An open letter to UNESCO, signed by virtually 150 (principally Ukrainian) artists and intellectuals, searching for assist in deferring selections about Odesa’s World Heritage till the tip of the conflict, has sparked controversy in Ukrainian social and mass media. Signatories have been accused of opposing decolonization and upholding Russian narratives.
The letter, despatched on Oct. 21, appeals to Audrey Azoulay, Director-Basic of UNESCO, which acknowledged Odesa’s historic heart as a World Heritage Web site final yr, to ask President Volodymyr Zelensky to halt selections about virtually 100 avenue names and 19 historic monuments which have been earmarked for elimination.
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They notice that selections, introduced in late July by Oleh Kiper, the Kyiv-appointed Head of the Regional Navy Administration, had been reached with no public consultations and the residents of Odesa solely realized about them as a fait accompli.
The authorized justification for these top-down selections is a brand new Ukrainian regulation “On the condemnation and prohibition of propaganda of Russian imperial coverage in Ukraine and decolonization of toponymy,” which mandates the “liquidation of symbols of Russian imperial politics to guard Ukraine’s cultural and informational house.”
Many Odesans reacted negatively to the selections, with fashionable Telegram channel polls exhibiting 76% to 88% opposition to the renaming of streets. A petition, signed by lots of this summer time, was despatched to the Head of Regional Navy Administration, with copies circulated to the Ministry of Tradition, Institute of Nationwide Reminiscence and the President’s workplace, to no avail.
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Odesa, Ukraine’s principal Black Sea port metropolis, has a wealthy and distinctive historic and cultural heritage, the place Italian and French influences mingle with Russian and Jewish components that gave the town its character within the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beneath Russian tsarist and Soviet rule, Ukrainian id remained muted however has been step by step reaffirmed since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, and extra vigorously since Russia launched its conflict in opposition to Ukraine in 2014.
Whereas lots of the figures to be erased from Odesa’s cityscape are Soviet-era non-entities, whose absence will upset few, this initiative additionally stands to liquidate a complete host of Odesa’s writers, from Ilf and Petrov to Vera Inber, Valentin Kataev, Yuri Olesha, four-time Nobel nominee Konstantin Paustovsky, Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin and the town’s most well-known author, Isaac Babel. Each the road named after Babel and his statue, constructed with funds raised by the town residents, are slated to be eliminated.
It isn’t simple to see the sense by which Ilf and Petrov, who mocked the Soviets, or Bunin, who condemned them in his Cursed Days, or Babel, who perished in Stalin’s purges, might be handled as “symbols of Russian imperial politics,” from which we have to “defend Ukraine’s cultural and informational house.”
The letter was signed by an array of artists, actors, and historians, curators, poets and anthropologists, musicians, novelists, filmmakers and photographers, not solely from Odesa, but in addition from Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv.
Amongst its signatories are additionally presently serving troopers and veterans of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, like Dmytro Dokunov, who took half in liberating Kherson and is now constructing a rehab for veterans, or Alexandr Onishchenko, a theatre director who volunteered for the entrance within the first days of the conflict, or Serhiy Bochechka, a scholar of Ukrainian literature, now serving as a Captain of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, or Oleksandr Babich, historian of Odesa now additionally on the entrance.
Quite a few eminent figures from the world over have additionally signed in assist. Some, just like the two-time Grammy Award winner Alex Sino, is from Odesa. Others, like Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg or writer of the bestselling novel The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal, hint their roots to it. Others nonetheless, like British journalist and novelist Julian Evans, have penned books in regards to the metropolis they’ve come to like.
The breadth and power of Odesa’s diaspora is testimony to the town’s “numerous, multi-ethnic, multicultural, cosmopolitan” historical past and sense of self, which UNESCO’s inscription celebrates, and which captivates authors and students, the world over. It’s exactly this cosmopolitanism that Ukraine’s new tradition politics now places in danger.
The letter itself demonstrates that, regardless of almost three years of Russia’s complete conflict and the suspension of many democratic rights, Ukrainian residents stay staunch democrats, unafraid to specific dissent, unwilling to simply accept top-down selections. This is the Ukraine we’re combating for – a rustic not solely unbiased from Russia, but in addition basically completely different from it.
Who ought to or shouldn’t be handled as a “image of Russian imperial politics” shouldn’t be judged by the language by which the figures in query wrote – Russian or Ukrainian – however the views they upheld.
Babel’s writings make many fall in love with Odesa, simply as Kafka, who wrote in German, the language of a state that after invaded the Czech Republic, attracts many to Prague. Why is Babel to be excluded from public reminiscence in Odesa, whereas Prague prides itself on statues of Kafka?
Odesa’s UNESCO letter will not be solely in regards to the metropolis’s heritage. It’s also about Ukraine’s future. The nation now faces a alternative of two very completely different futures. It will probably select an inclusive mannequin of political nationhood, which celebrates the nation’s multi-regional, multi-ethnic, polyglot historical past and social panorama, inside a unifying European democratic Ukrainian state, or it could actually go for an archaic and divisive ethnonationalist mannequin nearer to the Russian.
As Thomas de Waal, one of many letter’s signatories, wrote final yr, Odesa has already made its Ukrainian alternative, having positioned religion in Ukraine because the guarantor of its free, European future. Odesa doesn’t should be “Ukrainianized.” It’s already Ukrainian.
The views expressed on this opinion article are the authors’ personal and never essentially these of Kyiv Put up.
