Since the popular Maidan uprising by working people in Ukraine overthrew the brutal pro-Moscow regime of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, the rulers in Russia have waged a war to reconquer and Russify as much of Ukraine as they can. They seized the Crimean Peninsula and some of eastern Ukraine, then launched an all-out invasion in 2022. Ukraine’s working people, whether Ukrainian- or Russian-speaking, have been at the heart of defending their country’s sovereignty.
A wing of the capitalist rulers in Ukraine have been carrying on a “decolonization” drive to remove Russian culture from Ukrainian cities, changing the names of cities and streets, tearing down statues of Russian artists and writers, and attempting to quash use of the Russian language.
One reactionary “decolonization” target in Odesa today is a statue of Isaac Babel, who was Jewish, a son of the city, and supporter of the Russian Revolution against czarist oppression. Revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky wrote in My Life, Babel is “the most talented of our younger writers.”
This drive for cultural cleansing has sparked resistance in Odesa, a majority Russian-speaking city. Considered Ukraine’s most European and multicultural city, it is frequently targeted by Russian airstrikes.
An Oct. 21, 2024, petition signed by more than 120 cultural figures from Ukraine and internationally appealed through UNESCO to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop the removal of 19 historic monuments in Odesa.
“While removing statues and names of Soviet marshals or tsarist generals,” the Odessa Journal, an online English-language paper, said, “might be understandable,” this isn’t true for famous cultural figures of the city. “What has caused the most dismay” among the citizens of Odesa, the journal says, are plans to remove the statue of Babel.
“You can’t remove Babel,” said Antonina Poletti, the journal’s editor, whose Russian-speaking family has lived in the city for six generations. “If you remove him, you remove the soul of the city,” she told the New York Times May 5.
In the wake of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Babel, still a boy, was hidden by a Christian family and survived a czarist-organized anti-Jewish pogrom. He came to support the Bolsheviks led by V.I. Lenin, who helped lead the fight against Jew-hatred and pogroms.
Babel became a protege of Maxim Gorki, a famous Russian author and supporter of Lenin. During the civil war against the White army and imperialist invasions, Babel was a political commissar in a mounted unit of Cossacks, historically antisemitic, in the Red Army commanded by Trotsky. He wrote the vivid and unvarnished truth of that experience in the novel Red Cavalry. It was republished in 2002 with additional material, including his 1920 diary of this experience, by his daughter, Nathalie Babel.
Later he wrote a book about the city, Odessa Stories.
Babel killed in Stalin’s purges
In the late 1920s, a counterrevolution led by Joseph Stalin overturned the internationalist course championed by Lenin and Trotsky. Ukrainian working people, leaders of the 1917 revolution and Soviet intellectuals were especially targeted. Babel was arrested and interrogated in the notorious Lubyanka prison by Stalin’s political police on charges of being a “Trotskyist” and a spy. They murdered him after a 20-minute trial in January 1940.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Babel was posthumously rehabilitated. But reactionary Ukrainian “decolonizers” today hate all writers who used the Russian language — revolutionary and counterrevolutionary alike. They are determined to obliterate “Russian” culture.
Another of their targets is the bust of famous Russian writer Alexander Pushkin. “It is undeniable that Russian culture is used as a propaganda tool by the enemy,” the Odessa Journal notes, but the Pushkin statue belongs to the citizens of Odesa who erected it through public funds.
Pushkin, who was in Odesa in forced exile as an opponent of the czar, hailed his adopted city. Far from being an agent of Moscow’s domination, he is regarded as Odesa’s own dissident poet.
Moreover, as the journal notes, the drive to eliminate culture tainted with a Russian voice raises other targets. “What should happen to the Potemkin Stairs, made famous by [Sergei] Eisenstein’s film [Battleship Potemkin], or the beautiful Opera House, designed by Austrian and Swiss architects?”
The petition is aimed at UNESCO since it had granted Odesa World Heritage status in 2023, following naming Odesa as a City of Literature in 2019. Among the city administration’s responsibilities is preserving such monuments, not destroying them.
Signatories on the petition include many of Odesa’s foremost cultural figures — poets, artists, writers, musicians, scholars, historians, photographers and filmmakers — as well as others internationally. Members of Babel’s family are signers. All staunchly support the battle to defend Ukraine sovereignty against Putin’s bloody war.
Signers include Oleksandr Onishchenko, a theater director who volunteered for the front in the first days of the 2022 invasion; Dmytro Dokunov, a digital artist and war veteran who helped liberate Kherson, and now rehabilitates disabled soldiers; sculptor Klim Stepanov and historian Oleksandr Babich, who both currently serve in the Ukrainian armed forces.
Journal editor Poletti explained the dangers of censorship based on one’s national origins. “The Ukrainian identity is a civic one,” not a language or an ethnic one, she told the Times. “If you impose one ethnic model, you will create a big social conflict.”
This battle is important for Ukrainian working people, who need to unite in the fight against Moscow’s invasion regardless of language or background. And to make common cause with fellow workers in Russia, their best ally in bringing Putin down.