Putin (Ed. – or rather Putler) has undertaken the systematic annihilation of the country’s identity and culture. Museum Director Tetyana Pylypchuk and the staff of Kharkiv’s Literary Museum are fighting back.
The staff of the Literary Museum, in Kharkiv, are experts in history, narrative, and terror. The museum was started by cultural activists who, in the waning days of the U.S.S.R., wanted to document the Ukrainian Cultural Renaissance. In the nineteen-twenties, following the abolition of the Russian Empire and its censorship, and aided by Bolshevik policies that encouraged the cultivation of local languages and literatures in the former colonies, dozens of writers and poets took part in the development of modern Ukrainian-language literature. Kharkiv was at the center of this movement, which gave rise to such slogans as “Death to Dostoyevskyism! Up with the Cultural Renaissance!” and “Away from Moscow! Go to Europe!” But a decade later, Joseph Stalin reversed the policies, which had been known as “nativization,” and reverted to the imperial approach of forced Russification. Leaders of the Ukrainian Cultural Renaissance were among the victims of the first mass execution of the Great Terror, in Sandarmokh, in 1937. Altogether more than two hundred Ukrainian-language writers were executed, and scores more were imprisoned and persecuted. The movement is now often referred to as the Executed Renaissance.
Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly claimed that Ukraine as an independent country didn’t exist, that there was no such thing as a separate Ukrainian language, or a separate Ukrainian people. He specifically denounced the early Bolshevik policies of “nativization.” The people of the Kharkiv Literary Museum were familiar with this narrative. A quote stencilled on the wall of the museum as part of an exhibit on the Executed Renaissance served as a reminder. Ascribed to a founding father of Soviet literature, Maxim Gorky, it said that there was “no need” to translate work from Russian into Ukrainian, because Ukrainians spoke a “dialect” of Russian. History told the staff that Russians would once again use violence and terror to enforce this vision of history, in which neither the country nor the language exists.
Source: The New Yorker