Andrei Kurkov on Russia’s war against Ukrainian culture

29 Mar 22 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine

Celebrated Ukrainian author Andrei Kurkov. Photo: Juerg Vollmer

After five days of silence, my friend, a writer, journalist, and historian in occupied Melitopol, finally sent me a message. I’d been afraid something had happened to her, that I would never hear from her again. But, thank God, it turned out that she’d simply had no internet access or telephone reception. I asked her to keep a diary of life under occupation, to take photos on her smartphone, and to send all that to me. I would keep it safe. The original diary could then be destroyed.

She’s been living under occupation for more than two weeks and doesn’t set foot outside, for fear of being captured. The director of the Melitopol History Museum, Leyla Ibragimova, a Crimean Tatar, has already been kidnapped. They terrorised her, interrogated her, confiscated her and her family’s phones and computers — then released her. The next morning they picked her up for another interrogation. Activists and journalists are disappearing in the occupied territories. FSB agents walk the streets with lists of names and addresses in hand. These lists were prepared before the start of the war.

Oleg Baturin, a journalist from Kakhovka, was abducted by the Russian military. Eventually, he was released — after eight days of beatings and torture, of demands to go over to the Russian side, of hunger and thirst, of humiliation. Those who beat him hid their faces and forbade him to raise his head and look at them. Is this today’s Russia? Yes. But it is also the Soviet Union of the 1930s. These are the practices of the Gulag. The Ukrainian author Stanislav Aseyev wrote an entire book about the torture camp in Donetsk. After two years of captivity in this camp and in the prison run by separatists, he had plenty of material. He studied closely those who beat and abused Ukrainian prisoners of war and others who had been seized on the streets and brought to this already infamous concentration camp, called “Isolation.” Years ago, the place had been a factory for the manufacture of insulation for electrical wires. Later, under the same name, it became a contemporary art centre. When the separatists, aided by the Russian military, captured Donetsk, they converted it into a concentration camp, with a set of chambers in which all their detainees were tortured. Stanislav Aseyev’s book has already appeared in several languages, including English. I highly recommend it to anyone who seeks to better understand what went on and continues to go on in the separatist “republics” since 2014. And now the same things are happening in the territories occupied by the Russian army.

We’re well into 2022. Books about what is happening now in Ukraine are already being written, but are not yet published.

The unsuccessful attempt to annex or, to put it plainly, occupy all of Ukraine has angered Putin and now, judging by the military actions of the Russian army, Russian generals have been ordered to destroy cities and villages, to kill civilians, and simply to make sure that Ukraine ceases to exist.

This is not the first attempt to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians. In the late 1920s, Ukrainian peasants refused to join collective farms, and for this the Soviet government deported 250,000 families to Siberia. In 1932-1933, as punishment for the same individualism and unwillingness to become part of Soviet collective agriculture, all reserves of wheat and, indeed, all sources of nourishment were confiscated from Ukrainian peasants, leaving them with no food for the winter. Some seven million Ukrainians perished during this artificial famine organised by Moscow.

In those same years, the Soviet government decided to destroy Ukrainian culture. Nearly all the country’s leading writers, poets, and playwrights were arrested, sent to Solovki in the north of Russia, and shot. In Ukrainian literary history, the authors of this period are referred to as the “Executed Renaissance.” These people had tried to revive Ukrainian culture after decades of official prohibitions on the use of the Ukrainian language and on anything distinctly Ukrainian in tsarist Russia. Soviet communists had decided that the revival of Ukrainian culture posed a danger to the Soviet Union. And alongside the writers, poets, and playwrights they executed, the NKVD also shot many artists and theatre directors. The works of Mykhaylo Semenko (1892-1937), Maik Yohansen (1895-1937), Mykola Zerov (1890-1937), and dozens of other Ukrainian writers killed in that purge could only be published again after the collapse of the USSR.

Today’s Ukrainian intellectuals face the same danger. That goes for writers and journalists and historians. Anyone who believes that Ukraine should remain independent and become part of Europe is already an enemy of Russia. Culture is what cements a nation. Ukrainian culture has only just begun to revive after 70 years of Soviet rule, 70 years of censorship and persecution.

But today that culture and its representatives are the targets of Russian bombers. The attacks on Kyiv have killed Artem Datsyshyn, the principal dancer of the National Opera of Ukraine, and the famed actress Oksana Shvets. Near Kyiv, in the village of Bucha — home to a number of writers and composers— Oleksandr Kislyuk, a well-known translator from Ancient Greek and other languages, a teacher at the Theological Academy, and a professor at the Drahomanov Pedagogical University, was shot by Russian soldiers on the threshold of his house. It is thanks to him that Ukrainians can read the works of Aristotle, Tacitus, Thomas Aquinas, and other classic authors in their own language.

Now Oleksandr Kislyuk has been murdered and one wonders who will finish the translations he was working on in his final days.

Among those killed in this war are at least three painters. There are also photographers and scientists, musicians and architects, schoolteachers and university professors.

For almost a month, now, Russian bombers have been aiming directly at schools and universities, theatres and libraries.

Near Kyiv, in the village of Ivankiv, a bomb hit a historical museum that housed the works of famous Ukrainian primitive artist Maria Prymachenko (1909-1997). While the museum burned, locals carried her paintings out of the fire. Now those canvases are kept in the homes of people who live next to the ruined museum.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture has sent an order to all museums to prepare their exhibits for evacuation to Western Ukraine. Some museums managed to pack up their collections, others simply lowered them into basements and underground rooms. But none have so far been evacuated. The most important thing is to evacuate people from cities under constant bombardment and artillery fire.

For two weeks, Ukrainian writers tried to extract their colleague, the Russophone prose writer Volodymyr Rafeyenko, from the village of Klavdiyevo, which was practically destroyed by the Russian army. He is a refugee twice over. First, in 2014, he had to leave his apartment in Donetsk. Since then, he and his wife had been living in Klavdiyevo, at the dacha of the Ukrainophone writer and translator Andriy Bondar. Klavdiyevo has been all but flattened by Russian artillery and is surrounded by their tanks. Volodymyr and his wife spent more than a week in the basement of a half-collapsed house. At long last, they managed to break out of encirclement and volunteers took them to Kyiv.

Kyiv is also being hit by rockets, but not so intensively. The chances of survival are greater in Kyiv. There, in his apartment near the railway station, the publisher Mykola Kravchenko* sits at his table and works. He’s editing a novel by a young woman from Lutsk, titled Porcelain Doll. The novel concerns domestic violence. He knows that he won’t be able to publish it anytime soon, but he continues to work in order to preserve his psychological balance, in order to think less about the war.

Yet the war, including the violent attack on Ukrainian cultural heritage, continues. The number of bombed-out churches is already in the tens.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture is still at work and every day its employees collect new information about the historical sites and cultural institutions destroyed by the Russian army.

The list of Russia’s crimes against Ukrainian culture is constantly being updated.

* Editor’s note: Not the Ukrainian political figure of the same name who died in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.