Ukrainians in race to save cultural heritage

Luke Harding in Lviv and Harriet SherwoodUkrainians in race to save cultural heritage Guardian Wed 9 Mar 2022.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has been an all-round disaster. Its army has shelled densely populated cities, killing hundreds. More than 2 million refugees have fled abroad in Europe’s biggest exodus since the second world war. In besieged Mariupol, families have spent more than a week living in desperate conditions without heat, water or power. Alongside this humanitarian catastrophe, cultural assets have been bombed and damaged. They include a museum in the city of Ivankiv, north-west of Kyiv, which housed dozens of works by the Ukrainian folk artist Maria Prymachenko, some now lost forever. Last week Russian forces shelled the Assumption Cathedral in Kharkiv, hurling debris into its nave. In a video recorded early on Tuesday Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said Moscow had flattened a 19th-century wooden church in the village of Viazivka, in the western Zhytomyr region. “An act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation,” Olha Rutkovska, a member of the association for the protection of monuments, posted on Facebook. Many Ukrainians believe this vandalism is no accident. In an essay last summer Putin claimed Ukraine and Russia were “one people” and Zelenskiy has argued the Kremlin’s ultimate goal is the “erasure” of Ukraine as an independent sovereign state. That includes its language, people and culture, suppressed during previous eras of Russification. “The USSR was one big totalitarian regime,” Lviv museum director Olha Honchar told the Guardian. “They tried to make everything the same. They had one kind of monument, and one kind of artistic style with socialist realism. Moscow wants to eradicate Ukrainian culture. It’s what defines us and our identity. It’s a memory of who we are.” [...] “Russians are used to living in a totalitarian system. They’ve been zombified. We Ukrainians value critical thinking,” she said. “The idea that Russia and Ukraine are the same is a totalitarian myth dreamed up in Moscow. Lenin didn’t invent us. We are different.”