Mick Hartley

From historian Timothy Snyder's latest Substack article, on Russia's war as cultural suicide:

Russian culture was far more widespread and popular in Ukraine before the first invasion in 2014 and the current full-scale war of destruction.  As a result of the war, Ukrainians have changed their linguistic habits, and prominent writers have ceased to write in Russian and begun to write in Ukrainian.  Nothing has done as much to destroy what Putin calls "the Russian world" as his war.  The Russian world is now in retreat, and as it retreats it steals and burns.

As the Russians left Kherson city, they stole items of culture. Ukrainian libraries, publishing houses, and archives have been looted or targeted for destruction throughout the war. Ancient artifacts of Scythian gold were stolen from the museum at Melitopol. Some forty Ukrainian museums have been robbed by the Russians, including the art museum of Kherson. Amidst the scenes of joy in Kherson, Ukrainian journalists took the time to report on files from regional archives that the Russians had looted from Kherson and taken back with them to Russia.

That seemingly minor story touched me. Ukraine is a good place to do historical research; people have been writing the history of the USSR from Kyiv rather than Moscow for decades now, because the conditions for work are far better. Because I am sanctioned in Russia, those files are now out of reach to me. Far more significantly, they are now out of reach of Ukrainian historians. This is a loss, and it is a crime.

In a profound sense, these documents, despite physical possession, are also inaccessible to Russians. Anyone can kill, destroy, and loot. But what for? Russian schoolchildren and now offered schoolbooks that lack the words "Ukraine" and "Kyiv." What is gained by that? How then can children understand anything about the past, and about themselves, if there is no outside world, not even any immediate neighbor? On the basis of sheer negation no culture of Russia can be sustained….

Day by day, Ukrainian culture emerges, as Russian culture submerges. The sooner and more decisively Russia loses this war, the better it will be for the Russian future.