Efforts to cancel Russian culture are misguided

Earlier this week, Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of the 2006 memoir “Eat Pray Love,” announced she was withdrawing her next novel, “The Snow Forest” — or at least indefinitely postponing its publication, originally scheduled for next February — because of a ferocious reader backlash. The reason: The novel is set in Russia and follows a 20th century family that spends decades living in a Siberian forest, resisting both the Soviet regime and industrialization. For hundreds of Ukrainian and pro-Ukraine internet users, the sympathetic depiction of Russians — any Russians — was enough to declare the book offensive and hurtful given Russia’s horrific war in Ukraine.

This is the latest twist in the push to “cancel” Russians and Russian culture in reaction to the war. Such backlash has led to cancellations of performances by Russian artists, productions of Russian plays, and public events with Russian writers and journalists — even those who staunchly oppose Vladimir Putin and the war.

Last month, a panel at PEN America’s New Voices festival in New York featuring two expatriate dissident Russian authors — and Russian American journalist Masha Gessen, who has dual citizenship — was canceled after Ukrainian speakers on a different panel the same day said they could not participate if any Russians were part of the festival. A short while later, a commencement speech at Georgetown University by Daria Navalnaya, daughter of Russian opposition leader and political prisoner Alexei Navalny, drew protests from some students from Ukraine and Georgia. This, while her father prepares for a new trial for criticizing the war in Ukraine.

The prepublication savaging of Gilbert’s book, preemptively accused of “romanticizing” Russians even as Russia slaughters Ukrainians, seems especially startling because this time the target is an American author writing about Russia.

To some extent, Gilbert’s self-censorship reflects recent trends in the literary world, where the rise of social justice politics has led to pressures on authors to alter or withdraw their work in deference to diverse cultural sensitivities and often nebulous concerns about “harm” to vulnerable groups. Gilbert, too, invoked her fear of causing additional harm to Ukrainians already harmed by the war — which seems extremely unlikely. But it also reflects a troubling tendency among some Ukraine supporters to demonize all Russians and everything Russian.

One can debate the extent to which ordinary Russians support the war or subscribe to the imperialistic nationalism Putin has turned into a state ideology. Such things are often difficult to measure in an authoritarian society where being a critic of the regime and the war can easily send you to prison. One can also debate the extent to which Russian culture has sometimes supported and legitimized nationalism and imperialism. There were similar debates about Nazi Germany during World War II — many of its victims were hostile to Germans en masse and to German culture.

Yet soon after the war, Germany was brought back into the international community, not ostracized or demonized. Obviously, it is too early to predict how the war will end for Russia. But in the best-case scenario, the West will have to build new bridges to a post-Putin Russia. The cancellation of Gilbert’s novel comes from a mindset that, as some Russian dissidents have bitterly joked, would like to see Russia isolated by an iron dome or a crocodile-filled moat — which, even metaphorically, is not an option.

Recalling or postponing “The Snow Forest” was, of course, Gilbert’s own decision, albeit under pressure. But it was a bad decision in two ways: It enables censorship by bullying, and it empowers misguided calls to "cancel Russia."

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a cultural studies fellow at the Cato Institute, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.