Culture wars: the fight to save Ukraine’s art

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, the art and the artists under attack in Ukraine.

0:16Today in Focus is supported by Paramount+. The Agency. All episode streaming June 21st on Paramount+. In the world of espionage, truth is a moving target, and every decision carries a dangerous consequence. This new mission explores what it means to live as a double agent. Twice the lies, twice the risk. The lines between ally and enemy blur like never before, and survival depends on trusting no one. Starring Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Jodie Turner-Smith and Richard Gere. Don't miss The Agency. All episode streaming June 21st on Paramount+.

1:18Good evening, here's what's happening tonight. The Soviets are saying little, but what is known is cause for concern. A nuclear accident has occurred at a Soviet atomic plant in the Ukraine. In 1986, reactor four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. It triggered the worst nuclear accident in history. It's really, really hard to overstate what a huge effect that catastrophe had on Ukraine. We were recently stricken by a disaster. the Chernobyl nuclear power accident. It deeply affected the Soviet people and disturbed world opinion. It was one of those events that absolutely contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

2:06It's a sort of foundational event in the future independent Ukraine's sense of itself. Exactly 40 years later, on the 26th of April this year, the Chernobyl Museum reopened in Kiev after going through a huge renovation to make sure it truly commemorated the impact of the disaster. It had transformed itself, thinking about all the people who were affected by the disaster, and that was a lot of people because thousands of people were displaced, for example. This is Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian's chief culture writer. She was in Ukraine on a reporting trip in the south at the time of the reopening, and she was planning on visiting the museum as soon as she returned to Kiev.

2:51And the thing is, I never saw it. Just three weeks after the reopening, on the night of the 23rd of May, the museum was bombed, part of a huge combined missile strike by the Russians, one of the biggest attacks on the capital so far. We've already seen missiles going into the city. There's also the sound of anti-aircraft fire in the background there and the buzz of drones above us.

3:26Charlotte visited what was left of the building a few days later.

3:33I had not expected being in that destroyed museum to be quite so upsetting.

3:43And considering the fact that I've been working on the restoration project and the recent collection for the last three years, you can imagine.

3:51Charlotte Higgins:What a powerful impact it made on me. The museum director was standing in the middle of this collapsing, burnt-out building, kind of clutching a brown-painted earthenware jug with some patterning on it, a traditional piece of ceramic from the region where Chernobyl is.

4:19OK, so while the rescuers were kind of digging up the ceiling between the first and second floor, they found this jar from Polisa, which is, as you can see and imagine, it's like a small miracle. And they generally... She was actually deeply in shock. They reckoned that they were able to save 40 % of the artefacts on display. Every time a museum artefact is destroyed, it means the loss of a singular object that holds memory and knowledge. And once it's gone, it's gone.

4:59Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion, tens of thousands of Ukrainians have lost their lives. Homes flattened. Cities turned to rubble. But there's been another cost. Ukrainian culture is also under attack Thousands of museums, galleries, historic landmarks across the country have been destroyed or damaged Artists, filmmakers, writers and poets have been killed Countless works of art have been lost And the attacks appear to be increasing Just this week, Russia bombed one of the oldest and most precious religious sites in the centre of Ukraine in what the government said was a targeted attack.

5:44From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, the race to save Ukraine's cultural heritage. Charlotte Higgins, you're The Guardian's chief culture writer and your book Ukrainian Lessons Art in a Time of War is out in August. Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, you have visited the country many times. And you know, you're not a war correspondent. You're a culture writer and a critic. So what keeps drawing you back to Ukraine, despite the obvious danger?

6:18Charlotte Higgins:I went for the first time in October 2022 in order to write what I imagined would be one article about the way artists were reflecting and documenting the war in their work. because I had a conviction that artists would be responding to the war in a way that would likely be more interesting and more revealing than the work of even our dear colleagues, journalists and government reports, surely not, and politicians. And this was going to be a super interesting aspect of the war to try to cover. People are writing extraordinary poetry. There are amazing plays being written. People are making tremendous art, all of which I'm sure is going to shape the way this war is remembered.

7:08Charlotte Higgins:And the stakes are extraordinarily high. I mean, this is literally life or death. And the other reason that I wanted to go originally was that it was just extremely clear that culture was implicated in the war in an incredibly clear way. That is to say that Putin has repeatedly talked about the idea that Ukraine doesn't really have a separate culture, that Ukrainians and Russians are, quote, sort of brothers, that they belong together. And he even wrote an essay about this at the summer before the full scale invasion. And it's a really a kind of it's a denial of Ukraine as a separate identity.

7:50And you look at it through my eyes, through the doubtless prejudiced eyes of a culture writer, it just feels like a war about culture because history, language, identity are so implicated in it. And you're actually learning Ukrainian, aren't you?

8:03Charlotte Higgins:I am learning Ukrainian because I started learning Ukrainian almost as soon as I got back from my first trip because language is a part of culture. So it felt really churlish not to know any of the language. I will tell you that it's a massive struggle learning this language, but I am currently on a intensive Ukrainian course because I intend to conquer this language, even if it takes me until the next life to do so. It's very hard. So you were recently in the ruins of the Chernobyl Museum, obviously a really traumatic experience for those who work there. And I think I was reading in your reporting just before the interview that you had some kind of quite startling stats that something like the Russian army had destroyed or damaged 1723 cultural heritage sites, 2524 cultural infrastructure sites since 2022.

8:59So, I mean, it's huge, isn't it, the scale of that destruction?

9:02Charlotte Higgins:Yeah, it's huge. And it's very hard if you look at either government or, as it were, UNESCO statistics. It's kind of an ungraspable picture. But there are kind of several categories. One is those places that have come under occupation, right? So in Mariupol, for instance, at the beginning of the war, at least one museum was completely destroyed and burnt in aerial bombing as a result of fires from bombs. In Karsan, for example, the museum there was emptied out as far as the Russians could manage at the end of their occupation. So truckloads of artefacts were taken into Russia and some experts have tracked some of these artefacts from the museum in Karsan onto the Russian art market.

9:55And being in Kiev the last couple of weeks, these bombing campaigns are

10:01Charlotte Higgins:just relentless. It's been going on for so long. And no sooner have you recovered from one than you're waiting for the next. And, you know, you visit some of these sites afterwards, you've told us about the impact of going into the kind of smoking wounds of the Chernobyl Museum. when you've been to other sites what what were people's kind of spirits like that the people that work there that love those places so on the same day as I went to the Chornobyl museum I also went to the National Museum of Fine Art basically the National Gallery of Ukraine it's a classic museum and that it looks like a Greek temple it's really really beautiful they evacuated their collection several years ago.

10:45But inside that building, the building was just full of broken glass and rubble. And one of the chief conservators, the head of the curatorial team, and two interns who were there to do their practical art history experience, they were there with shovels in clouds of dust, shoveling rubble into carts.

11:09Charlotte Higgins:And the director said to me, You know, you can be sort of mentally prepared for it, and yet you're just not really prepared for it when it happens.

11:27Charlotte, this week we saw the bombing of one of Ukraine's oldest monasteries. Can you just tell us about this monastery and why this attack is, you know, so important to people in Ukraine? Well, actually, Annie, I honestly thought they would never hit this particular monastery, because this monastery was founded in the 11th century by monks who came from Mount Athos and founded this, what became eventually a complex, a whole complex of churches, monastery, now it's museums, kind of cultural and religious territory. It's a spectacular group of buildings, you know, with golden domes that, you know, the sheen of them as the sun rises.

12:13It's extraordinary. And it is precious throughout the Eastern Orthodox world, including in Russia, right? Everything about it is both sort of sanctified in a religious sense, but also of huge cultural importance and huge historical importance. It was awful, really, to see the footage of flames and smoke pouring out of the Pachersk Lavra was very disturbing. The emergency services worked really hard in Kiev, but you can't catch absolutely everything.

12:45Charlotte Higgins:And I think they did limit the damage, but it's just very hard to wrap one's head around the significance of these events. And it's not like the city's being destroyed in one night. It's not like the British carpet bombing Hamburg, precisely. It's this cumulative damage and the rubble and the mess and the cleaning us up and the repairing it and the trying to go on. And just hard to watch people absorbing all that into their lived lives. And in this war and in many conflicts around the world, arts and cultural sites are bombed and destroyed, sometimes deliberately. When it comes to Ukraine and the attacks by Russia, how much of this do you think is targeted?

13:26Charlotte Higgins:I think it's very hard to unravel, actually, Annie. I mean, who can look into the minds of Putin and his army chiefs and say, what were they actually aiming at? I mean, clearly, sometimes they're aiming at military targets and they might hit a museum. But the fragments of Shahed missiles were actually found and seen amid the wreckage of the roof of the Dormishan Cathedral, which led the Ukrainian government to assert that the error was actually targeted. The Russian government claimed, by contrast, that the damage to the cathedral related to air defence. But that seems not to be the case. The result is exactly the same, whatever the intention was.

14:17Charlotte Higgins:If those attacks are successful and something is obliterated and something is lost, then that's removing a layer of memory from the culture. That's a sort of irrecoverable loss then. and you have to decide whether you're going to try and rebuild it, whether you're going to try and put something else in its place or how you're going to keep the memory of it. And all of these things, you know, what to do when something is destroyed, that's a kind of really live debate in Ukraine.

14:55And over the course of your many trips to Ukraine, What have you learned about what people are doing to try and save art and cultural artefacts from the front line?

15:04Charlotte Higgins:There have been extraordinary and remarkable efforts to safeguard as much as possible. But some of these efforts took place quite late in the game. If you remember back to 2022 and the beginning of the war, Ukraine's government hadn't made any evacuation orders for museums towards the front line, for example. There are lots of reasons and political reasons for that, but that's how it was. So a lot of museums were evacuated during the full-scale invasion when the bombs were already falling. So I remember going to the National Historical Museum in Kiev and talking to the people there and they were taking objects off display when they could see Russian helicopters flying outside the windows and living in that museum for a month at the beginning of the full scale invasion to get everything down into the basement and ultimately to safety.

16:02Charlotte Higgins:So it's been a very mixed picture of people self-organising in a remarkable way to safeguard objects. But there are lots of things you can't do anything about. You know, if there's a beautiful 17th century wooden church in a frontline area, there's very little you can do to protect that from fire. But you can't pack it up and move it. And in 2024, you met a group of citizens who were, you know, really taking this process into their own hands, didn't you? Yes. So there was a group of extraordinary, ordinary people, not people who were employed by museums or by the state or by any kind of official apparatus led by a guy called Leonid Marischak, who risks unbelievable dangers.

16:44Charlotte Higgins:I mean, if you remember back in 2022, it looked like Kiev might fall. And so the first thing he did was he drove into Kiev to deliver humanitarian aid to the city and then drove out with archives and artworks. When I say he drove, he actually can't drive. His brother-in-law drove him and his wife's mini countryman. He was taking out super important archives and artworks. There was a sort of powerhouse couple in the 1960s called Ala Horska and Viktor Zoretsky. They were both sort of dissidents and pro-Ukrainian. They made unbelievably amazing work. He arranged to get their archive out, stuff like that.

17:28Amazing, amazing stuff.

17:29Charlotte Higgins:And then because he'd worked quite a lot in eastern Ukraine, he realised that museums that he knew in the east were threatened. So he, again, for the first few months using this mini countryman, being driven by a friend, got stuff out. Then they graduated onto a Mercedes Sprinter, which was a van, which was smashed by a Shahad drone in Nicopole, I believe. Wow. God, they really are everyday heroes. They are. They are. I don't use the word heroic lightly, but I do think what they did was kind of heroic.

18:17And Charlotte, you told us at the beginning of this conversation about what originally inspired you to go to Ukraine in the first place was some of the work that was being created there. so I'm really interested in how a new generation of Ukrainian artists and writers are reflecting this incredibly brutal time in their art now I think and whether this is conscious or unconscious

18:41Charlotte Higgins:in Ukraine I think there is an urge to create against the destruction you know so many things are being rendered non-existent and so many people are being rendered non-existent when I first went in 2022, the beginning of the war had, for many people, stopped them in their tracks in terms of their creativity for really super obvious reasons, like staying alive and making sure your loved ones were alive, possibly volunteering for the army or doing humanitarian work. All of these were much more pressing than getting your watercolour set out. But actually, quite quickly, writers and artists felt this urge to create documentary of one sort or another.

19:27Charlotte Higgins:So there were lots of diaries, there were lots of essay writing, particularly for foreign publishers and foreign press to try and get the story out there, but from Ukrainian subjectivity, super important. Then came poetry, actually. So poetry is a form that can happen quite quickly. You can write a poem in a trench as was proved in the first world war and is being demonstrated over and over again now i mean there are extraordinary poets who are writing from the front lines and poetry in 2022 felt like the form because everyone's existence had felt like they had disintegrated exploded time was meaningless everyone was living in this sort of present moment.

20:11Charlotte Higgins:Language felt like it didn't hold form anymore. So poetry is a space where you can do something with that. There's a volume of poetry, Annie, for instance, called We Were Here, by a young poet called Arthur Drone, who's in his 20s and was in the army for three years. He was actually very badly injured and is now a veteran. He's not in the armed forces anymore. But his poems are really surprising if you're expecting anything full of machismo and ardent, furious patriotism and loathing of the enemy. His poems are beautiful, tender, tiny memorials for people he fought with and who he lost. And so the Ukrainian army is made up of Ukrainian citizens.

21:03and that means that there are a lot of Ukrainian artists and writers and creative people in the army. So it was incredibly bleak in many ways. So many young talents are being killed on the front lines. And there are a fair few talents being killed as civilians behind the lines as well. And Charlotte, you've had a really painful personal loss yourself. Your friend, the novelist and war crimes investigator, Victoria Amelina was killed in a Russian strike in 2023. What has her loss meant to you but also to Ukraine?

21:40Charlotte Higgins:I met Victoria Amelina in October 2022. She was an extremely articulate advocate for Ukraine abroad and she was a very significant artist in Ukraine so her novels were very popular So I knew her for a very brief period. But, you know, in times of great stress and in a war, you actually become friends with people rather quickly. And she's one of the reasons that I returned to Ukraine. You know, I went to Ukraine once to do one article and then it was Victoria who pointed me in the direction of another story and said, I think you should really think about writing about this. and it was the story of another writer Volodymyr Vakulenko who had been killed in his village under occupation in 2022 and Victoria as a war crimes investigator had gone to his village and had found the diary of occupation that he had written and buried in his garden.