Vladimir Putin’s favourite exhibition, laconically called ‘Russia’, took centre stage in Moscow’s cultural scene from November 2023 to July 2024. Located in VDNKh, a 325-hectare exhibition and recreation complex built in 1939 during the Stalin era to showcase Soviet economic, industrial, and agricultural achievements, the exhibition megalomaniacally praised Putin and his reign. Each of the 89 regions of Russia, plus the occupied territories of Ukraine, had their own promotional pavilion or stand. More than 18 million people visited the exhibition, which featured propaganda messages, patriotic talks, and workshops for kids on weaving camouflage nets and crafting trench candles from tin cans. A giant, shiny banner with Putin’s statement ‘Russia’s border doesn’t end anywhere’ was displayed in the pavilion dedicated to Ukraine’s Kherson region, 70% of which Russia currently controls.
Sergey Kirienko, the presidential administration’s First Deputy Chief of Staff, orchestrated the ‘Russia’ exhibition to celebrate his boss. Putin loved it so much that he ordered the construction of a dedicated complex in the center of Moscow to display the exhibition’s highlights permanently, which is now being developed. In an anonymous comment, a political strategist referred to the project as a future ‘Putin mausoleum’. After all, Russia is well experienced in commemorating its late rulers: since 1924, the preserved body of Vladimir Lenin, the man behind the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of the USSR, is displayed in his mausoleum at Red Square. You can visit for free on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 10 am to 1 pm but can’t take pictures and should stay silent in pensive awe.
Eight months after the exhibition closed, a museum glorifying the war in Ukraine opened its doors in VDNKh. Sardonically, the museum inhabits the building used as Ukraine’s exhibit pavilion during Soviet times. The new museum follows in the exact ideological and propaganda footsteps of Putin’s favorite expo. It draws explicit parallels between the Second World War and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since 2022, framing it as a continuous existential fight against fascism. The expensive displays feature captured and destroyed Ukrainian vehicles and FPV drones, all marked as trophies, scattered among stones, rubble and birch branches. There’s also a detailed diorama of the Battle of Bakhmut, depicting Ukrainian soldiers as defeated or kneeling in surrender, and a reconstructed military dugout featuring videos of boastful Russian soldiers.
The museum doesn’t touch on how the Russian army in Ukraine has conducted the largest crime against art in Europe since Nazi Germany. Russians have stolen and hidden some 1.7 million artifacts and exhibits since the Russian invasion of 2014. Neither does it mention the high toll that the Russian invasion has taken on culture in Ukraine. Since 2022, Russia has damaged or destroyed more than 1,550 cultural heritage sites and 2,380 cultural facilities, including libraries, museums and theaters across Ukraine.
Instead, the new war museum in VDNKh sets a ‘golden standard’ for others trapped in wartime censorship, forced to tiptoe around politics at all costs – an impossible challenge, since the Russian state aggressively pushes propaganda into exhibitions, arrests artists, censors work and is rewriting history to mould Ukrainian cultural identity. Russia now controls more than forty Ukrainian museums, integrating them into its cultural infrastructure, and is establishing new museums in Ukraine.
All of these efforts follow a strict state-sanctioned blueprint that provides a detailed ideological message, distributed via cultural institutions across the country and occupied lands. ‘The Russian world’, conceived as a state with limitless borders, assumes the reintegration of former Soviet nations and opposes Western influence.
The state openly utilizes its law enforcement to punish those who step out of line. In April 2025 the chairman of the Russian Investigative Committee – one of the pillars of Putin’s repressive machine – ordered the establishment of an internal cultural council. Its purpose is to ‘coordinate dialogue’ between law enforcement, public organizations, and cultural workers. According to Russian official Alexander Bastrykin, this is paramount for forming patriotism, civic engagement and traditional moral values among youth. The сommittee’s first meeting, held on 30 September, was called ‘The role of culture in shaping citizens’ legal awareness and preventing crime’.
In the last three and a half years since the full-scale invasion began, the face and state of culture both inside the country and the occupied territories have undergone drastic changes. In wartime Russia, culture and repression have become symbiotic.
The self-censoring cultural hub
In December 2021, three months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the GES-2 House of Culture had its grand opening in Moscow, just across the river from the Kremlin. The 470-million-dollar (400 million euros) reconstruction of a 20th-century power plant into a centre for contemporary art was led by Pritzker-Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, renowned for designing the Centre Pompidou and Istanbul Modern. GES-2 initially attracted some of the best contemporary art talent from within Russia and abroad. But the hub for modern cultural leisure, with its library, cinema, space for workshops, talks, fashion shows, its high-end restaurants, birch grove and even ice-skating rink, is an appealing, spacious building that lacks a crucial message. It has become a self-censoring worrywart.
Before GES-2 opened to the public, its founder, billionaire oligarch Leonid Mikhelson, who owns Russia’s largest non-state natural gas provider, hosted a private tour for Vladimir Putin and Moscow’s mayor. Some reports say both were not only unimpressed but borderline furious with the highbrow, hipster haven. GES-2 was never intended as a political megaphone, but times were changing, and even its innocuous cultural position was deemed too much.
Curator-director Teresa Mavica soon stepped down from her role, and Mikhelson started interfering with the exhibition programme and content. GES-2 cancelled its artistic workshop on the history of Russian authority at the last moment. Staff removed some works from exhibitions considered ‘too provocative’. They changed the name of the performance, God, Moscow to Untitled. Contestation began circulating in Moscow. Three days before the full-scale invasion, GES-2 announced it had hired a PR expert to communicate with the Russian state and make sense of the non-stop repression and censorship. Pro-Kremlin Telegram channels immediately labelled this position as one of internal censorship. After the war escalated, the museum described itself as ‘a neutral and apolitical territory where there was no space for emotional and rash declarations’ and temporarily shut down all shows.
Since February 2022, however, many staff members have left GES-2. According to some reports, the pressure Putin’s administration puts on Mikhelson to host more patriotic events has forced him to walk a managerial tightrope. The cultural centre is only getting by, hosting mediocre exhibitions and workshops. The coffee is still good, though.
When denunciations shape cultural policy
Other cultural spaces and activities have fared even worse. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, owned by oligarch Roman Abramovich, closed its exhibitions for two years in the hope of avoiding trouble once the war escalated. Seven months before reopening, the museum was raided by OMON, special police units within the National Guard, and its long-standing director, Anton Belov, stepped down and left the country. Once reopened, Garage then endured a siege by pro-war activists, who demanded the establishment of war-related exhibitions. The museum strikes a careful balance.
In November 2022, Putin signed a decree outlining the implementation and preservation of ‘traditional Russian spiritual and moral values’. Among them are human rights, dignity, freedom, patriotism, serving the homeland, family values, historical memory and spiritual superiority over materialism. The decree also highlights that the USA and other unfriendly countries, along with unnamed media, transnational corporations and NGOs, pose a threat to those values via the use of destructive ideological and psychological influence. Two months later, the Ministry of Culture demanded that the Tretyakov Gallery, which was established in 1856 and regarded as the foremost repository of Russian fine art in the world, update its exhibitions to follow these traditional values.
A civilian complaint to the Ministry of Culture, which stated that the gallery showed signs of a destructive ideology, overwhelmingly pessimistic, hopeless and hollow, prompted the directive. In his denunciation, the complainant blamed the gallery for showcasing paintings with demonic and voluntaristic interpretations of historical and religious events, topped off with alcoholism and funerals.
Within a month, officials appointed a new CEO of the Tretyakov Gallery. Elena Pronicheva, a former parliament employee with a track record of working at VDNKh and Gazprom, the largest national energy company, stepped into the role. Born in the now-occupied territory of Ukrainian Melitopol, she is the daughter of prominent Federal Security Service (FSB) general Vladimir Pronichev, who led the operation against the Moscow theatre hostage crisis in 2002, where 132 hostages died due to the effect of sleeping gas used by special forces, and was part of the task force during the Beslan school hostage crisis in 2004, where 330 people, including 180 children, died. Pronichev also founded the Division for the Defense of the Constitutional Order and the Fight against Terrorism within the FSB, which is responsible for some of the largest political trial cases.
In March 2024 police stormed the apartments of 20 artists in connection with a case of treason against Peter Verzilov, founding producer of the feminist Pussy Riot rock band that became world famous after they were arrested and given two-year sentences for shooting footage inside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, located near the Kremlin, in 2012; Verzilov, who left Russia years ago, is now enlisted in the Ukrainian army. The police search was brutal: artists were forced to lie on the floor of their apartments, were yelled at, beaten and threatened with machine guns, before being detained for questioning. Artists and curators Svetlana Baskova and Anatoly Osmolovsky, who spearheaded the post-Soviet, Moscow art underground, left Russia as a result. In an interview, Osmolovsky said that contemporary art, which represents the idea of modernity, has no place in Russia, under the current regime that dwells on the past: ‘A concept of the future is absent in the Russian consciousness.’
The state also tightly controls collective memory. In November 2024 authorities shut down the Gulag History Museum in Moscow, which was established in 2001 to publicly acknowledge the brutal system of Soviet-era camps, bringing together a collection of state documents, family photographs and other objects from gulag victims. In 2021 it won the Council of Europe Museum Prize, for exposing history and activating memory, ‘with the goal of strengthening the resilience of civil society and its resistance to political repression and violation of human rights today and in the future’. Officials claimed the closure was due to fire safety violations, but the real cause was censorship. When the museum fired its director, Roman Romanov, Elizaveta Lihacheva, then the head of the Pushkin Museum, publicly defended the museum and Romanov. Despite being a loyalist, authorities then fired her two months later – even small acts of disobedience aren’t tolerated.
It is rumoured that the Gulag museum will reopen in a year under new directorship. But its management will have to be careful: the state assesses historical and memory activities. Authorities have banned the human rights organization Memorial. Officials have forbidden the annual day of remembrance for victims of the Great Purge. Artists get arrested and imprisoned for calling Russian aggression what it is – war.
Looted treasures and inherited power
Mikhail Piotrovsky, 80, the long-standing head of the Hermitage and a vocal supporter of Putin, is one of the few gallery managers in Russia holding their ground. Having inherited the position in 1992 from his father, who had been 36 years in the job, Piotrovsky’s tenure isn’t far behind. And, like father like son, he hopes to transition power to his son, Boris Piotrovsky, the vice-governor of Saint Petersburg.
The museum possesses caches of European art that Soviet Trophy Brigades looted from Europe after the end of the Second World War. Among them are papyri from the Austrian National Library in Vienna, Japanese and Chinese works of art from the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin, Degas’ Place de la Concorde from the Gerstenberg-Scharf collection, and paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Courbet and Renoir from the collections of industrialists Otto Krebs and Bernhard Koehler.
The state kept these and other tens of thousands of art pieces in secrecy until the fall of the Soviet Union; then, in the 1990s, officials triumphantly displayed them. Authorities nationalized the pieces, using them as one of the many building blocks of Putin’s ideology. The regime, seeing them as restitution for damage that the Nazis caused, heralded them as winner’s trophies. Since Russian ideology merges the Second World War and the war in Ukraine as one, these artifacts are now seen both as a historical reminder of overcoming invasion and an excuse for war.
Recently, Piotrovsky issued a lengthy document explaining the mission of all Russian museums, which he claims is to instill ‘feelings of loyalty and love for the Homeland through immersion in native culture and national history’. This autumn, officials once again prolonged Piotrovsky’s term, this time until 2030. Both Mikhail and Boris Piotrovsky are heavily involved in shaping cultural policy in Ukraine’s occupied territories, most notably in the annihilated city of Mariupol.
Forced russification through culture
When Mariupol was under siege for three months in 2022, more than 20,000 people were killed and 90% of residential buildings destroyed. Authorities have since rebuilt the city as a display of forced russification. Here, like elsewhere in the occupied territories, schoolchildren are now studying from textbooks that praise Russia and its military, and downplay Ukrainian identity. The Russian state hosts patriotic concerts, exhibitions, talks and other events celebrating the war throughout occupied cities, and has commandeered museums for brainwashing citizens.
In the centre of Mariupol, the cosy museum of folk life, once beloved by its citizens, has been turned into a museum dedicated to Andrei Zhdanov, a close associate of Joseph Stalin who was born in Mariupol. Zhdanov, who was responsible for Soviet propaganda and helped orchestrate the Great Purge, crafted a party cultural doctrine known as Zhdanovshina. Under his policy, authorities in Ukraine criticized writers, actors, directors, producers and artists who contravened the official line. Officials attacked institutions of Ukrainian history and literature, creative unions, and editorial offices of newspapers and magazines. They censored theatre repertoires, removing any idealization of the pre-revolutionary past, replacing it with content that glorified Soviet rule.
Now, Stalin’s cult is seeing a comeback. Russian authorities are reconstructing destroyed museums and integrating them into the bigger russification picture. In the first days of war in Mariupol, Russians kidnapped and tortured museum workers until some of them collaborated. Today, officials have appointed new directors to most of the region’s museums, who have since signed partnerships with various institutions across Russia, participated in Russian events, received Russian awards and spoken on state TV. The obliterated Museum of Local Lore, for example, has been rebuilt and now houses exhibits from the Russian National Guard. In the first year and a half of the occupation, authorities had already implemented more than 50 exhibitions across the occupied territories. The state has also established new museums in the occupied lands celebrating Russian Cossacks, Russian icons, Soviet Donbas coal miners and Second World War resistance.
In Sevastopol, Crimea, the construction of a cultural cluster designed by the Austrian architectural firm Coop Himmelb(l)au is nearing completion. Putin is personally overseeing the complex, which includes a choreography academy, an art museum and an opera theatre. Despite Ukraine imposing sanctions and opening a criminal case against the firm’s leaders in January 2022, Coop Himmelb(l)au’s architects continued working on the project until October 2022, when EU sanctions finally forced them to stop. Co-founder Wolf Prix defended the collaboration, claiming he was ‘building for people, not Putin’, arguing that ‘architecture is art, and art knows no borders or sanctions’. He simultaneously criticized what he saw as Western hypocrisy, particularly colleagues who refused Russian projects yet continued working with authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Construction workers are now completing the buildings without the architects’ involvement but using their original designs.
Blueprint for historical revisionism
Everything that happens in culture and museums within Russia and Ukraine’s occupied territories follows a strict doctrine adopted by the Ministry of Culture, guided by the Kremlin’s lead. The internal paper ‘Methodological recommendations for creating exhibitions dedicated to the history of the special military operation in museums of the Russian Federation’ lays out the straightforward groundwork for historical and memory revisionism. According to this document, Russia considers Donbas and southeastern Ukraine as historically Russian territories, with the 2014 Maidan revolution characterized as an illegal coup in Kyiv. The war is justified, the document states, as a means to protect the identity and rights of Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
The doctrine explains precisely how to read the history of Russia and the world. The doctrine presents the war as Russia’s defensive response to ‘protect Russian speakers from cultural and political discrimination’ and to ‘defend Russia from Ukraine’s planned attack’. It frames the invasion as part of preserving ‘historical truth’ and traditional spiritual and moral values. The same points are repeated in school textbooks and lessons in Mariupol and other occupied cities. Russia’s culture ministry, alongside law enforcement agencies, is strictly imposing these guidelines, merging its cultural institutions into already mighty propaganda and repression machines.
There is, however, a bright side. As one of the former museum directors said off the record, Russia is an exceptionally large country and, even though the Kremlin and the Ministry of Culture have their plans, blueprints and strategies, it’s hard to make sure people will actually follow them. Museum staff will always find a way to just phone it in, balancing authenticity with the rules of propaganda by doing the bare minimum. And if they’re caught, they can always play dummy.
Russia’s new curation model, while mostly bleak, suits the general public, who are also trying to live their lives as if nothing horrible is happening. Last summer, Zelfira Tregulova, the former head of the Tretyakov Gallery and a loyalist whom authorities removed in favor of the FSB general’s daughter, curated a massive expo at GES-2. ‘The exhibition is doing everything in its power to maintain the illusion that everything in the world and in Russia is the same as it was four years ago,’ wrote art critic Sergei Hatchaturov. The event has set a baseline for contemporary museums – visually appealing, censored, isolated and uncritical. Even if the souvenir shops do have lovely tote bags.