Dostoevsky gives way to Warhol

On the streets of Kiev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky gives way to Andy Warhol. Ukraine is accelerating efforts to erase traces of Soviet and Russian influence from public spaces, removing monuments and renaming hundreds of streets in honor of its artists, poets, soldiers, independence leaders and others - including heroes of the current war.

After Moscow launched an invasion on February 24 that killed and wounded countless civilians and soldiers, and destroyed buildings and infrastructure, Ukrainian leaders refocused a campaign that once focused on dismantling the communist past into a campaign of "derussification," the Associated Press writes. .

Streets with the names of the leaders of the revolution Vladimir Lenin or the Bolshevik Revolution were already a thing of the past; now the enemy is Russian, not the Soviet legacy.

As AP points out, it is partly a punishment for the crimes committed by Russia, and partly an affirmation of national identity by honoring distinguished Ukrainians who were mostly neglected.

Russia, in the opinion of many, imposed its dominance on its smaller southwestern neighbor through the Soviet Union for generations, keeping their artists, poets and military heroes in the shadow of famous Russians.

If the victors write history, as some claim, the Ukrainians are doing some remaking of their own - although their fate is uncertain. Their national identity is growing rapidly in all ways.

President Volodymyr Zelensky was photographed wearing a black hoodie with the words "I am Ukrainian".

He is among many Ukrainians whose first language is Russian, AP reminds. Now they are rejecting it - or at least limiting its use. Ukrainian is traditionally spoken more in the western part of the country - a region that previously rejected Russian and Soviet iconography.

Large parts of northern, eastern and central Ukraine are now implementing this linguistic shift. The eastern city of Dnipro on Friday removed a bust of Alexander Pushkin - who, like Dostoyevsky, is a giant of 19th-century Russian literature. The belt from the crane was made into a noose under the chin of the statute. Volodymyr Pokopiv, deputy head of the Kyiv City Council, said that since 2015, Ukraine's "decommunization" policy has been applied in a "soft" way so as not to hurt the feelings of Russophone and even pro-Russian residents.

"Everything changed with the war. Now the Russian lobby is helpless - in fact, it doesn't exist," Prokopiv said in an interview with AP from his office overlooking Hreschatik Street. "Renaming the streets is like erasing the propaganda that the Soviet Union imposed on Ukraine".

During the war, the Russians also tried to impose their culture and dominance on the areas they occupied.

Andrew Wilson, a professor at University College London, warned of "the dangers of revising periods of history in which Ukrainians and Russians cooperated and built together." "I think the whole point of the de-imperialization of Russian culture should be to refine in areas where we were previously blind - often in the West."

Wilson pointed out that the Ukrainians "use a fairly broad approach."

As an example, he cited Pushkin, a Russian writer from the 19th century, who could upset some Ukrainians. For them, for example, the Cossacks - the Slavic people in the east of Europe - "mean freedom, while Pushkin describes them as cruel, barbaric and outdated." And as people who need Russian civilization", said Wilson, who recently published the fifth edition of his book "Ukrainians".

As part of its program, Kyiv conducted an online survey and received 280 proposals in just one day, Prokopiv said. Then, an expert group reviewed the responses, and municipal officials and street residents gave final approval.

Before the beginning of this year, about 200 streets were renamed in Kyiv as part of "decommunization". In 2022 alone, the same number of streets were renamed, and another 100 will soon receive new names, Prokopiv said.

The street named after the philosopher Friedrich Engels will be given a new name in honor of the Ukrainian avant-garde poet Bogdan Igor Antonich.

The boulevard "Friendship of Peoples" - an allusion to the diversity of ethnic affiliations in the USSR - will be named after Mykola Mikhnovsky, an early supporter of Ukrainian independence. The second street pays tribute to the "Heroes of Mariupol" fighters who were under Russian fire for months in the port city on the Sea of ​​Azov, which eventually fell. The street named after the Russian city of Volgograd is now called Ulica Romana Ratusnjija, in honor of the 24-year-old civil and environmental activist who died in the war.

A small street in northern Kiev still bears Dostoyevsky's name, but will soon be named after Warhol, the pop-art visionary from the United States whose parents are originally from Slovakia.

Valery Sholomitsky, who lived on Dostoevsky Street for almost 40 years, says that it doesn't bother him.

"There are less than 20 houses here. That's little," Šoplomitski told AP while shoveling snow from the street in front of a faded sign with the name of the Russian writer. He said that Warhol was "our artist" - originally from Eastern Europe: "Now it will be even better", he said. "Perhaps it is right that we are now changing the names of many streets, because we used to name them incorrectly," he added.