"If Russian literature or Russian music were not doing what they are doing, there would be a permanent dictatorship in Russia,", Nina Khrushcheva tells DV.
Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of Soviet party and statesman Nikita Khrushchev, who is a professor of international relations in the US, has been invited to open this year's Salzburg Festival. "This is a huge honor for me," she told DV. The theme of the festival is "Between Heaven and Hell" and because Russia is constantly between heaven and hell, the organizers decided to include Russian culture at the festival, Khrushcheva told DV.
She recalls that in 2022, with the start of the war against Ukraine, the participation of Russian performers was constantly canceled, and "they just throw people into Putin's arms, confirming his ideas that the West wants to " shorten" the Russians".
At this year's opening ceremony in Salzburg, the works of Russian composers Alfred Schnittke and Sergei Prokofiev will be heard, the program includes two operas based on works by Dostoyevsky, and Navalny's letters will also be read.
DV: How can Russian culture have a positive influence in Russia itself - so that people can freely express their opinions?
N. Khrushcheva: It could be said here that there are many examples from Russian culture in which this theme is touched upon, and yet things are constantly repeated. First - Russian culture is not only about Russian culture, Dostoevsky speaks for everyone. It's just that Russian culture is a culture of 11 time zones, it's a country where schizophrenia is part of its genetic code, if we consider that on one side is Kaliningrad and on the other is Vladivostok and Kamchatka. Added to this rupture of the human soul are the enormous sufferings and the enormous size of the country - it basically represents a macrocosm of human experiences. If Russian literature or Russian music were not doing what they are doing, there would be a permanent dictatorship in Russia. And we see that this was not always the case. At some point, we see that Russia reads enough Russian literature, listens to enough Prokofiev and Schnittke, and says to itself - how did we allow ourselves to become like this. In such cases, as Sakharov notes, she teaches a lesson to the world. That is why Russian culture is so irreplaceable.
Of course, we want Stalinism, Putinism not to be repeated, but this is a problem of size. Because Russia is like a pendulum - it constantly swings from one extreme to the other, as without the description of this - for example, without Solzhenitsyn - it would be very difficult for us to understand first the actions of Stalin and the collapse of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, and then Putin's actions and his invasion of Ukraine. I'm not sure I know how to act on this background, but it is extremely necessary as an analysis and explanation.
DV: Now Russia has two cultures - one that remained under Putin, and the other that left. Well, they will part ways - will they go in different directions?
N. Khrushcheva: They already diverged like this after 1917 and in the 1970s. After which they united. This is really very unfortunate and I wish I could see it happen again. And it will happen. In the end, both the departed and the remaining will unite. But it is unfortunate that this pendulum will continue to swing and kill people, creating problems for the world's population.