Officials claim to have deconstructed a “myth” by scrapping the names of ‘hero cities’ honored for their fight against Nazis
A Ukrainian World War II museum has defaced memorials to Soviet cities which demonstrated resolve in fighting off Nazi invaders. The move was touted as helping to deconstruct “Communist myths”.
The USSR declared a number of cities heroic for the role that their residents played in the fight against the Axis powers. Kiev was one of the recipients of this honor and has a memorial alley in which each city was given a granite stone marked with its name and a bas-relief of the gold star of the hero of the Soviet Union award – the highest state decoration at the time.
On Friday, the national War Museum in Kiev, which has custody of the alley, reported taking “a very important symbolic step” in removing all letters and images from the stones. The names of all of these locations, including Kiev and others located in modern Ukraine, were scrapped, judging by a video from the scene.
Термін «Місто-Герой» утвердився Указом Президії Верховної Ради СРСР від 8.05.1965 р. Першими містами, які отримали звання у 1965 р., стали м. Ленінград, Одеса, Севастополь, Волгоград, Київ, Москва, та Брест. 3/4 pic.twitter.com/DEMJLI3S5O
— Музей історії України у Другій світовій війні (@warmuseum_ua) December 27, 2024
Calling cities heroic was “one of the foundational myths of the totalitarian Soviet regime” it claimed, despite the honorific being restored in 2022 and bestowed upon cities for the role they have played in the ongoing conflict with Russia.
In August 2023, Ukrainian officials had the Soviet coat of arms removed from the iconic Motherland Monument, a World War II memorial in Kiev. It was replaced with Ukraine’s current national symbol, the trident.
Kiev declared “decommunisation” a priority policy after the Western-backed armed coup in Kiev in 2014. In practice, officials are targeting Russian cultural heritage, including sites from the period predating the USSR. In early December, the city council of Odessa announced a decision to remove a bust of the poet Alexander Pushkin, a UNESCO-protected piece of art built in the 1880s.
The War Museum’s goal is to revise the history of World War II, Director Yury Savchuk said last month on the occasion of the institution’s 50th anniversary. It wants to create a permanent exhibition “telling about the centuries of the Ukrainian fight for independence” – primarily during the two world wars, he said.
Western Ukrainian nationalist forces allied with the Nazis during World War II expected the Third Reich to help them create a Ukrainian state. In practice, the Germans used them as auxiliary occupational forces, including to perpetrate massacres of Jews, Poles and Soviet sympathizers in the captured territories. Today, Ukraine honors those people as freedom fighters and national heroes.
In an interview this week, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the Ukrainian policies since 2014 “absolutely racist” and aimed at the full eradication of anything Russian, including the language. The discrimination is one of the core causes of the ongoing military conflict between the two nations, he said.
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