Kyiv, Ukraine – Fyodor Dostoyevsky walks the streets of Kiev. Andy Warhol is on his way.
Ukraine is accelerating efforts to erase traces of Soviet and Russian influence from public spaces by tearing down monuments and renaming lots of of streets in honor of its own artists, poets, soldiers, independence leaders and others – including the heroes of this 12 months’s war.
After the invasion of Moscow on February 24, which killed or injured countless civilians and soldiers and demolished buildings and infrastructure, Ukrainian leaders shifted from a campaign that when focused on dismantling the communist past to a campaign of “derussification.”
The streets that honored the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin or the Bolshevik Revolution have largely disappeared; now the enemy is Russia, not the Soviet legacy.
That is partly a punishment for crimes committed by Russia, and partly an affirmation of national identity by honoring Ukrainian notables who’ve been mostly neglected.
![Volodymyr Prokopiv, Deputy Chairman of the Kyiv City Council, during an interview in Kiev, Ukraine, December 14, 2022.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/Russia_Ukraine_War_Erasing_Russia_12759jpg-d4bd5.jpg?w=1024)
Russia, through the Soviet Union, is seen by many in Ukraine as a rustic that has left its mark on its smaller southwestern neighbor for generations, dooming its artists, poets and military heroes to relative oblivion in comparison with its more famous Russians.
If the victors write history, as some claim, Ukrainians rewrite history themselves – even when their fate hangs in the balance. Their national identity is experiencing unprecedented growth, to a big and a small extent.
President Volodymyr Zelensky began wearing a black T-shirt with the inscription: “I’m Ukrainian.”
He’s one among the many Ukrainians who speak Russian as their first language since birth. Now they avoid it – or at the least limit its use. Ukrainian is traditionally more spoken in the western a part of the country, a region that early eschewed Russian and Soviet imagery.
![Valery Sholomitsky poses after clearing snow from a street in Kiev, Ukraine, December 15, 2022.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/Russia_Ukraine_War_Erasing_Russia_89640jpg-519c8.jpg?w=1024)
Large areas of northern, eastern and central Ukraine are making this linguistic shift. The eastern city of Dnieper demolished a bust of Alexander Pushkin on Friday — like Dostoyevsky, the giant of Nineteenth-century Russian literature. A crane strap was unceremoniously wrapped under the statue’s chin.
This month, Vitaly Klitschko, the mayor of Kiev, announced the re-baptism of about 30 streets in the capital.
Volodymyr Prokopiv, deputy chairman of the Kyiv City Council, said that the policy of “decommunization” of Ukraine since 2015 has been applied in a “soft” way in order to not offend the sensitivity of the Russian-speaking and even pro-Russian population of the country.
“Every thing modified with the war. Now the Russian lobby is powerless – it doesn’t actually exist,” Prokopiv told The Associated Press in his office overlooking Khreshchatyk Street, the capital’s foremost thoroughfare. “Renaming these streets is like erasing the propaganda that the Soviet Union imposed on Ukraine.”
![Civilians were seen sitting on a bench while seeking shelter at the Dnipro railway station on December 17, 2022.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/shutterstock_editorial_Russia_missile_attacks_result_13673648b.jpg?w=1024)
During the war, the Russians also tried to go away their mark on their culture and dominance in the territories they occupied.
University College London professor Andrew Wilson warned of “the dangers of rewriting periods of history where Ukrainians and Russians collaborated and built things together: I feel the whole point of deimperializing Russian culture ought to be to discover where we’ve previously been blind – often in the West”.
Wilson noted that the Ukrainians “take quite a broad approach”.
He quoted Pushkin, a Nineteenth-century Russian author who could have understandably irritated some Ukrainians.
For them, for instance, the Cossacks – a Slavic nation in Eastern Europe – “stand for freedom, while Pushkin portrays them as cruel, barbaric, obsolete. And it needs Russian civilization,” said Wilson, whose book The Ukrainians was recently published in its fifth edition.
For its program, Kyiv conducted a web-based survey and received 280,000 suggestions in at some point, Prokopiv said. A bunch of experts then reviewed the responses, and city officials and street dwellers give their final approval.
As a part of the “de-communization” program, about 200 streets in Kiev have been renamed by this 12 months. Prokopiv said that the same variety of streets were renamed in 2022 alone, and one other 100 are because of be renamed soon.
A street named after the philosopher Friedrich Engels will honor the Ukrainian avant-garde poet Bohdan-Ihor Antonycz. The boulevard, whose name translates as “Friendship of Nations” – an allusion to varied ethnic groups in the USSR – will honor Mykola Michnowski, an early advocate of Ukraine’s independence.
On one other street, you recognize the “Heroes of Mariupol” – fighters who resisted the devastating Russian campaign for months on this port city on the Sea of Azov, which finally fell. A street named after the Russian city of Volgograd is now named Roman Ratushnyi in honor of a 24-year-old civil and environmental activist who died during the war.
A small street in northern Kiev still bears Dostoyevsky’s name but will soon be named after Warhol, the late US pop art visionary whose parents had family roots in Slovakia, across Ukraine’s western border.
Valery Sholomitsky, who has lived on Dostoyevsky Street for nearly 40 years, said he could go either way.
“Now we have lower than 20 houses here. They’re only a few,” said Szołomicki, shoveling snow from the street in front of a faded address sign bearing the name of a Russian author. He said Warhol was “our artist” – with a heritage in Eastern Europe:
Now it should be even higher, he assures.
“Possibly it’s an excellent thing that we’re changing quite a lot of streets now, because we used to call them mistaken,” he added.