Man on a mission

In conversation with Michael Church, the pianist Evgeny Kissin speaks out about the invasion of Ukraine and how this relates to his experiences of anti-Semitism while growing up in the USSR

- Michael Church

It’s an ill wind… Temporarily prevented from performing in Verbier by tendonitis in his left shoulder, Evgeny Kissin suddenly has time on his hands and is in a mood, I’m told, to give an interview. So I jump straight in, because this is a man who normally does his best to avoid giving any interviews at all. What has triggered this volte-face?

I get the answer before I’ve had the chance to ask my first question, as he launches into a diatribe, eyes blazing with fury: ‘We’re here in Switzerland, and this morning I read that this beautiful country has refused to treat wounded Ukrainian soldiers, citing its traditional neutrality.’

A few hours later it emerges that Switzerland will row back on that prohibition, but Kissin’s rage encompasses all democratic countries which don’t put their shoulder to the wheel in the Ukraine war. He very much approves of Britain’s support for Zelensky, but thinks Britain should press on militarily even harder, until Ukraine wins the war and Putin is defeated.

He then offers a detailed catalogue of Putin’s crimes, from turning Russia back into a totalitarian state to his nonsensical assertion that Ukraine’s government is undemocratic, and to his claim that that country is a hotbed of Nazism. ‘Yet since the end of the Gorbachev period,’ says Kissin, ‘Russia has literally been teeming with fascist organisations and publications. And although the Russian criminal code states that igniting ethnic, racial or religious hatred is punishable by law, no one has been punished.’ Putin’s propaganda, he adds, ‘involves lying in a special way, best expressed in the Russian saying that the thief shouts “stop thief” more loudly than anybody else.’