Mick Hartley

For many of us, our images of Russia's brutal destruction of Ukraine are centered on the port of Mariupol, after the 20 Days in Mariupol documentary film, and the BBC's Mariupol: The People's Story.

Now, from the Times – Museum celebrating Stalin’s culture chief opened in Mariupol:

At the height of his powers after the Second World War, Stalin’s culture chief, Andrei Zhdanov, demanded that writers, artists and musicians show slavish obedience to Communist dogma.

A ruthless party boss who had personally approved 175 execution lists during Stalin’s Great Purge in the 1930s, he denounced Anna Akhmatova — one of Russia’s finest poets — as “half-nun, half harlot” and ostracised Ukrainian writers judged to have been too nationalistic.

After his death in 1948, Mariupol in southern Ukraine, Zhdanov’s home city, was renamed in his honour. It did not change back until 1989, when the Soviet Union began to disintegrate and popular feeling turned against Stalin’s henchmen.

Now, as Vladimir Putin revives some of the sentiments of Zhdanov’s time in modern Russia, a new museum to him has been opened in Mariupol, a city that was pulverised by bombing in the early part of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine before being occupied by Russian forces in May 2022.

The museum, created to lionise Zhdanov, has caused anger and disquiet among many Ukrainians.

I imagine anger and disquiet are the least of it. Outrage and horror, more like.

Andrey Kurkov, one of the country’s most celebrated contemporary novelists, said in a telephone interview from Kyiv that the decision to open the museum was “ridiculous and disgusting”.

Zhdanov was a ruthless “destroyer of any freedom” who persecuted the arts and was “ready to sacrifice any number of people” to save his own skin during the purges, said Kurkov.

“This museum is a warning from Moscow to Donbas [eastern Ukraine] that there is no going back and they should remember Soviet history and what happens to those who disagree with state policy,” he added. “And I’m sure all the children of the region will be taken there and brainwashed even more … Russia is marking its territory.”

Russian and pro-Moscow local officials said Zhdanov was being honoured because of his key role in the defence of Leningrad during the siege there from 1941 to 1944.

“The people of Mariupol also endured the hardships of terrifying days under blockade,” Oleg Morgun, the Russia-installed mayor of Mariupol, told reporters at the opening of the museum. “These memories will remain for ever in the hearts of our people. In liberated Mariupol, we honour and remember the true history of our country.”

In liberated Mariupol! "Liberated" by the bombing and killing and destruction done by Zhdanov's heirs.

To Kyiv this looks like Orwellian doublespeak because it was Russian forces that encircled and attacked Mariupol in 2022. The UN concluded that up to 90 per cent of residential buildings were damaged or destroyed and 350,000 people forced to leave the city.

An estimated 8,000 people died as a result of the siege, hundreds in a single incident when a Russian airstrike hit a theatre where civilians were sheltering. They had written “children” in huge letters in Russian on the ground outside….

Russian liberals are also angry about his rehabilitation. Nina Popova, a former director of the Anna Akhmatova museum in St Petersburg, called Zhdanov’s return “a violation of the moral norms of society” and “revenge” for his erasure during the 1980s.

“Zhdanov is being raised on a shield,” wrote the columnist Andrei Kolesnikov. “And not just anywhere but in Mariupol, a city whose fate is tragic whichever side of the trenches you’re on. They want to underline that tragedy by re-mythologising a Stalinist hangman. Why such cynicism?”

Because Putin. And now, because Trump.