Since the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24, Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, has been trying to reduce the legacy of the tsars and the USSR which still marks its identity and its culture. In kyiv, “there has been a wave of street renaming”, warns Iryna Tuz, president of the Ukraine Libre solidarity association in Toulouse, who tells 20 minutes the few weeks she spent in Ukraine. Thus, “the street of Saint-Petersburg has become the street of London”, and those with the names of Russian personalities have given way to streets with the names of Ukrainian heroes.
“At the start of the war, we were talking about decommunization, today it’s downright derussification,” said the former journalist. The statue of writer Mikhail Bulgakov in kyiv has been removed, and those of the poet Pushkin are endangered across the country, including in Ternopil where part of Iryna’s family lives. “The police preferred to remove it in the face of the anger of the crowd,” she explains. Beginning of July, the BBC recorded more than 80 destructions of landmarks.
In kyiv as in the Baltic countries, we are remaking history
The visual change still has its limits. During her first days in kyiv, Iryna had seen statues of Ukrainian celebrities protected from bombings in the center of the capital, unlike statues from the communist era. The hypothesis of a difference in treatment has faded over the days, also observing Ukrainian statues in the open air in a park. And in the deep University metro station, where the busts of Soviet scientists are lined up, none have been moved or even defaced.
But Iryna does not want to minimize its impact. Among the renamed streets are “Ukrainian heroes, some of whom were called traitors” in Soviet times. Ukraine is taking a step back and rebuilding its history in the light of the relationship of domination with Moscow. The national feeling goes through a new collective identity, so that “in the streets, we hear Russian speakers speaking Ukrainian or others who have changed their political point of view”.
kyiv spares no effort to encourage the international media to change their ways of writing city names. And Ukraine is not the only one to rework its history and to want to get rid of the Soviet heritage: Latvia and Estonia have recently removed from monuments commemorating the victory of the Red Army against Nazi Germany.
Russian culture will return ‘when the war stops’
“It’s really a cultural act, because the statue of Lenin, a much more political symbol, was removed in 2014” and the war in the Donbass, continues the former journalist on the statue of Pushkin removed in Ternopil. The next figure that could fall? Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovsky, the illustrious composer of Swan Lake, which gave its name to the National Conservatory in Kyiv. If the majority of the population wishes to replace him with a Ukrainian composer, Iryna reports a discussion with a trombonist from the Ukrainian symphony orchestra: the latter wishes to keep the name of Tchaikovsky, highlighting “his Cossack roots”.
The rejection of Russian culture is necessary, according to her. “When the war stops, we will think about culture,” she promises, and about the place that Russian artists should play in the Ukrainian panorama. But in the meantime, she remains “a symbol of the aggressor”, and must therefore be set aside, in the same way as Russian athletes, she argues. Even internationally, organizing concerts by Russian artists thus amounts to “supporting Russia”, she believes, drawing another parallel: “Today, there are Wagner concerts everywhere. But it was not really in good taste during the Second World War… ”