Natalia, Kyiv:
I ask my students to ask me some questions, they do. Some of them are personal and some are very interesting to discuss with all. Here they are: Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about russian and Ukrainian culture.
Russians appropriated lots not only from Ukrainian culture, but from many others too. Now it seems that we finally and broadly started to recognise that russian culture do not exist in many ways we thought it does. Also, the question about post-colonial look at our culture arises.
So I was wondering how long it will take to get rid of russian labels on our cultural heritage? Is it even possible to do so? I would like to hear what all of you think!
Dmytro, Ukraine:
At first I’d like to separate the culture and the politics. If we look back into history, we can find out that Ukraine was a part of the Russian empire for a long time and their culture and traditions were widely popularised among us. So in my opinion, we can’t really say where it is Ukrainian or russian part of a culture.
If we come back into nowadays, we can see that modern ukr and rus cultures (I mean blogging, social media, music) are completely interconnected. There can be a singer in Ukraine and producer in Russia. It WAS normal.
And now I am really interested in how it will work after the war. A lot of big countries left Russia, so in my opinion, Ukrainian artists will start working with Europe at the same way as they have worked with russian content makers
Anastasia, Ukraine:
Many people don’t want to support russian products, singers etc. They choose ours. So yes, it’ll be sooner, then we expect
As for me, every morning I wake up with feeling “I don’t want to have something in common with that country” DESPITE my father is russian, so I’m a half of that. But I think we are that little part of people that fights with a government
Sasha, Ukraine:
Actually, I think that it is a very long process or even some aspects of culture can be with us forever. We had the same example in 2014, when, at the beginning, some people stopped speaking russian language, listening to russian music, watching russian movies and so on. But a year later, everything started to come back. I’m very glad that today all people over the world know that Ukraine is not part of russia and we are so different nations, but what a price we had to pay to make them realize it… I want to believe that we will never make such a mistake again and from today our cultural heritage will be without russian labels.
