The Moldovan author and diplomat Oleg Serebrian is looking with optimism to a future where public discourse is less focused on war and more on peace, a process in which the creative intelligentsia will have a special role to play.
“Cultural workers can band together faster than societies, and it’s very important for the intellectuals in Russia who are hesitant for the time being to understand this. Because there are hundreds of important figures, actors, musicians, writers (...) who are still silent. I think it’s time for these people to speak out. Because if they keep quiet, it means they have a different position than those who support the war”, said Oleg Serebrian during an IPN debate on the role of culture in times of war.
Asked to explain how some Russian philosophers and cultural figures came to justify the war in Ukraine, Oleg Serebrian said that during wars there is always some kind of national mobilization, recalling that big names - such as philosophers Martin Heidegger and Carl Gustav Jung, or writer Knut Hamsun, or composer Carl Orff - supported Nazism during World War II.
“Especially during massive wars, there is this solidarity of the self with the whole. That’s one of the explanations. However, we cannot say that Heidegger was a criminal by definition. (...) This is nothing new. (Philosopher Alexander) Dugin or other propagators of war and of the ‘Russian world’ are pygmies compared to the names I just mentioned, and by the way, I’m rather relating to what (writer Lyudmila) Ulitskaya is saying about the war than what Dughin is. I am glad that this big figure of contemporary Russian culture is against this war and I could go on with the names”, said Oleg Serebrian.
Commenting on the polls according to which over 80 percent of Russians support the invasion of Ukraine, the writer called them “devastating” and “mind-blowing”. “I only hope that these numbers do not reflect reality. It reminds me of the Soviet times. What would you have said then if someone asked you about the Afghanistan war, which was totally unpopular? You would say one thing, while believing the complete opposite. I suppose that in the contemporary Russian society, which perpetuates many of the atavisms of the Soviet period - and not only them, in the former Soviet space we find many atavisms of thought - people would say “yes, I support”, but what they would say in the kitchen at home may differ”, said Oleg Serebrian, going on:
“Fear is detrimental in this case. Fear and the absence of a civil society, because if there were a genuine civil society, it could have fought back and overcome the fear. Can you fight fear on your own? Yes, solitary heroes are very important. But the mass hero is the one who matters most in critical situations”.
Oleg Serebrian stressed that we must separate the Kremlin regime from the Russian people and especially from the Russian culture. “Of course there are public excesses, too. (Pro-war messages from Russian intellectuals) are not uncommon and, on some emotional level, they can be understood. However, if we look back again at World War II, no one in the Soviet Union or Britain banned the music of Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. The most studied foreign language in the Soviet Union was actually German (...) It is very important to make a distinction - especially in a society like ours, like the one in Ukraine, the ex-Soviet space in general - between people and regime. The people may be the biggest victims of that regime”.
According to Oleg Serebrian, today Facebook plays a bigger role than theater or literature. “Someone with more or less influence posts a video on Facebook, makes a pro-war or anti-war call, and the impact may be greater than decades of literature (...) Rather, non-culture has a bigger impact”.
The writer also spoke about the comments on social media below news posts about the war. “Look at the comments, especially those in favor of the war, look at their quality. I’m not talking about the grammar or the language used, but, oh my God, what those people say! You can figure out the values of a large part of society (...) I think that those comments get more reads than many novels or more views than many plays and I think that their impact is much greater. It is a new phenomenon, which, from a sociological point of view, has not yet been studied well enough”, said the writer and diplomat Oleg Serebrian.
The debate was the 250th installment of the “Political Culture” Series, run by IPN with the support of the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
