The processes taking place in the cultural sphere of Russia after February 24, 2022 are not only the forced departure of a number of cultural figures, the closure of independent art spaces and criminal and administrative cases against artists.The cultural sphere includes hundreds of museums, cultural centers, leisure centers, youth houses, galleries, libraries, theaters, concert halls, etc. in all regions of Russia. They are subordinate to the municipal and regional authorities or directly to the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, are financed from the budget and do not stop their work all this time. Among them there are those who tried to distance themselves as much as possible from what is happening, continuing their current activities in such a way that no reality seeps into it, and there are also those who, under duress or at the call of their hearts, became participants and organizers of propaganda events. We have analyzed the data on the activities of Russian cultural institutions this year (2022) and their activity in social networks and want to talk about how culture is becoming an instrument of Russia's war of conquest against Ukraine.

How did we collect information for this material? First, we used open data from the Ministry of Culture, for example, a dataset with cultural events from July 2016 to January 2023. This table contains "information about events and activities in the field of culture, data about which are entered on the digital platform PRO.Культура.рф. The set of these data is obviously incomplete, these are only the events that the organizers entered on this digital platform (and we do not know how obligatory this procedure was for employees of cultural institutions), it can be assumed that there may be more such events. In total, this set contains 2,568,904 events of cultural institutions throughout Russia. Secondly, we parsed the official groups of various institutions on VKontakte and used TGStat to collect materials in Telegram channels.

All official cultural activity, which in one way or another relates to this war, can be divided according to its functions into five large groups:

1) normalization of the entry of the occupied territories into Russia (posts, events), integration of the occupied territories, their involvement into cultural exchange;
2) expression of loyalty to the authorities (video appeals of employees of institutions expressing support for the decisions of the president, participation in z-rallies, organization of relevant events, flash mobs);
3) expression of support for Russian soldiers, including analogies with the wars of the past;
4) participation in campaigns to collect things for the military, residents and institutions of the occupied territories (actions "We are together", collection of books for the libraries of Donbass, Kherson, Zaporozhye, etc.);
5) participation in propaganda (both dissemination of information about the propaganda actions organized by the authorities and participation in them, as well as independent holding of “patriotic” events, organization of exhibitions with materials falsifying data about what is happening in the war in Ukraine in favor of Russia, creating a myth about heroic soldiers of this war).

Let's look at some examples.