“Who is the clown who authored this?”
Someone who thinks Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Prokofieff, Shostakovich, Turgenev, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Borodin, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, etc. were gas station operators.
Right and the more recent figures of Stalin, Derzhinsky, and Lenin (whose body remains in full display in Red Square) were...?
Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff both spent the latter half of their lives and died in the U.S. (New York and Beverly Hills respectively) because the climate of their homeland was so repressive and dangerous.
Granted, Putin’s country is not Stalin-times, but enough repression and constriction of innovation remains. I say this as someone who spent time with lots of creatives there.
The filmmaking community is showing promise though. However the movie currently getting the most potential buzz for Foreign Language - Oscar is ironically a very critical of the current state of Russian society. The movie is called “Loveless” by Andrey Zvyagintsev.