“Ukrainian russophobia has absolutely no boundaries and limits”: a monument to the Chuvash communist poet Mikhail Sespel was demolished in Chernihiv region, which agitated the occupation authorities in Chuvashia

With the big war against Ukraine, the Kremlin only spurred the processes of both de-communisation and decolonisation (demoscovitisation, de-russification, de-russianisation – whatever you call it) of this country.

Ukrainian authorities began to actively get rid of foreign toponyms, names and foreign monuments, as well as the imperial interpretation of the history and spelling of Ukrainian language, artificially imposed by the occupying forces.

Since both the tsarist and the Soviet authorities tried to artificially create a “united” cultural, social and economic space, everything should be equally mixed in all parts of the empire – a mixture of tens and hundreds of cultures, languages, peoples that would create Russian people together and then the Soviet people. So that it was even unthinkable to divide all this.

Thus, we have a situation in which in almost every part of the post-Soviet space one can find a piece of any of the cultures of the empire.

And therefore, many toponyms, monuments and even literary works that are directly or indirectly related to all the republics of Idel-Ural fall under the process of decolonisation in Ukraine.

On the one hand, this is a blow to our national memory and our ties with Ukraine, and on the other hand, in this way Ukraine gets rid of everything that connected it with the empire, of which our republics are still a part.

Now some governors of the Kremlin in our republics (the so-called heads of the republics, although we did not elect them) are very loudly indignant at such “vandalism” and are trying to pretend that they are protecting our culture and our honor. Which they do not protect within the empire itself, while being mankurts and accomplices of the imperial occupiers.

It is necessary to promote our cultures, but not in this way. We should do everything so that Ukrainians themselves want to come into contact with our culture, and not persuade them to live as the Kremlin empire ordered.