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set and costume designer who
teaches at the University of Mary-
land and has designed produc-
tions for such D.C. companies as
Woolly Mammoth Theatre and
Arena Stage, among others.
Artists have operated on an
unspoken understanding with
the government, Kachman said: “
‘We won’t do certain things, and
you won’t touch us, and you fund
us.’
“Now that social contract has
been ripped apart,” he added, “be-
cause the government are mili-
tary criminals who are commit-
ting war. Not that we learned
anything new about the govern-
ment, but there was some willing-
ness to ignore it.”
‘The screws started
tightening’
At one point, Vladimir Jurows-
ki, chief conductor of the Berlin
Radio Symphony Orchestra, was
among those willing to overlook
signs of trouble in his homeland.
In 1990, at 18, he left Russia for
Berlin with his parents, when an-
tisemitism made it impossible for
his father, also a conductor, to
work. In recent years, whenever
Jurowski traveled back to Russia
to lead concerts, he faced ques-
tions from his friends in the West.
“People would say, ‘Why are
you playing in Putin’s Russia?
Don’t you understand you are
helping the regime?’ ” Jurowski
said, speaking from a train en
route to Vienna, where his orches-
tra was scheduled to perform.
“I told them, ‘I am not helping.
I’m bringing that necessary
breath of fresh air to people who
need it.’ I didn’t feel I was commit-
ting any crime. Yes, the country is
ill, but if one of your family mem-
bers is ill, you bring this person
hot tea and lemon and medicine
instead of punishing them.”
“That’s what I was doing” with
music, he said — “bringing medi-
cine to my country.”
From 2011 to 2021, Jurowski,
49, was artistic director of the
State Academic Symphony Or-
chestra of Russia. As a visiting
“foreign specialist” traveling
there from Berlin, he was im-
pressed by the artistic openness.
Until that began to evaporate.
Jurowski says he felt a change
in 2014. “It was like the Benjamin
Britten opera ‘The Turn of the
Screw,’ ” he said. “The screws
started tightening. The whole at-
mosphere became suddenly
much less tolerant.”
It was about this time that
some artists were being targeted.
Members of the feminist punk
rock group Pussy Riot had been
imprisoned in 2012 for their anti-
Putin lyrics. In 2017, stage and
screen director Kirill Serebren-
nikov, who built Moscow’s Gogol
Center into a cultural hot spot,
was put under house arrest for 18
months on embezzlement charg-
es. The director denied wrongdo-
ing, and the charges were seen by
many as phony and politically
motivated. Cultural conservatives
had bristled at Serebrennikov’s
use of onstage nudity and his
modern adaptations of Russian
classics.
Putin was once seen as a savior
of the arts in Russia. State fund-
ing for culture dried up in the
chaotic 1990s, when the Soviet
Union broke up under Mikhail
Gorbachev, the Communist Party
collapsed, and Russia was thrown
into economic crisis. When Putin
was first elected in 2000, he fu-
eled the arts with grants, earning
him the gratitude of ballet danc-
ers, musicians, actors and other
artists across the country.
“That was a pact with the dev-
il,” said Jurowski. “We know from
Faust, the bill is never presented
to you immediately. And it’s com-
ing to all of us now. I was also part
of that plan without knowing it
because I was allowed to return
and have a substantial career in
that post-Soviet state, thanks to
the seemingly tolerant position of
the authorities at that time.
“Now it’s clear that tolerance
had its limits, and I am off-limits
now,” he said.
On March 22, Jurowski pub-
lished a public letter signed by
dozens of musicians calling for an
end to the war in Ukraine and an
end to the boycotting of Russian
artists. Those boycotts — such as
London’s Royal Opera House can-
celing a summer tour of the
Bolshoi Ballet — have dismayed
many expatriates, who say it is
wrong to punish the artists.
“My return to Russia is un-
thinkable,” Jurowski said. “As
long as this war doesn’t stop, I
won’t set foot in Russia.”
It’s more difficult for artists to
wrench themselves away when
they live there. Six weeks ago,
Krymov’s calendar was crammed
with jobs, stretching into the next
three years. But he couldn’t shake
a feeling of impending catastro-
phe, which is why he gave such a
cheeky title to the film he wrote
and directed, about life “when
everything seems to be okay, but
you understand that really every-
thing is not okay and not normal,”
he said.
Then his fears came true. The
day Russia invaded Ukraine, the
ARTISTS FROM E1
director and his wife, Inna, were
on their way to Philadelphia. The
trip had been booked months in
advance — a providential twist, he
said.
“God prevented me from mak-
ing a conscious decision about
leaving the country because I was
already here,” Krymov said.
In his adaptation of “The Cher-
ry Orchard,” which runs April
12-May 1, he’s experimenting with
working in references to Ukraine.
Directing the classic Russian play,
which deals with the loss of one’s
home and motherland, is another
bit of providence.
“The pain that Chekhov was
talking about expresses what is
happening now,” he said. “He was
writing about us.”
Krymov is 67, with hanks of
pale hair sweeping across a broad
forehead. Asked about his plans,
he falls silent. Behind his aviator
glasses, his eyes brim with tears.
“It’s maybe childish of me, but I
don’t want to believe in the most
dark thing,” he said finally. “I hear
about a darkness that will engulf
us, and maybe that is right. But
every day I open up the news
section, and I hope that every-
thing is okay, and [that] at the endof April I will go back.”A system that can produce
‘great art'
Has the omnipresent tension
between state control and the
artist’s quest for creative freedom
contributed to Russia’s legacy of
great art?
“It is i ronic,” said Paata Tsi-
kurishvili, 55, “because it gives
you the opportunity to take your
art to a different level.”
Tsikurishvili and his wife, Iri-
na, founded Synetic Theater in
the D.C. area in 2001. They fled
Georgia amid the brutal wars
erupting in the republic during
the mid-1990s, after the Soviet
Union dissolved. “What you see
on TV now [in Ukraine], that was
my ‘90s,” he said.
Yet for years, he and Irina had
worked in theater and dance in
the Soviet system. The financial
support had its benefits, he said.
“I think that’s the reason why
great art was produced, because
you can spend much more time
when you’re putting on a show. It
gives you time to really chew it
up,” Tsikurishvili said in a recent
Zoom interview. “At the end of the
day, that’s the best training, thatyou can go so deep” into your art.
On other hand, he added, “it’s
censored and it’s propaganda. So
then it doesn’t matter about the
quality, you don’t serve art any-
more. What’s the point?”‘To go backward is not
evolution’
The flight from Russia of high-
profile artists such as Smirnova,
the Bolshoi Ballet star, brings
back memories of dancer defec-
tions in Soviet times, during the
1960s and ‘70s. Natalia Makarova
shocked the world when she de-
fected from the Mariinsky Ballet
in 1970 in London. In a recent
interview from her home in San
Francisco, Makarova, 81, said she
identifies with Smirnova.
“It is quite a good step, quite
courageous and mature to take
that drastic step,” Makarova said.
“Particularly from the Bolshoi.
Every dancer probably dreams
about going to the Bolshoi.”
Thinking about her own defec-
tion, she said, “Under the Iron
Curtain, we did not have freedom
of action at all. And I remember
the fear, constant fear, when I was
at the Mariinsky as a ballerina.
And I think this emotional fear is
a most dangerous and unpleasant
thing.
“My motivation was, I want to
be free, to make my choice,” Ma-
karova continued. “Not to be dic-
tated to. For Smirnova it is differ-
ent, probably, but I admire her
courage. It’s difficult to adjust to a
new theater, new repertoire, new
people.” (Smirnova did not re-
spond to a request for comment.)
Makarova said she fears the
Iron Curtain “is coming back.”
“It is important to have evolu-
tion, not a war,” she said. “To go
backward is not evolution, no?
For humanity.” The war in
Ukraine, she said, “is already the
first steps of that.”
Putin seems to have at least one
backward step in mind for the
arts in his country — the consoli-
dation of the Bolshoi and Mariin-
sky theaters under a single direc-
tor. In the midst of war, the Rus-
sian president found time last
week to meet with artists and talk
about his idea for the country’s
top performing-arts institutions.
According to the Russian state-
controlled Tass news agency, Pu-
tin advised conductor Valery Ger-
giev, a noted loyalist and head of
the Mariinsky Theatre, “to think
about” founding a joint manage-
ment of the two colossal theaters.
“How do you feel about the idea
of re-creating a common director-
ate?” Putin reportedly asked Ger-
giev, referring to the system in
imperial Russia, before the 1917
revolution, when a single director
oversaw the opera, ballet and
theater companies in St. Peters-
burg and Moscow, as well as their
schools.
Reached for comment, Bolshoi
spokeswoman Katerina Novikova
said in an email, “What is pub-
lished here by Tass agency is that
Mr. Putin suggested Valery Ger-
giev to think over the idea of
united direction the way it was”
with the imperial theaters, “and
we don’t comment on it.”
What does that potential devel-
opment portend for the future of
the arts in Russia?
“That would be a terrible deci-
sion, politically and artistically,”
said Jurowski, the conductor.
“There’s a danger now that the
state, because of the crisis it’s in,
will exert even more power over
the arts organizations in Russia.
That will be a really fatal develop-
ment over the next few years. I
think repression will function in
higher gear because the govern-
ment is now afraid of its own
citizens.”
What’s clear is that artists
working in Russia now face a
pressing moral dilemma.
“I don’t know who will be able
to create anything in these cir-
cumstances, morally,” said Yury
Urnov, co-artistic director of the
Wilma Theater. He moved to the
United States from Russia 13
years ago.
“It’s hard to rehearse when you
know every second that someone
is bombing the country next to
you. You can’t not think about it.
You can’t not talk about it. You
can’t not make art about that,” he
said.
“You’re connected to it. So peo-
ple will try to sneak their ideas
and feelings and horror into their
work — and that means censor-
ship will be coming after them,”
Urnov said.
Krymov, reflecting on the fu-
ture of the arts in his country, fell
silent for a moment. “For many
people, and for me, too, there is no
life without theater,” he said. “But
what if people cannot leave?
They’ll have to work there. When
I think about that I lose control, I
go into darkness. I don’t under-
stand.
“I’m thinking about the people
who are there, wonderful people
who I know and love who have to
work there,” he continued. “How
are they going to think about that
line, the line that marks when
they will not be able to work there
anymore? Where is the line that
they won’t be able to step over?
Because they will be faced with it
every day.”Artists flee wartime Russia,
dicey system of state support
SERGEI KARPUKHIN/REUTERSSYNETIC THEATERVIT SIMANEK/CTK/ASSOCIATED PRESSJOHANNA AUSTINDINA MAKAROFFCLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Olga Smirnova and Vladislav
Lantratov perform at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in
2013; D mitry Krymov rehearses in Philadelphia for his
adaptation of “The Cherry Orchard”; Paata Tsikurishvili is
co-founder of Synetic Theater in Arlington, Va .; Natalia
Makarova dances in “Swan Lake” in 1972.