In October 2006, British art gallery owner Matthew Bown ^[1] was arrested ^[2] in Moscow as he tried to fly back to London. He was accused of carrying contraband.

The prohibited items were not drugs or currency or antiques. They were a series of modern works by an art collective known as the “Dark-Blue Noses,” which he had purchased from Moscow’s Marat Guelman gallery earlier that day and intended to show in London. This is one of them:

^[3]

The image depicts a semi-nude George Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Vladimir Putin reclining together on a sofa. Bown was allowed to leave the country only after the artwork was confiscated. The day after Bown’s arrest, Guelman’s gallery was attacked and ransacked ^[4]. He was brutally beaten. Nationalist websites were soon identifying him as an “enemy of Russia.”

You may say it appears that Putin is no art lover, but that would not be correct. He himself is a professional painter. He recently made his first sale ^[5], collecting the tidy sum of $1.1 million. Here is the proud auteur along with his masterpiece in an image circulated by ITAR-TASS, the state-owned newswire:

As state-owned propaganda TV network Russia Today likes to point out ^[6] in its advertising, Josef Stalin also wrote romantic poetry. So Putin is following in a long line of Russian rulers who, expert in the arts, are fully qualified to determine what the nation’s citizens should and should not be allowed to see. How long it will be before Putin decides, like Stalin before him, that certain artists need a bit of reeducation in the gulag is anyone’s guess.

The crackdown has escalated dramatically in recent days.

First came word that Moscow museum director Yuri Samodurov and curator Andrei Yerofeev were facing prosecution ^[7] and up to five years in prison just for organizing an art exhibition. While he was the director of the Andrei Sakharov Museum last year, Samodurov worked with Yerofeev to host a show called “Forbidden Art.” The show’s purpose was to chide the Putin regime’s crackdown on freedom of expression, and it included a number of controversial works by prominent Russian artists. In one image, a Russian general was shown raping a young soldier, echoing the horrifying Russian army hazing ritual known as dedovshchina ^[8] — which has led to a number of mutilations and suicides.

Then we learned of the strange case ^[9] of Artyom Loskutov ^[10], a 22-year-old performance artist from Siberia. He was arrested after receiving a phone call from the local office of the Center for Prevention of Extremism, ordering him to appear at the police station and to discuss his role in organizing an event on May Day this year. The event protested Russian nationalism and militarization (nuclear missiles were once again paraded down Red Square before an onlooking Putin, in the time-honored Soviet tradition). Loskutov refused to appear and was arrested on the street for drug possession. (He says the marijuana was planted by the authorities.)

The CPE was created pursuant to the enactment by Russia’s parliament a few years ago of a statute called the “Law Against Extremism.” Ostensibly aimed at terrorism, human rights groups warned from the beginning that the measure would in fact target only opponents of the regime for crass political purposes. This has proven to be the case.

Perhaps most disturbingly, Putin recently paid a visit ^[11] to the home of 79-year-old Ilya Glazunov, one of Russia’s most famous living painters. Upon seeing a large work depicting a medieval knight, Putin declared: “The sword is too short. It’s only good enough for cutting sausage!” Glazunov agreed to make it longer. In similar fashion, the Dark-Blue Noses backed away from their work after Bown was arrested, and few of the artists whose work was shown by the Sakharov gallery have rallied to defend the accused. That’s not surprising, since during the time of Stalin many Russians were willing to inform on their neighbors.

Even if you believe that a “qualified” national leader should be able to regulate his nation’s artistic output in the country’s “best interests,” Putin’s taste is somewhat dubious. Back in February, the BBC reported ^[12] that Putin had paid $20,000 to fly in the ABBA tribute band Bjorn Again for a gig at a private soiree with a few friends and a woman who may or may not have been his wife. The Beeb quoted the group as follows:

“It was the smallest audience we have ever performed to but Mr Putin was really enjoying it, shouting ‘Bravo’ and clapping with the others,” Aileen McLaughlin, who performs as Abba’s blonde Agnetha Faltskog, was quoted as saying by the Times newspaper. “He [Putin] was dancing along in his seat to Super Trouper and raised his hands in the air during Mamma Mia when we asked the audience to,” she said.

Putin was recently forced to rush to a town on the outskirts of St. Petersburg where local factory workers, unpaid for months, had seized control of a major federal highway. Faced with defaults on a fifth of their loans, it’s predicted that Russia is about to endure a second major economic downturn as the result of its own domestic subprime crisis. Yet Putin can still find time and energy to pursue his art.

Russians may or may not be able to find consolation in that fact.