The first thing they attacked in the town of Ivankiv was the museum.
It was the second day of the war. The bomb hit the modest building that housed part of the work of Maria Primachenkoone of the most beloved artists of Ukraine.
The neighbors did not hesitate. They tore down the bars of the Local History Museum and entered the inferno of the flames to save fifteen works of art full of fantastic animals inspired by local folklore. Not only was the legacy of one of the greatest representatives of naif art in the world in danger. From the fire they saved a symbol of Ukrainian identity.
It is not the only national emblem to have been targeted by Russian troops.
In Borodianka, when Ukrainian soldiers retook the town in April, they found the bust of beloved nationalist poet Taras Sevchenko riddled with bullets. In Kharkiv, the museum-house of the poet and philosopher Grigory Skovoroda, another Ukrainian great man, was also bombed.
Most of the pieces and files had been put to safe days before, but the building was destroyed. Only a sculpture of the poet was saved, which, white and still standing, turned into a symbol of resistance, seemed to want to defy the bombs.
The war in Ukraine is being waged on many fronts, including the cultural one. The bombs that have destroyed cities and killed thousands of people in Ukraine are also destroying the country’s historical and cultural heritage.
The UNESCO speaks of at least 143 damaged sites or completely destroyed, a figure that the Ukrainian government raises to more than 380, including museums, libraries, churches and cultural institutions. Added to the physical damage is the looting of its museums.
The destruction is indiscriminate, but for some among the chaos a certain pattern emerges.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear on numerous occasions that he does not believe that Ukraine is a real state, or that its people, language or culture are real. It’s all part of Russia, he argues. Are those bombings and looting a way of trying to erase that Ukrainian national identity?
“There is several evidence that Russia has specifically targeted the Ukrainian identity,” Volodymyr Kulyk, professor of Political Culture and Ideology at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, assures BBC Mundo.
The academic cites several examples: “In the city of Mariupol, just after it was taken over by Russian troops, they removed Ukrainian from road signs and left only Russian. The same has happened in schools in the occupied territories, where Russian has been imposed as the language of instruction and it is known of libraries where they have destroyed books in ukrainianespecially works on the country’s history or language”.
It could be that the bombing of museums, churches or libraries is rather a reflection of what indiscriminate what the Russian attacks are being, concedes Kulyk. But the very concept ofdenazification“, with which Vladimir Putin has justified the war from the beginning, “reveals his intentions to eliminate or undermine the Ukrainian identity,” argues the professor, who is also a research associate at Harvard University.
According to Kulyk, for the Russians, the “denazification” of Ukraine does not mean doing away with extreme right-wingers “but with everything that is not Russian.”
pillage
Not everything is being destroyed. There are pieces, thousands, according to different local sources, that are being transferred to the regions controlled by the invaders and from there, the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture suspects, to Russia.
In April, several soldiers, accompanied by an expert, went to the Melitopol museum, in the south of the country, in search of a very special collection.
The scythian gold hoard from the fourth century BC that housed the center had been hidden by its director, Leila Ibrahimova, in the basement when the conflict broke out. Armed Russian troops showed up at her house and interrogated her for several hours to tell them where her pieces were, though she was eventually released and she managed to flee. Another employee of the museum, Galina Kucher, did not suffer the same fate. The soldiers took her away at the end of April and the BBC does not know what has become of her since then.
The Scythians were a nomadic people who founded a prosperous empire centered on the Crimean peninsula between the 8th and 2nd centuries AD. It spread across much of Asia and into parts of what is now Russia and the Ukraine.
Putin’s fondness for Scythian gold, which is considered especially symbolic of Ukrainian identity and independence, comes from afar. In 2014, when Russian troops invaded Crimea, several pieces of the treasure were on loan in Amsterdam for an exhibition.
Russia demanded that the gold be returned to the Crimean museums from which it had come, launching a legal battle that has lasted for years. A judge ruled in 2021, however, that the gold belongs to the Ukrainian state, not to museums on the peninsula, now controlled by Russia.
The pieces that were in Melitopol have not suffered the same fate. The soldiers and the expert finished finding the boxes in the basement.
The same has happened in Mariupol. It is believed that at least 2,000 objects of art They have left their museums for Donetsk, including a manuscript Torah scroll and a valuable Venetian gospel from 1811. Representatives of the Donetsk museum said that the works were temporarily handed over to them, and that they would be returned to the museums they visited. they belong if they so request.
“They already did it in Crimea and now they are doing it in Mariupol and other cities. What they want, they take away,” says Russian political scientist Sergej Sumlenny.
Museums and other cultural places in Ukraine, explains the expert on Eastern Europe, are being attacked “deliberately, it is not a coincidence, it is a fundamental part of Russia’s strategy to eliminate Ukrainian culture. Do not weaken it, mind you, delete it. And it’s not newthey have been trying to do it for 300 years, from Pedro I to Catalina la Grandeall emperors have had that goal.”
One of the proofs, Sumlenny maintains, is that one of the most illustrious sons of the city of Mariúpol has not been spared from the bombs.
The museum dedicated to the nineteenth-century painter Archip Kuindzhiwas bombed at the end of March.
Its director, Tatiana Buli, told the Russian service of the BBC how she herself, like Ibrahimova had done in Melitopol, hid some of the most important paintings in the basement in the first days of the war. Shortly after, she managed to flee from one of the cities that have been most intensely martyred by Russian artillery.
Putin’s troops, however, found the works thanks to the collaboration of the director of another local institution, who I knew the exact place they were hidden in it and he handed them over to the Russians.
Among the pictures taken by the soldiers are Kuindzhi’s paintings “Red Sunset”, “Autumn” and “Elbrus”, all of them very valuable, as well as some by his teacher Ivan Aivazovsky.
Born in Mariupol at the time when it was part of the Russian empire, Kuindzhi is an example “of the complexity of multiple identity of many artists at that time”, explains the artist Nikita Kadan from kyiv. They are Ukrainians and Russians, the two countries claim their legacy and turn them into symbols of identity.
Together with other compatriots, Kadan has represented his country at this year’s Venice Biennale with works created from debris and twisted pieces of metal which he collected in 2014 during the war in Donbas.
“Of course there is a cultural front beyond the war front, which focuses on giving visibility to Ukrainian culture and art and raising awareness of the catastrophe of Russian aggression,” explains the artist.
The destruction of heritage, a Unesco spokesperson reminds BBC Mundo, “is a serious violation of human rights, inseparable from humanitarian and security issues. Cultural heritage also plays a fundamental role in affirming identity and the cultural diversity of a country, mutual understanding or social cohesion”.
The UN Security Council has also passed several resolutions in recent history that equate crimes against culture with war crimes. The latest is Resolution 2347, of March 2017, the first to focus exclusively on the destruction of cultural heritage, illicit trafficking in cultural property and its impact on global peace and security, and which recognizes the mandate and role crucial role of UNESCO in the prevention of crimes against heritage.
peace symbol
The work of Maria Primachenko also arrived at the Ukrainian pavilion in Venice, escorted by the police from kyiv. The artist, self-taught and revered by Pablo Picasso, died in 1997.
Besides peasant scenes and fabulous flowers, Primachenko also reflected in his paintings the reign of terror that Josef Stalin unleashed in the Ukraine. Decades later, her work once again becomes a national emblem and a peace symbol.
“Putin is trying to erase our history, our culture and everything that makes us Ukrainians,” Anastasiia Primachenko, great-granddaughter of the artist and director of the foundation that bears her name, denounces BBC Mundo.
But even if he partially achieves his geopolitical objectives, defends Professor Volodymyr Kulyk, “Putin is not going to achieve his identity objectives, quite the opposite. The only thing it has achieved is to further unify Ukraine“.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-61684594, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-06-18 04:30:06
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