Moscow (AFP) – On Teatralnaya Square where the Bolshoi Theater stands in the night in Moscow, Valentina Ivakina admits in cautious words the desire to “escape from the current problems” in Russia, engaged for four years in a bloody conflict in Ukraine.

Published on: 02/18/2026 - 07:31

Packed concert halls, the Tretyakov Gallery packed in the middle of the week, no more tickets on the internet for the Chagall exhibition at the Pushkin Museum...

Moscow, which, along with Saint Petersburg, concentrates Russian cultural life and whose offer has not dried up since 2022, saw attendance at its museums jump by 30% in 2025 over one year, according to the deputy mayor of the Russian capital, Natalia Sergounina.

Valentina Ivakina runs shows.

On this snowstorm evening, this 45-year-old marketing specialist goes to a Prokofiev opera on the historic Bolshoi stage, after having seen a ballet after Chekhov the day before on the New Stage of the same establishment. The week before, she was in another theater.

“It’s a certain attempt to escape from reality,” she euphemizes on Teatralnaya Square, which shines like a Christmas tree, evoking “fewer possibilities of going somewhere and leaving the country”.

On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin launched a large-scale offensive against Ukraine which left hundreds of thousands dead, the deadliest conflict in Europe since the Second World War.

Trade with the West has broken down; foreign messaging applications are blocked or restricted, independent media in exile, visas difficult to obtain. At the same time, the government exalts “patriotic” values.

In public, references to the previous four years are made by allusion, generally condensed into one: "the context".

- "Feast in times of plague" -

“There seemed to be very little left to hold on to,” summarizes Victor Tchéline, a photographer met with his wife at the exit of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where the lucky ticket holders for the Chagall exhibition entitled “The Joy of Earth's Gravity” flock.

But museums "are a kind of silent conspiracy, when you walk and you understand that you are united with others by the admiration of a certain beauty."

Contacted by AFP, the management of the Pushkin Museum did not respond to requests for comment on the success of its temporary exhibition of the painter, born and trained in the Tsarist Empire but who emigrated to France a few years after the 1917 revolution.

The shows and exhibitions offered by major institutions in Moscow all fall within a classical repertoire. The great Russian artists who are critical of the authorities are forced into exile or silence.

Sociologist Denis Volkov deciphers to AFP a "desire to reduce the flow of bad news, to filter it" or not to talk about it with loved ones, "because there is the risk of coming across a contrary opinion".

The common attitude, believes Mr. Volkov, director of the independent polling center Levada declared a "foreign agent" in Russia, consists of "not following (the information) attentively, not discussing" to "preserve one's own psychological health and one's relationships with others. Perhaps that is where a renewed interest in culture comes from..."

For Victor Tchéline, 30, something huge happened in Russia, which we are all afraid of. To which we turn a blind eye, but while trying to live and maintain a certain normality.

He evokes "the impression, as they say, of a feast in times of plague", in reference to the title of a tragedy by Pushkin, written during a cholera epidemic in Russia in 1831.

Victor and his wife lived in Georgia for two years after the massive offensive against Ukraine began, before returning to St. Petersburg, where they assiduously frequent the Hermitage Museum: "We don't even go to see specific works of art, but rather anchor ourselves, as if joining something familiar."

Irina, a former piano teacher who only gives her first name, refutes the idea of ​​a loophole. This 79-year-old woman, dressed in a short fur coat, with neon pink lips, asserts with a knowing look that she knows "everything that is happening in the world and where black and white are."

“We live with that. Yes, we live with that,” she repeats, adding: “We often go to all the exhibitions that nourish us and put us in a good mood. And Chagall is so colorful that it makes you want to live.”

© 2026 AFP

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