In his lecture, the American historian Tymothy Snyder describes the 1932–1933 man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine, which killed around four million people, and which was a deliberate political consequence of Joseph Stalin’s forced agricultural collectivization. To deflect responsibility from systemic policy failures, the Soviet elite reframed the disaster using a paranoid, personalist narrative. They falsely blamed the famine on sabotage orchestrated by Ukrainian nationalists and Polish agents. This fabricated narrative triggered severe repressions directly targeting the Ukrainian intelligentsia. The thriving “Ukrainization” cultural policies of the 1920s were completely reversed. The state launched aggressive purges, leading to the systematic arrest and execution of prominent writers and cultural figures, a tragedy known as the “Executed Renaissance”. Driven to despair by these unrelenting repressions, influential figures like writer Mykola Khvylovy and education commissar Mykola Skrypnyk ultimately committed suicide.

Both articles examine the phenomenon known as the Executed Renaissance, a generation of Ukrainian intellectuals in the 1920s–1930s who became victims of systematic Soviet repressions. This period initially saw a powerful cultural revival, as writers, artists, and scholars contributed to the development of Ukrainian national identity through literature, theatre, and scholarship. However, the Soviet regime increasingly viewed this cultural awakening as a political threat. By the early 1930s, repressions intensified: intellectuals faced censorship, arrests, forced labor, and executions. Stalin’s purges culminated in the destruction of thousands of cultural figures, with mass executions carried out in places such as Sandarmokh forest. Together, the articles demonstrate how Soviet policies deliberately dismantled Ukraine’s cultural elite, replacing creative freedom with ideological conformity.

Soviet suppression systematically targeted the Ukrainian cultural elite from the 1920s through the 1980s, imposing decades of enforced silence. In an essay for Literary Hub, Myroslav Laiuk notes that the number of published Ukrainian writers plummeted from 259 to 36 during the 1930s due to executions, labour camps, and forced suicides. Laiuk highlights this historical devastation by tracing four iconic poets. Yevhen Pluzhnyk died of tuberculosis in a brutal concentration camp, while Volodymyr Svidzinskyi was burned alive by secret police. Pavlo Tychyna survived by yielding to pressure, writing regime propaganda that transformed a genius into a state buffoon. Decades later, dissident Vasyl Stus died under mysterious camp conditions. Today, Ukrainians remember these martyred artists, drawing strength from their legacy to resist modern Russian aggression.

Both texts examine the lasting impact of Soviet repressions on Ukrainian cultural life, particularly literature. The article by K. Vovk focuses on the Slovo Building in Kharkiv, once a vibrant hub for writers of the Executed Renaissance. It later became a place of fear, surveillance, and arrests, symbolizing the destruction of a thriving intellectual community and the transformation of the city’s cultural identity. The culmination of that terror happened in the Solovki Special Camp with the death of over a thousand of Ukrainian creatives. The #ARTvsWAR text by the European External Action Service features the broader struggle for the survival of Ukrainian. Despite repressions in the past and challenges today, writers continue to preserve and promote their language and culture. Together, the texts show that Ukrainian culture, though deeply scarred, remains resilient and thriving.

Les Kurbas is known as a visionary Ukrainian director who revolutionized theatre, moving it from ethnographic realism to modern, avant-garde European styles. As the founder of the “Molodyi Teatr” (Young Theatre) and later the experimental “Berezil” theatre in Kharkiv, he transformed actors into active creators and incorporated new artistic forms that made him a genius of 20th-century Ukrainian art. His work combined avant-garde methods with a deep exploration of social and cultural themes, shaping a new theatrical language. Accused of “bourgeois nationalism,” Kurbas was arrested in 1933. He was later executed in the Sandarmokh forest in 1937, becoming a prominent victim of the “Executed Renaissance” – a generation of artists destroyed by Stalin’s purges.

This video features “Boychukism” – a unique artistic phenomenon meant to become the face of Ukrainian monumentalism. The story follows Mykhailo Boychuk and his school, who blended Byzantine traditions, the Renaissance, and Ukrainian folklore into a modern form. Viewers will learn about the tragic fate of the “Executed Renaissance” artists, whose frescoes and paintings the totalitarian regime systematically destroyed for decades, attempting to erase the memory of Ukraine’s distinct artistic path. The video focuses on a major exhibition that reconstructs the grandeur of this lost heritage through surviving sketches and archival documents. The video demonstrates how Boychukism served as an act of visual decolonization, continuing to inspire modern generations even after the physical elimination of its creators. It is a compelling narrative of how Ukrainian art won its right to be heard globally, despite all imperial attempts to silence it.

The Ukrainian dissidents of the 1960s, known as the Shistdesyatnyky (Sixtiers), were a generation of writers, artists, and intellectuals who emerged during the Khrushchev “thaw.” At first focused on cultural renewal, they soon began to challenge Soviet censorship, Russification, and restrictions on Ukrainian language and identity. Influenced by European modernist and humanist ideas, they revived interest in banned Ukrainian cultural traditions and the repressed “Executed Renaissance” of the 1930s. Key figures included Vasyl Stus, Ivan Dziuba, Lina Kostenko, and Viacheslav Chornovil. Their activities included literature, public criticism, and the underground circulation of banned texts through “samvydav” (“samizdat”). As repressions intensified in the mid-1960s and especially after 1972, many were arrested or silenced. Despite this, the Shistdesyatnyky, who became the foundation of Ukraine’s later dissident movement, played a crucial role in shaping modern Ukrainian cultural identity.

The Kharkiv Human Rights Group Virtual Museum is dedicated to preserving the history and memory of Ukraine’s dissident movement and Soviet-era repressions. The museum collects and presents biographies, testimonies, documents, and archival materials about individuals who resisted the Soviet regime through peaceful and intellectual means. The museum shows the diversity of dissidents, including political activists, writers, religious figures, and participants in national movements, all of whom defended human rights, freedom of expression, and Ukrainian cultural identity. Many of them were subjected to surveillance, arrests, imprisonment, exile, and psychological pressure. The focus is on oral history, which helps recover personal experiences of the people who were previously suppressed or erased. By documenting these stories, the museum not only preserves historical truth but also highlights the importance of civic resistance.

John-Paul Himka analyses post-Stalinist Russification in Soviet Ukraine, contrasting Stalin’s violent methods with his successors’ systematic institutional marginalization of Ukrainian culture. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the state drastically reduced Ukrainian-language education. While the ratio of Ukrainian to Russian schools was 9.5:1 in 1948, over half of Ukraine’s pupils attended Russian schools by 1987. Major southern and eastern cities were left with virtually no Ukrainian schools. Khrushchev’s 1958–59 school reform allowed parents to choose the language of instruction, leveraging systemic inequalities to favour Russian. Ivan Dzyuba’s 1965 book, Internationalism or Russification?, featured by the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, demonstrated that Soviet policy systematically subordinated Ukrainian culture, severely reducing native periodicals, books, university instruction, theatre, and cinema. Cultural activities carried severe political risks, and dissidents faced the danger of imprisonment for their adherence to Ukrainian identity.

Russia systematically Russified eastern Ukraine over centuries to erase its identity and justify geopolitical expansion. The Russian state weaponized imperial narratives, linguistic suppression, and historical falsifications, starting from the tsarist era’s Valuev Circular and Ems Decree. In the Soviet period, this colonial project intensified through forced language assimilation, the Holodomor genocide, and the execution of cultural elites. Furthermore, Russia executed structural assimilation through settler colonialism – moving Russian citizens into industrial centres – and passportisation, which forcibly registered Ukrainians as Russians and altered surnames. Additionally, mass deportations displaced native populations to remote Soviet regions. Modern Russia continues these violent, genocidal practices in temporarily occupied territories, dismantling Ukrainian monuments, rewriting textbooks, and abducting children to enforce total ideological conquest.

The video emphasizes that the widespread use of Russian in Ukraine is the result of a deliberate, 300-year policy of Russification. Under the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian language was systematically suppressed and banned from public life. Authorities outlawed Ukrainian schools, books, theatres performances, and organizations, punishing or killing those who promoted local literature. Additionally, the state heavily marketed Ukrainian as a “farmer language” for the uneducated, while framing Russian as the only tool for social advancement. During the Soviet era, Russian was mandated as the official state language, cementing its dominance through schools, cinema, radio, and public administration. This intense historical policy forced Ukrainians into a total Russian-language environment, causing generations to absorb it as a secondary native tongue.

Russia weaponizes the language issue to destabilize Ukraine. After centuries of tsarist and Soviet marginalization, Ukrainian became the official state language in 1991. Despite this, Russian retained dominance in public life, transforming language policy into a political flashpoint. Since the early 2000s, the Kremlin has manipulated linguistic fluidity to portray Russian speakers in Ukraine as an oppressed minority, justifying its 2014 annexation of Crimea and ongoing hybrid warfare. While the war fostered an inclusive civic national identity under President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, vulnerabilities persist. Pro-Kremlin forces continually exploit minor incidents, like a fabricated controversy over a McDonald’s electronic menu, to manufacture outrage.