MOSCOW, March 30 Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance considered the name of the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov a symbol of “Russian imperial policy,” follows from the conclusion of the institute’s commission.
A publication on the organization’s website claims that Bulgakov allegedly “had a biased and expressively negative attitude towards everything Ukrainian,” and his work is associated with “the glorification of Russian imperial policy.” The institute considered “the assignment of his name to geographical objects, names of legal entities, objects of toponymy, as well as the establishment of monuments and memorial signs in his honor in Ukraine” as an element of this policy.
In the same conclusion, the institute also accused other figures of Russian culture of allegedly “refusing humanism as soon as they came to discussing the Ukrainian issue.” In particular, the text mentions the poet Joseph Brodsky and the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In May last year, the Ukrainian publication «Strana» reported that the memorial plaque in honor of Bulgakov was updated on the facade of the museum in Kyiv, and in the new version he was called an «outstanding citizen of Kyivian.»
The dismantling of monuments associated with Soviet history, as well as the renaming of streets, began in Ukraine in 2015, when a law on the so-called decommunization was adopted. Recently, the Ukrainian authorities have begun to fight not only against Soviet history, but also against everything connected with Russia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov previously stated that the Ukrainian authorities have been pursuing aggressive de-Russification and forced assimilation for many years.