Italiiska Vulitsya, or Italian Street, runs through the center of Odesa, a Ukrainian city on the Black Sea, from the train station to city hall. It is home to the Italian consulate, the Philharmonic Theater, a department store and the Bristol Hotel, which was recently damaged by a Russian missile attack. It is always busy.
In 1880, when much of Ukraine was part of the Russian tsarist empire, the street, which was named after Italy in 1824, was renamed Pushkinskaya in honor of the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin. Last July, it reverted to its original name as part of an ongoing “decolonization” process in the country. A monument to Pushkin outside the town hall still stands but is set to be dismantled.
Dismantling Russian propaganda
The Ukraine law “On the Condemnation and Prohibition of Propaganda of Russian Imperial Policy in Ukraine and the Decolonization of Toponymy” came into force in July 2023 in the middle of the war.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country was launched in February 2022, but many consider that the war really began with Russia’s occupation of the Crimean peninsula and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014.
According to the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, “Russia’s imperialist policy at various times was aimed at the subjugation, exploitation and assimilation of the Ukrainian people, including their Russification.” The law requires local authorities to remove imperial symbols such as monuments and place names that originate from the Tsarist era or the Soviet Union from public spaces. If this does not happen within a given period, the regional administration can take action. Odesa has now been ordered to remove monuments and rename streets.
Artem Kartashov works for the regional administration and is part of the decolonization working group. He explained what the law covered.
“People who held certain offices in the Russian Empire, were involved in the establishment of Soviet power on the territory of Ukraine, carried out propaganda for the tsar or the communist regime, spread Russification and Ukrainophobia, or were involved in the persecution of members of the Ukrainian independence movement in the 20th century.”
He said more than 400 street names and 19 monuments in the Odesa region met these criteria.
Appeal to UNESCO
There has been opposition to the law. In a letter to UNESCO, numerous cultural figures from Odesa appealed to ensure that any decisions pertaining to the “decolonization” law were postponed until after the war. The art historian Kyrylo Lipatov, one of the signatories, said it was “clear that the events of the past 10 years, and particularly the past three, require a change of attitude towards such an unpleasant memory of culture,” but he said right now, “the Ukrainian state and society have more urgent and more important problems.”
He said that dismantling monuments would not erase imperial stereotypes from people’s minds. Instead, he thought that new monuments should be erected to honor Ukrainian personalities associated with Odesa.
The historian Taras Honcharuk pointed out that there were some Russian-funded monuments in the city that commemorated people who had nothing to do with Odesa’s history.
One example is Vladimir Vysotsky, an actor, singer and poet who addressed forbidden topics during the Soviet era despite strict censorship. Honcharuk said that a monument to Vysotsky near the Odesa Film Studio had been removed in December.
“He was a Moscow actor known throughout the Soviet Union, but he only played one role in Odesa.”
Honcharuk said that many well-known Ukrainians had had a lasting impact on the city and deserved to be commemorated. Some worthy candidates he mentioned indluded the Ukrainian film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who shot his first films in Odesa and is regarded as the founder of poetic cinema, or Les Kurbas, one of the most important representatives of the Ukrainian avant-garde, or the Ukrainian writer Yuri Yanovsky, who once described 1920s Odesa as a “Ukrainian Hollywood on the Black Sea.”
‘The pride of Odesa culture’
Opponents of the “decolonization” process say that Odesa’s cultural heritage is being destroyed. The journalist Leonid Shtekel has been organizing protests, criticizing the renaming of streets named after the Soviet writers Valentin Kataev, Ilya Ilf, Isaac Babel and Konstantin Paustovsky particularly.
“These are people who were the pride of Odesa culture,” he said.
But they all fall under the “decolonization” law, say the members of the working group. Kartashov points out that Babel, who was born in Odesa to Jewish parents, fulfilled all the possible criteria and had himself written in the foreword of his book “Red Cavalry” that he had served in the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police organization.
“He glorified the Soviet authority that established itself on the territory of Ukraine, and he persecuted members of the Ukrainian independence movement in the 20th century.”
Babel’s claims that he worked for the Cheka are disputed. The writer was himself arrested by the secret police in 1939 and executed the year after.
After the removal of monuments, the idea is to keep and display them in museums or as part of exhibitions, said Kartashov. He said that they should no longer be used for purposes of “glorification” and that instead, people whom “imperial and Soviet propaganda once tried to wipe out” should be commemorated in Odesa.
He added that monuments to people involved in today’s war would replace those to Soviet generals.
The critics of “decolonization” also say that Odesa’s famed multiculturalism is at risk of being overlooked by the renaming of street names. Others say the process offers new opportunities to highlight the city’s multicultural past.
“Odesa flourished when it was a multicultural city, but then it became exclusively Russian-speaking,” said Svitlana Bondar of the Institute for Central European Strategy, a Ukrainian think tank founded in the western Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod in 2019.
Bondar said that there were now many more streets named after people from ethnic minorities. “With decolonization, Odesa’s multiculturalism, which was lost during the Soviet era, is coming to light.”
This article was originally written in Ukrainian.
