Part of the Russian efforts to destroy Ukrainian identity is the deliberate destruction of works of Ukrainian art, cultural and scientific heritage.
Just a few examples:
■ Numerous works by artists of the “Executed Renaissance,” seized during searches and arrests, disappeared without a trace.
■ Most of the poems by Swidzinsky, who was burned alive, burned with him in 1941.
■ In 1948, the Russian occupiers arrested the rector of the Lviv Conservatory, the brilliant Ukrainian composer Vasyl Barvinsky. After five months of interrogation, on absurd charges of being an English spy, a Gestapo agent, and a long-time member of the OUN, he was sentenced to 10 years in a Mordovian concentration camp and two years of exile.
But the condition for saving his life was to sign a document agreeing to burn all of his manuscripts with his works. His students were forced to do this.
For the last two years of his life, Barvinsky tried to restore the destroyed works and looked after his wife, who returned paralyzed after the same punishment. The daughter of the outstanding physicist Ivan Pulyuy, Natalia, was a pianist…
During the only visit of their entire imprisonment term, the couple was ordered to communicate exclusively in Russian. They remained silent.
By order of the concentration camp management, Barvinsky was seated opposite another prisoner, the Patriarch of the UGCC, Joseph Slipy. They were ordered to rub bricks against bricks so that the composer would forget the music and the priest would forget the prayer.
From July 31 to August 2, 1952, thousands of works of Ukrainian art from the so-called special funds were burned in Lviv.
Paintings by Ivan Trush, Oleksa Novakivskyi, Mykhailo Boychuk, Oleksa Gordynskyi were burned in large furnaces. The sculptures of the world-famous Arkhypenko were broken and thrown into the trash.
In 1964, as a result of deliberate arson by KGB agent Pogruzhalsky, one of the seven floors of the Central Library of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR burned down. It was the department where the Ukrainian studies funds, archives, and 600,000 unique publications were stored.
The same year, on the instructions of the authorities, a stained glass window was broken at T.H. Shevchenko University in Kyiv. This work was created by Alla Horska together with Opanas Zalyvakha, Halyna Zubchenko, Lyudmyla Semykina and Halyna Sevruk for the anniversary of Shevchenko.
In 2022, in Mariupol, mosaics of Alla Horska (who was killed by the Russians back in the USSR) were destroyed by Russian shells.
