In kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa (Ukraine).
“Historically, Ukraine is the wheat granary of Russia.” Lily or prou, that’s all we have learned in school on this big country. By limiting it to a kind of pantry, perhaps we ended up forgetting that Ukraine is also and above all a state and especially a nation with its own history, its own multisecular and ancient culture.
This reality disputed by Russia demonstrates how wrong our representations are also wrong about the factors that trigger conflicts. War is above all an ontological question almost always catalyzed by cultural questions. In other words, we wage war when she becomes a possible option in hearts and minds. To justify it, we then invoke the cultural and historical legitimities that suit us. One of the most widespread intellectual paths is to believe that conflicts are triggered for economic and territorial reasons.
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia illustrates this desire to erase a nation by also attacking its culture with an intensity rarely affected. Operationally, this manifests itself by damage to Ukrainian heritage: bombing of museums and cultural symbols, replacement of directors and staff of these same establishments by prorussian people in the occupied territories, but also looting, spoliations, revisionism and negationism. Above all, it is a question of perpetuating the Russian narrative making Ukraine an artificial nation which has no clean existence.
“The losers’ mark”
In kyiv, Olga Apenko, documentalist chief of the National Museum of Bohdan-and-Varvara-Khanenko, explains why “his” establishment is for the moment a ghost building. “We have put the permanent collection under the shelter, in places kept secret, since October 10, 2022, when a missile struck the museum.” For Olga Apenko, this desire to destroy the historical heritage “Is necessarily the brand of losers”.
Hundreds of kilometers from the capital, the attacks carried out in the Oblast of Kherson (south of Ukraine) revealed to the international community the operating mode of these cultural erasure missions in the occupied territories. In March 2022, the Russian occupants hastened to appoint new curators of museums and Kherson cultural centers. Aim of the operation: to exalt Russian “special military operation” by integrating works and cultural objects into the “Novorossia”, this “New Russia” which integrates all or part of states that belonged to Russia, then to the former USSR, to the national territory.
However, the Russians are not only interested in the past. By looting, destroying or also kidnapping the archives, they deny, disorganize, deteriorate the present. To date, no one can say where the documents that were stored in the National Archives of the Kherson region were taken away. At the end of October 2022, Iryna Lopushynska, director of the said archives, attended helplessly in the bag of the premises organized by the Russian soldiers. “They also attacked the cadastre, civil status, administrative registers, leaving tens of empty linear meters, when they did not defecate on the spot.”
#Ukraine : The Russian forces have looted thousands of works of art of value before retiring from Kherson. This systematic looting was an operation organized to deprive Ukrainians of their national heritage and is equivalent to a war crime. pic.twitter.com/doa7b5hman
– HRW in French (@hrw_fr) December 20, 2022
It is a clear message left to the Kherson Ukrainians: your past belongs to us, your present does not exist and you have no future. Another marking fact raised by Iryna Lopushynska, the Russians concentrate their efforts on the history of independentist movements in the mass of accumulated documents and classified for more than a century. In this way, they try to make the sustainability of the Ukrainian nationalist rebellions carried out for several centuries invisible.
“As they cannot kill us all, they erase us”
“This lead has been hanging over Ukraine for at least three centuries”says Taras Beniakh. Intellectual, polyglot, painter, he is one of the figures of this joyful nationalism which, younger, had led him with his acolytes, to build a replica of a cosacher boat (a tchaika, the Prena Pokrova). All these little people had conveyed the Black Sea ship to Saint-Tropez.
Since the start of the Russian invasion, Taras Beniakh has dropped his brushes and has now been piloting drones. He tracks down the Russians by giving the Ukrainian special forces with the eyes necessary for the conduct of lightning operations which, regularly, hurt the occupation troops. “They cannot stay, it’s a question of dignity for ushe says. As they cannot kill us all, they erase us. The Russians say that we are nationalists. It’s true, but they omit an important fact. Our nationalism is a survival nationalism that has nothing to do with xenophobia. On the contrary, we want to exist to make our culture known and know that of others. ”
For Taras Beniakh, the facts are stubborn. “Muscovites are trying to submit to us, to destroy us for a long time. They appropriated our poets, our writers, our artists and our sculptors. They even appropriated our name, the rus ‘, because when the rus’ of kyiv existed, their territory was called Muscovy until the XVIIIe century.” When we met Taras Beniakh for the first time in March 2022, he had expressed his desire to repel the Russians outside Ukraine and then to “Walking to Moscow, to solve the problem once and for all”. Today, his will is intact but like all, he is tired by these years of war.
“Our story was incorporated into that of our invader”
At the other end of the country, in Kharkiv (northeast of Ukraine), the observation is sometimes more bitter. “Understanding one thing, erasure and negation of our culture is made all the more effective today, thanks to the last decades experienced under the USSRIndicates Tetyana Pylypchuk, director of the Ukrainian literature museum located in Kharkiv. Many Ukrainians do not know their history, simply because it was not taught to them and has been incorporated into that of our invader. This is also why our fellow citizens are very permeable to disinformation and sometimes collaborate with an occupant who is not always felt as an enemy. ”
In France, Christian Castagna and Kseniya Kravtsova are busy to set up the means to assist certain Ukrainian NGOs in this fight against cultural erasure of Ukraine. Christian Castagna is advisor and analysts in international relations and Kseniya Kravtsova is a Ukrainian and activist artist. She lives in Paris, she is based in Barbentane, in the Bouches-du-Rhône. Both rely on the association for Ukraine, for their freedom and ours!, In order to exclude Russia from the International Museum Council (ICOM), of which it is still a member.
But, for both, this is only a first step that should ask the question of the recognition in international law of the concept of “cultural genocide”. To justify it, there is no question of relying on morality, but of course. And since the law is above all a question of concept, for Christian and Ksenyia, there is no doubt that a cultural genocide is at the right time in Ukraine: “Denying the existence of the other, not for what he does, but only for what he is, is genocidal thought.”
