To fantasize about life as it could be, listen to Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Particularly the version played in Leipzig by the Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Kurt Masur (1927-2015).
The German maestro brought the brass, strings, and drums through moments of suspense, melancholy, and smiles, anxiety, and then joy, to the awesome glory of the 10th and final section, known as the Great Gates of Kyiv.
The Leipzig audience, mostly German, responded with prolonged applause. The artistry, which transcends any current news about politics or our material existence, may today cleanse spirits and reboot minds.
Mussorgsky had been so moved by the sudden demise of his friend and colleague Viktor Hartmann that he immediately spent three weeks in 1874 composing the piece as a piano concerto in his memory.
The 10 movements traced watercolors and drawings from Hartmann’s travels through Poland, Italy, and France, with the final movement depicting Hartmann’s design for a new Great Gate for Ukraine’s capital.
Mussorgsky probably began his path to alcoholism when he attended a military cadet school in St. Petersburg. Another former student, the composer Nikolai Kompaneisky, claimed the institution was “proud when a cadet returned from leave drunk with champagne.”
Wasted by alcohol and fearful of music critics, Mussorgsky often left his compositions incomplete. Several Russian and European composers later tried to orchestrate Pictures at an Exhibition.
The music suggests the long-ago glory of Kyiv, founded by Viking warriors, the Varangians. King Henry I of France sent emissaries to Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise (978-1054) to ask for the hand of his daughter Anne, a reputed beauty, and to align with Kyiv against invaders from the east. Married in 1051, Queen Anne lived with Henry for nine years and, after his death, acted as regent of France.
Two of Yaroslav’s other daughters became queens of Norway and Hungary as he built alliances with the West. Formidable in combat, Yaroslav also founded schools, and he, or his father, Vladimir the Great, built St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv early in the 12th century.
The gap with modern Kyiv was bridged in 2023 when President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine were awarded the International Charlemagne Prize, named after the great unifier of Europe, for their efforts to defend the continent’s values.
Of what could we now fantasize? A Europe — perhaps a world — in which all nations coexist in good humor and harmony. This dream would see former enemies recognizing their own failings and each other’s positive features.
Like Hartmann’s drawings of Russian-ruled Poland, so magnificently portrayed by Mussorgsky, we could take note of what is rich and poor and strive to develop all that could become positive.
Chauvinism would evaporate and give way to awareness of our interdependence, our shared vulnerabilities and capacities for bolstering the good, true, and beautiful. We would actualize what makes us human, beginning with the ability to think clearly and empathize.
In what for generations has been a vast killing field, Germans, Russians, Poles, and others would see the folly of their past conflicts. They would study one another’s achievements and create new ways of life with mutually beneficial orientations and outcomes.
Vladimir Putin and his Ministry of Culture brag about Russian culture, as if it blossomed alone, with no influences from its neighbors.
For example, though I studied in Moscow in 1958 and 1959, and later visited the USSR several times, I didn’t experience Kazakh music and art until I attended a 1990 conference in Alma-Ata (where we learned what Soviet nuclear testing had done to people’s health).
Did Russia or any of these nations gain from their past wars? Violence destroyed many lives and other resources. Wars helped some leaders and their cronies become richer, but these gains were often ephemeral.
A war waged with modern weapons would leave no winners.
Imagine if the ingenuity and materials in a weaponized drone instead nourished something constructive, such as education, health care, or environmental quality?
The Marshall Plan after World War II provided a model for mutual gain in planning, inputs, and perceived benefits. It led to cultural, economic, and security cooperation that, for many decades, saved Europe from fratricidal combat and cultivated both material and intangible riches.
The US fostered these undertakings, usually without coercive bullying. The Truman administration invited the Soviet Union to join the European recovery programs, but Stalin, in 1947 and later, refused.
This case and others warn us that, even when the value of cooperation is clear, individual leaders may seek to sabotage the entire operation. As we dream, we also need guardrails.
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Boston University. He wrote The Baltic Transformed: Complexity Theory and European Security, Foreword by Jack F. Matlock (2001); Baltic Independence and Russian Empire (1991); and Can Russia Change? The USSR Confronts Global Interdependence (1990 and 2011).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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