Former director of the Wiener Staatsoper Ioan Holender has published an article on the Kurier calling for an end to bans on Russian artists.

In the article, Holender said, “Nobody should be disinvited.” He added, ” No one doubts that the war that broke out in Ukraine a year ago was caused by its neighbor, the Russian Federation. Whatever the reason, those who started the war should be condemned. It is also self-evident that one has to help the attacked in every way. But the absurdities of some measures against everyone and everything that is Russian, against the 144 million people who live in Russia or have ever lived there, are grotesque and inhuman.”

He added, “changing street names with Russian poets or composers such as Pushkin, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky to Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, and Prokofiev in Western countries and excluding and changing theater and opera programs with Russian writers and stage works senselessly impoverishes our culture, our knowledge, even our civilization!”

He added that he did not see the benefit of canceling such works as Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” or Chekhov’s “The Seagull” and said that Olympic players should not be banned.

He said, “the Olympic Games are a great, deep, global achievement of our history. The Olympic Committee focuses on three values ​​that have existed since ancient times: respect, friendship and achievement. Respect aims to ‘promote rapprochement and mutual understanding between peoples.’ The five rings are symbolic of the five continents and their six colors correspond to those of all national flags in the world today. Expelling an athlete from the competition – a runner from Irkutsk or a weightlifter from Vladivostok – because he or she is Russian is unfair, unjust, corrosive to the competition and not in the spirit and spirit of the Olympic spirit in the broadest sense, which also means international competitions like Wimbledon in tennis, where recently one of the world’s best tennis players was not allowed to compete because he is Russian.”

Holender’s article comes as the war in Ukraine is set to be one year. The war began on Feb. 24, 2022 and saw numerous theaters ban Russian works and numerous artists.