There’s an element of schizophrenia in this.” Mikhail Shvydkoi on bans in Russian culture

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“There’s an element of schizophrenia in this.” Mikhail Shvydkoi on bans in Russian culture

Former Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi said he did not even suspect how many “recommendations, bans, laws” exist in Russia’s cultural sphere until he ran into restrictions himself. “There’s an element of schizophrenia in this,” he noted in an interview with RBC.

When Shvydkoi was working on the project “Theater in Cinema” (broadcasts of theater productions on big screens), the operetta The Circus Princess initially received a distribution certificate with an 18+ age rating. Even though in the theater it is staged with a 6+ label. The age restriction was raised because of a mention of wine and the display of a kiss between a man and a woman.

In the former minister’s view, amid efforts to raise the birth rate in the country, “teaching children to kiss before they start having children still makes some kind of sense.” He also mocks the other restrictions:

And what are we supposed to do with Pushkin, for example? “Let us raise our glasses, bring them together at once, long live the muse, long live reason.” Clinking glasses, not to mention the poor old girlfriend and so on, all of this is taking on a rather strange character.

As Mikhail Shvydkoi emphasizes, one cannot pretend that the country exists in peacetime. But bans should primarily concern things related to military actions. Although even that, he believes, is useless: people will still get the information they need.

Shvydkoi is convinced that such bans will not help in raising children, because they need to see both good and evil in order to distinguish between them. However, for one simple reason, officials find it easier to ban everything:

A paper comes to me: approve it or not approve it? Well of course, don’t approve it. Because if I ban it, no one will say a bad word to me. They may call me an “idiot,” but no one will fire me. But if I approve it, then a whole series of problems begins.