Putin’s Culture War
Under Russian occupation, Mariupol’s cultural institutions have become propaganda and repression machines.
SEPTEMBER 9, 2025
On the night of March 19, 2023, Vladimir Putin flew in for his first and only visit to Mariupol, the Ukrainian city that Russian forces had obliterated a year earlier. In a siege that lasted nearly three months, from March until May 2022, Russian forces had destroyed 90 percent of residential buildings — as well as hospitals, supermarkets, and schools. Thousands of Ukrainians were killed in the fighting, and conditions were described by human rights organizations as “apocalyptic,” with civilians trapped in the city forced to bury the dead by the side of the road. Before Russia’s invasion, Mariupol had been a thriving industrial port city of 450,000 on the shores of the Azov Sea. Estimates of civilian deaths during the siege range from 22,000 to 87,000; reliable figures on the current population are hard to come by. Water is scarce, rationed to just three hours a day in some districts, and packs of stray dogs roam the city. Under Russian control, the city is being rebuilt to serve Moscow’s wartime propaganda goals.
In a 30-minute video published on the Kremlin's official website, we see Putin exiting a helicopter at dusk. “Vladimir Vladimirovich, we are now on the territory of Mariupol airport,” Deputy Prime Minister for Construction Marat Khusnullin says, as Putin settles behind the wheel of a car. “The building is quite heavily destroyed: There was active combat, but the runway is more or less preserved … We'll reconstruct it. We plan to have a full-fledged airport with the ability to fly to all cities in Russia and abroad.”
Since 2022, approximately 1,500 cultural heritage sites and 2,300 cultural facilities — including libraries, museums and theaters — have been damaged or destroyed across Ukraine.
Throughout the video of the trip, Khusnullin presents the president with endless figures. There are hundreds of new hospital beds and parking spaces, hundreds of miles of repaired roads and embankments, tens of thousands of square feet that have been demolished and restored. Putin, focused on the road, only occasionally asks a question. Khusnullin has earned Putin’s unconditional trust due to his lengthy experience in remaking cities. In the 2010s, Khusnullin oversaw Moscow's renovation, which included the expansion of the capital's metro, the reconstruction of one of Moscow's sports complexes for the World Cup and the creation of Zaryadye Park right under the Kremlin walls. Now, Khusnullin, who is on several international sanctions lists, oversees construction on annexed lands. Russian propaganda calls it the restoration of liberated territories.
Khusnullin doesn’t talk about the destruction of Mariupol. Nor does he mention the civilian death toll, which Ukrainian officials put at more than 20,000 in April 2022, when the siege was still ongoing. But also unmentioned by Khusnullin, and largely unknown outside Ukraine, was the high toll that the Russian invasion has taken on culture in Ukraine. Since 2022, approximately 1,500 cultural heritage sites and 2,300 cultural facilities — including libraries, museums and theaters — have been damaged or destroyed across Ukraine. Some 1.7 million artifacts and exhibits have been stolen and hidden since the Russian invasion of 2014. In the occupied territories, more than 40 museums have been turned into cogs in the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.
The war in Ukraine has become the largest crime against art in Europe since Nazi Germany and given rise to widespread, systematic state indoctrination in occupied territories. Since Mariupol's fall, at least 50,000 Russian government employees, security forces, military families, and construction workers have moved into the city. Locals have been deprived of their rights and homes and forced to adopt a Russian passport. Without one, there is no way to access medical care, pay for utilities, find employment or claim property. In schools, children are studying from Russian textbooks that praise the country and its military. Patriotic concerts, exhibits, talks and events celebrating the war are held throughout the city. In what remains of local museums, the narratives are designed to rewrite local identity, with active cooperation from Russia’s National Guard, the defense ministry and the FSB, the country’s security agency. Culture is being put to work for the greater cause: Russia’s vast project to transform Ukraine’s culture.
On Putin’s tour of Mariupol, he stopped at a new residential complex on the city’s outskirts, some eight minutes from the airport. The complex is named after Alexander Nevsky, the 13th-century prince who is also considered a symbol and “heavenly patron” of St. Petersburg, where Putin was born. Wrapped in a bulky down jacket, Putin greeted residents eager to meet him. An elderly man enthusiastically shared that his birthday is 15 days after Putin's, and a woman, holding her hands clasped in front of her face, reported that she prays for him: “We wish you happiness! We've been waiting for you!” “Do you like it?” Putin asked her. “Very much! This is a little piece of paradise we have here now.”
From the playground, behind the camera's view, someone shouted: “This is all a lie! This is all for show!” The video was first uploaded to the Kremlin website in full; later this fragment was edited out.
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In the months and years since the siege that destroyed it, the city has been turned into a showcase of the concept of the "Russian world" — an idea of Russia as encompassing nations in its former sphere of influence — and an exemplary model of forced Russification.
A short walk from the Philharmonic on Georgievskaya Street, in the center of the city, used to stand a small museum of folk life. The exhibitions described the daily life and culture of Greeks, Jews, Germans, Ukrainians and Russians who had inhabited the Azov region since the 18th century. The museum was beloved by locals, who left online reviews praising the staff's work and their warm welcome. The museum also held workshops on weaving motankas (traditional Ukrainian rag dolls) and a blacksmithing festival. During the Soviet era, before it became a folk museum, it was a museum glorifying Andrei Zhdanov, a close associate of Joseph Stalin who was born in Mariupol. Now, Russian authorities have turned it back into a Zhdanov museum.
A third of the exhibition is dedicated to the “special military operation,” as Russia officially describes the current war in Ukraine, and shows photos of Mariupol's destruction and reconstruction. It also includes “enemy artifacts”: T-shirts with logos of Ukrainian battalions and a fragment of a Ukrainian rocket launcher.
Zhdanov, a member of the Politburo, was responsible for propaganda in the Soviet government and helped to orchestrate the “Great Purge,” a series of trials in which Stalin’s opponents were found guilty of treason and executed, largely on fabricated evidence and confessions made under intense pressure and torture. He was also known for persecuting writers and artists to make them submit to the party line. In Ukraine, Soviet authorities under his control pressured writers, actors, directors, producers and artists, and criticized and attacked institutes of Ukrainian history and Ukrainian literature, creative unions and newspaper and magazine editorial offices. Officials censored, revised, and rewrote theater repertoire to remove any idealization of the pre-revolutionary past and add content that glorified Soviet rule.
Mariupol was renamed Zhdanov in 1948, after his death; the museum dedicated to him was founded two decades later, in 1969. During perestroika, the city regained its historical name of Mairupol, and Ukrainian authorities demolished Zhdanov city monuments. The museum was replaced by a new Museum of Azov Everyday Life, which featured everyday objects like national costumes, pottery tools and weaving looms.
That museum was damaged during the 2022 siege. The collection’s whereabouts are unknown, most probably destroyed. The new interactive exhibition about Andrei Zhdanov in the same building now describes him as a modest party official. There is no mention of the toll that his policies had on Ukraine or his role in the Great Purge. His personal belongings, including a tablet and Belomorkanal cigarettes, are displayed. A third of the exhibition is dedicated to the “special military operation,” as Russia officially describes the current war in Ukraine, and shows photos of Mariupol's destruction and reconstruction. It also includes “enemy artifacts”: T-shirts with logos of Ukrainian battalions and a fragment of a Ukrainian rocket launcher. Andrei Zhdanov's grandson, who is Russian, came to the exhibition opening. “Historical justice is beginning to triumph,” he said, almost in tears, to pro-Russian media present at the opening ceremony.
On the same street as the Zhdanov museum are two other landmark museums: the Local Lore Museum and the Kuindzhi Art Museum. Both were heavily damaged in the war. The Local Lore Museum burned down; its director estimated that the museum lost 95 percent of its exhibits. The Kuindzhi Art Museum's director, Tatiana Buli, managed to hide the museum’s most valuable artifacts — including paintings by Arkhip Kuindzhui, Mariupol’s most famous landscape painter and the museum’s namesake, 19th-century icons, and antique furniture — in the building’s basement when the siege started. After a shell hit her house and killed six of her neighbors, Buli escaped to Kyiv, taking the museum keys with her. The museum was damaged by shelling in late March, shortly after she left. Russian authorities took the entire collection, including the artifacts she had hidden. The head of the Local Lore Museum, Natalia Kapustnikova, had collaborated with the Russian military and showed them the basement vault.
At the end of April 2022, the Russian army moved the Kuindzhi Art Museum's entire collection to a museum in the capital of the Donetsk People's Republic, a separatist and politically unrecognized territory annexed by Russia. The Donetsk Republican Local History Museum now contains stolen paintings like Kuindzhi’s “Red Sunset,” “Autumn,” and “Elbrus,” a posthumous portrait of the artist by his student Grigory Kalmykov and valuable paintings by Ivan Aivazovsky. Russian forces had also taken old icons and books, a Polovtsian saber, Scythian bronze items, buckles, amulets, temple rings, axes and arrowheads from the times of Kievan Rus, the first East Slavic state, established between the 9th and 13th centuries. The director of the museum in Donetsk said in a press statement that several of Aivazovsky's paintings could be worth up to $1.5 million. Both Russian propaganda and Natalia Kapustnikova, who now works at “History of the Fatherland,” a foundation established by Putin to protect Russian heritage, have hailed the new location of the artworks as a salvation and a way to protect the precious paintings.
The guidelines designate historical and military museums as the main institutions for spreading this narrative, and instruct museums to create exhibitions glorifying soldiers, displaying war artifacts and engaging in so-called “scientific-educational activities” — essentially, propaganda.
The Local Lore Museum in Mariupol has since reopened; it regularly partners with Russia's law enforcement agencies and national guard to put on events that glorify the war and Russian soldiers. The Kuindzhi Art Museum is being restored and is also expected to reopen. Nearby, authorities are constructing new cultural centers, such as the so-called “NGO House,” which will host a military art museum, contemporary art exhibits and the headquarters of Russia’s ruling party, United Russia.
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By restoring destroyed museums in the occupied territories, Russian authorities are turning them into tools of indoctrination. These efforts are a crucial part of forced Russification, Putin's war efforts and overall control. They follow a Kremlin-approved blueprint.
In 2023, Russia’s culture ministry adopted a new policy doctrine that it distributed among cultural institutions both in Russia and the annexed territories. The internal paper, called “Methodological recommendations for creating exhibitions dedicated to the history of the special military operation in museums of the Russian Federation,” lays out guidelines for historical and memory revisionism.
It explains exactly how to read the history of Russia and the world. The war is presented as Russia's defensive response to “protect Russian speakers from cultural and political discrimination” and to “defend Russia from Ukraine's planned attack.” It frames the invasion as part of preserving “historical truth” and “traditional spiritual-moral values.” These same points are repeated in school lessons and textbooks used in Mariupol and other occupied cities; they have also become a central part of overall Russian cultural policy. The guidelines designate historical and military museums as the main institutions for spreading this narrative, and instruct museums to create exhibitions glorifying soldiers, displaying war artifacts and engaging in so-called “scientific-educational activities” — essentially, propaganda.
Russia’s culture ministry, alongside law enforcement agencies, is strictly enforcing these guidelines, merging its own cultural institutions into the country’s already mighty propaganda and repression machines. The renowned Tretyakov Gallery in the center of Moscow was forced to update exhibitions to comply with “spiritual and moral values”; later, the daughter of a prominent FSB official was appointed as the gallery’s new director. GES-2, the $130 million contemporary art museum across the river from the Kremlin, has become a self-censoring shadow of itself. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, also in Moscow, faced raids by security forces and demonstrations by pro-war activists; it later replaced its long-standing director amid political pressure from Russian authorities. In November 2024, officials shut down the city’s GULAG History Museum, established in 2001, claiming fire-safety violations.
While established museums desperately try to stay afloat by avoiding politics or acceding to the Kremlin's demands, the Russian government is establishing new museums not only in Mariupol, but in other occupied cities as well. There are plans for new museums celebrating Russian Cossacks, Russian icon painting, the valor of labor in the Donbas region, and World War II resistance.
What this really means is the creation of more propaganda and more tools to crack down on dissent. The censorship of independent media, the de facto ban on YouTube and the persecution of journalists, artists, and researchers adds to the repression.
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At the end of March 2024, a year after Putin's visit to Mariupol, Natalia Kapustnikova, the former head of the Local Lore Museum who is now a collaborator with Russia, returned to the city. She brought with her a traveling propaganda show called “Ordinary Nazism,” crafted to meet Russia’s cultural doctrine. The show has now made more than 20 stops in Russia, Belarus, Abkhazia and annexed lands. The exhibit includes “Nazi symbols” (Ukrainian military patches, chevrons and insignia), “NATO involvement proof” (a NATO-style helmet, Czech medical coat, Canadian military ration packs, ammunition boxes, a flag supposedly signed by Polish special forces); Ukrainian history textbooks with “distorted facts” about Soviet repression; and military trophies (T-shirts and uniforms from Ukrainian battalions, Western ammunition).
One of the crucial narratives of such exhibitions is that Ukrainian military forces are the ones to blame for the destruction of Mariupol and other cities. Kapustnikova herself claims the Ukrainian Azov battalion was the one to burn down the Local Lore Museum she used to run.
Russian authorities are also planning to install a new museum inside the rebuilt Mariupol Drama Theater. During his March 2023 visit to Mariupol, Putin had avoided the theater. Operating since 1887, it became world-famous on March 16, 2022, when a Russian airstrike destroyed the building. An investigation by the Associated Press found that the attack killed an estimated 600 people. During the siege, it became the city’s main bomb shelter, and at least 1,200 civilians, mostly women and children, had been sheltering there. They had written the word “children” in large Russian letters on the asphalt on both sides of the theater, the letters visible even on satellite images. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said the attack constituted a war crime; an investigation by the Associated Press found that Russia targeted the site knowing it was sheltering civilians. Russia has repeatedly denied these claims. According to state-owned media, the newly established theater museum will tell the story of how it was destroyed by Ukrainian neo-Nazis.
✺ Published in The Dial
