This is really something special, writes Eastern Europe expert Sergej Sumlenny. Anastasia Arkhipova, who run the Jury of HCAA, an important prize for illustrators of children’s books – is a Board Member of the Moscow Artists’ Union, a Soviet-time-created organization, pro-actively supporting the Russian genocide on Ukraine. Among other things, the union is organizing Awards Events for the war propaganda like “Art(ists’) Front”. The goal of the events is to support the war against Ukraine and the West.
Here is the official description of the goals of the project, run by the Artists’ Union, where Arkhipova is a board member: support for:
– re-unification of the historical Russian lands
– Mobilization – Increasing of the war mood
– Visual messages strengthening “Russian World”…
-Demoralization of the Enemy
– Ideological fight of the Worlds: Russia vs USA, Russia vs Nato
– Resisting to demonization of Russia
“Drawings and cartoons have always been a powerful weapon of propaganda. We call to create such images to strengthen the Russian World” – quote from official description of the project.
A lot of the Russian artists – and amateurs – accepted the call of the Arkhipova’s Union. Here are some examples of the creativity, inspired by the call of the Arkhipova’s Union.
One can imagine, that the organizers knew nothing about this. Arkhipova is famous for her illustrations for the children books, and these are very kitsch and lazy, but are not pro-genocide (at least openly). So the idea was – probably – to invite her as a sign of “openness”.
But it is a terrible sign of how blind about the Russian genocidal propaganda are the Westerners dealing with culture. It is enough to open the web page of the Union where Arkhipova is in the board, to see that they promote mass murder, ethnic cleansing. One only needs to use Google translator.
Would it be fine to have a Russian children books illustrator as a President of the Jury? Absolutely, why not. But this person is not “a Russian children books illustrator”, she is a board member of a Union, which inspires people to produce propaganda posters calling for genocide
