Not just bombing of cities. In the Ukrainian tragedy, a heavy cultural bombardment would also begin. The information agency Maidanpress has released the news, given by the Ministry of Defense, that in the occupied areas of the separatist regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, but also in Chernihiv and Sumy, the systematic examination of public libraries (or whatever remains). The Russian military police, which collects all the volumes contrary to the Kremlin’s propaganda, and destroys them on the spot or transfers them elsewhere, always with the same purpose. It’s a scene from “Fahreneit 451”, quite chilling. The site accompanies the alarm with the image of one of the sinister – and famous – book burnings organized by the Nazis in Germany during 1933.
In Ukraine, these are mainly scholastic and historical, scientific and popular texts, the contents of which, for the invading army, are “extremist”. Not even Ivan Stepanovič Mazeppa is saved, a Cossack noble who in the second half of the seventeenth century sided with the Swedes against the Tsar, sung by Byron, Pushkin, Hugo (he dedicated the poem to him, perhaps the best known in the posthumous fortune of this character, the one that takes up the legend of the endless ride across the East, tied to the back of a stallion), without forgetting the symphonic poem by Franz List and the work of Tchaikovsky. Now, however, it is forbidden to mention him in any way, as it happens for the politicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, independence activists who were enemies of the Red Army during the Soviet revolution – these very controversial characters.
A book that caused a lot of discussion and had a huge success in Ukraine a few years ago, “The case of Vasyl Stus” by journalist Vakhtanga Kipiani, would also have disappeared from circulation. Stus is considered the great Ukrainian poet of the twentieth century. Dissident and defender of human rights, he was arrested in 1980 and died in unclear circumstances in 1985, locked up in a forced labor camp, one of the last victims of the Gulag archipelago. In 2019 there was a legal battle to prevent its spread, when the book came out – and a film was made of it – by the defense attorney of the time, at that time at the head of a pro-Russian party. Now, it seems, we go more for the quick. That said, it is true that many reports of war and repression, including this one, must be taken with caution and cannot often be verified beyond any doubt. But the “cultural” offensive launched by the
Kremlin against the invaded country is not a too indirect confirmation of what is happening, even if the Soviet strategists do not seem to have a sense of proportions at least: it is difficult to think that, even with violence and forced indoctrination, centuries can be erased. of traces, and what traces, left by the memory of a Mazeppa