The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the international sanctions that followed almost immediately affected the cultural sphere of Russia.
Foreign artists and curators refuse to cooperate with Russian institutions and have withdrawn works from already completed exhibitions.
Due to complications that arose in logistics, works from Russian collections were "stuck" abroad, and the Russian Ministry of Culture banned the export of museum exhibits abroad a week after the start of the war.
All this led to a wave of cancellations and indefinite postponements of exhibitions and events.
Museums faced a similar situation in 2020, when all events had to be canceled due to the corona virus.
But the pandemic "first taught everyone to be in solidarity, both Russian institutions and international participants," an employee at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA), who asked to remain anonymous, told the BBC.
"And on February 24, 2022, it became obvious that everything was a nightmare," he adds.
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Cancellation of exhibitions
A week after the start of the war, the exhibition "Duel. From God's dare to a noble crime" about European knightly duels.
The main part of the exhibition consisted of exhibits from the largest European museums: the French Louvre, the Spanish Prado, the Austrian Museum of Art History, the Royal Collection of Great Britain and others.
However, after February 24, 2022, everyone withdrew the exhibits from the already prepared exhibition, and the organizers announced that it was being cancelled.
Replacements for both exhibits were later found in the collections of Russian museums, and in mid-May the exhibition was opened in an abbreviated form.
The cultural events that have been disrupted due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine can be enumerated for a long time.
A large solo exhibition of the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, one of the most famous representatives arte povera ("impoverished arts"), three years in a row it was on the list of the most anticipated exhibitions of the year, but it was never opened.
It was supposed to be shown in the museum of the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art (MMSU) as early as 2020, but it was postponed indefinitely due to covid.
The exhibitions of the French artist Christian Boltanski in the Central Exhibition Gallery Manezh in St. Petersburg have also been cancelled.
This project was the last one the artist personally worked on - he died in the summer of 2021.
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'Reputational Risks'
In the first week after the start of the invasion of Ukraine, the MMSU team, like many others, "found themselves in a difficult psychological state," a museum employee recalled in an interview with the BBC.
One of her colleagues, originally from Ukraine, had a sister in Kiev, another employee was worried that all the men "will now be taken to war".
"Some artists have fallen into apathy, and some have started making harsh statements that they are ending any cooperation with state institutions. Those were such strong emotional outpourings that had never happened before," she says.
The contemporary artist from Chechnya Aslan Goysum, in protest against the actions of the Russian authorities in Ukraine, renounced his work in the collections of the Hermitage, the Tretyakov Gallery and the National Center for Contemporary Art.
Oleg Eliseev of the art group EliKuka said he wanted to withdraw works from MMSU, the Tretyakov Gallery and the Museum of Multimedia Art.
The artist Arsenij Zhiljaev announced that he is severing relations with the company SmartArt, which organizes exhibitions.
"We don't agree that everything we've all done in art becomes a decoration for bombs," he wrote.
Russian content only
Krasnoyarsk Peace Square is the largest museum center of contemporary art in Siberia.
It was opened in 1987 as a branch of the Moscow Lenin Museum and became the last such museum in the history of the USSR.
Trg mira was turned into a museum of contemporary art in 1993 and since then it has always cooperated closely with other countries.
"From the beginning of the 2000s to the 2010s was a golden period when the museum had frequent international cooperation.
"He invited the participants of European biennials to participate in ours in Krasnoyarsk. The Netherlands, Slovenia, and Germany have also participated in recent years," says an associate associated with the museum center, who requested anonymity.
The museum cooperated a lot with the German Goethe Institute and in partnership with it the 14th consecutive Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale was held in 2021.
The Goethe Institute allocated part of the money for the biennale in 2019, and in 2017 this event was held in partnership with the Austrian embassy.
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Now there is no foreign cooperation.
"Previously, the museum cooperated with embassies and cultural centers as well as non-governmental organizations. Now we are focused on Russian artists who stayed here," says the employee.
In conditions where international cooperation was reduced to zero, Russian museums reorganized their activities and directed work from their collections and archives, looking for new meaning and new possibilities within them.
Such an approach to work has positive potential, says the MMSU associate.
"But it's also a gradual return to the Middle Ages."
Termination of scientific cooperation
Old Russian art and especially Russian icon painting is a rather isolated area.
Russia has more icons than any other country in the world.
International contacts in this area did not play the most important role.
"However, we are losing those contacts, which is very disappointing," says Natalia Komashko, former scientific secretary of the Andrei Rublev Museum in Moscow.
He assesses the situation in which museums with icon paintings are located as difficult.
According to her, the war greatly influenced the contacts of Russian museums and scientific organizations that study icon painting as a phenomenon.
A few days after the start of the war, the European Commission suspended payments to Russian institutions involved in EU-funded research projects.
And a month later, at the beginning of April 2022, it announced the decision to terminate existing contracts with Russian organizations.
Komaško has been involved in Ricontrans, a project funded by the European Union and led by Greece.
He deals with the identification of Russian icons that ended up in the Balkans.
Initially, Komaško was involved in this project through the Ruble Museum.
After the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the decision of the European Commission that followed, the Greek Institute for Mediterranean Studies sent the Rublev Museum a notice of termination of cooperation, Komashko says.
She continues to participate in the project because she lives in the European Union - after the outbreak of the war, she moved to Bulgaria.
On the list of participants, she is no longer represented as an employee of the Rublyov Museum, but as an art historian from Bulgaria.
Of the five participants from Russia, only two remained on the project, who currently live in the EU.
"This is a living example of how scientific ties are broken.
"Of course, they are still held on a personal level, all the researchers in our work know each other, and some contacts are made, but at the official level they no longer exist," says Komaško.
She emphasizes that there is no attempt to "cancel" the Russian icon as a cultural phenomenon.
"As you can see, the European Union continues to support donations for the study of the Russian icon. The rules for participating in it have simply changed."
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Joint exhibition with Belarus
Since the pandemic, the Ruble Museum has not planned any major international projects, and the war made them completely impossible.
The flow of foreign tourists to museums has also decreased.
"We still make inscriptions in English for exhibits at exhibitions, but it is purely out of inertia and in the hope for a better future," says Komaško.
The museum had very significant international contacts, especially with the countries of the Eastern Christian cultural tradition, for example, with Serbia and North Macedonia.
But the war also made those contacts impossible, primarily due to logistics.
"First, how do you get the icons there? With a landing in Istanbul? Nobody will now. It's expensive and it's not safe."
The only remaining opportunity for international cooperation are joint exhibitions with Belarus.
"But that is not enough, without Ukraine this topic is incomplete from the point of view of science. "Ukraine and Belarus are, in general, a unique artistic and cultural entity, for example, when we talk about the 16th and 17th centuries," she explains.
The Rublev Museum opened its last exhibition in Kyiv in 2013 - "Masterpieces of Old Russian Art of the XV-XVII centuries" and it was held in the Cathedral Church of Saint Sophia.
It was supposed to last until March 2014, but at the end of February of that year, the Rublyov Museum announced the premature closure of the exhibition and removed all the icons.
Like the economy, the culture is now oriented towards the east.
"Now we work quite actively in the direction of Asia, and with the Middle East, with Israel, with BRICS and SCO countries," said in 2023 the special representative of the Russian president for international cultural cooperation, Mikhail Shvidkoi.
But museum workers are skeptical of such a prospect.
"This does not mean at all that those countries with which contacts have not been broken need our art. And if something is invented there, it will be a directive from above. It will be something stillborn," Komaško says.
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Self-censorship and the fear of becoming a 'foreign agent'
The severing of ties with the West dealt a heavy blow to Russian cultural institutions, but a no less blow was dealt by the new repressive laws that the Russian authorities passed immediately after the start of the war.
This is, first of all, the law on "fake news" about the Russian army, the tightening of the law on "LGBT propaganda" and "foreign agents".
The vague wording of the latter practically made it impossible for Russian state museums to communicate with Western institutions.
Now the status of "foreign agent" can be obtained not only for foreign financing, but simply for "foreign support" and "foreign influence", which can be interpreted very broadly.
Krasnodar Center for Contemporary Art Typography, one of the most successful cultural institutions in the south of Russia, the Russian Ministry of Justice included in the register of non-governmental organizations of foreign agents in early May 2022 and announced its closure nine days later.
"We can no longer consider this space safe. We have made the decision to close it, and this is the most difficult decision we have ever made," its executives wrote.
Due to the tightening of the law on "foreign agents", cooperation with the German Goethe Institute and the Swiss art council Pro Helvetia Moscow, which, according to the BBC interlocutor, supported many Russian artists working with complex art forms, was terminated earlier.
"This mutual cooperation was interrupted, among other things, because the Russian State Museum does not have the right to receive financial resources from foreign companies," she says.
Now on the website of Pro Helvetia Moscow there is a statement that with the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the foundation has decided to stop supporting any public activities in Russia.
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Within the museums themselves, new laws against fake news and bans on "LGBT propaganda" have led to increased self-censorship.
"Everyone is forced to ask the question in one way or another: can we show this? And what will be the reaction?" says the MMSU employee.
"Everyone has already somehow started to apply self-censorship: they carefully choose the words for the announcements in the texts for the exhibitions. A kind of Aesopian language is still in the formative phase, but it is no longer possible to publish any open statements".
The war and increased internal repression led to a change in the course of cultural policy.
"I feel that now there will be more and more appeals in official culture to the social realism of different periods, to going back," says the interviewee of the BBC, citing as an example the exhibition about the Soviet past.
"This government has not produced anything new and is therefore trying to find some ideas in the past."
Those who left and those who stayed
After the outbreak of the war, there was a "great outflow" of people from the Russian cultural sphere, says the interviewee of the BBC.
At the beginning of February 2023, the publication Artgid published the results of changes in the Russian cultural sphere after the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine.
Almost half of those surveyed (47 percent) reported a "significant" or "colossal" outflow of personnel from Russian cultural institutions and projects.
"Museums are always a place to express your personal attitude. How can you even work in a museum if you're tongue-tied? That is absolutely not possible," says Natalija Komaško.
About 10 percent of the employees left the Rublje Museum.
Numerically, it may not be so noticeable, but those who left are people who worked in the museum for years and "guaranteed a certain quality of work", and their place was taken by people with less experience, she says.
The BBC interlocutor from MMSU fears that the places of those who left will be taken not only by people with less experience, but also by ordinary officials.
"The places of artists, curators and directors will be occupied by political officials and they will start making projects within the framework of official policy," she says.
A similar number of people left MMSU as those from the Rublyov Museum.
"But in general, based on what is in my environment from the cultural sphere, I can say that 40 percent, whether they completed the projects or not, left the country," he says.
Foreign foundations that previously cooperated with the institutions supported artists who are not connected to the state, but above all, help them to leave Russia if they want.
They give them donations, help with visas and travel to residences abroad.
They help museum curators and researchers with whom contacts and long-term cooperation were established before the war to find work abroad.
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