Why all the controversy over the current From Russia exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts? Don't Panic investigates.

Nothing in Anglo-Russian affairs these days seems to be free of the mucky stains of Putin’s politics. But then, even the art of this amazing show is highly charged with political history. The pictures themselves come from the last era in which Russian billionaires bought up bits of west European culture. Pavel Tretyakov, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov were all textile barons of the late 19th century. Where today’s ‘New Russians’ buy football clubs and yachts, they bought canvases from Russian painters such as Tatlin, Chagall, Kandinsky and Bakst and French artists such as Gaugin, Matisse and Cézanne. What a comparison!

Paul Gauguin, Vairaumati Tei Oa (Her Name is Vairaumati), 1892, Oil on canvas

The heavy-handedness started with Lenin, who seized the Russian collectors’ works of art in 1918, soon after the revolution. Stalin went one better and closed the exhibitions in 1948 because they were a “breeding ground of formalist views and obsequiousness before decadent bourgeois culture”.

Ilya Repin, Leo Tolstoy Barefoot, 1901, Oil on canvas

Now that we can see the pictures in London, it’s hard not to be influenced by the back-story – hard not to suspect conspiracies, or come over all John le Carré while marvelling at the art. The exhibition has already been to Germany where it does not seem to have caused anywhere near such a stir. In Britain we had to have an emergency Act of Parliament to reassure President Putin that the heirs of Shchukin and Morozov would not try to repossess the masterpieces, including the star of the show, Matisse’s The Dance.

Ilya Repin, October 17, 1905, 1907, 1911, Oil on canvas

For other dark reasons the paintings might never have made it to Piccadilly. Putin loses no opportunity to turn Russia’s riches into political capital. Just as the oil, gas and mines have given him more political clout than nuclear bombs did for his predecessors, so art has been used as a football in the ongoing match between the UK and Russia. Gazprom, the monopoly Russian gas company, is a sponsor of this Exhibition. Coincidentally, it also controls about half of the EU’s natural gas supply.

Pablo Picasso, Dryad, 1908, Oil on canvas

Tensions have been running especially high between Russia and British Council ever since the Litvinenko affair. Ironically, while the British Council actually is a post-imperial propaganda machine as Russian security services suggest, in Russia it has behaved impeccably. With real altruism it has sponsored teacher-training and helped to reform Russia’s methods of teaching English. But to Putin, with his very Russian chip about Western cultural imperialism, the Council is an NGO and NGOs are instruments of gesture politics, symbols of condescension by the rich to the poor. In this case “the poor” have bought up just about the entire stock of £50 million houses in London and, by turning off the tap as they did to the Ukraine back in 2006, they have the power to freeze all Europeans in winter.

Léon Samoilovitch Bakst, Portrait of Sergei Diaghilev with His Nanny, 1906, Oil on canvas

So put on your biggest winter coat on and get down the Royal Academy. The French paintings are worth the visit, but the Russian pictures are probably even more amazing and you won’t see them again without going to Moscow and St Petersburg, where at least it will be warm – possibly in more senses than one.

The From Russia exhibition of French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg will be running at the Royal Academy, Piccadilly until 18 April.

More details at their website