“The names of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninov are being removed from playbills, Russian writers and their books are being banned,” said the Russian president.
QUICK FACTS:
- Russian President Vladimir Putin compared the current campaign against Russian culture in the West to Nazi Germany under Hitler, TASS reports, amid Russia’s “military operation” in Ukraine.
- “The notorious cancel culture has turned into the cancellation of culture,” Putin said on Friday. “The names of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninov are being removed from playbills, Russian writers and their books are being banned.”
- “Last time, such a large-scale campaign against undesired literature was conducted by the Nazi in Germany nearly 90 years ago,” he went on to say.
- Russia’s Putin also commented on cancel culture. “Today, they are seeking to ‘cancel’ an entire centuries-old country, our people,” Putin said. “I mean the growing discrimination of everything that is linked with Russia, about this tendency, which is unfolding in several Western nations with the utter connivance of the ruling elites or even encouraged by them.”
WHAT ELSE PUTIN SAID:
“It is impossible to even imagine such things in our country! We are immune to such things thanks to our culture,” the president said, harkening back to when books were thrown into bonfires and lit on the central squares of German cities under Nazi control. “It is inseparable from [our] homeland, from Russia, where there is no place for ethnic intolerance, where people of dozens of nationalities have been living, working, and raising their children side by side and where cultural diversity is the pride of society, the strength and advantage of our state.”
BACKGROUND:
- JK Rowling pushed back at President Putin after he cited her in his speech criticizing cancel culture.
- At the televised speech, Putin compared recent criticism of the Harry Potter author to that faced by pro-war Russian composers and writers, the BBC reports.
- Rowling denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, arguing that Russia was “slaughtering civilians.”
