Ukraine must stop destroying its cultural heritage

Russia is not the only country erasing Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Ukraine itself has been demolishing its own public statues and murals for years. Before the war, in 2015, our parliament passed legislation that criminalised communist propaganda. ‘Decommunisation’ was a deceptively simple idea: it started with the removal of our 1,300 Lenins and a few other revolutionary figures. Since the invasion, even monuments with complex histories have been removed.

In Odessa, a statue of the city’s founder Catherine the Great was toppled. In Dnipro, seven monuments were torn down, including those to writer Maxim Gorky, 18th-century scientist Mikhail Lomonosov and poet Pushkin. Two months ago, a Soviet monument to the soldier Alexander Matrosov in Dnipro was also dismantled. Matrosov was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1943 after throwing himself in front of a Nazi machine-gunner to save his comrades. His Soviet documents stated that he had grown up in the Ukrainian city, but the current mayor claims they were forged to hide his Turkic ethnicity.

I understand the desire to remove the relics of Ukraine’s totalitarian communist past; the colonial history of the USSR has left behind a tragic legacy. But monuments such as the one to Matrosov show just how complicated that history can be. Perhaps he did try to hide his true identity – in which case he was also a victim of the Soviet Union and its forced assimilation programme.

Ukrainians lived under the USSR for almost 70 years. There were those who did not accept Soviet power and those who fought against it. There were supporters and party leaders, and those who simply lived and survived as best they could. Modern Ukrainians are their descendants. Soviet history in Ukraine is preserved not only in museums and monuments but in every family photo album.