New decolonialism guide gives context for Ukrainian heritage

A new museum guide to decolonialism focused on Ukraine will be published this year. It has been developed as an international partnership project led by the Ukrainian Institute and developed in collaboration with the Museums Association (MA) and the UK and Ukraine National Committees of the International Council of Museums (Icom UK, Icom Ukraine), with support from the British Council.

It will help cultural heritage professionals to be more nuanced in cataloguing, labelling and contextualising Ukrainian history and heritage in their collections. It will also act as a model for other regions and countries coming to terms with the legacies of having been colonised. 

The guide, which uses the MA’s Supporting Decolonisation in Museums publication as a model, is the result of conversations that started soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Sadly, the control of cultural heritage is a powerful tool for subjugating peoples and rewriting their histories. By accurately and sensitively describing the cultural heritage of Ukraine, museums, galleries, libraries and archives worldwide can help to dismantle the damaging legacies of the Russian empires.

Whereas the MA guide was largely written for a UK-based audience coming to terms with its past as a coloniser, this new Ukraine-focused guide is written from the point of view of the formerly colonised. It reveals a blind spot in the world’s understanding of eastern Europe and the many countries that were colonised under the Russian empire and Soviet Union. 

In museums in the west, the cultural heritage from these countries is often grouped under the catch-all heading of “Russia”, which is incorrect and plays into the hands of the colonising power. The control of cultural heritage is a powerful tool for subjugating peoples and rewriting their histories. Sadly, Russia is again attempting to eradicate Ukrainian cultural identity and regularly justifies its war in terms of regaining its lost empire.

Museums, galleries and other cultural organisations have a responsibility to diversify and represent the many different voices and communities of Eastern Europe, the Baltic, Caucasus and central Asia. They also play an important role in how these countries are perceived on the global stage. In some museums and galleries, there are old labels and database entries from a different era which prioritise the dominant colonial narrative about the supposed superiority of Russian culture. If museums don’t go through these systematically and update the text, they are leaving colonial structures in place. 

One challenge is how to accurately describe identity, nationality, and placenames in a region subject to changing political powers and shifting borders – such as Ukraine during the early 20th century.

Take, for example, L’viv, a historic city in the west of Ukraine. Its name changed several times under different colonising or occupying states. It was known as Lemberg (under Austro-Hungarian rule), Lwów (under Polish rule), Lvov (under Soviet Russia) and Lemberg again (under the Nazis) before reverting to the Ukrainian name of L’viv. This city – and many other towns and villages nearby – changed hands at least eight times between 1914 and 1945, sometimes overnight. A well-known saying from the time describes how it would be possible for someone to have been born in the Austro-Hungarian empire, schooled in Poland, married under the Third Reich, employed in the USSR and a pensioner in Ukraine without having left town. 

We have seen many incorrect and confusing attempts by curators trying to unpick the historical record or, worse, taking the lazy route of referring to the whole of Eastern Europe as “Russia” and anyone born in the region as “Russian”.

We recommend the approach taken by archaeologists to describe findspots where best practice is to use current place names and territorial borders. For catalogue entries or object labels, this would include
a person’s birth and death locations ideally followed by a list of places where they were active, again using current place names transliterated from Ukrainian and not from Russian. Not only does this avoid the challenge of matching historic place names with particular dates, it also neatly sidesteps the issue of specifying nationality in a region where borders have been in flux, or where an individual’s identity may have differed from that of the ruling state. 

Not only will the guide equip cultural heritage professionals with the knowledge and confidence to develop their decolonial practices it will ensure our museum colleagues in Ukraine feel seen and heard on the global stage.

Tetyana Filevska is the creative director at the Ukrainian Institute and Maria Blyzinsky is a heritage consultant and trustee of Icom UK