Cultural Amnesia In War-Torn Ukraine, theamericanconservative.com

Declan Leary, associate editor of The American Conservative.

Who is the Tolstoy of the Ukrainians? Don’t you dare say Tolstoy.

Lest anyone think that America’s race radicals have a monopoly on historical erasure, the liberal elite of Ukraine have taken up their own campaign of posthumous cancellation. Leo Tolstoy, the great 19th-century writer, tops the list.

Born to a family of old nobility in Western Russia in 1828, Tolstoy is universally renowned for monumental works like War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He is also the namesake of a city square and subway station in Kiev, Ukraine—though maybe not for long. The capital’s city council is mulling the idea of renaming the landmarks after Vasyl Stus, a dissident Ukrainian poet of the Soviet era whose stature is a tiny fraction of the Russian’s.

The move is part of a broader effort to “decolonize” Ukrainian public culture, purging all potential links to the young Slavic country’s much larger neighbor. Professedly a rejection of Russian imperialism, the push is both foolish and doomed to fail. The choice of Tolstoy as a target illustrates one major reason why. Läs artikel