Declan Hayes
NATO's campaign against Tchaikovsky and, by extension, against all Russian and global culture may best be viewed as a chess game where NATO are the white hats and civilisation must play black.
NATO's campaign against Tchaikovsky and, by extension, against all Russian and global culture may best be viewed as a chess game where NATO are the white hats and civilisation must play black. NATO's aim in this sick game is to uncouple Tchaikovsky from the rest of his team, to control the cultural centre of the board and, by removing him from their cultural chess board, to pulverise Russian culture, to demote the Russian language to a patois of little, if any, significance and to say that Russian culture is as nothing to the riches Zelensky and his cross-dressing friends bring to our culturally diverse world.
Though it is a solid, if somewhat demonic plan, Tchaikovsky's CV makes it fatally flawed. It cannot and must not succeed.
Tchaikovsky, recall, is best known for his ballet scores and his 1812 overture, which maps his fellow Russians' demolition of Napoleon's Grande Armée. Though ballet, Le Grande Armée and being a long dead Russian make strange bedfellows, taken together, they show why NATO is on a fool's errand with this cultural terrorism.
Ballet's roots are in Italy, France and Tsarist Russia. Here, for example, is Louis X1V, France's Sun King, dancing the part of Apollo in the ballet Royal de la Nuit. As Louis X1V was France's equivalent of Tsar Peter the Great, who introduced ballet to Russia, it is fair to say that ballet owed its original prominence to the patronage of Tsars and Sun Kings. Thus, Russia's Imperial Ballet School was founded in 1738 and the equally world-famous (Moscow) Bolshoi Ballet Company first saw the light of day in 1773, whereas the Kyiv (sic) Ballet School, then called the National Opera of (Tsarist) Ukraine only began operations in 1867, some 57 years after the founding of the (Tsarist funded) Odessa Opera and Theatre Company and more than 100 years after St Petersburg staked its claim to be East Europe's cultural powerhouse.
The importance of those historical tidbits is that Tsarist Ukraine was a Johnny Come lately in ballet and NATO renaming Degas' Russian dancers as Ukrainian dancers because Degas' palate included yellow and blue is as crude, acultural and uncouth as anything else emanating from Zelensky's rotten Reich. Rewrite history as they might, Moscow and St Petersburg were Eastern Europe's operatic powerhouses and anyone arguing otherwise is delusional at best and mad as a Ukrainian hatter at worst. Russia, for better or worse, remains the world's pre-eminent exponent of ballet and, if NATO and her thuggish cronies wish to continue to ban Tchaikovsky's ballets and the great Russian troupes, who are its best exponents, the loss is theirs and all the young girls, who dream of dancing Swan Lake or the Nutcracker. Shame on those savages.
And then we have the 1812 Overture which Tchaikovsky was commissioned to write and which was meant to be first showcased outside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which was likewise built as a monument to Tsar Alexander's defeat of Napoleon.
Moscow has a simple remedy there. All they have to do is have an annual Tchaikovsky concert in the Cathedral and, perhaps also simultaneously reach out to Ukraine by getting them to put on drag shows by Zelensky and Pussy Riot in their own commandeered cathedrals. I know which one I would prefer.
Finally, and perhaps most damning of all, Tchaikovsky was a Russian, albeit one who kept his professional distance from The Five who were at the heart of the New Russian School, who tried to develop a distinctly Russian national style of classical music. Although Tchaikovsky successfully threaded Russian (and French) motifs into his 1812 Overture, the Five were no xenophobes as they were all very amenable to Orientalist influences.
Thus, though NATO trying to cast Russian culture adrift by attacking Tchaikovsky is a fool's errand, as the fool knows not that the fool knows not, it is a waste of time arguing with these Philistines. Far better to enjoy Russia's great composers and to allow Chinese and other civilised folk perform them throughout Russia.
To make it easy on Russia's critics, one could always learn Georgian to read the much acclaimed poems of Stalin without, of course, endorsing Stalin's later career choices. Although NATO's cross dressing Ukrainian comedians would argue that Stalin's poems or those that influenced him should not see daylight, that would mean banning all of Georgia's greatest poems and poets and show how truly absurd these NATO savages are at heart.
NATO's problem in erasing Russian or, for that matter, Georgian or Armenian culture, is that they are so firmly enmeshed with all that is best in the world's other great cultures. Not only is this latest NATO effort at cultural vandalism a possible war crime but it is, at heart, a foolish and fascistic exercise.
Tchaikovsky and all of Russia's great composers can only be extirpated by the extirpation of culture itself. As long as Moscow, St Petersburg and Russia's other great cities stand, so will Russian, Chinese and other civilised peoples flock there to see the greatest exponents not only of Tchaikovsky but of Russia's other gifted geniuses as well. And, though Chinese and other civilised people will continue to be welcome there, Ukraine can continue to console herself that she still has the cross-dressing Zelensky and the crack addict Hunter Biden to amuse their troops, and many others of us as well.