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Jul 26, 2023

Pushkin must fall: monuments to Russia’s national poet under threat in Ukraine

Since last February’s invasion more than 30 statues of the 19th-century poet

Since last February's invasion more than 30 statues of the 19th-century poet seen as a symbol for tsarist imperialism have been dismantled

The seated sculpture of Alexander Pushkin on Peremohy Avenue in central Kyiv is living on borrowed time – and not only because of the threat of Russian missiles.

Unprotected by sandbags and hoardings, unlike the capital's better-loved monuments, the statue of Russia's national poet is covered by spray-painted graffiti.

These are variously translatable as "imperialist"; "what did he do for Ukraine?"; and "soldier of the other culture". The single word that sums up the mood of the interventions, though, is straightforward: "Demolish!"

Pushkin has been falling rapidly in Ukraine. Since the start of the full-scale invasion last February, more than 30 monuments to the poet have been dismantled.

From a western European or anglophone perspective the loathing of a poet who died nearly 200 years ago can seem bewildering.

In the west, he is probably less read in the 21st century than absorbed through much-loved adaptations – Tchaikovsky's ballets and operas including Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades.

In Ukraine things look very different. The bronze statue in Kyiv – a mighty monument erected in 1962 – is unlikely to survive the war, at least in its present position.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy last month signed new decolonisation legislation into law, which will almost certainly result in the removal of the statue, and many like it.

The new law echoes 2015's decommunisation legislation, which brought the removal of statues to Lenin, Marx and other figures, and the changing of more than 200 street names.

But the targets now are those who embodied or supported Russian imperialism, whether during the tsarist Russian empire, or during the Soviet era. And Pushkin was "a true imperialist", said Serhii Plokhii, professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University.

The legislation specifically refers to "images, monuments, memorials and inscriptions dedicated to persons who publicly, including … in literary and other artistic works, supported, glorified or justified Russian imperial policy".

Many Ukrainian intellectuals argue that the works of classic Russian authors project the tsarist empire's values – values absorbed and reworked by Putin's Moscow. "If you’re looking for the roots of Russia's violence against its neighbours, its desire to erase their history, and its rejection of the ideas of liberal democracy, you will find some of the answers on the pages of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Dostoevsky," wrote the philosopher and editor Volodymyr Yermolenko recently.

Ukrainian readers point to works such as Pushkin's poem To the Slanderers of Russia, which portrays the Polish uprising of the 1830 against the Russian empire as a "domestic difference" and imagines Russia as a realm stretching from "Perm to Tauris" (the Urals to the Crimea) and from "ice-clad Finnish crags to blazing Colchis" (modern Georgia).

But for many Ukrainians the problem with Pushkin is not only, and not even mainly, the poetry itself.

It is to do with his sheer ubiquity – and the way he has been instrumentalised as the ultimate symbol of Russian culture and influence.

According to research published five years ago, 594 streets in Ukraine were named after the poet.

That made him the third most common historical figure represented in the country's streetscapes, behind Ukraine's national poet, Taras Shevchenko, and the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. At the time the research was conducted, he outranked leading Ukrainian literary figures such as the pioneering feminist Lesya Ukrainka and the polymath Ivan Franko.

"Putting up a monument to Pushkin has always meant marking territory for the Russians," said the Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Mykhed. Where you have a monument, a bust, or a park named after Pushkin, it's saying, ‘This is ours.’"

Pushkin was, he said, a symbol of the "Russkiy Mir" – the "Russian world", the nation's putative political, spiritual and cultural sphere of influence.

The use of Pushkin as a propaganda symbol was clear in the south-eastern city of Kherson last year. During its months of Russian occupation, billboards emblazoned with images of the writer were seen in the streets, part of a propaganda campaign proclaiming that Russia was "here for ever".

The Russian habit of using Pushkin to mark influence, Mykhed said, extended to Damascus, where a monument of the poet was erected in 2019 after Russian military intervention in the civil war.

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Mykhed also pointed to a bizarre treason trial earlier this year in which a retired KGB officer living in Lviv was accused of sending plans of local military installations to a Russian citizen living in Crimea – though he claimed he had merely been sharing a map of good mushrooming sites with a friend. The defendant's apparently innocuous life in the western Ukrainian city had involved his running the Alexander Pushkin Russian Society.

In the streets of the eastern city of Kharkiv, about 20 miles from the Russian border, Pushkin looms even larger than in Kyiv. "There are two streets in Kharkiv named after Pushkin," said Maria Takhtaulova, who works for the city's branch of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, the government body tasked with bringing Ukrainian national history to light.

"Why? He had no connection with the city. He didn't come here – though he did insult Kharkiv University, saying it was worse than a tavern in Kursk."

Takhtaulova said the naming of streets after Pushkin came in two great waves – in 1899, on the centenary of his birth, and then in 1937, that of his death.

The latter anniversary in particular brought an outbreak of "Pushkinmania", said the writer and public intellectual Oksana Zabuzhko. "Stalin was determined to outdo the Russian empire in celebrating Pushkin. My grandmother remembered everyone learning Pushkin by heart. It was real madness."

The mass renaming of streets in his honour meant "deleting local names and local memories", she said.

In Kharkiv, there is also a Pushkin underground station and a Pushkin theatre – the latter still bears the name on the facade, though it has recently been officially renamed Kharkiv Academic Drama Theatre. There is also a plinth, now empty, where a bust of Pushkin stood until the city council removed it in November.

The reality is that even before the decolonisation laws come into force, Pushkin is disappearing from the streetscapes of Ukraine.

In Kyiv, the city's oldest monument to Pushkin, a bust erected in 1899 in Slavy Square, was toppled by unknown activists on 11 October last year, leaving an empty plinth.

The date may have been significant – early the previous morning, Russia launched cruise missiles on central Kyiv that landed close to public monuments to two giants of Ukrainian culture, Shevchenko and the historian and statesman Mikhailo Hrushevsky. Some Kyivans speculated the monuments could have been the missiles’ intended targets, and the removal of the bust of Russia's national poet may have been a retaliatory act.

Kyivans have recently voted to change the name of Pushkin Park, at whose entrance the graffitied bronze statue of the poet sits, to Bahrianyi Park, after the writer Ivan Bahrianyi, the author of the Ukrainian classic novels Tiger Trappers and Garden of Gethsemane.

The poet and pop star Serhiy Zhadan has made a habit of posting selfies in front of Pushkin monuments to Instagram. By coincidence or otherwise, they tend to be removed shortly afterwards – as in the case of Dnipro's bust of the poet. On that occasion, in December, he wrote: "I love poetry. Byron, say. Or Mickiewicz" – referring to the Polish romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. This week, he posted a selfie in front of the Pushkin sculpture in Peremohy Avenue.

Many Ukrainian intellectuals look forward to the time that Pushkin can be seen in due proportion – as a part of world literature, rather than a dominating cultural force stamping influence on every city, town and village.

As historian Serhii Plokhii said, echoing Zhadan, "I see no reason why we have more monuments to Pushkin than there are monuments to Lord Byron."