The Intricacies of Canceling Russian Culture
After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there has been a lot of controversy about canceling Russian culture, both inside and outside Ukraine. Selective and superficial media coverage of some scandals may create a misleading picture of an “aggressive party line” in Ukrainian cultural diplomacy or “rampant nationalism” within Ukraine.
In my article “Ukrainians’ Embittered Reactions to the Russian Opposition, Explained” from November 2022, I tried to shed some light as to why many Ukrainians insisted on canceling everything Russian, including public figures with a clear anti-Putin stance. I stated that there was a combination of emotional reaction with reasonable arguments related to the imperialist mindset of many Russian dissidents.
In this post, I look at what is really happening inside and outside Ukraine, dissecting some of the scandals, and argue that the point is not to erase every trace of Russian culture in Ukraine, which is impossible, but to neutralize its harmful influences. In the last section, using the examples of two unique phenomena with roots in Russian culture, but with distinct features that don’t exist in Russia, I discuss how Ukraine might rationally approach them as well as the wider cultural heritage of its various minorities.
Broken dialogue
When discussing developments outside Ukraine, we can take a separate look at the dialogue with living Russians and at the attitude towards those long dead.
In a civilized society, anyone who vocally supports violence, terrorism, and genocide or propagates chauvinist and imperialist narratives should have no access to public platforms. Anyone who provides venues to odious figures like Aleksandr Dugin or Zakhar Prilepin, including positive media coverage and book publishing, should be pushed to the fringes and viewed as complicit in crimes against humanity. There should be a red line between a harmless contrarian opinion, which is absolutely acceptable, no matter how freaky or delusional it is, and broadcasting messages that may lead to human deaths.
However, providing venues to anti-Putin Russians is a different story. Here I will consider a few literature-related scandals that attracted my attention, but similar things have happened in music, cinema, sports, and other fields.
On September 8, 2022, the Ukrainian author Yurii Andrukhovych held a public discussion with the Russian writer and dissident Mikhail Shishkin during the Bjørnson Festival in Norway. Some important facts to understand the full picture are that Andrukhovych is one of the three most popular living Ukrainian writers along with Serhiy Zhadan and Oksana Zabuzhko; that Shishkin has been living in Switzerland for over 25 years, is a Swiss citizen, and writes in Russian, German, and English; and that the discussion was held in English.
A hate campaign started on social media, accusing Andrukhovych in trying to legitimize “good Russians” and to drag them into the Ukrainian media landscape. Back then I noticed a few curious details.
While the first critical comments appeared immediately, the massive wave of hate started a few weeks later after a post by a popular blogger, who also happen to be a (not-so-popular) writer. The said blogger and many other commentators are subscribers of a large media connected to ex-President Petro Poroshenko, which was regularly posting news about another Russian dissident, Boris Akunin, most recently on September 21, doing exactly the same that Andrukhovych was accused of — dragging a “good Russian” into the Ukrainian media landscape, but nobody seemed to notice or start a hate campaign.
It was also interesting to compare the case of Andrukhovych with another public figure, Oleksii Arestovych, a former advisor to Zelenskyy’s office, who is known for his regular talks with the Russian opposition. He is provoking a lot of hate here and there, but it has never turned into a sweeping avalanche like the one directed against the “patriarch of modern Ukrainian literature,” as Andrukhovych is sometimes called.
There are two main differences between Andrukhovych and Arestovych. The former has no social media accounts, and thus no organized “support group” that could be quickly mobilized. He responded to the critics in an article and an offline debate in his hometown, but people these days prefer endless and useless comment wars on Facebook.
Also, Arestovych’s target audience are Russian speakers who, while being pro-Ukrainian, are not willing to cut ties with everything Russian and see nothing wrong in contacts with Russian dissidents. Andrukhovych, on the other hand, is mainly popular with Ukrainian-speaking readers, and some of them viewed him as a “traitor” for talks with a Russian.
Another scandal broke out in early May 2023, when two little-known Ukrainian poets, Anna Gruver and Olena Huseinova, refused to participate in the Prima Vista literary festival in Tartu, Estonia, when they saw Linor Goralik, a Russian-speaking author and a citizen of Israel who was born in Ukraine, on the guest list. As a result, the organizers canceled Goralik’s speech, while Gruver and Huseinova did not change their mind, and so the festival took place without them.
However, most media writing about the incident omitted the fact that Goralik was supposed to be part of a Russian-language panel. A separate panel for one author would have been strange, and indeed, the program included six other Russian speakers, currently based in various European countries. Strangely enough, the poets only protested against Goralik, and she was the only one who was canceled, while otherwise the panel proceeded as planned.
The participants included Ekaterina Velmezova, a philologist living in Switzerland; Rimma Markova, a poet who has been living in Sweden since 1994; Elena Skulskaya, a Russian-speaking author born in Estonia; Roman Voitehovich, a philologist born in Estonia; Aleksei Turovskii, a Jewish zoologist and ethologist who was born in Moscow, but has been living in Estonia for most of his life; and Andrei Ivanov, another Russian-speaking author born in Estonia.
Goralik is only different in that she is better-known and in that she founded the ROAR (Russian Oppositional Art Review) project in 2022, thus choosing to be a voice of the Russian opposition. In fact, creating another outlet for Russian dissidents to pose as victims was the main accusation against her in the social media campaign that followed, in addition to her love for Russia evident in her books.
However, it was the Ukrainian poets who received the most hate. Some Ukrainians accused them in trying to cancel Goralik, a native and supporter of Ukraine, who left Russia for Israel after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, while Gruver participated in events in Moscow as recently as in 2016, after Russia had occupied her hometown Donetsk. Still, the most illustrative were the commentaries of many Russians who were supposed to be pro-Ukrainian, often with a Ukrainian flag on their profile picture, who suddenly turned into cynical chauvinists and immoral bigots, pouring out all imaginable verbal dirt on the women, using everything from their poetry through their appearance to their nationality as an “argument,” making one think that banning Russians from the international tribune might have been not such a bad idea after all.
Just a few days later the Ukrainian writers Artem Chapeye, Artem Chekh, and Iryna Tsilyk, the former two being active-duty soldiers in the Ukrainian army, voiced a protest against the planned participation of the Russians Ilia Veniavkin and Anna Nemzer in the Escape from Tyranny: Writing in Exile panel at the PEN World Voices Festival. As a result, the panel was canceled, and Masha Gessen, a Russia-born Jewish American writer and journalist who was supposed to moderate the panel, resigned as the vice president of PEN America’s board of directors. This time the Ukrainians attracted a lot of criticism in America and worldwide for attempting to silence Russian dissidents, while Ukrainian social media users turned their hate on Gessen.
At the same time when this latest scandal was unraveling, the Ukrainian writer and musician Serhiy Zhadan took part in Book World Prague 2023. Ukrainian media reported about his participation, but didn’t mention that another guest of the festival was the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin, now living in Germany. They did not appear on stage at the same time, but in the previous two cases the Ukrainians had protested exactly against the Russians’ presence at the same event, even if in a separate panel.
The information about Sorokin’s participation was on the festival’s official website, so it’s hard to tell if the Ukrainian media didn’t notice it or if they had other reasons to avoid mentioning it, but it’s remarkable how two of the Big Three modern Ukrainian authors don’t make a big deal of sharing an event with a Russian dissident. (The third one, Oksana Zabuzhko, is explicitly against it.)
As can be seen from the above, there is no official “party line” that every Ukrainian must follow. Ukrainian public figures can choose to engage with Russians, but also have the right to boycott them and state their reasons for such a boycott. It’s up to the event organizers if they want to support the boycott or respond in any other way. Boycott is a democratic way to demonstrate disagreement or dissatisfaction.
However, social media campaigns, which may start as an expression of solidarity with a boycott, often degenerate into a hate spree that is based on emotion, limited view, and manipulation and lacks rational arguments and civilized manners. They can’t give a good picture of the controversy, and it’s not always wise to join them.
Aut bene, aut nihil?
The issue of long-dead Russian cultural figures has two aspects.
First, many of them propagated imperialist and chauvinist ideas, from Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky, who approved of their fatherland’s imperialist policies, to Joseph Brodsky, who, while being in opposition to the Soviet regime, was a rabid chauvinist and wrote an anti-Ukrainian poem in the early 1990s, dripping with hatred, ethnic slurs, and offense and worthy of a toxic mediocrity and not a Nobel Prize winner.
It’s time to reject the ancient maxim that instructs telling only good of the dead. Russian classics are badly in need of revision, objective commentary, and warnings about the authors’ views on book covers, and Brodsky’s Nobel Prize should be revoked.
Second, Russia’s imperial status helped many of those cultural figures become internationally acclaimed, while those who were writing in languages of colonized nations remained in their shadow.
Thus, now may be the right time to repair the historical injustice and listen to the voices that have been silenced for centuries. One should ask who is really being canceled: those whose works can be found at every bookstore and are in the public domain, or those whose books most of the world cannot read as they were never translated, not because they are worse, but because they were written in a minority language by authors who were discriminated against for their nationality.
No, Ukraine is not erasing every trace of Russian culture
What is happening inside Ukraine — renaming streets, removing statues, repurposing museums, or people consciously choosing to switch from Russian to Ukrainian — is part of the long process of deimperialization. The point is in reconsidering the centuries of colonial past and eliminating the symbols through which the empire imposed its supremacy. And the empire often used street names and monuments to mark its territory.
It is clear that millions of Ukrainians will continue speaking Russian, though now that it’s less prestigious more and more people will be choosing Ukrainian.
It is also clear that many buildings will remind of the colonial past for decades or centuries to come, unless Russians destroy them.
The affair with streets, statues, and museums is not (or at least not always) thoughtless, either. For example, it was decided not to rename Andrei Sakharov Streets in the western, most “nationalistic” cities of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil. By the way, all three were renamed into Sakharov Street from their Soviet names after 1990. Sakharov was Russian, participated in the Soviet nuclear weapons program, but also advocated human rights and civil liberties and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.
Some personalities raise controversy, like Anton Chekhov, Anna Akhmatova, or Mikhail Bulgakov. Chekhov and Akhmatova had Ukrainian roots, but were undoubtedly part of Russian culture. Bulgakov was born in Kyiv and spent part of his life there, but he was Russian by origin, and some of his statements demonstrate Russian chauvinist bias.
On the other hand, no one is going to cancel Nikolai Gogol, Vladimir Vernadsky, or Nikolai Pirogov. Gogol was Ukrainian and his early works were about Ukraine, but he was always writing in Russian and chose to continue his career in Saint Petersburg. Vernadsky was also always writing in Russian and spent most of his life in Russia, but he had Ukrainian roots, spent his childhood years in Ukraine, and was a co-founder and the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He is pictured on Ukraine’s largest denomination banknote. Doctor Pirogov was Russian, but spent his later years in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, where you can visit the museum in his former estate and see his embalmed body in the mausoleum chapel that was built by his family.
In recent years Ukraine has also exerted significant efforts to reclaim internationally renowned artists with multicultural background who were appropriated by Russia, including Kazimir Malevich, Ilya Repin, Arkhip Kuindzhi, and Ivan Aivazovsky.
And there is another aspect of Russian heritage that hasn’t received much consideration so far, but which Ukraine may want to accept and integrate instead of ignoring and allowing Russia to capitalize on it.
The Odesa dialect and the Lipovans
In the nineteenth century Odesa was a rapidly growing seaport with a multicultural population, which is still reflected on the city’s map: French Boulevard, Italian Boulevard, Genoese, Greek, Jewish, Bulgarian, and Polish Streets, Lutheran Alley, Big Arnaut and Small Arnaut Streets (Arnaut is a name for Albanians), and the neighborhoods Moldavanka and Lustdorf (a former German settlement).
The lingua franca for all these various peoples was Russian, the official language of the empire. However, under the influence of large Jewish and Ukrainian communities, a unique dialect gradually developed, with significant influences of Yiddish, Ukrainian, and, to a lesser degree, other languages.
So, how Ukraine should approach it? It is a dialect of Russian, but it evolved in Ukraine, and no one speaks it in Russia (except those who were born in Odesa, obviously). I’m not talking about any official administrative status as it can be abused, and not everyone speaks it in Odesa today anyway — many people only know the most famous words and idioms, so it may fall into oblivion within a few generations. But Ukraine could recognize it as part of cultural heritage that was popularized in literature by Isaac Babel and other authors, as well as in music.
A similar case are the Lipovans.
When Patriarch Nikon of Moscow introduced church reforms in the 17th century, some believers and clergy members did not accept them and were persecuted both by the Moscow Patriarchate and tsarist officials. They subsequently became known as Old Believers (Starovery or Staroobryadtsy). Many of them sought refuge at the outskirts of the Tsardom of Muscovy, which was soon renamed into the Russian Empire, as well as outside its borders.
A group of Old Believers settled in the Principality of Moldavia, the Principality of Wallachia, as well as on both banks of the Danube River, in the regions known as Dobruja and Budjak. Today their descendants live in Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, and Ukraine, and they are known as the Lipovans. Although even some academic publications claim that the name is derived from lipa, which means linden tree, referring to linden forests where they supposedly used to live, they are also sometimes called the Filippovans, which is interpreted to refer to a certain Filipp who was their spiritual leader.
In Ukraine, they are mainly concentrated in two regions. One is Budjak, in the southernmost part of Odesa Oblast. Their largest settlement here is Vylkove, a unique island town in the Danube Delta, sometimes called Ukrainian Venice. There are also Lipovan communities in the town of Kilia, located upriver, and in a number of nearby villages.
Another important Lipovan center is the village of Bila Krynytsia in Chernivtsi Oblast, also at the border with Romania, but in Western Ukraine, in what is historically known as Northern Bukovina. There are other Lipovan communities nearby, including in the village of Lypovany (literally “Lipovans”).
Bila Krynytsia is important because the first full Old Believer church hierarchy was created here in 1846, when this region was part of the Austrian Empire. Today the Archbishop of Bila Krynytsia resides in Romania.
In recent decades, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) stopped considering the Old Believers heretics, so the enmity between them subsided. Before 2022, the Lipovans and other Old Believers in Ukraine were in communication with the Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church (ROORC), which is subordinate to the Bila Krynytsia Hierarchy, but politically follows the same party line as the ROC. In 2022, the Ukrainian Old Believers cut ties with the ROORC and registered the Ancient Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The clergy members in their statement unambiguously blamed Russia and took the side of Ukraine.
So, what should Ukraine do about the Lipovans? They are Russians by origin, they speak Russian, there are some concerns about their sympathy for their historical homeland, but they also developed their unique culture. The term “Lipovan” is not used in Russia, save for a small group that agreed to be repatriated from Romania after World War II. They speak a unique dialect with Ukrainian, Romanian, and Turkic influences. Although their churches often follow Russian traditions, their architecture also borrows a lot from their neighbors. And the Lipovans of Vylkove are known for their unique fish-based cuisine and their wine.
While Old Believers in Russia and around the world are notorious for their secluded lifestyle and distaste for modernity, the Lipovans seem to be relatively well-integrated into the Ukrainian society, especially the inhabitants of Vylkove, who are known for their hospitality — their town was a popular tourist destination before the war. So Ukraine can integrate them even more by recognizing their culture as part of the multicultural heritage of Ukraine instead of estranging them because of their origin and language.
Steps in a similar direction have already been taken with regard to the Goryuns (Horiuns), an ethnic group living in the northeast of Ukraine, whose culture combines Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian elements and who Russia claims to be part of the Russian people. In 2022, the Goryun museum in the village of Nova Sloboda was included in the list of intangible cultural heritage of Ukraine, and the Goryun dialect and their songs are recognized as cultural heritage on the regional level.
While Ukraine has already made efforts to recognize the cultural heritage of the indigenous peoples of Crimea — the Crimean Tatars, the Karaites, and the Krymchaks, — it is also important to recognize that other minorities who have been living in Ukraine for centuries have developed their unique cultures that are often significantly different from those of the distant homelands of their ancestors. They include Ukrainian Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Albanians, and, yes, some Ukrainian Russians like the Lipovans.
Look beneath the surface
The processes of deimperialization that happen in Ukraine, as well as the efforts to restore justice on the international level, are more complex than it looks on the surface. Before jumping to conclusions and attaching labels, it’s worth considering if the part you’re looking at really represents the whole and if the sources you’re using are adequate and competent. Unfortunately, accounts in Ukrainian media are also sometimes emotionally distorted, but the major cause of misunderstanding on the part of foreigners is thinking in stereotypes like “a former Soviet country,” “a former part of the Russian Empire,” or “a nationalist country.” None of this alone is a good key to comprehension.