Categories: ANALYTICS

How russia kills Ukrainian culture over and over

50,000 books were destroyed by russia in Kharkiv just in one strike yesterday.

First, they will kill your artists.

They will beat the painters to death behind garages, drive the poets to suicide, rot the journalists and historians in camps, shoot the priests, and force the musicians to sing their songs.

Then they will open cinemas, literary schools, and conservatories. You will watch movies in the Pushkin cinema, study in the Glinka conservatory, and listen to opera in the Mayakovsky theater.

And they will also flood your bookstores and music shops with their products. You won’t even notice when a “Golden Series of Russian Classics” appears on your bookshelf, and your favorite music band becomes “Alisa,” blasting from the speakers with their song about “The Sky of Slavs.”

You will watch “The Storm Gate” and “The 9th Company,” hate the “Chechens,” and think that ours would never make something like that.

One day, you will be in Kyiv and visit the Bulgakov Museum, because the “Sixtiers” Museum will seem provincial and unattractive to you.

And one day, in a bookstore, you will come across a lonely book in Ukrainian, with a cheap cover and an unknown author, and you will think that our literature has completely failed.

They will always tell you that their culture is “great,” while your Shevchenko is just a provincial who accidentally conquered the capital.

You will surely watch several series about Pushkin and Yesenin and won’t even know that Panas Myrny or Valerian Pidmohylny exist.

Then they will destroy your house and drive you from your home, once again killing your writers, destroying bookstores, churches, and libraries.

And you will realize that it all started over again. Only this time, you have witnessed the new beginning and can understand it.

The Glinka conservatories and Pushkin theaters were a lie you lived in. Your favorite Chekhov stories and Vysotsky songs were a deception you were drawn into.

But you weren’t there at the beginning, because you were born in a city named after Kirov and studied in a school named after Tolstoy.

You were convinced that this was normal, that this was how it should be. You definitely thought, “we just didn’t make it in literature,” it happens, not every literature can be great. But you were wrong.

The only truth you ever saw was that one Ukrainian-language book among hundreds of Russian ones, which held this country together while it was being drowned in Dostoevsky.

Oleksand Sapronov

Ukraine Front Lines