Destroying Cultural Treasures: How Ukrainians Are Trying to Save Their Culture from Extinction

When the Kremlin announces that Ukraine could “disappear from the map”, there can be no doubt about the goals of the aggressive war.

In terms of Ukrainian identity, Moscow has done the exact opposite since the war began.

This should not distract from the fact that the list of destroyed or damaged monuments, theaters, libraries, museums, archives and churches in the contested areas is growing daily.

More than four hundred historical sites have been destroyed or damaged since February 24, Andrii Portnov, head of the chair for "Entangled History of Ukraine" at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), recently reported.

Entangled History?

During a discussion at Berlin's Robert Havemann Society on “Ukrainian cultural heritage in Russia's war of aggression”, Portnov did not deny that the history of his country is thoroughly interwoven, even confused, after many political rewrites.

According to Portnov, the Ukrainian culture with its multilingualism, its multi-confessionalism and its “spectrum of ideological preferences” is all too often reduced to ethnic nationalism in the German public.

Instead of discriminating stereotypes about his country, Portnov calls for the “art of critical empathy” towards a nation that is now increasingly manifesting itself.

Targeted attack on culture and people

The read eyewitness reports from the war zone spoke for themselves.

Olena Lysenko, a staff member of the "Soviet-era State Terrorism" department of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, described the attack on the archive in Chernihiv, north of Kyiv.

The day after the start of the war, the building was completely destroyed by rocket hits, 13,000 files were burned, and diaries, photographs, audio and film recordings of suspects in the Soviet secret service were irretrievably wiped out.

"An entire layer of our history burned up in a moment." This also made it impossible to rehabilitate victims of the NKVD and KGB.

"Russian troops have 'liberated' us from our historical legacy," Lysenko added bitterly, reporting that

how she saved at least forty of the three thousand burned personal files of the Soviet "special services" and later hid them in different places from the Russian troops by burying them in the ground "in the old manner of Ukrainian peasants".

Chernihiv is now back in Ukrainian hands, but Lysenko is certain: "It is an extremely heavy loss for the country's entire cultural heritage."