Igor Podporin and His Cultural Heritage on 25 May 2018

In my Moscow Journal, I wrote that viewing Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 moved me to tears. Well, I was moved to tears again last night when I learned that less than three weeks after I saw this iconic painting, Russian ultranationalist Igor Podporin attempted to destroy it using a metal bar. The attack caused approximately $500,000 in damage. It will be years before the public will see the painting again, and only then behind bulletproof glass.

This is not the first time someone has attacked Ivan. The first incident happened in 1913 for similar reasons: someone thought it was a sin to depict Ivan the Terrible as a crazed man, a murderer. However, in 1913, Ilya Repin, the painting’s artist, was still alive and able to restore it himself. I do not envy the men and women who will dedicate years of their lives to saving this priceless work.

Since last night I’ve been thinking about why someone, especially a Russian citizen, would want to destroy such a famous painting. Yes, it depicts an awful and contraversial moment in Russian history. Father and son were arguing; the son’s wife, pregnant at the time, was the victim of her father-in-law’s physical abuse. Things got too heated, and with a single blow, Ivan the Terrible’s dynasty came crashing down. Yet in the painting, Ivan the Terrible’s eyes suggest that he was not a sociopath, quite the opposite. And the dying son, in his last conscious moment, seems to forgive his father. It’s a sympathetic picture of a man who in reality had little mercy or love for anyone.

Podporin claims he wanted to destroy the painting because he’s a nationalist. In Moscow I saw a lot of what people imagine when they think of nationalism: tanks on parade, military flyovers, and people carrying banners depicting loved ones who had fought and died in the Second World War. Yes, all of those things are a form of nationalism. So is Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan 16 November 1581. I’m not an art expert by any means, but when I saw this painting, a part of me knew that no American artist had ever produced anything as magnificent. Two days prior, an identical sensation had overcome me standing in the shadow of the Monument to the Conquerors of Space:

I, an American, was jealous.

Igor and people like him should know that nationalism isn’t tanks, flyovers, and a religious veneration of the past. It’s your cultural heritage. And this afternoon, as I type these words, I feel just a little less jealous of Russian culture…

…and it breaks my heart.