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Sergey Gradirovsky
Director of the Volga Federal
District Strategic Research Centre

I belong to a group of people who have for many years put high hopes on the cultural policy. But hoping is not doing. We have to admit honestly: after the break-up of the USSR hardly anything has been done in this sphere, and what has been done led to devaluation of the idea as such.

Could we expect any other result when the brand ‘cultural policy’ was farmed out to art-project makers and managers? And yet, we must be thankful to them for taking it up. And for carrying it. At least they did the best they could.

Art-managers and functionaries from the Ministry of Culture who joined them couldn’t even dare to think about a policy. It’s not surprising then, that cultural policy was left out of politics, loosing as a result both its specific content and a necessary form. Philosopher O.I.Genisaretsky is right saying that in today’s Russia cultural policy is understood as working out and implementation of cultural projects and programmes, while it is absolutely necessary to elaborate “political foundations for institutionalization of cultural and political activity”¹.

Hence the result – the handicapped cultural policy failed to solve (or even help to solve) any of strategic objectives that the Russian nation and society face today.
     
I. What tasks the cultural policy was not equal to

Before answering this question we should emphasize the importance of work with value foundations of a social background and through it – of a concrete person. For the work of this kind and scale we need publicity, political power and basic institutions of all-pervading encouragement, constraint and support (but not only specific institutions taken directly from the sphere of culture). Cultural policy is needed for course correction, for the work with public fears and total despair.

Existential despair. We treat the ingrained in the whole Russian society alcohol addiction as a form of escapism. Alcohol is the most available, culturally enhanced and even encouraged for active use antidepressant. In Russia, alcohol carries off almost one third of all men and one seventh of women before their time. Every second man is not able to live up to the age of retirement. ‘African mortality’ of the male population is the most serious problem lying in the core of our homeland depopulation. Difference in the average life expectancy of men and women is thirteen years. Most women are doomed to live alone at the old age.

Сultural policy in Russia failed to offer any decision to the question of the people’s attitude to their own health and life and, through it, to the health and life of those close to them.

Disbelief in self-government. Local self-government is an alternative to the arbitrary rule of gangs and despotic willfulness of leviathan. Local self-government allows going into details. Strong and mature self-government is the key agent of social environment development, which means creation of attractive places for social and creative capital. Without it we will not be able either to improve the quality of life, or achieve competitiveness. The cultural code of the ‘power vertical’ makes everything revolve around it, leaving no place or time for people’s self-determination. It is crucial to restore the natural, non-delegated human power.

Disbelief in the court of justice. Russians continue to think that the court is a profanation. When his master asks: ‘How shall we judge – according to law or according to conscience?” a Russian man answers: “According to conscience, my lord, according to conscience!” Economist Evgeny Yasin noted that during the last years the world has been clearly shown that the Russian laws, the prosecution, the court, the Russian authorities in general are not going to take into consideration ‘democratic prejudices’. Authorities in Russia stand above the law. During the whole history of our country Russians have been convinced that the court doesn’t exist for helping people achieve justice, and lately they received one more proof: the court serves the powers that be, or at least those who are rich and able to ‘be grateful’ to the judge.

So, what we have is: the people who doesn’t believe into the honour of court, judges who have a prosecutor’s way of thinking, and the authorities who above all value historical appropriateness. This is undoubtedly a cultural situation.

Fears of globalization. Cultural policy failed to ensure reasonable attitude to the globalization process. Most of the Russian citizens consider the fundamental process of our days not as a situation full of opportunities (along with the risks which can be discussed quite pragmatically), but as a bogeyman story which excites nationalistic passions and at the same time paralyzes creative genius. As a result, the Russian society has found itself in the most disadvantaged of all possible positions – globalization is under way against everyone’s will and it seems to be introduced by force.

Fear of globalization conceals the deep fear of the other, the different, of something unaccountable, in the long run, the fear of death.

Fear of the other, fear of death. Almost all Russians feel inexplicable aggression towards immigrants (even their fellow countrymen). This affect developed after the historical instinct for relocation had become atrophied. The Russians not only refused to settle in new places and reduced their presence in the bordering limits, but also lowered their inner mobility, which fell to the level of pre-industrial period (this, among other matters, is discussed by sociologist Zhanna Zaionchkovskaya). The aggression we witness today is a substitution feeling, it substitutes fear.

How did it happen that the nation-colonizer, the nation-conqueror of the endless Eurasian space shrank away with horror in front of those whom it once tamed and made subjects/citizens of a great Eurasian empire – immigrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia?

To enhance (restore) the scale of the Russian identity is the task of our cultural policy.
     
II. What is not cultural policy

‘Dealing for a fall’ we shall call a situation when cultural policy is reduced to culture exploitation. In this view, cultural policy is to serve as a moderator and a comforter (for example, during the vulgar Zurabov’s monetization²). Acting in this role it is only “a sauce” for economists’ and politicians’ dishes; in terms of the ancient world – a Hellenic guide for barbaric plans of ecumene development. Well, our top managers are barbaric enough in their approach to our nature, culture and traditions. However, correction of political and economic reality is only a secondary function of the cultural policy.

We should not mix cultural policy with theory and practice of culture-consistent activity. Of course, we want managerial decisions of different levels and different morphology be taken involving obligatory cultural expertise. It is the right cause. Institualization of the expertise would have saved us from numerous foolish mistakes of the authorities. Nevertheless, even such a step, which could be introduced by analogy with ecological expertise, will not lead to the appearance of a cultural policy.

And surely, cultural policy is not departmental policy in the sphere.

Culture institutions management conducted by the state over the years of public discussions and the responsibilities taken by it has not resulted in anything resembling a cultural policy. There is a big gap between management and policy, which cannot be bridged with the methods of Ministry of Culture administration. The Russian Ministry of Culture remained a sectoral rearguard establishment. It has always lacked and still lacks skills of framework management which implies responsibility for future anthropological and sociological changes, and not just elementary putting everything in order in the institutions within its jurisdiction.

At the same time, grandfathers and great-grandfathers of today’s Lunacharskys³  knew well what cultural policy is all about. In the Soviet period, cultural policy was a part of the agitation and propaganda machine, which had been started up by the Ideology Department of the Communist Party Central Committee; the Ministry of Culture was just one of the performers of the programmed show. The aim of the Bolsheviks’ cultural policy was “to make available for the working people all art treasures created by means of their labour exploitation” (VIII Congress of the Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks)).

However, today our state cultural policy is reduced to comparatively autonomous and poorly coordinated activities of different institutions related to protection of cultural heritage, art, media, work of libraries and museums (A.Ya.Flier)⁴.                    
     
III. Ways of cultural policy institualization.

Very often an idea is expressed that culture always and in all possible ways resists any modernization (see the well-known example from Roman history about the irrational resistance of barbaric culture to the comforts of civilization – aqueducts, thermae, and roads).

Such view at culture is one-sided, because it takes culture as tradition whose historic mission is in fact to hinder unrestrained development; the development, inevitably defined by tradition as deviation, mutation, as a programme error. The stronger the cultural artifact, the steadier it stands on the way of change. As a matter of fact, we judge about the historical strength of an artifact by the period of time it could last restraining development (think of how many centuries were needed to overcome the provisions of Aristotle’s physics, consecrated by Peter’s Holy See).

Every one of us has met cultures with low sensitivity to their context. The text of such cultures can critically fall behind the constantly changing context. The culture that fails to reinterpret itself in good time looses control over the situation and, as a result, yields the role of a flagship-navigator to another culture. In such cases representatives of the traditional culture exclaim against cultural intervention (good examples are threats of westernization or wahhabization), resorting to the help of cultural policy as some secondary unimportant mean, and relying mostly on the brute force of Caesar’s machinery.

Cultures differ in their readiness for self-development. If a culture contains a genetic code of self-deployment, it tries to realize it under all circumstances, while functions of restraint are performed not by the culture itself but by the existing ‘guarding corporations’ of culture. In such case culture opposes tradition. Such culture doesn’t reject tradition, but plays with it knowing where it belongs. Because such culture is an ever-living, naked, aspiring to authenticity revelation. This is the culture we seek.

Cultural policy, as well as self-government policy or policy of public health (healthy way of life), cannot be built on just one and, what is more, centralized institution. You cannot be in charge of such policy. Such policy can be programmed, involving more and more new subjects into the process of its public forming.

According to Culture Studies researcher Sergey Zuyev – cultural policy is a result of changes in mass managerial training, in which the humanitarian layer should be widened and made more complex.

A.I.Flier believes that the main goal of cultural policy is “transformation of norms and standards of people’s social adequacy into images and models of their social prestige, in other words, propaganda of social adequacy norms as most prestigious form of social being, as the shortest and safest way toward social benefits and high social status”.

The last definition seems extremely conforming, but in fact I can recommend everyone interested in technologies of cultural policy institualization to read the works of the abovementioned philosopher O.I.Genisaretsky who has published over the past two decades several keynote articles.