Over and Done With

I imagine Masha Gessen mouthing the name of the website with mild bemusement. Aarch-nekt? Aark-net? In a recent interview with the New Yorker about mounting Russophobia, the journalist and New Yorker columnist explained their resignation from the board of a prominent free-speech nonprofit after it bungled the arrangements for a literary festival at which Russian and Ukrainian writers would be present. (Complaints from the latter led the organization to disinvite the former, including Gessen.) Cultural programmers in the West, evidently fearful of becoming unwitting marks of Russian soft power, have derailed forgatherings of the international literati, performances of Tchaikovsky operas, and now, unassuming gallery shows about Soviet architecture. Gessen referred to the incident in which Cooper Union administrators kneecapped an exhibition about “a revolutionary art movement crushed by Stalin” organized by its own faculty, following the appearance of “a couple of articles in architecture newsletters that criticized the show, including one which accused the curator, co…