Mindlessly Hating Everything Russian Will Not Save Ukraine

Recently, a Welsh orchestra announced that it would no longer be playing the music of the Russian classical composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Tchaikovsky is one of the most famous composers of the classical era, and responsible for works like Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. Saying you will no longer play him because of the actions of Putin is essentially erasing large parts of music history because of something he had no control over.

Mind you, I could understand this — although I’d still disagree with it — if Tchaikovsky’s work was nationalistic in nature, but it was not. In fact, Tchaikovsky was constantly in conflict with the Russian society he found himself in due to his own homosexuality, a fear of this being exposed being what caused him to take his own life in 1893. Tchaikovsky also based his work much more off of the western music he grew up learning than the nationalistic music of his peers, with critics even accusing him of not being nationalistic enough.

While I will not say that Tchaikovsky would have been against Putin had he been alive today — although Putin’s famous homophobia would certainly put the two at odds — I will say that nothing Tchaikovsky composed could be seen as “pro-Putin,” if only because Putin was not alive yet. For that matter, the fact that Tchaikovsky…