Ukraine is a country where many, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, grew up with Russian as their first language. But now this language is disappearing from public life and disappearing even in some daily private conversations.. Russo-centric museums close under pressure. Streets named after Russian monuments, poets and generals of the Soviet army are being renamed. This is stated in the Washington Post article..

Zelenskiy signed two laws last month banning the use of Russian toponyms and requiring Ukrainian citizens to know the Ukrainian language..

“Russia itself is doing everything to ensure that de-Russification takes place on the territory of our state,” Zelensky said a month after the start of the invasion in February 2022..

Putin partially justified his bloody attack on Ukraine by saving the Russian people there from cultural extermination.. But Russia's war against Ukraine, including the bombing of predominantly Russian-speaking cities like Mariupol and Kharkiv, has only pushed Ukrainians further away..

No one has done more to de-Russify Ukraine than Putin, said Rory Finnin, assistant professor of Ukrainian studies at the University of Cambridge, adding that Putin's aggression has spurred many to push for the complete removal of Russian culture and history..

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" Monuments to Russian poets and Soviet generals are being demolished or damaged, and public art and propaganda murals are closed or removed.

Erasing the past has sparked a debate similar to that in the United States: how to deal with the physical attractions of a heavy history? Americans doubt whether to keep monuments to enslavers and Confederate generals. Ukrainians overestimate the place of Soviet and Russian figures who once seemed intertwined with their country's history.

Kyiv activist of the CSO “Ukrainian Kyiv” Oleg Slabospitsky recorded the location of more than 200 signs and monuments in the capital of Ukraine, which, in his opinion, should be removed. Telegram channel of another organization Decolonize Ukraine has more than 5000 users. Daily posts tell in detail about every corner of the country where the stamp of Russia still remains. Similar to vigilantes, members sometimes go out at night to damage or dismantle monuments they consider offensive and which the local authorities have not taken down..

These attempts to " During the pro-democracy Maidan Revolution of 2013-2014, Ukrainian demonstrators rejected Soviet symbols, in particular the statue of Vladimir Lenin, as they rejected authoritarianism and communism and demanded closer ties with the European Union. Ukraine banned Soviet symbols in 2015 after Russia illegally annexed Crimea and supported separatists in the country's east. For many, this is not enough..

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Other Ukrainians, however, object to the massacre being waged by self-styled guardians of national identity.. They would like to discuss what should be removed.

“It’s one thing to physically demolish these facilities, and another to dismantle them in a civilized manner and store them safely,” says Ukrainian scientist Leonid Marushchak.. He is a member of an organization called Denede, formed in 2015 to look into the problems that the decommunization law created for historians and artists.. “As a historian and researcher, it is important for me not to lose the object of research with which I can work, regardless of the year, era or perspective.”.

The Soviet Union donated an installation called the Friendship of Peoples Arch in 1982. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, demonstrators drew a large crack on the arch. In May last year, it was renamed the Arch of the Will of the Ukrainian people..

Soviet mosaics throughout Kyiv, minted on residential buildings, bus stops and schools. The Hammer and Sickle of the Communist Party is depicted on Brestsky Avenue.

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Pushkin in Ukraine.

Monuments to Alexander Pushkin, a 19th-century writer and one of the greatest Russian poets, have also been targeted by activists.. Statues and frescoes depicting him have been damaged - even some that are more than a century old..

Pushkin has become for Ukrainians a symbol of a full-scale Russian invasion, said Edita Boyanovskaya, a professor of Slavic languages \u200b\u200band literature at Yale University.. “The saturation of the urban landscape with statues of famous Russian writers is part of the imperialist heritage of Russia, which tried to make these important cultural figures also central to Ukrainian culture,” she said..

17-year-old Maria Kazimirenko, who lives near Kyiv's Pushkin Park, agreed with this.. She added: “I think we should take down all these monuments because we have to get rid of any Soviet … past and Russian culture.”.

Some in the literary community denied the attacks on the poet. “The enemy is Putin, not Pushkin,” German PEN wrote in a March 2022 press release calling for no boycott of Russian books and plays.

But Pushkin, whose work sometimes guided tsarist imperialism, has long been Putin's propaganda vehicle.. Children recited his poetry from the time of the Russian annexation of Crimea. Russian actors who supported the full-scale invasion of Ukraine read the poems of a Moscow bard.

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De-Russification of Kharkov.

Russian culture should be valued, Boyanovskaya said, but "

In Kharkiv, a predominantly Russian-speaking city just 26 miles from the Russian border, past tensions may be sharper than in other parts of Ukraine. On the main road to Ukraine's second largest city, there are two signs that greet travelers: one in Russian, the other in Ukrainian, symbols of dual identity.

The Kremlin may have assumed that the inhabitants of the city would welcome the Russian army.. “The reality turned out to be very different,” said Hamlet Zinkovsky, a Kharkov street artist who documented the war in real time on the walls of the bombed-out city.. - The invaders were greeted with Molotov cocktails and many technicians were simply burned. This is our "

The city was destroyed by Russian shelling at the beginning of the war. But for Kharkiv Mayor Igor Terekhov and some residents, completely erasing the city’s Russian heritage would also strip them of their identity..

With the removal of the statues, he said, "

About a year after the start of the war, the city feels empty as people have fled their homes driven out by shelling and lack of heat and electricity.. Many who remain are ambivalent about Russian symbols and frescoes woven into Kharkiv.

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Part of history?

“Ukrainian cultural heritage is not a monolithic thing,” said Katherine Younger, scientific director of the Ukraine in European Dialogue program at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. “The Soviet legacy is an integral part of the Ukrainian heritage, and this should also be part of this history.”.

A large metal array called " Passers-by said that the Ukrainian flag was inserted into his gun only recently.

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Kharkiv City Hall still bears traces of the Soviet past: the hammer and sickle are part of its facade.

Decolonize Ukraine Kharkiv spokesman Vadim Pozdnyakov grew up in the city and said he was puzzled as a child why streets and parks are named after people who organized atrocities against the Ukrainian people..

Names included Vlas Chubar and Pavel Postyshev, two Communist Party officials involved in the Holodomor of 1932-1933, which killed millions of Ukrainians and was caused, historians say, by Soviet policy..

“I had a desire,” Pozdnyakov said, “to clear the city of the symbols of colonial, Russian, Soviet enslavement”.

Kiev activist Slabospitsky says that theoretically these memos could be kept in a museum. Other former Soviet countries have taken similar approaches: Budapest has a park dedicated to statues and plaques from Hungary's communist era.. Lithuania founded a museum and sculpture garden to house its artifacts.

But, notes Slabospitsky, there should have been a lot of museums, “since there are a lot of these monuments”.