Dismantling Matter: Ukraine’s Attempts to Decolonize its Culture
By Nadiia Honcharenko
The transformation of Ukrainian society and culture has slowly started after the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991. This process has later been accelerated by several important historic events such as the Orange Revolution (2004), the Revolution of Dignity (2013), Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the initiation of war in Eastern Ukraine (2014). But especially in 2022, facing the Russian full-scale invasion, Ukrainians rethink not only the history of the twentieth century but also the need to decolonize their culture and de-russify their cultural consciousness. In Ukraine, there has been a strong public demand that certain elements of heritage should be removed from public space, as they contain distinct symbols of colonial and totalitarian domination and therefore aggravate the sense of trauma that Ukrainians are currently experiencing, as well as increase the pain of grief and loss caused by Russian aggression. This demand can be seen as both, reason and result of Ukraine’s struggle to reject the false and deeply violent so-called ‘brotherhood’ between Ukrainian and Russian society.
Since spring 2015 decommunization has become one of the most popular topics in Ukrainian media and a subject of regular debates not only for politicians and journalists, but also for policy analysts, historians, cultural studies scholars, and cultural figures. These discussions demonstrate the extreme importance and relevance of decommunization and the problems it is supposed to solve. There are many actors with different intentions involved in these processes. Nevertheless, two main trends are evident: The desire of Ukrainians to free themselves from Russian shackles on one side and the attempts of the Russian political regime to slow this desire down, or even prevent it, on the other side.

Russia‘s use of soft power long before 2013, but especially its intimidation and military intervention in order to keep Ukraine in its orbit of influence, only strengthened and geographically expanded the desire and readiness for resistance by dismantling the symbols of the former Soviet empire. Along with the growth of Russian influence and the diversification of its tools, the scale of Ukrainian resistance grew: intellectually, politically, and militarily.
In the case of Soviet Ukraine and its cultural space one could find clear signs of what can be called cultural colonialism, which were contradicting the official state rhetoric of ‘flourishing cultures of all Soviet peoples’. Political scientist Maria Mälksoo states that “[m]ainstream postcolonial studies have focused on the political construction of racial hierarchies along the color lines, not among the white-skinned people themselves. The question about the postcoloniality of former Russian imperial subjects, including post-communist subjects in former Soviet republics and the outer fringes of the Soviet empire, remains fraught and contested in the scholarship.”[1] Due to the insufficient applicability of the label ‘postcolonial’ to the former Soviet imperial space, Ukraine has been among the most obviously neglected cases of Soviet colonialism for many years.
I have been interested in the topics of decommunization and decolonization long before it had been named as such and before it had become an official state policy. My own experience as a Ukrainian speaking student at Kyiv Taras Shevchenko University in the late 1980s connects with what Mykola Riabchuk, Ukrainian author and journalist, later in 2013 insightfully described as the following: The Ukrainian language and culture were “a stigma, a sign of backwardness and inferiority vis-a-vis the superior Russophones who represented both wealth and power – a relative, largely fictitious wealth of the Soviet cities, and absolute, highly coercive power of the totalitarian state.”[2]
I have been involved in the mass demonstrations and protests since my student days in the late 1980s. Thus, I never claim to be a scholar who is completely distanced from her topic of interest. On the contrary, I do believe that my personal involvement in the cultural transformation of Ukrainian society helps me to understand and analyze many of the peculiarities of this particular process as well as its main stages, problems, features and obstacles.
Finally, after many years of Russia disregarding Ukrainian agency, the need to decommunize and decolonize Ukraine’s historical narrative and cultural heritage has become recognized publicly as well as in academia. Sadly, many scholars, politicians and journalists in Ukraine and abroad have tended to interpret decommunization in a narrow sense, namely as the implementation of the four laws[3] adopted by Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on April 9, 2015[4].
However, I follow the concept of Ukrainian memory policy analyst Oleksandr Hrytsenko that “the decommunization process has included not just measures taken by government agencies (notably by Ukrainian Institute of National Memory) to implement the four laws, but similar activities of local self-government bodies and civil society as well. Therefore, decommunization in broader sense usually means a longer and more multifaceted political, social and cultural process of undermining and even removal from public space and public conscience of political, ideological and partially cultural heritage of the Communist/Soviet period.”[5]
After decades of forced Sovietization and Russification of all national cultures in the USSR, which of course also included the suppression and destruction of Ukrainian culture as well as the execution of hundreds of Ukrainian writers and artists and the banning of their works for decades, a canon of ‘Ukrainian socialist culture’ was imposed on society covering all forms of artistic and cultural expression. A huge number of cultural heritage elements were created according to the rules of the socrealist[6] canon. Throughout Ukraine thousands of monuments to Lenin, the Great Victory and other Soviet heroes as well as mosaics on public and residential buildings, museum exhibitions and place names, hundreds of parks of ‘Eternal Glory’ or ‘Culture and Recreation’ (often on the sites of mass graves of communist executions) saturated the symbolic space. Besides of imposing the Soviet propaganda cliché, it was a way of distracting people from tragic events, and the attempt of convincing them that they live in the ‘happiest country’ in the world. All of these elements served as tools to poison the collective memory of society by marginalizing the communicative memory of the past that differed from the cultural memory imposed by the Soviet regime.
Between the late 1980s and the early 1990s the process of acknowledging previously banned or marginalized Ukrainian cultural and historic heritage had started, which included publications of Ukrainian poets, novelists, historians and political thinkers. Back then, decommunization began with the destruction of Soviet monuments and the renaming of streets. This process took place mainly in Western Ukraine as well as in a few big cities across Ukraine. The public space of Eastern and Southern Ukraine remained unchanged. During the 1990s and beginning of 2000s the decommunization of culture in Ukraine had been rather slow encountering various obstacles from within, as political and economic power stayed largely in the hands of the former Soviet elite, which rejected or ignored the need to rethink the Soviet legacy. Cultural circles endured under the influence of connoisseurs of the ‘Great Russian culture’ fueled by Soviet nostalgia, which confirmed its presence in the Ukrainian cultural space in old Soviet monuments and new Russian books, popular music, and films.
Some attempts of the political elite, civil society activists, and cultural figures to decommunize the cultural space beganafter the Orange Revolution in 2004, especially in 2007–2008, due to President Viktor Yushchenko’s efforts to commemorate the victims of Holodomor. His decrees on the removal of monuments of Soviet leaders who were responsible for the organization of Holodomor as well as local perpetrators of the Great Terror campaign were met with harsh criticism from Russian and pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians, artists and scholars.
This campaign was hardly necessary in Western Ukraine, had some success in Central Ukraine, and almost no effect in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, where most Soviet symbols remained intact until 2014. However, Yushchenko’s presidency brought some successes in the decommunization of Ukrainian culture through broad discussions on the Soviet legacy in Ukraine and the need to dismantle elements of cultural heritage created by anti-Ukrainian propaganda. There have also been significant changes within the field of memory culture including the creation of new elements of the memory infrastructure – non-Soviet memorials and museums.[7]
During his presidency, Viktor Yanukovych (2010–2013) attempted to re-sovietizice the Ukrainian cultural space. His views, as well as those of his supporters, were deeply rooted in the Soviet mythology of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and the ‘brotherhood of nations’. For example, the Soviet-style ‘Alley of Eternal Glory’, which includes several busts of Soviet generals, was built in Kyiv’s Glory Park in 2013.[8] Back then, the elements of Soviet heritage became strongly associated not only with the USSR, but with Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Russian politics as well. Protests against this politics transformed into the dismantling of Lenin monuments.
During the Euromaidan protests by the end of 2013 the idea of decommunization returned to the political and cultural agenda. Hundreds of anti-government activists of various political orientations practiced ‘decommunization from below’, when several hundreds of monuments to Lenin and other Soviet leaders were removed. The grassroots protests marked the unfolding of the most intense stage of Ukrainian decommunization based on the will to reject the most toxic heritage of the Soviet regime.
But how was Soviet cultural heritage interpreted in the decommunization laws? The Law On the Condemnation of the Communist and National Socialist (Nazi) Regimes, and Prohibition of Propaganda of Their Symbols condemned these two totalitarian regimes as criminal and introduced a prohibition of their propaganda including the production and public display of their symbols as well as monuments, mosaics and murals. Toponyms named after Soviet leaders, so-called ‘civil war commanders’, had to be renamed according to these laws. At the same time the monuments and toponyms “related to the opposition and expulsion of the Nazi occupants from Ukraine or to the development of Ukrainian science and culture are exempt, so is the use of totalitarian symbols in academic publication, museum exhibitions, art works, private collections etc.”[9]
These laws, adopted in April 2015, have become a target for criticism from various points of view. Pro-Russian critics insisted that the rejection of Soviet historical concepts is distorting of ‘our glorious past’. Liberal intellectuals and artists protested against the prohibitions of totalitarian propaganda as ‘violation of freedom of expression’, therefore, cultural criticism was focused on the so-claimed ‘destruction of valuable cultural heritage’.
During the first three years of the implementation of decommunization laws more than two thousand Soviet monuments were removed; nearly one thousand cities, towns, villages, and fifty thousand streets, avenues and squares were renamed. However, the most important feature of this period was the broad and heated debate on decommunization and re-evaluation of the Soviet heritage, which revived public interest in Ukrainian history and culture.
However, even among those who condemn the crimes of communism, and despite the Russian war against Ukraine, there are still connoisseurs of the ‘great Russian culture’ who are outraged by the removal of its markers from the symbolic space. The resistance remains notable among representatives of some local governments and cultural figures. This can be explained by the longstanding focus on Russian cultural products and on the idea of the inseparability of Ukrainian and Russian cultures.
Due to the dominant position of Russian culture many people have poor understanding of other literatures and cultures. The case of Aleksander Pushkin, in my opinion, needs to be mentioned here. Jonatan Brooks Platt, professor of Slavic languages and literatures, shows in his book Greeting Pushkin! Stalinist cultural politics and Russian national bard[10], that the cult of Pushkin was formed already in 1937 and became the perfect example of epistemic injustice. This happened at the same time as hundreds of Ukrainian writers and artists were physically murdered and their works destroyed, removed from libraries and museums, or secretly removed without permission to publish. Many famous Ukrainian writers and artists, even translators of Pushkin, were killed by the communist regime in 1937 and buried anonymously nearby Kyiv, in Bykivnia forest. In the end of March 2022, there were more than one hundred Pushkin monuments located all over Ukraine and more than a thousand streets named after him. Only monuments dedicated to Taras Shevchenko are more numerous. No other Ukrainian cultural figure of any historical period could compete with Pushkin in terms of being immortalized in Ukraine. After all, the presence of Russians was often at the expense of Ukrainians. The Pushkin toponyms banished Ukrainian figures, especially those who were directly associated with a particular city or village.
Thus, the new wave of Russian aggression in 2022, including their war crimes in Bucha near Kyiv, provoked the public’s desire to dismantle the monuments dedicated to Pushkin, including the one in Kyiv. This led to misunderstanding and criticism under slogans such as ‘Culture is beyond of politics.’ or ‘This is Putin’s war, not Pushkin’s.’. However, as British analyst of Russian propaganda Jade McGlynn wrote in 2023, “for most Russians, it is natural to care more about a Pushkin statue than a dead Ukrainian child.”[11]
The decolonization is a deepening of decommunization, for which society was less prepared before the 2022 attack by Russia. The public demand for the removal from symbols and names of public spaces associated not only with the Soviet totalitarian regime but also with the Russian imperial heritage was a response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. At the end of 2022, local governments, responding to community initiatives, renamed 7652 place names and dismantled monuments throughout Ukraine (except for those occupied by Russia): 28 monuments to Pushkin, nine to Maksim Gorky, twenty monuments and memorials in honor of Soviet liberators, four monuments to Nikolay Ostrovsky, and four to Aleksander Suvorov.[12] This movement provoked considerable support, heated debates and calls for a regulation by the legislative power on how to handle either preservation of elements of cultural heritage or the dismantling of symbols of colonial rule. Oleksandr Tkachenko, Minister of Culture (2020–2023), stated that the legislation on the protection of monuments does not regulate the process of dismantling markers of imperial domination.
Therefore, on 21 March 2023, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine passed the law On Condemnation and Prohibition of Propaganda of Russian Imperial Policy in Ukraine and Decolonization of Place Names[13]. This law created a legal framework for a process that has been actively underway for over a year. Cleaning up public space is part of the mental resistance to the aggressor. The implementation of the law has shown that state regulation mechanisms need to avoid the spontaneous destruction of monuments. They might be indeed of artistic or historical value. But at the same time they represent objects of monumental propaganda glorifying the defeat of Ukrainian statehood and the rejection of the Ukrainian identity in favor of the Russian identity. On 10 November 2023, the government supported the initiative of the Ministry of Culture and removed monuments dedicated for example to Pushkin or the Bolshevik leader Mykola Shchors as well as other Russian and Soviet figures from the state register. Finally, they were dismantled from public space.
For now, we can observe that public support for decommunization and decolonization is growing. According to a survey conducted in 2023[14], 81,8% of the respondents are for the prohibition of Russian empire symbols, 71% of them are positive about renaming streets and cities which are until now named after Soviet political and Russian military leaders and 59% support the elimination of street names which are associated with Russian cultural figures.
Therefore I see the necessity to analyze the historical, political and aesthetic arguments for either preserving or deconstructing elements of the cultural heritage created by Soviet totalitarianism and Russian colonialism. Also, it is important to develop the necessary criteria – historical, aesthetic, legislative, political and security – according to which heritage elements can be reinterpreted and preserved in a new context. Moreover, we should work on criteria according to which heritage elements must be removed from public space. By preserving the elements of the Soviet cultural heritage we seem to be signaling that we support and preserve a part of the Soviet and Russian identity, so it makes sense to ‘liberate’ us, as contemporary propagandists have been persuading. By rethinking and dismantling them, we are breaking away from the ‘Russian world’, establishing a distance and filling our space with our own content, own agency, own identity.
Notes
[1] Maria Mälksoo, “The Postcolonial Moment in Russia’s War Against Ukraine,” Journal of Genocide Research 25, no. 3-4 (2023): 471–81, here: 473, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2022.2074947.
[2] Mykola Riabchuk, “Colonialism in Another Way. On the Applicability of Postcolonial Methodology for the Study of Post communist Europe,” PORÓWNANIA, no 13 (2013): 47–59, here: 57, https://doi.org/10.14746/p.2013.13.10972.
[iii] Law No. 317–VIII: On the Condemnation of the Communist and National Socialist (Nazi) Regimes, and Prohibition of Propaganda of Their Symbols acknowledges two totalitarian regimes, the Nazi and the Soviet ones, to be criminal and introduces legal responsibility for public propaganda of these regimes. Law No 315–VIII On Perpetuation of the Victory over Nazism in World War II of 1939–1945 replaced the previous law On Perpetuation of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945. It marked a rejection by official Ukraine of Soviet mythical concept of the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Law No 314–VIII On Legal Status and Honoring the Memory of Fighters for Ukraine’s Independence in the Twentieth Century provided official recognition by the state of several organizations and movements of Ukrainian national liberation, and even recognized the national liberation movement as the main subject in achieving national independence in 1991. Law No. 316–VIII On Access to Archives of Repressive Agencies of the Totalitarian Communist Regime of 1917–1991 guarantees free access to the mentioned archives.
[4] The Laws in Ukrainian and English: Декомунізація | Офіційний веб-сайт УІНП.
[5] Oleksandr Hrytsenko, Decommunization in Ukraine as a public policy and as a sociocultural phenomenon (Kyiv, 2022), 293.
[6] Socialist Realism, or Socrealism, was the official cultural doctrine of the Soviet Union, especially represented in literature and visual arts.
[7] The memorials to Holodomor victims in different regions of Ukraine, the museum of Ukrainian People’s Republic of 1918–1921, the memorial to Ukrainian and Polish victims of Stalinist Great Terror in Bykivnia near Kyiv, the museum of Soviet occupation in Lviv and more.
[8] Some elements of this Alley (four busts of Soviet military leaders) were dismantled in December 2024.
[9] Hrytsenko, Decommunization in Ukraine, 298.
[10] Jonathan Brooks Platt, Greetings Pushkin! Stalinist cultural politics and the Russian national bard (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburg Press: 2016).
[11] Jade McGlynn, “Pushkin at the Mass Grave,” Jade’s Substack, December 22, 2024, https://smalldeedsbigwar.substack.com/p/pushkin-at-the-mass-grave?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3165649&post_id=153500831&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=l46az&triedRedirect=true.
[12] “‘Депушкінізація’ у дії: у 14 областях України демонтували 28 пам’ятників Пушкіну,” Ministry of Culture
and Strategic Communications of Ukraine, December 29, 2022, https://mcsc.gov.ua/news/depushkinizatsiia-u-dii-u-14-oblastiakh-ukrainy-demontuvaly-28-pam-iatnykiv-pushkinu/. [“‘Depushkinization’ in action: 28 monuments to Pushkin dismantled in 14 regions of Ukraine”, author’s trans].
[13] The Law of Ukraine “On the condemnation and prohibition of propaganda of Russian imperial policy in Ukraine and decolonization of place names” (2023): Про засудження та заборону п… | від 21.03.2023 № 3005-IX.
[14] “У близько половини українців зріс інтерес до історії після повномасштабного вторгнення – соцопитування,” Ukrainisches Institut für Nationales Gedenken, November 22, 2023, https://uinp.gov.ua/pres-centr/novyny/u-blyzko-polovyny-ukrayinciv-zris-interes-do-istoriyi-pislya-povnomasshtabnogo-vtorgnennya-socopytuvannya. [“Almost half of Ukrainians are more interested in history after the full-scale invasion”, author’s trans.].
About the Author
Nadia Honcharenko is Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Cultural Heritage and Research & Preservation, Institute for Cultural Research of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine). Since 2018 she is also the editor of publishing the series Crimean Tatars Prose in Ukrainian. Her latest publications are: “Transformation of the Historical Narratives of the Second World War and the Decommunisation of Memory Policy in Ukraine,” Australian Journal of Politics & History, Februar 2025; “Transformation of perceptions of cultural heritage and dilemmas of choice between its preservation and elimination,” The Culturology Ideas 26, no. 2, (2024); “Die Erinnerung an den Holodomor in der Ukraine. Vom sowjetischen Vergessen über individuelles Gedenken zur staatlichen Politik,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 4, no. 3-4, (2024).
Other recent articles in the TRAFO series Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval:
Olena Sobolieva, Witnesses, Participants and Creators: the Two-Day Workshop “Ukrainian Scholars and Artists at War”, 05.08.2025.
Tamara Hundorova, Traumatised Decolonial Transit: Constructing Historical Narrative in Ukrainian Culture in the Early ХХІ Century, 08.07.2025.
Yuliia Koniva, Dichotomy of Methodology Between the American and the French Approach in Frontier/Border Studies: Sloboda-Ukraine in the 18th Century, 19.06.2025.
Citation: Nadia Honcharenko, Dismantling Matter: Ukraine’s Attempts to Decolonize its Culture, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 21.08.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/60892
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (August 21, 2025). Dismantling Matter: Ukraine’s Attempts to Decolonize its Culture. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved November 11, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14hod


