The writer Isaac Babel is commemorated in the act of creative thought, eyes on the horizon and pen resting in a paper battery, in a bronze statue in the center of Odesa, his hometown on the shore of the Black Sea of Ukraine.
The statue can soon be dismantled. For the Ukrainian authorities, it is a threat that must be eliminated under a so -called decolonization law that orders the elimination of “symbols of Russian imperial policy” to protect Ukrainian culture. The law entered the statue of Babel, which served in the Soviet red army and built part of his literary career in Russia at the beginning of the last century.
The planned elimination has caused a strong rejection of many Odesa residents. They argue that in their classic “Stories of Odessa” and elsewhere, Babel’s writings about the Jewish inheritance of the city and her sandy world of smugglers and artists of each ethnicity helped to make Odesa famous and exhibited her multiple seizure.
As much as they oppose the War of Russia, they fear that the law will erase Odeesa’s character. “You can’t eliminate Babel,” said Antonina Poletti, 41, editor of a local media and a sixth general Odesan. “If you eliminate it, you eliminate the soul of the city.”
The city is already supporting the order of the invasion of Russia, with gifts and missiles hitting it every two nights. Now a cultural battle is dividing Odessa, with the statue of Babel as a flash point. The spark was the decolonization law, which was part of a broader effort in the Ukraine War to cut ties with Russian inheritance and build an identity free of its influence.
On the surface, the cultural dispute looks like any other dividing city in the world. Political opponents taking advantage of the issue to score points. University professors dismiss the work of the other. Street activists disfiguring statues. Local elites appeal to international cultural organizations.
But both parties say that the result of the cultural dispute in Odesa is of huge importance. Odesa was founded under the Russian Empire and is home to a population largely in Russian speech. The debate will shape the postwar identity of the nation and if it focuses on Ukrainian roots and says goodbye to Russian influences, or encompasses a broader multicultural heritage.
“Odessa is a test for Ukraine,” said Artem Kartashov, Odesa’s lawyer and sponsor of the decolonization law. “It is proof of how we fight against Russian influences: how we are fighting them now and how we plan to fight them in the future.”
The decolonization law is the last step in the effort of a decade of Ukraine to throw the legacy of its former rulers first the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union. The previous laws prohibited Soviet simolas, demolished Lenin’s statues throughout the country, and made Ukrainian the mandatory language in most aspects of public life.
Approved in the spring of 2023, the decolonization law is directed to persistent simulations of the cultural domain of Russia. In most places, the process has developed without resistance: more than 25,000 streets and squares have been renamed and more than 1,000 dismantled monuments.
An outstanding objective has been the 19th -century Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. Censored and exiled under the Tsarist regime, it was later elevated by Stalin as a cultural icon to promote Russian culture in the Soviet Union, with statues erected in Ukraine. The Kremlin has revived that duration of the current war approach, in and is in the image of occupied mariupol.
But in Odesa, many residents see Pushkin not as a symbol of Russian propaganda, but the poet who loves freedom who spent a year in exile in the city of Adir, where he began working on his masterpiece “Eugene Onegin”. A bust of him, financed by the locals in 1889, still rises on a ride.
Iryna Radian, 57, a French professor at Odesa, said she supported the elimination of statues of Russian military figures. “But great people and writers, what have to do with this?” He asked, stop next to Pushkin’s bust. “I think we need a much more nuanced approach.”
Around their standing monuments that reflected the imperial and Soviet past of Odeesa, including the great stairs of Potemkin, 192 granite steps and 10 landings that descend towards the port. Once a symbol of imperial ambition, then they were immortalized as a communist site or revolt in Sergei Eisenstein “Battleship Potemkin”.
“We like it or not, much of the history of our city is linked to the imperial and Soviet periods,” said Ivan Liptuga, head of the Cultural Department of the City of Odesa. “It is impossible to erase, ignore or rewrite acts of thesis.”
Mr. Liptuga said that the City Council had made its part under the decolonization law, renewing 230 streets in honor of the Soviet generals and Catherine The Great, the Russian Empress that Odesa founded in 1794. That the players at once or the streets of Odessaug-Euggg-Eough Odougs or Odesa, the streets, they said with a smile. streets.
Even before the decolonization law, the city eliminated a Catherine statue at the end of 2022. It is now horizontally in a metal box in the courtyard of a museum.
But the Regional Administration, which responds to the president’s office, considered that the effort is insufficient: he renamed 83 more streets and designated some 20 monuments for elimination, including those who honor Russian -speaking literary figures such as Babel and Pushkin.
On a recent visit to Odessa, weak contours of Pushkin Street eliminated on the walls of the buildings are visible. The street has returned to its previous name, Italian Street, a wink to Italian merchants attracted in the nineteenth century to the city. Other streets were renamed after the Ukrainian soldiers who died during the invasion of Russia.
Mr. Liptuga said it seemed “incomprehensible” to eliminate the names that “symbolize the literary and cultural legacy of Odessa.”
But Mr. Kartashov, who coordinated the application of the Law of the Regional Administrations of the Law, pointed out what he called “the dark side” of Babel, including accusations that he had a role in the Soviet Secret Police and his praise for the Soviet collectivization. “Hey, did a lot of damage to the Ukrainian state,” Kartashov said.
Gregory Freidin, an expert at Babel and professor at Stanford University of Languages and Slavic literature, replied that the writer had condemned the collectivization and that his involved with the Soviet Secret Police was not not proven. Stalin’s forces executed Babel for charges manufactured in 1940.
Even so, said Kartashov, the domain of figures such as Babel in Odesa reflected decades of Russia’s efforts to accumulate his cultural influence on Ukraine, while hiding the contribution of other Ukrainian artists and writers. He pointed out, for example, that there was no statue in honor of Lesya Ukrinka, a prominent Ukrainian speech poet who spent time in Odesa.
“Russia has always understood this very well,” Kartashov said. “They marked ODESA with thesis monuments so that people have the impression that Odesa’s Russian version is correct.”
The opponents of the decolonization law appealed to UNESCO, the United Nations Cultural Agency, arguing that some monuments scheduled for elimination fall under their protection. The agency is expected to give its conclusions on the matter this summer.
Decolonization supporters push it in Odesa as an opportunity to finally free the city from Russian influences. But erase all the traces of the Russian inheritance risks that it would alienate the Ukrainians who grew up Russian speaking and are immersed in their culture, but they were still loyal to Ukraine when Moscow troops invaded, Mrs. Poletti, a Russian speaker and editor of the Odessa magazine of the English language.
“Ukrainian identity is civic, non -ethnic,” said Poletti. “If you impose an ethnic model, you will create a great social conflict. I am afraid of this future.”
