Erasing Identity

Destroying culture to destroy a people

by Olivia Poust

Only the battered and charred walls of the Hryhoriy Skovoroda National Literary and Memorial Museum remain standing, like ribs surrounding a chest cavity, void of the heart and lungs that once beat and breathed life.

“Hryhoriy Skovoroda forged the spirit of the Ukrainian nation,” says Hanna Yarmish, who heads the educational department of the museum in Kharkiv.

“The enemy destroyed everything to destroy the identity of our people,” she says, referring to Russia and its attack on the museum in its full-scale war launched against Ukraine on 24 February 2022. “It was a direct hit. Damage was huge.”

The museum dedicated to the 18th-century Ukrainian poet and philosopher was obliterated in a Russian missile strike last year on 6 May, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy identified as a targeted attack.

Monuments, art works, churches, museums and libraries are not always unintended casualties of war. Often, attacks on heritage sites and objects are tactical measures used by perpetrators of violence to erase a culture, history and tradition — and with them, a people.

As of 17 May, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, had documented 256 cultural sites in Ukraine damaged since the war began. These included 110 religious sites and 22 museums, with the greatest number in the Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk and Kyiv regions.

Three months earlier, the U.N. Human Rights Office expressed

Hanna Yarmish stands by the ruined Hryhoriy Skovoroda National Literary and Memorial Museum in Kharkiv, Ukraine. The plaque reads, “Famous Ukrainian enlightener, philosopher and poet H.S. Skovoroda spent the last years of his life and died in this building.”