Remember The Monuments Men film of 2014 written and directed by George Clooney? Based on the book of the same name, it follows the death-defying escapades of a group of art experts tasked with finding and saving priceless works of art before they are stolen or destroyed by the Nazis.
Leonid Marushchak, a 38-year-old historian by training, has taken on a similar task as war rages in his native Ukraine. A recent in-depth investigation by The Guardian newspaper into his work, reveals a level of passion and bravery that many expect to find only in books or movies. It began in March, 2022, when Marushchak became concerned about a favourite collection of 20th century studio pottery, languishing in the far-eastern town of Sloviansk. When he called the director of the museum to ask about evacuation plans, he was surprised to learn that none had been made. The Ministry of Culture had no definite plans in this regard either he discovered.
Marushchak decides to take matters into his own hands. He does not drive but hitches rides with friends and strangers to cover the 600 odd kilometres from Kyiv to Sloviansk in the east of the country. Fighting is taking place just over 20kms away when this particular monument man arrives at the town’s museum of local history. With the help of a police van, organised by his friend, the Deputy Minister of Culture, Kateryna Chuyeva, he manages to rescue the Maksymchenko ceramics along with an array of taxidermized animals.
Since then Marushchak and an unlikely group of friends and fellow art lovers, have spear-headed the evacuation of artworks from dozens of museums along the frontline. They have saved tens of thousands of artefacts from drawings, letters, antique furniture and precious textiles to 180 giant medieval sculptures carved by Turkic nomads of the steppe. Describing his tight knit band of monument men and women as guerilla fighters, Marushchak has risked his life to save art on more than one occasion. He made numerous trips to the now infamous Bakhmut when it was under siege and to the eastern city of Lysychansk, both are now under Russian control.
Yet for places like Mariupol it is sadly too late. The city’s Museum of Local History came under aerial attack by Russian forces and finally succumbed to a series of fires. According to the Ukrainian News Agency, over 3000 cultural sites have been damaged or destroyed as a result of the war. In November, 2022, Russian occupiers in Kherson, loaded five truckloads of works from the Art Museum and transported them to occupied Crimea.
For Ukrainians, their cultural heritage is deeply intertwined with the country’s political history. In the 1930s, a generation of Ukrainian writers were executed in one of Stalin’s purges. More recently, modernist artist, Alla Horska, who Marushchak credits with being the founder of Ukrainian identity in the 1960s, was murdered, probably by the KGB. Hers are among the works of art that Marushchak worked hard to save when Kyiv came under attack from Russian bombing at the start of the war.
Appreciating the death-defying work of Marushchak and his small team, it to appreciate that this war is just as much about Ukrainian territory as it is about its cultural identity. The existence of which Putin and his forces seem set on obliterating. Yet the passion and bravery with which those like Marushchak have taken up the fight to preserve their country’s artwork echoes a century’s old struggle for Ukrainian identity that is not easily extinguished. Souwie Buis August 2024
Information taken from the original article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian
