Culture and Conflict

It has been one year since we woke to the unimagined horror of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and there has, of course, been much written about the courage, stoicism and heroism of the Ukrainian people.

This current war is ‘the military manifestation of a linguistic and cultural struggle that has been ongoing since the 19th century, between two visions of the Russian-Ukrainian relationship…. The battles of the 21st century are hybrid wars fought on many fronts: military, economic, political, technological, informational and cultural’. I am quoting from an article in the Observer Magazine (December 2022) entitled Ukraine’s warrior librarians (author Stephen Marche). The night before Russia invaded Ukraine, Oksana Bruy, the President of the Ukrainian Library Association, had left her computer open at work. A few days later, she crept back into a huge empty library, grabbed her laptop and rushed to her car, fleeing west to Lviv to continue working and keeping the libraries of Kyiv Polytechnic open. Ukraine’s libraries are key because this conflict is a war over language and identity.

The world now knows Volodymyr Zelenskiy well but in those first few days, when Russia assumed Ukraine would be broken easily and Kyiv would fall, it was Zelenskiy’s powerful speech to the European parliament that changed the course of the war. Putin’s assertion that Ukraine was a fiction and part of the Russian state, was countered by Zelenskiy’s insistence that Ukrainian identity not only existed but that it was European. The war is a struggle over the past as well as the future. Ironically no one has done more for the development of Ukrainian culture and identity than Vladimir Putin.

Russia has targeted libraries since the beginning of the war, demolishing state archives and evidence of Russian oppression. “Those who burn books will eventually burn people” the German poet Heinrich Heine said, but in this war the Russians burn both. The Russians have destroyed more than 300 state and university libraries since the start of the war and several thousand school libraries. But Ukrainian librarians are not defeated. On 1st March 2022 Sucho was launched – Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online. Thousands of volunteers working long days are saving archives by digitising them online. Meanwhile, the libraries follow their users – to the metro and the bomb shelters, serving as centres for displaced persons, offer counselling and art therapy and – of course – books.

Culture is always political. In Simon Schama’s History of Now (BBC iplayer), three one-hour programmes of the importance of art and culture during conflict, Schama states that it is not always politicians but artists, musicians and writers who rouse us from indifference and become the true agents of change. In Schama’s own words “Their words, their paintings, their music has given me an abiding faith in the moving force of culture. If there ever was a time when we needed to understand what great art can do, that time surely is now”.

Born in 1945, Schama and the post-war generation were determined to stand up for the defence of democracy against tyranny. His journey through the art and culture of the second half of the 20th century begins with Picasso’s Guernica which stands as a testament to the power of art to preserve the historical record and speak truth to power. Picasso said an artist is also a political being, alive to what happens to the world.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s libraries and librarians stand firm. On their Ukrainian Library Day on 30th September last year, their new motto was unveiled: The library is unbreakable.