of the Slavs, the Finn, / the still-wild Tungus, and the Kalmyk, friend of the steppes.' What appears apolitical is in fact a homage to Russian imperial culture.
Imperial conquest as a moral maxim
What the Pavilion conceals beneath flowers, music and the vocabulary of universal culture is laid bare in the St. Petersburg exhibition ‘Russian Imperative', which opened almost simultaneously. Where the Pavilion cultivates the impression of an art detached from politics, this presents art openly as an instrument of empire, political mobilisation and symbolic warfare. The exhibition stages the continuity of the Russian imperial project, tracing Russia's military history ‘from the emergence of the Russian state to the present day'.
Here, the Pavilion's universalism is abandoned entirely. In place of Kant's categorical imperative stands the ‘Russian Imperative', which elevates imperial conquest into a moral maxim. The Russian Pavilion in Venice and the exhibition at the St. Petersburg Manege are therefore not opposites but two faces of the same amalgam: here the seemingly apolitical face of Russian culture; there openly imperial and martial.
Visitors to the Manege are greeted by a monumental installation: a gigantic steel-helmeted soldier's head set into a red-framed structure, its eyes reduced to glowing slits. According to the curators, it is based on the monument to ‘Hero of the Soviet Union' Alexander Matrossov, designed by the Soviet sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich – the artist behind the Soviet Soldier-Liberator in Berlin, The Motherland Calls in Volgograd, Mother Ukraine in Kyiv, and Swords into Ploughshares at the United Nations in New York.
Yet more than Vuchetich's Soviet monuments, the visual language of the Manege installation recalls the political aesthetics of the late Weimar Republic. During public discussion of the exhibition, attention was drawn to the 1929 mobilisation poster UND DU? – the work of the artist Ludwig Hohlwein, who would later join the NSDAP.
There too, a soldier's head is monumentalised, the face hardened into a mask, the gaze obscured beneath the helmet, the individual transformed into a superhuman figure. More important than the formal resemblance, however, is the shared political logic. In both images, militarism, imperialism and violence are presented as responses to an alleged threat to the national community. The aggressor is cast as the victim; aggression becomes self-defence.
The St. Petersburg exhibition text stresses that the Matrossov monument was demolished in Dnipro in 2023 on the orders of the Ukrainian authorities. At the very moment when Russia is waging a genocidal war against Ukraine, it casts itself as the victim of an alleged cultural destruction, mobilising its own population through art. This inversion of victim and aggressor lies at the heart of the narrative that the Russian Pavilion in Venice tells in a different aesthetic register. Culture is again enlisted to make that inversion appear credible.
Against this background, the reopening of the Russian Pavilion is not a gesture of dialogue, but the symptom of a dangerous European self-deception. Anyone who wishes to avoid that self-deception must understand how Russia turns culture into a weapon. Because precisely where it invokes artistic freedom, it answers the freedom of others with terror and violence.
It is not others who are ‘cancelling' Russian culture. Russia itself is destroying its own culture – by reforging it into a weapon of war.
