Are nesting dolls and kokoshnik headdresses even Russian? A former Pushkin Museum director’s answer just got her reported to prosecutors.

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On June 18, Elizaveta Likhacheva, an art historian and former director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, sat down with YouTuber Pavel Kostin for an interview that focused mainly on education and child-rearing — but it was her remarks on Russian culture and identity that drew the most attention. “Why distance ourselves from Western culture? I don’t understand it,” she told Kostin. “Russia is part of a great civilization. For us, this may be our last chance to reckon with that question.”

Likhacheva argued that many symbols Russians associate with their national identity are rooted in the traditions of other cultures. The matryoshka, commonly known as a Russian nesting doll, derived from a “Japanese toy,” she said. The kokoshnik, meanwhile, was invented by “artists of the Art Nouveau era, who lifted headwear from 15th-century Italian paintings.” She also addressed Russian literature, noting that many of its forms — the novel among them — were borrowed from abroad, and that some canonical texts were partly composed in foreign languages. “War and Peace,” she said, was written “approximately half” in French.

Nearly three weeks later, on July 6, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova weighed in on her Telegram channel. She called Likhacheva a “pseudo-intellectual false honey fungus” and claimed, citing unspecified “concerned citizens,” that French words make up less than four percent of the text of “War and Peace.” “Who will protect us, the people, from the egregious ignorance, the frenzied charlatanism, the arrogant pomposity being literally foisted on us everywhere by the Sharikovs [references to the loutish antihero of Bulgakov’s ‘Heart of a Dog’] who hold forth and the Shvonders [his officious minder] who patronize them? Only we ourselves,” Zakharova wrote.

MSK1.RU sought comment from Likhacheva after the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman’s remarks. “Apparently we have already defeated all our enemies and reached agreements with everyone, since a senior official at the Foreign Ministry is busy hunting down the statements of an unemployed art historian and refuting them on her blog, turning it into a news event,” she told journalists.

Likhacheva’s comments about kokoshniks drew fire from well beyond the “patriot” camp, reaching Russians with opposition sympathies. Among those who responded was embroiderer Olga Vasilkova, who, according to her bio, lives in political exile and makes headdresses and kokoshniks. She also created a headdress bearing the words “No to war” for Liza Monetochka. Vasilkova recorded a video pushing back on the art historian, pointing out that kokoshniks appear in Russian documents from the 17th century and that museums hold surviving examples dating to the 18th and 19th centuries. She also said she was eager to see the 15th-century Italian paintings that Likhacheva claimed had inspired the kokoshnik’s creators.

On July 12, Vladlena Grinblat, the founder of the Russky Kokoshnik (“Russian Kokoshnik”) museum at the Khaustovo estate near Zvenigorod, addressed the art historian’s remarks. “All married women in Rus’ from the late 16th century wore kokoshniks in roughly the form we see in the antique artifacts that have survived to our time from the late 17th to the early 20th century,” Grinblat told the Russian state news agency TASS. “To deny the existence of the kokoshnik on Russian territory since ancient times is hype for the ignorant and a crime against the culture of the nation.”

On July 14, professional denouncer Vitaly Borodin wrote on his Telegram channel that he had filed a complaint with the Prosecutor General’s Office asking it to review Likhacheva’s statements to determine whether they “discredited cultural heritage.” “To deny such things publicly is no longer a scholarly discussion. It is a blow to our cultural code, to historical memory. […] If someone, funded from abroad, is trying to rewrite our history and divide society, we are obliged to stop it,” Borodin wrote.