Russia’s Greatest Artists Hated Russia

Oppression, exile, and borrowed glory

8 min readJun 12, 2025

“Russian culture”-there’s a smugness in the term that warrants suspicion. What exactly do we mean by “Russian culture”? Icons praised as national treasures, proudly paraded in Red Square parades and museum exhibitions alike-are they truly the beating heart of Russia, or actually just stolen property?

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky stands as Russia’s quintessential composer, his music played in Kremlin concerts with solemn reverence. Yet, his existence beneath the glamour was one long torment. Homosexual in a society that pathologised such inclinations, Tchaikovsky spent his life shrouded in secrecy and fear. His suspicious death, officially blamed on cholera, has ignited endless speculation about a forced suicide orchestrated by an elite determined to silence scandal (Poznansky, 1996). Is this tragedy a glorious triumph for Russian culture or its sordid indictment?

Consider Nikolai Gogol, another so-called “Russian” giant of literature. Gogol, whose writings surge with the soul of Ukrainian folklore, was born in Poltava, heartland of Ukrainian nationalism. Russian intellectuals annexed Gogol posthumously, absorbing his wit into their canon, but never comfortably. Gogol lived torn by dual loyalties, eventually sinking into despair and religious fervour, destroying manuscripts in bitter confusion.

Russia’s embrace of Gogol is only a celebration if you believe a hostage gets a birthday party; just more theft from Ukraine’s intellectual treasury.

Then there’s Anna Akhmatova, a figure etched in the marble halls of Russian poetic memory. But Akhmatova, with Ukrainian roots, never found peace within Russia’s borders. Under Stalin’s iron grip, her husband executed, her son repeatedly jailed, her poetry banned as dangerous individualism (Feinstein, 2005).

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“Russian culture” is adept at lionising those it first brutalises.

Joseph Brodsky, Nobel laureate and proud Russian poet-how quickly we forget his crime of “social parasitism.” Sentenced to forced labour before exile drove him to American shores (Loseff, 2011), Brodsky’s cultural canonisation in Russia after death is ironic, bordering on grotesque. Does a nation that persecutes poets truly earn the right to laud them later?

This pattern is not an historical accident. It’s a centuries old calculated cultural heist. Osip Mandelstam penned a poem mocking Stalin’s moustache and found himself dead in a Siberian camp (Brown, 1993). Marina Tsvetaeva, endlessly harassed, her family arrested, hanged herself under relentless Stalinist persecution (Schweitzer, 1992). Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinsky both fled revolutionary Russia, creating their most celebrated works far from the land that claims them.

One of my most favourite writers, Mikhail Bulgakov, too, wrote with a pen dipped in acid — his masterpiece The Master and Margarita a searing, surreal satire of Soviet power masquerading as magical realism. But for that brilliance, he paid in silence. Stalin admired him just enough to keep him alive, yet disallowed the publication of his major works during his lifetime. Bulgakov died watching his novels rot unpublished in a drawer while Soviet literary elites celebrated obedient mediocrities. A nation that couldn’t bear the mirror he held up later crowned him a genius, posthumously — and conveniently — when he could no longer speak back.

Russia as Jung’s Shadow

Why is Russia so eager to own these artists’ legacies, despite having driven them away or extinguished their flames?

Consider the psychology at play. Carl Jung famously spoke of the shadow, the hidden dark side societies refuse to acknowledge within themselves. Russia’s shadow is vast, filled with guilt and repression, yet displayed perversely as cultural pride. For Russia to own these artists is to pretend that the shadow never existed at all.

Russian authorities historically preferred artists as obedient tools, not critical mirrors. When creative minds resisted becoming regime puppets, the state inflicted punishment or exile. Yet after their deaths, the regime’s descendants hoist their effigies aloft, using art’s glamour as a superficial mask for authoritarian brutality.

From a survival standpoint, small tribes (read: early human communities, not English football clubs) needed:

Shared myths to unify,
Punishment of heretics to maintain cohesion.

Russia’s centuries of authoritarian systems have always replicated this tribal instinct. The artist who writes honestly becomes a symbolic heretic-a “threat to cohesion,” even if their work poses no real danger.

So Russia, like all authoritarian regimes, reverts to ancestral instincts that result in suppressing the iconoclast and rewarding the bard who sings for the king.

Russia’s historical abuse of its greatest cultural figures isn’t random. It reflects a pathological system where power demands symbolic loyalty, and creative independence becomes a threat to state cohesion.

Russia as Narcissist

At the root is what psychologists call collective narcissism (Golec de Zavala et al., 2009): the belief that one’s nation is exceptional, but constantly under threat. This leads to:

Hyper-sensitivity to dissent
Demand for public loyalty
Rage toward those who refuse submission

Artists, some, may say by nature, are dissenters. When they refuse to glorify the state or conform to its myths (e.g., “Mother Russia”), they become enemies of the national ego. The regime doesn’t just reject them-it often needs to symbolically destroy them.

“The narcissist cannot tolerate ambiguity, because ambiguity implies limits to control.”
- Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941)

Let’s take Kazimir Malevich as another case. Born in Ukraine to a Polish-Ukrainian family, Malevich founded Suprematism, a radical break from representational art. The Soviet regime declared his work bourgeois degeneracy. He died impoverished, blacklisted by Stalinist cultural commissars (Douglas, 2007). Today, Malevich adorns Moscow galleries, presented as quintessentially Russian genius. Isn’t this akin to a criminal displaying stolen paintings in plain sight?

Russia’s Purity Spiral

Anthropologist Scott Atran coined the term sacred values -beliefs so core to identity that violating them evokes disgust, not debate.

In the Russian political mythos, the homeland is sacred and art that doesn’t serve the homeland is blasphemy. This leads to something called “purity spirals”-where the only acceptable art is patriotic, loyal, and state-serving. Anything ambiguous, critical, or ironic (e.g., Bulgakov, Brodsky, Mandelstam) must be expelled-or posthumously purified by rewriting their legacy.

To what degree must one reject, or be rejected by, Russia to become an authentic “Russian” icon?

Consider Vsevolod Meyerhold, the visionary theatre director executed during Stalin’s Great Purge. Or philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, silenced, unpublished, and internally exiled for decades. Or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, jailed and expelled for revealing Soviet Gulag horrors, later ironically hailed as a Russian prophet.

If cultural heritage means anything, it must imply authenticity and origin, not mere possession after persecution.

Russia’s celebration of its cultural icons resembles a kidnapper lauding his captives for their virtues, virtues sharpened precisely through suffering inflicted by the captor.

The uncomfortable truth is that Russia’s vaunted culture largely owes its depth and power to defiance against Russia itself. Artists who remained unscathed and compliant are rarely memorable. If at all. Artistic greatness emerged from struggle against oppression, not harmony with it. Russia produced genius not through nurturing but through torment-twisting, persecuting, exiling, and occasionally killing the very creators it now lionises.

Here’s a hierarchical imperative: societies that honour artists they once tormented must grapple openly with their past violence rather than painting over it. I am not moralising; this is an existential necessity. Self-deception on a national scale can only lead to psychological fracture.

This is where we are today. Russia’s contemporary aggression and revisionism on the world stage mirrors precisely this refusal to acknowledge its past brutality.

The myth of Russian culture as a harmonious wellspring of creativity crumbles upon honest inspection. Its greatest figures typically thrived despite, not because of, Russian society. The regime’s appropriation of these artists, from Gogol to Shostakovich, remains fundamentally dishonest, morally bankrupt, and intellectually suspect.

So next time someone proudly invokes “Russian culture,” probe deeper. Think about, and beg the invoker to think about, which Russia, exactly, are they talking about? The idealised image projected today or the harsh, censorious environment that tormented these geniuses into greatness?

True cultural appreciation demands facing historical realities squarely. Without this clarity, Russia’s cultural pretensions amount to nothing more than historical plagiarism-a theft of identity from those it once oppressed.

Perhaps Russian culture’s deepest irony lies in this: its richest treasures are testament to human resilience against Russia itself.

A nation honest enough to accept that truth would be, could be, should be, genuinely great. But until then, the ghosts of artists past will remain restless, forever whispering warnings about cultural truths buried beneath national mythologies.

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Originally published at https://biselin67.substack.com.