Two Million Euros and the Argument That Lost in 1980

Sergei Loznitsa, one of Ukraine's most significant living filmmakers, has just made an argument that should have died in 1989. The European Commission cut €2 million in funding to the Venice Biennale after it reopened Russia's pavilion in spring 2024 — the first time since the invasion began — and Loznitsa responded by attacking the punishment as absurd, childish, disproportionate. He was defending artistic autonomy: the idea that institutions exist outside politics, that dialogue with adversaries matters more than consensus, that showing work to Russians somehow serves the cause of moderation.

This is exactly what Western institutions said about Soviet culture in 1980, when the US led a boycott of Soviet artistic and scientific exchanges after Afghanistan. The logic was familiar then too: isolation would be counterproductive, dialogue would matter, access to Western achievement would soften Soviet state behavior. Forty years of evidence suggests otherwise.

The US and its allies maintained cultural sanctions against the Soviet Union through the 1980s. No Olympic Games, restricted academic exchanges, frozen collaborations. The intention was to make the cost of invasion visible. What actually happened: the isolation hardened Soviet cultural policy without changing Soviet military policy one degree. Dissident voices like Solzhenitsyn, who had actually lived under that system, rejected the entire premise. They knew that Kremlin decision-making had never depended on whether Moscow could access American film or European symphonies. The boycott made Westerners feel principled. It made Soviet policy more rigid.

Loznitsa is defending the Venice Biennale's choice to include Russia while his own country fights for survival. That takes a particular kind of conviction. But conviction about what, exactly? Not dialogue. Russia is not negotiating through art. Not moderation. The invasion continued regardless of cultural access. The autonomy he defends is abstract. The €2 million the EU withdrew was concrete. It came from an institution that exists because its government decided culture matters in geopolitics. You cannot argue both sides: either artistic independence transcends politics, or it does not. If it does, funding decisions are political violations. If it does not, then showing work to Russians during wartime is a choice with consequences. Those consequences belong to the chooser.

What Loznitsa really wants is the comfort of believing that hosting adversaries is virtuous rather than costly. That belief survived the Cold War despite overwhelming evidence against it. It will not survive this one either, but institutions will spend years arguing about it while their funding disappears.