Is Russian culture a justified casualty of war?

At the Royal Opera House on Monday, Oliver Mears, the English opera director, appeared on stage before curtain-up. Tonight, and at every performance, he announced, the orchestra would play the Ukrainian national anthem.

The near-capacity audience was on its feet immediately for an emotional start to the evening’s production of Rigoletto. Taking her bows at the end, one of the singers, Ukrainian mezzo Ksenia Nikolaieva, draped herself in her country’s flag. Her fellow performers, who included Russians, put their arms around her.

Similar scenes have played out in the Albert Hall, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the world over, as artists and lovers of the arts join the outcry against Russia and demonstrate their solidarity with Ukraine.

Swiftly imposed sanctions have blindsided Russian billionaires, businesses and sports bosses, but they have also hit the arts with ballet troupes sent packing and celebrated maestros ostracised overnight.

Opera houses, theatres and programme-makers are doing what is expected, but where will this all end? Even as the war in Ukraine rages, Western arts establishments must be able to discriminate between Russia, the rogue state and Russian culture per se.

The New York Met makes the distinction clear, saying it would no longer engage with artists or institutions that support Putin or are supported by him, and other organisations have followed suit, shunning the tyrant’s apologists.

Big-name casualties so far include the feted Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, whose friendship with Putin and failure to condemn his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine have cost him a number of high-profile podiums in the past week. These include the Edinburgh International Festival, the Vienna, Rotterdam, and Munich Philharmonic Orchestras, La Scala, and Carnegie Hall.

Anna Netrebko, the Russian superstar soprano, has pulled out of all scheduled performances, including at the Met and at Zurich Opera House, where she was due to perform this month. Although she wrote on social media that she was “opposed to this war”, she has refused to renounce Putin.

In other moves, a planned summer residency by the Bolshoi Ballet at Covent Garden has been dropped, and Dublin’s Helix theatre cancelled a performance of Swan Lake by the Royal Moscow Ballet.

Russia will no longer be represented at international events such as the Venice Biennale and the Eurovision song contest, and Russian film and TV-makers are being uninvited from award shows and festivals, including the Cannes Film Festival.

The scale of the art world’s reaction to Putin’s war reflects the scope of Russia’s cultural heft, in music, dance, opera, and, of course, literature. Tolstoy himself, no admirer of marauding warlords, has been caught up in the hostilities, with Netflix axing a new series of Anna Karenina, already filmed, from its schedules.

Even for such a large country, Russia produces a disproportionate share of the world’s great artists, today and historically, and few concert halls and concert programmes will not feature Russian musicians, dancers and singers and Russian music during a normal season.

But normal went out the window just over a week ago, and the art world’s response is in keeping with the West’s horror at the destruction of Ukraine.

Just as Wagner, antisemitic and appropriated by the Nazis, was stigmatised after World War Two, we are beginning to see beloved Russian composers cast out. Raymond Gubbay’s series of Classical Spectacular concerts at the Albert Hall will not, as is custom, end with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture, the triumphalist cacophony marking Russian victory in the Battle of Borodino that even the composer was said to dislike.

Russia uses culture as propaganda, says Ukraine’s state-owned news agency Ukrinform. The country’s minister of culture, Oleksandr Tkachenko, has called for sanctions to “limit Russia’s presence within the international cultural arena”, a demand the West seems eager to meet.

But there is a danger that in standing up to Putin’s warmongering, we will banish blameless performers into a cultural wilderness and stir hatred towards innocent Russians who despise their country’s dictator as much as we do.

Grand institutions like the Bolshoi may be synonymous with Russian power, but there are countless Russian ensembles and individuals integrated into Western cultural life. In declaring open season on all Russian culture, we must guard against punishing the wrong Russians.

The plea by Russian curator Raimundas Malašauskas, who was set to curate the Russian pavilion at April’s Venice Biennale, will hopefully not fall on ears deafened by Putin’s war machine.

People from Russia should not be rejected “solely due to their country’s oppressive policies and actions”, said Malašauskas in a statement on his website. He advocated “multi-levelled forms of solidarity where there are international forums for art and artists from Russia to express the freedom that they can’t express at home”.

It may be too early in the conflict for such high-minded appeals, especially from the periphery the arts inhabit. But it is in such forums that, eventually, the world heals itself.

Cultural engagement, not isolation, helped raise the Iron Curtain in the Cold War, a lesson we should not completely forget in the current crisis.

The Edinburgh Festival was launched in 1947 with a remit to “provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit” in the wake of the war. It brought together the leading lights of the international music scene, many of them Germans.

That same festival’s newly appointed director, the Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, said this week that the “festival was founded on principles of reconciliation and the ideals of art transcending political and cultural fracture”.

It was a message that, in time, culture can build bridges even if that seems a forlorn hope now.