Rodney Mims Cook Jr, the chairman of the US Commission of Fine Arts, participated in a roundtable on US-Russian cultural exchange on Thursday, at Russian president Vladimir Putin’s showcase St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). He was the first US official to participate in the event in nearly ten years.
Oil and military targets around St Petersburg, Putin’s hometown, were hit on 3 June by Ukrainian drones in a strike timed for the start of the forum, which is known as Putin’s “Davos”.
The two-hour roundtable, titled “Russia-USA: dialogue of cultures,” was moderated by Mikhail Shvydkoy, Putin’s international cultural envoy who engineered Russia’s controversial return to the Venice Biennale last month.
Cook, who has helped guide US president Donald Trump’s ballroom project at the White House and triumphal arch proposal for a site opposite the Lincoln Memorial through the necessary approvals as part of his role at the Commission of Fine Arts, spoke for nearly 20 minutes at the roundtable about his longtime love for Russian culture. He said many of those present “have been my personal friends for decades”. A public champion of classical architecture, he outlined his support of heritage projects in Russia, including the cathedral of the New Jerusalem Monastery and the Arkhangelskoye Palace near Moscow, and about how he has built a dacha in Atlanta, Georgia, his hometown, in the Russian village style. Cook has worked on heritage projects in Russia with Priscilla Roosevelt, a writer and scholar, and his late father-in-law, James D. Robinson III, the former chief executive of American Express.
Cook also spoke of his work on Trump’s ballroom and planned “triumphal arch,” which Cook says he has promoted since 2000. In his presentation, he included a photograph of a heritage preservation event organised by the Soros Foundation, which was banned in Russia in 2015 as a state security threat (and is now named the Open Society Foundations).
Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum, who was recently sanctioned by the European Union for his support of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was seated next to Cook. Olga Lyubimova, the Russian culture minister, who was sanctioned by the EU in 2022 and the US in 2023, called for “depoliticisation” of culture and for symphony and ballet tours to resume. Valery Gergiev, the conductor, who is now the director of both the Mariinsky and Bolshoi theatres, was also at the panel, which promoted his return to conducting in the US.
The US actor Steven Seagal, who was granted a Russian passport by Putin in 2018 and appointed as a special envoy for Russian-American humanitarian relations, also spoke. Te panel was broadcast live on Rutube, a Russian platform owned by state-controlled Gazprom-Media.
Neither Cook nor the commission responded to requests for comment about the intent of the trip to the St Petersburg forum.
Up until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the forum welcomed large Western delegations and contributions. In 2017, for example, the then NBC News television anchor Megyn Kelly moderated a panel at the forum that featured her tense questioning of Putin. However, sanctions following Russia’s full-scale invasion cut off most business ties between Russia and the US. Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s advisor and Russia’s ambassador to the US from 1998 to 2008, told journalists on 2 June that “Americans haven’t been [at the forum] at this level since around 2017-2018”, the official Tass news agency reported.
Questioned in the US senate on 2 June, the secretary of state Marco Rubio denied knowledge of the US delegation in St Petersburg. “I’m not aware of the delegation that went,” he said when pressed by the senator Dick Durbin.
Other US guests at the economic forum included Candace Owens, a far-right commentator who has praised Russia for its beauty and Christianity in social media posts throughout her visit, and the British American manosphere influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate.
Vladimir Legoyda, a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church—whose Patriarch Kirill I has been a vocal supporter of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—was another notable participant at the roundtable with Cook. Ahead of the summit, Cook had delivered a copy of the Sitka Icon of the Theotokos to a monastery in St Petersburg as a gift from Trump. It was a response to an icon that Putin presented to Archbishop Alexei of Alaska of the Orthodox Church in America after his meeting with Trump in Anchorage last August. Legoyda said the Orthodox Church can become a platform for US-Russian dialogue.
“We see the growing interest in Orthodoxy in the US today,” Legoyda said. “I believe and hope that this religious dimension of our life—which always transcends the prevailing climate, standing apart from any political expediency—can, alongside the immensely powerful cultural backdrop we discussed today, serve as the foundation for us to start with a clean slate, while remaining mindful of all the points of contact that have existed and continue to exist within our cultures.”
Sergei Chapnin, an expert on the church and culture who was fired as editor of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate in 2015 and is now the director of communications at the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University in New York, tells The Art Newspaper: “Vladimir Legoyda’s brief remarks at the SPIEF should not be underestimated: the message was unmistakably clear—the Russian Orthodox Church intends to prosecute cultural diplomacy, and America is the principal target.”
