Ukraine’s Death-Defying Art Rescuers
August 07, 2024 at 09:26PMWhen Putin invaded, Leonid Marushchak, a historian in Kyiv, saw that Ukraine’s cultural heritage was in danger. So he set out to save as much of it as he could. He’s done much of his work in secret, traveling thousands of miles to and from the war’s front lines to extract paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and more. He’s had help, in part because he cannot drive. When asked why he’s never learned, Maruschak said that if he had a license, “he’d have long ago driven to Russia to try to bring back Ukrainian artworks that have, over the centuries, been taken from his country”:
Without his own means of getting to Sloviansk, Marushchak had his brother-in-law drive him from Kyiv 300 miles east to the city of Dnipro. From there, friends took him a further 50 miles, to the city of Pavlohrad. Then he walked to the last checkpoint in town and hitched a lift for the last 120 miles—this time, on a Soviet-era armoured personnel carrier”:
In Sloviansk, artillery boomed alarmingly close; the opposing armies were fighting over a town only 18 miles away. When Marushchak reached the museum, staff were finally packing up the exhibits—though, to his annoyance, the official instructions on what should be prioritised dated from 1970, and stated that what he referred to as “an old bucket of medals” from the second world war should be rescued first. Aside from the Maksymchenko ceramics and the medals, there was also a natural history collection to deal with—AKA, stuffed animals, which, just to add another layer of danger to the enterprise, had probably been preserved with highly toxic arsenic. Into Marushchak’s ark—in reality, a police van that deputy minister for culture Chuyeva had managed to commandeer for him —went a moose, a bison, a fox, a wild boar, a wolf and a small herd of deer. All were spirited on a long journey west to a safer location.
Since those early days of the war, with the help of a motley group of intrepid friends, Marushchak has achieved something quite extraordinary. He has organised the evacuation of dozens of museums across Ukraine’s frontline—packing, recording, logging and counting each item and sending them to secret, secure locations away from the combat zone. Among the many tens of thousands of artefacts he has rescued are individual drawings and letters in artists’ archives, collections of ancient icons and antique furniture, precious textiles, and even 180 haunting, larger-than-life medieval sculptures known as babas, carved by the Turkic nomads of the steppe. “At times,” said Chuyeva, “he has been doing almost unbelievable things”—putting himself into extreme personal danger for the sake of often humble-seeming regional museum collections on Ukraine’s frontline.
A nation’s understanding of itself is built on intangible things: stories and music, poems and language, habits and traditions. But it is also held in its artworks and artefacts, fragile objects that human hands have made and treasured. Once lost or destroyed, they are gone for ever, along with the stores of knowledge they contain, and potential knowledge that future generations might harvest from them. For Marushchak, his country’s culture, no less than its territory, is at stake in this war: a culture that Vladimir Putin has repeatedly claimed has no distinct existence, except as an adjunct to Russia’s.
On that day in Sloviansk, something became clear to him: there was no point relying on official evacuation efforts. If he wanted to see the job done, he was going to have to do it himself. “He had to do it with his own hands,” his friend, the artist Zhanna Kadyrova told me. “There was no one else.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/07/ukraines-death-defying-art-rescuers/
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