A museum which hides its Russian masterpieces, Pushkin shunned and the “tongue of the oppressor” which recedes… In one of the most Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, the war started by Moscow is in the process of obliterating Russian cultural influence.
While Ukraine’s appetite for “derussification” began before the February 2022 invasion, the 18-month-old war has intensified the campaign to erase Russian and Soviet symbolism from public space.
In northeastern Ukraine, Kharkiv, the country’s second largest and largely Russian-speaking city, was one of the first targets of the Russian army, before being forced into a humiliating retreat by a lightning counter-offensive by the Ukrainians in last September.
The shrapnel-scarred walls and boarded-up windows of the city’s art museum are reminders that Kharkiv has suffered and continues to suffer Russian missile and rocket strikes with chilling regularity.
Maryna Filatova, a museum official, explains that in this context, it is impossible to continue to exhibit the works of Russian artists.
The institution therefore removed the words “and Russian” from the name of the “Ukrainian and Russian Art” department, and the paintings, such as the emblematic “Response of the Zaporozhian Cossacks” by Ilya Repin, a 19th century Russian painter born in a Ukraine then under the rule of the Tsarist Empire, were removed from the walls.
“The city is suffering, the city is in mourning”, says Maryna Filatova, “people will not accept Russian art. This is not the time”.
The museum therefore exhibits works by local artist Viktor Kovtoun, illustrating the “reality of war”, as well as objects made from remnants of munitions that hit Kharkiv.
In city parks, statues of Russian figures, such as 19th-century poet and novelist Alexander Pushkin, have been torn down or defaced.
The works of Fiodor Dostoyevsky and Mikhail Lermontov must be removed from the school curriculum.
Finally, we see more and more inhabitants switching to Ukrainian, while many families have members on both sides of the border.
This is the case of Mykola Kolomiets, who at 40 runs an art studio for children. Speaking Russian now leaves “an unpleasant taste” in his mouth, as if he had “eaten something rotten”.
But the mayor of Kharkiv, Igor Terekhov, who speaks Russian as well as Ukrainian and whose patriotism nobody questions, warns against the temptation of a boycott.
According to him, forcing derussification in a region where Russian has dominated for so long is not without risk.
“Insisting that people give up Russian is not the best way to proceed”, judges the city councilor, while in his city the older generation, those who lived through the Soviet Union, remain largely Russian-speaking.
“The more you push, the more resistance there will be,” predicts Mr. Terekhov, who speaks to AFP in Ukrainian but exchanges with his team in Russian.
If the derussification of Ukraine was initiated after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 that really gave it impetus. And with the invasion of 2022, the phenomenon has become widespread.
“This is the point of no return,” said Rostyslav Melnykiv, director of the department of Ukrainian literature at a university in Kharkiv, devastated by a Russian strike in 2022.
According to Oleksandre Savchuk, a 39-year-old publisher, the invasion sparked unprecedented interest in Ukrainian cultural figures, especially those banned during the Soviet era.
“We don’t want people to just change the language,” he told AFP, “we want them to feel more Ukrainian.”
08/29/2023 13:18:05 – Kharkiv (Ukraine) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP