Russia’s cultural genocide in Kharkiv

By Sian Norris

On 28 October, at around 9pm, a Russian bomb hit the UNESCO-listed Derzhprom building in the centre of Kharkiv. The futurist skyscraper, completed in 1928, was ripped open by a powerful FAB-500 bomb. An attack on the region earlier that day killed four people.

According to reports in the Guardian, the bomb “hit third floor-offices, sheering off a corner of the building and exposing an internal zig-zag staircase. Windows were blown out. On Tuesday rescuers tossed glass and door frames from broken upper stories onto a courtyard below. A truck and digger scooped up debris. Many of the rooms inside were wrecked, with buckled ceilings and walls, and thick dust.”

When I saw the news break last night, my head immediately went to the people I knew who used the building – people who tell stories, report the news, make sure the truth about Russian aggression is spread around the world. And my thoughts went too, to the people of Kharkiv who treasure the building as one of its great symbols. 

Why would Russian bombs target an historic building, that has no military connections, in the hours just before curfew? The answer is that the Kremlin is determined to commit cultural genocide against Ukraine and its people. 

In Liberation Square, where surrounding buildings were targeted near the start of the full-scale invasion and since, Derzhprom is a startling and domineering piece of architecture, one that perfectly encapsulates the 1920s and its daring look to the future. 

It is a moment of Ukrainian history and culture – and that is unacceptable to Russia. 

After all, Putin and his mouthpieces have long claimed that Ukraine has no culture – that any Ukrainian culture is Russian culture. Such untrue and cruel accusations are particularly thrown at Kharkiv, precisely because it is the heart of Ukrainian culture. It is a city of universities, of art, of publishing and music. 

Kharkiv’s existence, and the thriving intellectual and cultural scene the city contains, is a total repudiation of Russian disinformation and Russian imperialist claims. So, according to the Kremlin, Ukraine’s culture and heritage must be destroyed. 

This goes beyond buildings or the recent bombing of Kharkiv’s most prolific publishing house. It’s there in the bombings of schools and universities – attempts to try and prevent a generation from accessing education and achieving their aspirations. It’s in the attacks on language. And it is also achieved by destroying the places that people love. 

When I interviewed Ukrainian journalists in Kyiv last year, Natalia Nagorna told me “who now remembers that Bakhmut was the city of flowers? They have taken the places where we used to be happy.” Kristina Berdynskykh described it as “it is like they are shelling our childhoods.” 

Cultural genocide is a way of destroying the places where we used to be happy – of destroying shared memory and experience. It is about denying Ukraine’s existence and crushing its ability to tell its own story, its own history, in its own language. 

The flipside of this, of course, is that Russia continues to sell itself to the world on its cultural heritage. In Kharkiv, the artist Pavlo Makov expressed his anger to me at how Russian culture has been used to sell an image of itself as a country of ballet and literature in order to hide its cruelty and aggression. That image, he said, is false – it is a form of propaganda. 

Makov was one of many artists and musicians I met in Kharkiv who are determined to celebrate and create Ukrainian culture. From the hip-hop artist who explained to me how increasingly, rappers in Kharkiv were making music in Ukrainian and turning away from Russian language music, to the graffiti artist Gamlet’s whose murals paint over shelled buildings, Kharkiv maintains a thriving cultural scene even when faced with a genocidal enemy. 

Of course, human casualties – whether civilian or military – will always be the bigger tragedy. But it is also important to recognise that attacks against places the the Derzhprom are a form of cultural genocide, in Russia’s ongoing genocidal war.