“An old, old Soviet story repeating itself,” Boris Akunin, a novelist who signed the opposition petition, wrote in an email when asked about the war of words.
“It’s just that under Stalin, if a prominent cultural figure dared to protest he’d be shot; under Brezhnev he’d be imprisoned; now he just risks losing state donations and having to travel economy class — but this often proves enough,” Mr. Akunin wrote. “It’s a fascinating sight to watch people make this moral choice.”
Some opponents raised what they considered a larger and more troubling concern signaled by the Culture Ministry’s effort: that the annexation of Crimea seemed to crystallize the renewed use of ideology and loyalty as the measuring stick for good citizenship, a tool for control that faded with the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union. Mr. Putin himself inveighed against “national traitors” in his speech reclaiming Crimea for Russia.
“This awful notion of ‘national traitors’ appearing suddenly as if it is a kind of call from the old and gloomy past, from the Stalinist era when this was a crime against the state,” said Irina D. Prokhorova, the editor and publisher of The New Literary Observer. Last December, Ms. Prokhorova replaced her brother, Mikhail D. Prokhorov, the tycoon who owns the Brooklyn Nets, as the head of a fledgling political party, Civic Platform.
The Ministry of Culture petition endorsing the annexation of Crimea, issued on March 11, was just four sentences. “Our mutual history and mutual roots, our culture and its spiritual origins, our fundamental values and language have united us forever,” it read, going on to say that those who signed “firmly declare our support for the position of Russia’s president on Ukraine and Crimea.”
Initially published on the ministry’s website with 85 signatures, it stopped at 511 names after the ministry announced that it was overwhelmed by the flood of letters, which led to “technical errors.” The ministry apologized to three artists whose names were added without their permission. The dead guy went unmentioned, but the name V. E. Tsigal quietly disappeared from the list. (It could have been one of two brothers: Vladimir, a sculptor, died last year; his brother Victor, a painter, in 2005.)
Karen G. Shakhnazarov, 61, the head of Mosfilm, Russia’s major movie studio, said he signed first in memory of his father, who fought in the Red Army to liberate Crimea from the Nazis. More important, Mr. Shakhnazarov signed because, he said, Ukraine lacks a legitimate government, and the people in Crimea “have the right to choose their fate themselves.”
Polls indicate that at least 75 to 80 percent of Russians support the annexation of Crimea, a piece of Russia until it was granted to Ukraine as a gift in 1954. Like many, Mr. Shakhnazarov mentioned the potential rise of fascism in Ukraine — part of the daily news diet on Russian television — as well as similar liberation struggles in Scotland and Kosovo.
He rejected differences — that all sides approved holding the referendum in Scotland, that the Kosovars were being killed by their own government, and that none of the others have been asked to vote under what amounts to military occupation, as occurred in Crimea. “The Crimea would vote like this in any case, under any conditions,” he said.
Mr. Shakhnazarov, who has been the head of Mosfilm for 15 years, said, “If I had not signed the letter, there would have been no problems, no consequences.”
Mr. Gergiev, the conductor, who attracted protests at the Metropolitan Opera in New York last fall for what demonstrators considered his anemic response to Russia’s antigay laws, did not return a phone call requesting comment.
Russia’s Ministry of Culture recently called leading artists and intellectuals to suggest that they endorse a petition hailing President Vladimir V. Putin’s annexation of Crimea, sparking impassioned accusations from the literati that the Kremlin was resurrecting repugnant Soviet methods.
Boldface names immediately signed: Valery Gergiev, the director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg and the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra; the pianist Denis Matsuev; and Vladimir Urin, the director general of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.
But even as Russia’s leaders employed a tactic that harked back to Stalin, pressuring its cultural elite to kowtow, the effort was not without problems. At least one artist whose name appeared was dead. Several more protested that their signatures had been added without their knowledge. And opponents of the Crimea venture responded with a mixture of derision and outrage, issuing their own diatribe against the Kremlin’s Ukraine policy titled “Don’t Bend, Don’t Yield to Lies.”
But he was quoted by the official newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta as saying, “Ukraine for us is an essential part of our cultural space, in which we were brought up and in which we have lived until now.”
The bulk of those who signed the government petition were directors of state-financed cultural institutions — theaters, museums and libraries. Sergei Shub, the director of the Baltic House Theater in St. Petersburg, said in an interview with Novaya Gazeta that he signed without pressure when the Ministry of Culture called. “Of course, I had a feeling that there was this theater behind me, the theater for which I am responsible,” he said. “There is always this feeling that you have your work behind you and people working together with you.”
More than 200 people signed the opposition petition published on March 13 in Novaya Gazeta, including musicians, writers, human rights advocates, architects, scientists and one self-described “jeweler.”
“Our country has been drawn into a dangerous gamble,” it said in part, warning that Russia faced a potential economic, political and military “catastrophe.”
Critics of Russia’s Ukraine policy have found their pictures and words plastered across a new website called “Traitors.” (“I was in very good company,” quipped Ms. Prokhorova.) They are assessing whether they can harness the momentum from the Crimea debate to bolster civil society.
“Russian civil society is still very vulnerable,” Ms. Prokhorova said. “There are not enough institutions to support it, to defend it from the state.”
Alexey K. Simonov, 74, the head of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, said the dueling petitions reminded him of public attacks from earlier eras against writers or dissidents like Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. Open letters would appear, he recalled, saying, “'To hell with Pasternak!’ or ‘To hell with Solzhenitsyn!’ to hell with them, they are rascals, they are enemies.”
Mr. Simonov said he signed the opposition letter not out of any support for a Western position — “I hate the politics of the U.S. as much as I hate the politics of my own country,” he said — but because he did not want to see Russia take on the world again.
The denunciations of critics of the Ukraine policy have further unnerved opposition figures. Their unease was compounded amid a rush of recent moves to silence dissenting voices — virtually shuttering the main independent television station, removing a news editor deemed insufficiently loyal, shutting opposition websites, and continuing to brand nongovernmental organizations receiving money from abroad as “foreign agents.”
One or two outspoken critics, including Andrei Zubov, a history professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, were fired after speaking out against Russia’s Ukraine policy.
Andrei Makarevich, a veteran rock star and famously outspoken voice since the era of perestroika in the 1980s, wrote in an opinion article on the website Snob.ru that Russia seemed to be spinning back in time.
“How fast we’ve returned to the Soviet Empire,” he wrote.
