Art heist at the Louvre of Kherson: Russia’s war on Ukrainian identity – National | 24CA News

KHERSON, Ukraine — The thieves entered the museum on October 31, eliminated the work from their frames and loaded them onto cargo vehicles.

It took them 4 days to empty the Kherson Regional Art Museum, often known as the Louvre of Kherson, and make off with greater than 10,000 works by Ukrainian, Russian and European painters.

Police are investigating, however who did it’s no thriller. Russian forces looted the museum and three others as they retreated from Kherson metropolis late final yr.

“They stole everything,” stated Alina Dotsenko, the artwork museum’s director, who ranked the incident as worse than the Nazi plundering of town within the Nineteen Forties.

To Dotsenko, what occurred in Kherson was not simply an armed theft. It was a part of a wider Russian marketing campaign to disclaim Ukrainians their existence as a definite folks and nation.

The full-scale invasion ordered by President Vladimir Putin one yr in the past this week was a land seize, however it was premised on Moscow’s declare that Ukraine isn’t an actual nation.

Although Kyiv is a whole lot of years older than Moscow, Putin has tried to justify his struggle with an interpretation of historical past that asserts that Ukraine is a part of Russia.

For many Ukrainians, the widespread assaults on cultural establishments of the previous yr are an try and erase their heritage and take up them into an empire-minded Russia.

Hanna Skrypka, the Kherson artwork museum’s deputy director, estimated the Russians stole 80 to 85 % of the gathering of 14,000 works, together with these by Ukraine’s masters and uncommon depictions of its previous.

“This was the proof of our identity,” she stated.

Per week after the Russians cleaned out the museum, Ukrainian forces pushed them out of Kherson metropolis and again throughout the Dnieper River.

But the Russians weren’t accomplished.

On Nov. 30, they shelled the museum with artillery.

The St. Catherine’s Cathedral was a museum of atheism in the course of the years when the Soviet Union managed Ukraine. It re-opened as an Orthodox church in 1991, when Ukraine gained independence.

Inside the thick sandstone partitions, Father Vitaly lifted a lure door set into the wood floorboards and descended a staircase to a dank room.

The crypt beneath the church was the tomb of Grigory Potemkin, Kherson’s founder and the lover of Russian empress Catherine the Great.

The grave is empty now. The casket is gone. So are Potemkin’s bones, which had been saved in a fabric bag. Ten Russian troopers spirited them away, claiming the Ukrainian navy was planning to bomb the church.

Instead, after looting the 18th-century cathedral, the Russian military fired artillery at it. One shell landed within the grass close to the columned entrance. Father Vitaly stated emergency companies staff eliminated the rocket the day earlier than.

More shells hit the park straight behind the church, and when the Russians blew up the TV tower subsequent door, the explosion shattered the church home windows.

“Thank God, nothing else,” he stated.

Before the invasion, the cathedral served a congregation of about 350, and thrice as many at Easter and Christmas. But the river that has change into a frontline is shut, and no extra that 60 flip up now.

“A lot of people left the city, and this part of the city is really under constant shelling,” the priest stated. “So they are afraid.”

“The city is empty, like a ghost city, but thank God the people survive and come back and everything will be as it was before.”

But it received’t be precisely because it was, not for the reason that grave-robbers dropped by. Father Vitaly stated Potemkin’s stays had been simply bones. “We don’t need to be so upset about it. It’s not religious, just historic.”

“History is in the heart of the people, the memory of people. A lot of things were lost but the major part is we should remember who we are. History is good but the main thing is life.”

He stated he tells his congregants to not be offended, and to assist one another as a result of the struggling will finish.

“All wars finish,” he stated.

Russia’s assault on Ukrainian cultural websites has been relentless. According to UNESCO, 240 of them have been broken prior to now 12 months — 105 church buildings, 86 buildings of historic or creative curiosity, 19 monuments, 18 museums and 12 libraries.

During the final three weeks of the Russian occupation of Kherson metropolis, Russian forces looted not solely the artwork museum and cathedral, but additionally the historical past museum and nationwide archives.

Members of Russian’s FSB safety service arrived on the Kherson Regional Museum on Oct. 24 and stole silver, gold, Greek vases and struggle relics, in accordance with Human Rights Watch.

From the archives, Russian forces took 18th and nineteenth century paperwork, maps, city plans, pre-war newspapers, and virtually every little thing associated to the pre-revolutionary interval, Human Rights Watch stated.

“Kherson residents had already suffered months of torture and other abuses during the Russian occupation, and then watched their cultural and historical heritage get packed up and taken away,” the group added.

“This systematic looting was an organized operation to rob Ukrainians of their national heritage and amounts to a war crime for which the pillagers should be held to account.”

But as an alternative of erasing Ukrainian nationalism, the struggle seems to have invigorated it.

Outraged at Putin, many Russian-speakers have renounced the language. Ukrainians have modified avenue names and torn down statues related to Russia.

In Kyiv, a monument to Ukrainian-Russian friendship was dismantled. An Odesa avenue was renamed after Boris Johnson, the previous British prime minister.

Ukrainians name it derussification and decolonization.

In the basement of Kherson’s artwork museum, gold-painted image frames with ornate edging had been stacked in opposition to the partitions. They had been all of the Russians left behind.

On the morning the Russians started preventing their method into Kherson from the south aspect of the river, Dotsenko went as much as a rooftop and regarded on the Antonivskyi Bridge.

“I wanted to blow it up,” she stated.

But the Russians rapidly seized town, and she or he centered on making an attempt to avoid wasting her museum. Dotsenko had labored there because it opened in 1978. The artworks had been like her kids.

“It was my life,” she stated.

At the time, the three-storey construction, as soon as town corridor, was present process renovations. It was fenced off and the work had been saved in a storage room.

Since the gallery partitions had been largely naked, Dotsenko tried to keep up the ruse that the artworks had been moved because of the building.

And for a time, it labored.

To assist the facade, she saved employees she knew she may belief, and despatched the remainder residence to work remotely. Plainclothes Kherson police who had been a part of town’s partisan motion quietly changed her safety guards, she stated.

On May 2, the Russians arrange a checkpoint close by, and a dozen gunmen entered the gallery by breaking down the door. They handcuffed the guard face down and took his keys.

Two days later, a person phoned Dotsenko and launched himself as a part of Kherson’s new administration. He wouldn’t give his identify however requested her to arrange an exhibition on the authorities constructing.

She instructed him the museum was empty, however he responded that was a lie and he knew every little thing. He instructed her to report back to his workplace at 9 a.m. “We will teach you to respect the new authorities,” he stated.

She knew what that meant. She had heard from her police contacts the Russians had been arresting their opponents and locking them in detention centres often known as basements to be tortured and executed.

That night time, she packed a bag and left town, leaving her deputy, Hanna Skrypka, in cost.

Dotsenko believes the museum was betrayed by two former workers who collaborated with the Russians.

She doesn’t know what else she may have accomplished. The metropolis was underneath occupation. Checkpoints clogged the streets. Sneaking out 1000’s of artworks was an not possible process. “How?” she requested.

On July 19, the Russians returned to the museum and appointed an area lounge singer as the brand new director. They searched Skrypka’s residence and took her telephone and the museum keys.

“They asked where is the most valuable, expensive work,” Skrypka stated. She refused to assist them, she stated, and was instructed to remain residence, however she saved watch on the museum, peering by way of fences to observe what the Russians had been as much as.

At the top of October, the Russians known as Skrypka again to the museum and instructed her to make a listing of all of the artworks. They locked her inside and didn’t allow her to go away for 2 nights, she stated.

The Russians who got here to take the work appeared to know what they had been doing. “To see their actions, in reality they are representatives who have a background in museums,” Skrypya stated.

About 70 staff had been concerned. While they dealt with the artwork rigorously at first, they grew to become extra reckless as they ran out of time and didn’t use gloves.

The streets outdoors had been closed. Five vehicles and two college buses had been parked outdoors. Everything was carried into the automobiles.

“We saw how they moved it out, like rubbish,” Dotsenko stated.

Locals filmed the operation discretely with their telephones. Satellite photos captured two transferring vehicles and a van parked outdoors on Nov. 1. But no one may cease it.

Dotsenko was despondent to see her life’s work being loaded into “dirty trucks.” It was like watching her youngsters being kidnapped, she stated. “I had the feeling I’m dying.”

The work that had been taken included portraits, landscapes and nonetheless lifes courting again hundred of years: “Cossacks in the Steppe,” by Serhiy Vasylkivsky; and “On the Dnipro. Kherson,” by Oleksii Shovkunenko.

“All of the time the Russians try to destroy our culture,” she stated. “It was always like this.”

Skrypka additionally believes the Russians didn’t wish to depart behind any traces of Ukrainian id, nothing that will present how Ukraine is distinct from Russia.

“I think they want to collect memory,” she stated.

The theft has ruptured Kherson’s hyperlinks to its previous, she stated. She desires the gathering again. “We have hopes that most of our works will return,” she stated.

“Yes, we are hoping.”

By scanning social media, museum employees have traced a few of the artworks to the Central Taurida Museum in Simferopol, a metropolis in Crimea, the Ukrainian area that Russian troops invaded in 2014.

Photos present the work being carried into the entry corridor and stacked in opposition to partitions. In one, a girl walked previous a stolen piece, “The Ancient Walls of Vilnius,” by Augustunas Savockas. It was casually upended on the finish of a pile.

Victor Zaretskyi’s “Still Life With Flounder” was noticed in one other photograph, sitting on the ground of the Crimea gallery. Precious artworks handled like storage sale choices.

Dotsenko stated employees had been working to find them. She doesn’t know if your entire assortment was moved to the Crimea museum or if it was scattered.

The world must know what Russia did, she stated, and people accountable should be dropped at justice for his or her assault on Ukraine’s heritage.

“The people loved our museum so much,” she stated. “It was really a temple.”

Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca