06/08/2026
It seems strange that in the fifth year of a war aimed at the ethnocide of the Ukrainian people, it is necessary to write obvious things. But if necessary, then necessary.
The dismantling of the monument to Bulgakov in Kyiv is necessary not so much because Bulgakov himself is somehow bad. How much more so because of the instinct of self-preservation. After all, all of Russian politics in recent years has shown that the more Russian cultural presence in your city (in any form), the greater the likelihood that your city will be “protected”, that is, razed to the ground by KABs and “Sunsets”. And vice versa – the fewer Russian toponyms, Russian monuments, the Russian language and generally any sentiments towards Russia, the less the threat that they will come to “protect”.
I have been researching Russian propaganda for years, and one of the theses it keeps repeating is that Russia doesn’t need the western regions of Ukraine because the population there is too foreign, too hostile to Russia, and there is not enough Russian cultural presence.
As an example, I will give a fragment of an interview with Alexander Boroday, a deputy of the Russian State Duma from United Russia, who came to Donbas with Girkin in 2014 to create the “DPR”. He clearly formulates this opinion.
Borodai actually admits: the less Russian and the more Ukrainian in a region, the less interesting this region is to Russia. The imperial chauvinists themselves cease to consider as “food” those regions where the Russian language disappears, where there are no Mendeleev streets and Pushkin monuments. Therefore, Mendeleev himself can be as good a person and an outstanding scientist as you like, and he, of course, is not guilty of anything before Ukraine, but his presence in toponymy carries a hidden threat. There is nothing personal here – just the instinct of self-preservation.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/den.kazansky/?ref=embed_video
Deputy Borodai, without wanting to, actually gives instructions for action – remove any reminder of Russia, any connection with Russia. Be like Lviv – and then the Russian chauvinist will contemptuously cross you out of the contour maps of his imaginary empire. The Russian regime itself, through the mouth of its deputy, admits that Russophobia is an effective means against Russian expansion. And it forces even those who have read all of Bulgakov to become Russophobes involuntarily. Because the alternative to this is Bakhmut, Vovchansk, Marinka, Vugledar…
“We discovered that the same Russian people live there as we do, and we came to help these people,” Putin said about Donbas in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/den.kazansky/?ref=embed_video
For many years, a significant part of the residents of Donbas did everything to truly convince Russia that they are “the same Russian people.” For Donbas, this ended in genocide, which in some places looks more terrible than the Holocaust. Entire cities, entire districts have now been completely wiped off the face of the earth – there are no people, no houses, no graves left. With particular cruelty, Russia is currently destroying precisely those regions that it considers Russian and where there was the most Russian. Woe to that city that Moscow will call “Russian.” Ask the residents of Kherson. I would also advise you to ask the residents of Bakhmut, but there is no one to ask there anymore…
Bulgakov’s problem is not that he wrote disparagingly about the Ukrainian language, but that his work became the basis of the myth that has now become the justification for terrorist attacks on Kyiv. “The White Guard” is literally about “Kyiv is a Russian city.” So, in the understanding of the Russian imperialists, Russia has the right to punish him for his supposed apostasy.
In some other parallel reality, where Ukraine’s neighbor would not be an aggressive Nazi cesspool, but a normal civilized state, life in Ukraine would look completely different, and there would be no need to dismantle the Bulgakov monument. But we live in a reality where Russia itself uses its language and its culture as a weapon, as a pretext for mass murder and occupation, and literally forces its neighbors to abandon them and break all ties. To become as different as possible, so that, God forbid, they would see “brothers” here who urgently need to be “saved”, like Mariupol in 2022.
Nothing personal – just the instinct of self-preservation.
“In some other parallel reality, where Ukraine’s neighbor would not be an aggressive Nazi cesspool, but a normal civilized state, life in Ukraine would look completely different…”
Life could be so good if there were no such thing as russians. The sooner they go extinct, the sooner this planet can breathe a sigh of relief.