Russia - What began as a self-styled cultural revolution in this homely city on the edge of the Ural Mountains is now slipping into a culture war of sorts. On one side is a self-assured elite from Moscow. On the other side are locals who feel threatened and belittled by the implication that they are a bunch of rubes.

“The Moscow group hasn’t understood that Perm doesn’t live in the 21st century, but 40 years ago,” said Vladimir Abashev, a professor of philology at Perm State University.

It all began a couple of years ago when Oleg Chirkunov, the appointed governor of the Perm region since 2005, seized on a cultural initiative as a way to kick-start development and give this unglamorous city an exciting, post-Soviet identity.

He enlisted the help of a former university classmate, Boris Milgram, a theater director who left Perm for Moscow in the 1990s. Mr. Milgram became Perm’s regional culture minister and in turn attracted a group of scene setters from the capital.

Within a year this group had opened a nationally acclaimed contemporary-art exhibition in a reconverted Stalin-era riverboat station, a new theater, a series of avant-garde concerts, street-art projects and festivals.

In September 2009, Marat Guelman, the director of the Perm museum of contemporary art , announced that the city would become Russia’s cultural capital. Now the governor and his team are pushing Perm as a candidate for the title of European cultural capital.

But Alexei Ivanov, a local author with a national following, is an unrelenting critic of the new team from Moscow . “What is happening in Perm is a catastrophe,” he said. “They dreamed up this idea of a cultural revolution, but Perm has never lacked for culture. All these projects are there to turn over money to Guelman and his friends.”

There have also been vicious, xenophobic diatribes from conservative legislators and puzzlement on the part of citizens over the modern art on display. trying to grasp the relevance of a wallsize portrait of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California with a basketball hoop on his forehead, or a group of giant red figurines perched on a downtown square and a nearby rooftop.

But no one disputes that the Moscow group has reinvigorated Perm’s cultural life. Mr. Guelman “has an extravagant side, but without his resources, none of this would have happened,” said Dr. Abashev.

Tatyana Kursina, director of the Perm 36 museum, a labor camp that has been preserved as a memorial to the victims of the gulag, said she was not opposed to the arrival of Mr. Guelman and others “to give us a shake.”

The problem is one of balance, and of money. When the Perm culture ministry announced that next year it would increase spending on culture to 1.5 billion rubles, or about $49 million, people began to question the choices.

The chief beneficiary of Perm’s cultural splurge has been the contemporary art museum, which has attracted attention in Moscow and beyond . Its local appeal, however, has stalled, said Dr. Abashev. Most of his students are either uninterested or even hostile to the museum’s offerings, and he faults the new team at the ministry.

“Very little attention is spent on contact with society or education,” he said. “This group is made up of outsiders, and with some exceptions, they don’t feel the city,” he said.

This may now begin to change, as the culture ministry finally articulated its plans for the city on its Web site in October. Critics have been invited to submit their responses, and it is hoped that will spur the kind of dialogue that has been missing until now.

“What we need is to get around a table and discuss all this,” Ms. Kursina said. “There really is no other way, unless we want to invite the pope from Rome, but that’s pure idiocy.”


By CELESTINE BOHLEN PERM