I will continue to work as Sergei Kapkov

The resignation of the Minister of Culture of the Moscow government, which Novaya Gazeta had warned about back in January, was accepted on Tuesday, March 10

Once, about three years ago, when he had just arrived and everyone wanted to know in more detail who is Mister Kapkov, some interviewer, trying to establish the cultural inconsistency of the hero of the position, sarcastically asked: “You probably didn’t read Ulysses to the end ? “To which Kapkov replied with disarming sincerity: “Yes, I didn’t even start!”

Now he has time.

“Director of Atmosphere” was the title of his interview with “Novaya” a hundred days after coming to power: “... the main mystery that we are trying to solve is the atmosphere. The atmosphere of the city. I believe that I do not have a department of culture, but a "department of the urban atmosphere."

Well, he coped with the atmosphere quite well: Moscow - in museums, on boulevards, in libraries and parks - gave place to its future: a generation of IT people and hipsters, rebels and contemplators, young people who did not wander through the desert of the Soviet past, but appeared immediately in new times.

Kapkov is the hero of these new transitional times (the old culture has not died out, the new one has not grown stronger) - and he started ambitiously. He was going to start a unified cultural policy, increase the protected item in the budget, radically change the leaders of culture. And in the end, it logically got an undercover struggle, scandals and resistance from the environment. He sought to implement his main principle in the capital - "more young professionals." The strategy, in which the former must be rigorously replaced by the current ones, worked throughout the entire sphere, somewhere with brilliance, somewhere with stupidity. And yet he managed to bring not to work - to the service of Moscow - many young, energetic, European-educated people.

For four years, the biography of the political strategist helped him to look at what was happening without blinkers: to catch “new trends, respond to the challenges of the moment.” As a result, the minimum task - to inventory all the property and real estate of the department - was completed by him. The maximum task - the formation of a new cultural policy - is only partly. Moscow as a general idea continues to remain unknown, unconscious and unformulated.

Too bright, breaking out of bureaucratic schemes, too reckless, introducing a lot of personal into decisions and assessments - therefore, making mistakes, winning big and losing just as big. He tried to break the bureaucratic ice and rise against the ideological current, but underestimated the enemy and ended up on the shore. He had few successful predecessors, but he had an absolutely profitable background - Medinsky.

He didn't always know what was good and what was bad. He sometimes acted clumsily. But he did a lot to soften the aggression that is full of the city. And he did not try to make his personality a measure of prohibitions and changes. Two hundred walls and firewalls painted by Moscow artists will remind of him.

In four years, it has become a trend. And he legitimately stated in his farewell blog: “I can say one thing about my future career: I will continue to work with Sergey Kapkov.”

The question of what should be the person who directs culture today, his departure only exacerbates.

The appointment of Alexander Kibovsky in his place is a Freudian slip of the tongue. Culture, apparently, is conceived by the Moscow government as a sphere of "heritage", the conservation of space, and not a living, contradictory (and yes, nervous, or even fraught with scandals) process, in which Sergei Kapkov participated.

Department of Culture