The Russian diaspora, a complex superiority complex
an inadmissible escalation by Christian von Borries on the occasion of three full years of full scale war
How Russians are blending out their war is an overlooked phenomenon.
Most diaspora Russians I’m hearing of are trying to avoid to take any action against the politics of their country of origin. Instead, they focus on the West, questioning the West as an ideological construction. This refusal turms out to be self-blinding and far-reaching.
It includes a reassuring sense of creating “The most up to date form of art of our times, just this.” What a self-entitled junkie, what a Russian attitude! Someone described it as “Cosplaying the bourgeoise West. Since they reject facing reality, they are trapped in old ideas of privileged behavior. And the privilege is the fact that you don’t have to participate. They didn’t understand, that real privilege in the West means to shape, and not only oneself like a bodybuilder, yoga-fanatic, trophy-wife. Instead of projecting to the outside world, they are just projecting inwards” observed this non — Russian but Russian-speaking friend.
I know people who left Russia after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. They took jobs at Western art institutions and avoided any Russia connected discourse since. One of those even stated that it’s all too painful to be adressed. In reality, this is nothing but a rewriting of keeping all possible doors open for oneself. What these people love to do instead is inviting their favorit Ukrainian artists, i. e. the few that are still willing to work together. By doing so, further subdivision is established, and control over the small and just emerging Ukrainian art scene.
Others, and I helped about ten of those colleagues facilitating visas to the EU (nobody can say that I developed a hatred against Russia or my dear Russian friends!), became totally fixated on the Hamas-Israel war, and especially with the German government’s response. I’m reading this as a deviation or cover of what the presence of a self-declared “political artist”, “activist” should be. Self-declared “research is activism”, what a deteriorating attribute, is all that’s left. Gaza/Israel is becoming a superimposed field of projection, Israel is the “total ideal jew”, i. e. it’s not you, it’s them, the problem!
It goes as far as Russian artists stating how fascist the German government acts, since it decided not to support BDS-affiliated artists with state funding. I witnessed similar gaslighting and cancelling with a Chinese diaspora colleague, a self-declared anarchist whom I had introduced to David Graeber. He was not able to see the contradiction of the Western art world who is supposed to critizise a state which, ironically, is financing this very critique. “My disgust is a privilege” is how the late East-German poet Heiner Müller put this contradiction brilliantly.
What we see is Russian artists fighting with Ukrainians over Western cultural grants and recognition. These Russians are complaining about the hardship being an artist abroad, like the Ukrainians — basically sitting in the same boat; what a twist.
Obviously I’m criticizing as a Western white male who is privileged enough to afford myself to have my own opinion. Ukrainians have one as well, for the obvious reasons, no choice even. For Russians though, their self-referentiality it’s another game, talking about one’s own hardship while competing with their neighbors for Western funding.
So, could one maybe argue that what we are seeing here is the structure (of the art world), but not individuals who are responsible for anything?
Could it be that this hybris and inversion of reality comes from an old Sowjet-time conviction that Russia was and still is the pinnacle of Sowjet culture? I find many signs of this complex superiority complex, which at the same time is an inferiority complex, since the avant-garde after 1991 in Russia is dominated by Western discourses.
It starts with a persistence of finding it ok to keep speaking Russian to anyone now living on what used to be the Warsaw Pact soil.
I was present at several incidents where Russians were surprised that (for example) an Armenian friend refused to speak this language, instead proposing English, while at the same time feeling really uncomfortable about a selfinflicted potential nationalism.
The only book that is adressing this Russian heritage is, ironically, recently published in Ukraine. “Russian Colonialism 101” is describing over one hundred examples of Russian and Sowjet atrocities towards it’s minorities and neighbors.
Another example of this Russian hybris is a well known art and research group that emigrated and is framing itself now as “… in exile”, which is ok, but not as long as they only speak about themselves, creating right away a new label and corporate identity, a sales pitch.
Another time I was present at a private film screening of Ukrainian feminist films. The moscovits present stood out with agressive comments about the backwoodness and uncoolness of the Ukrainian films presented. And of course, again, the language spoken at this evening in Berlin was Russian.
It’s revealing how the Ukrainian side, embraced by the West at the beginning of the full scale war in 2022, produced art for their new Western audience in the tradition of “oh-dearism”, a term coined by Adam Curtis. It describes the sentiment of total helplessness on the side of the spectator. I remember the Kyiv-Biennale in Vienna (put together without any love and care by Austrian curators) and the Kyiv Perennial in Berlin, where I saw the Ukrainians with their “approved” (having moved to Berlin already before 2022) Russian friends, all like a heap of misery. Both shows exibited mostly self-victimizing videos and explicit fotos of the war in Ukraine and no discurs, context. This got even worse in Davos’ Ukrainian Pavillion, temporarily put up already twice for the World Economic Forum. Their space is provided and paid for by the Pinchuk Foundation, an oligarch who is controlling the contemporary art world in Ukraine and a prime example of autocratization. (I’m aware of the word oligarch, which is disguising the fact that the western billionaire is nothing else of course.)
In all these spaces, the visitor is exposed to brutal images of war, a second exploitation so to speak and similar to how Aljazeera is operating in Gaza. We can witness how these image politics are self-destructive. Their half-time is devastating, and already since quite some time Ukraine vanished from the attention span map. Even an Oscar for “the best documentary”, a pathetic effort for total subjectivity, didn’t help. Showing the injured and dead is, quoting Susan Sontag, nothing but “regarding the pain of others”, and even the otherwise cruel Israeli regime is trying to avoid this exploitation.
At the same time, the Ukrainian society so far was not able to address it’s own problematic history, especially concerning Western Ukraine. How about Bandera’s collaboration with the German Wehrmacht and the killing of 100.000 Polish people under this guise, the questioning of the uniqueness (not the brutality of course!) of the Holodomor. Instead, there seems to be an ideological fight inside the Ukrainian art world about the sovereignity of interpretation concerning monuments, with the prime focus on Sowjet ones, and not the huge untouched Bandera Monument in the center of Lviv.
In contrast, I saw the incredible exhibition “Our Years, our Words, our losses, our searches, our us” in Lviv’s Jam Factory last year about the will to survive under conditions of attack and war.
At last year’s Venice Biennale, the Ukrainian contribution dealt already with the self-imagination of “the Ukrainian in the West”. What we saw was a smartly staged unpleasant twist of image politics.
Meanwhile, on the other side, Russians are producing films about the difficulties to survive in the diaspora, or how hard it is for Gen-Z to maybe end up in the Russian army. I even met a Russian, having flet the draft to Uzbekistan, entertaining the idea of, WTF, just going back and fight. Later that day, we went to a club in Tashkent which turned out to be run by people from St. Petersburg. The attitude was how amaizing Uzbekistan is, so cheap, Russian-speaking, submissive (colleagues forced a restaurant to reopen for us and brought their own booze despite the fact that the place was run by muslims) — in other words “welcoming”. The idea was entertained to bring a St Petersburg film festival to Tashkent “so they can profit from it”.
Besides a little self-criticism, what I’m really missing is any kind of real resistance, in Russia and outside. These people are just getting on the nervs of Ukrainians and locals, while we could all learn something from the past. One example could be the German migration during the 3rd Reich (Brecht, Eisler, Feuchtwanger, Horckheimer, Adorno, Th. Mann to name but few — and, no, they were not all famous and rich at the time!). Obviously, these comparisons are always wrong, but a pattern, that you left for a reason, should not only not to be forgotten, but first of all create an entire world of analysis and resistance, including inside your country (like Elser and others did) — this could be something for creating a more just world without imperialism and militarization.
Where is the critique of Russian militarism? Why is there mostly a sensibility for Russian victims? Why are these people underestimating the regime’s vulnerabilities? How about organizing civil disobedience, sabotage? Stop the awkward self-definition that from the safe West, no action is possible. The past shows that any action has to start from a safe place. Where is the reflection of how it was even possible that such a regime could be installed in the first place, and why it was and is supported? Why is almost nobody talking about the imperial Russian character (like about the German subordinate character/Untertan?)
Not even mentioning helping women to better survive in a world dominated by an old male thinking wherever we look?
Instead, what we see is a digital art scene with symbolic anti-war-artefacts, a cybernetic deviation showcasing nothing but technical possibilities. These people even organized a clandestine congress of resistance — inviting Ukrainians being honored to be included I was told.
All these are not moral questions I’m trying to raise. Understanding social media, and how they shape people and discourses in times where we all are forced to become pro-Trump and by being this pro-Putin as well. So, are we ultimately all becoming products of fascism, but slowly, invisible and subcutaneous?
Last but not least, the people I’m talking about are of no value for what is happening in Western cities and especially Berlin, the city of lost struggles (I lived there for 40 years). Opportunists are only interested in themselves. But consciousness, in the sense of class consciousness, must be a sense of the way where there are no individuals, really — there are only structural forces. What we see instead is that you are what you already identify with. Today, this might not be sufficient.
Christian von Borries is an artist, musician and filmmaker who visited Moscow for the first time in 1987. Last year, he produced a film by Cricri Sora Ren that, with the help of AI, is staging Putin’s killing and other dystopian incidentsHe is a sailor and SAR coordinator on different rescue missions in the Mediteranean Sea. Since 2025, he is senior advisor for the Shanghai AI Research Institute of the China Academy of Art. He is now moving to Marseille.
