Even among artists in exile, the myth of Russian cultural supremacy lives on

Many liberal Russians shelter in states once part of the Soviet Union. It’s time that they learned to respect the cultures and languages their nation has so long suppressed

One day in the 1990s, I was playing with my cousin in a local park in Chișinău, the capital of Romanian-speaking Moldova, when two little girls from the Russian-speaking minority asked us what our names were. We told them: Mihai and Maria Paula. They immediately rebaptised us: “Misha i Masha!” To them, we were all Russians after all.

In 2024, such expressions of cultural imperialism are still rife in Putin’s Russia, but you wouldn’t expect to find them among Russian liberals, an estimated million of whom left their country after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/q7gX4aM