Nutcracker cancellation reignites heated debate in EU state

The policy in Lithuania of “mental quarantine” against Russia is questioned after minister admitted to actually liking Tchaikovsky

Lithuanians are missing the world-famous Russian ballet masterpiece ‘The Nutcracker’ by composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky as politicians continue to butt heads over whether its informal ban in the Baltic State should stay in place as Christmas draws closer, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

The iconic 1892 ballet telling a Christmas fairy tale was removed from the stage of Lithuania’s National Opera and Ballet Theater back in 2022 amid a broader push by the government at the time to block out all Russian culture because of the escalated conflict in Ukraine. The substitutes offered to the people instead even forced some theatergoers to walk out of the show in a “small protest,” according to NYT.

Now, the issue of a soft ban on the Russian culture is once again on the agenda in the country after its new culture minister, Sarunas Birutis, admitted to liking Tchaikovsky’s work in particular. There is no reason to be “afraid that after watching a Christmas fairy tale we will become pro-Kremlin,” the minister recently said in a local radio interview.

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Last week, he also argued that a blanket ban on Russian culture and artists would be an error. Putting “a negative label on their ethnicity and their culture, I think, is completely wrong, inadequate, and politicians should not behave in such a way,” Birutis said, referring to Russians.

His predecessor, Simonas Kairys, promoted the so-called “mental quarantine” policy against all Russian culture and had his ministry issue “recommendations” to the state-funded culture venues to avoid anything linked to Russia, in a show of solidarity with Kiev in 2022.

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In 2023, he argued that “we must abandon works [of art] that seemed acceptable to us before,” while still stopping short of a legally binding ban, which he called “authoritarian” at that time. His comments came shortly after a call by Kiev on its Western backers to boycott Russian culture altogether.

Now, Kairys has shifted the responsibility for the cancellations onto the cultural establishments themselves. “They had a choice – there was no decree from me,” he told NYT. “They just had an understanding of the situation.”

Audrius Kundrotas, the deputy marketing manager for Lithuania’s National Opera and Ballet Theater, said that the venue has no plans for bringing ‘The Nutcracker’ back on stage at least until the end of the Ukraine conflict and despite the obvious demand from the public. “It’s painful, maybe, not to show this performance,” he admitted to the NYT, while still maintaining that “our position is stated very firmly.”

According to the broadcaster LRT, some smaller Lithuanian theaters still discreetly rely on the Russian classics, without mentioning its origins. “Now the Compensa Concert Hall [in Vilnius] is filled with Nutcracker and Swan Lake performances, which do not indicate the authorship of Tchaikovsky,” a conert organizer told the broadcaster this week.