Activists around the world have been calling for a boycott of Russian culture for months, as punishment for Vladimir Putin’s relentless aggression in his war on Ukraine. But it seems there will be no need for any radical measures soon: Russia is destroying its art and cultural projects all on its own.

Since the start of the war, state censors and so-called hurrah-patriots have rallied for bans against popular Russian theater, art, and films they deem “pro-Western.”

In a video posted to YouTube this week, the head of Moscow’s department of culture, Aleksandr Kibovsky, declared that a recent decree signed by Vladimir Putin “to strengthen Russian traditional, spiritual and moral values” gives Russian authorities the green light to cleanse the country’s cultural scene from all “Western influence.”

“The presidential decree gives us, the culture authorities, guidelines to provide state support only to projects that obey the requirements,” Kibovsky said on Monday. “We now feel a hangover from all that mash the [the West] had been feeding us with for many many years… It’s sad that we needed the regime of the special operation to come to this.” Addressing the West, Kibovsky added: “We are not your monkeys any longer.”

Citizens across Russia have already taken measures to avoid the wrath of Russian authorities under the new policy.

“Some libraries and bookshops are running ahead of the train of state censorship and taking books off the shelves that have not even been banned yet,” Alexandra Vakhrusheva, the former director of the Turgenev library in Moscow, told The Daily Beast. “Names of banned theater directors are taken off theatrical billboards, and schools have received ‘recommendation letters’ from ministries of culture and education advising children to wear costumes of Russian fairy tales, and not of Western animation characters.”

Earlier this month, the Fathers’ Council—a Russian children’s rights group in Khabarovsk—purchased all copies of Summer in a Pioneer Tie, a book about a romantic relationship between two Soviet boys, so they would not end up in Russian homes.

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