
“Cultural Policy Lessons” take place every week on Fridays. At our course, they began in February, and at the Moscow Conservatory they have been taught them for the second year, but for some reason they had only at the first and fifth courses, and now everyone. He teaches them [Associate Professor of the Department of the Humanities of the Moscow Conservatory, Candidate of Economic Sciences] Kulmukhametov Farid Minomatovna.
These are in -line lectures that are not even given to one, but at once in two courses. Since this woman [Kulmukhametova] has an economic education, she talks mainly about the financing of art, how it all works, sometimes switches to some obvious propaganda things. As a rule, she simply reads documents from the site of the Ministry of Culture on how many millions to whom were allocated. Propaganda topics are all quite obvious - Western values against traditional, traditional family, “a woman is a place in the kitchen, a man at work” and so on. At the first lecture, we were told about the state as a subject of cultural policy, about how Western values are imposed on us, including, including the Bologna education system .
At the end of the year, students take the offset, but if you show a certain number of lectures and make a report, it can be obtained by a “automatic”. Reports can be done on different topics - financing of culture, cultural expansion, patriarchal family, and so on.
Students usually do not react to all this. Most are just a drum. I actively react only alone - with the silent approval of a smaller part of the audience and a fairly loud disapproval of everyone else. Each time I spoke in these classes somehow, in this way I just have fun: I come and trolley this woman. Those who do not approve of me say something like “you would have to fill your face”, “what are you like”, “I would sit silent” and everything is like that.
The audience had 30-40 people. It all started quite restrained, the teacher simply told where and how much they pay our cultural staff, how bad this is now and how all this will become good in the near future. Then she said that I, they say, have to go away, and you, young man, read this text [about the “Fifth Column” and “Traitors”]. Obviously, the teacher deliberately gave it to me to read the text, knowing how I feel about these lessons. The text was four pages, the weighing explained what the “fifth column” is, then about what this “column” is doing in Russia, who enters it, what they want and so on. And at the end this list is beautiful [representatives of the Fifth Column in Russia]. This time, the audience rather reacted approvingly to my irony, although, as I heard in the video, not all. Most simply wanted everything to end as soon as possible, and they could deal with their own business - and the main outrage was that everything was too long. Then Farid Minmatovna returned, took a piece of paper from me and decided to read the text on her own, already without comment.
Yesterday (March 23), at the next lecture on cultural policy, some girls from our course made a report on how good it would be to live in a patriarchal family. Then this woman said that she was talking to someone from the training department, and they discussed that I could be expelled. In the end, she read several paragraphs about some kind of financing reform and the institute of philanthropy.
The stories of other students who were present at the lecture can be read on Facebook and on the website of Echo of Moscow .
Recorded by Alexander Borzenko