The statue of Motherland, inaugurated by Leonid Brejnev in 1981, continues to overlook the south of kyiv from the top of his 102 meters, sword in one hand and shield in the other. The outdoor museum it dominates, called “Museum of the Great Patriotic War” during the Soviet era, is now called “National Museum of the History of Ukraine during the Second World War”, with resources essentially online .
A giant flag in blue and yellow colors of independent Ukraine floats today on the park of eternal glory, where two new exhibitions have been established from the start, almost a year ago, ‘Russian invasion. Because the desire to document the tragedy in progress, palpable throughout the country, does not only participate in a requirement for justice, so that war crimes do not remain unpunished.
It also aims to preserve the memory of the thousand and one gestures of collective and individual resistance which allowed Ukraine not to be crushed by its powerful neighbor.
the “crucifixion of the ‘Ukraine “
The team of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine during the Second World War worked, in the emergency of February 2022, to place in a safe place the 400,000 pieces of its collections. But, very quickly, despite the enrollment of certain employees in the armed forces and the exile of many others, the museum is working to collect the traces of the current conflict and to develop traveling exhibitions, doomed to defend the Ukrainian cause abroad.
A new step was taken, on May 8, 2022, with the opening on three floors of the “Crucifixion of Ukraine”, which replaces the previous museum of local conflict. The choice of the date is obviously symbolic, on this day when President Zelensky invokes in black and white the” never again “of May 8, 1945. As for Vladimir Putin, he celebrates the next day Pumps the “Victory Day” of the Soviet tradition.
The visitor is greeted by a giant red star, whose space is filled with shoes abandoned by Russian soldiers. The effect is quite striking and is faced with these installations of rockets embedded in a bench, mortar shells making up a cross, stacks of bazookas, but also devastated homes, shattered museums and burned churches. The legends are relentless precision, here a charred icon of Makariv, there a dome ravaged from the church of Loukianivka. However, the overcome leaves room for dread when we discover the endowments of a soldier of a Russian unit involved in the atrocities of Boutcha, where hundreds of civilians were massacred in March 2022. Even if the commentary remains sober, it is then difficult to detach your gaze from the cutlas thus exposed, alongside a uniform and military documents.
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