Cultural invasion? Ukraine de-Russifies its urban memorials.

Northeast of Lviv’s city center, among the mazelike, bending streets, a small road leads past European villas and a playground. Parked cars parallel the wide sidewalks. Rose bushes and cedar trees decorate boutique gardens.

This street – one of Lviv’s most posh and most European – was named after Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Or until last week, anyway.

In the last four months, a city commission has studied the 1,000 or so streets in Lviv and selected 53, including Tolstoy Street, to be renamed. The reason, says commission head and deputy mayor Andriy Moskalenko, is decolonization. Streets like these were named during Russian rule as emblems of Russian superiority. Those names, he says, reinforce a kind of “mental colonization.”

Thirty years after the fall of the USSR, almost every Ukrainian city still has Russian or Soviet memorials – mostly street or square names. And while past protest movements brought down political monuments, like statues of Vladimir Lenin, those honoring artists like Leo Tolstoy or Pyotr Tchaikovsky weren’t as controversial.

Then came Feb. 24, 2022.

Russian President Vladimir Putin justified the invasion that began that day, in part, by claiming Ukrainians and Russians are the same people. To Ukrainians, that’s another way of saying their nation doesn’t exist. Many in the country now see this conflict as another attempt to erase their culture, no different than decades of Soviet rule when Ukraine’s artists were executed and their literature suppressed. Russia’s invasion is, to them, a literal culture war.

Like Lviv, cities across the country have founded commissions to identify Russian or Soviet monuments and recommend which ones should be changed. The work requires judging what counts as the shared history of two neighboring countries and what counts as “colonization.”

Difficulty aside, interrogating monuments has become for many Ukrainians a powerful act of historical justice – similar to the removal of Confederate statues in the United States or relics of apartheid in South Africa. In that process, says Olha Honchar, director of the Lviv “Territory of Terror” Memorial Museum, the country can see what it’s trying to protect and why its soldiers are fighting.

“Culture politics and language politics are [safe places for] every country because they’re a part of identity,” says Ms. Honchar, whose museum documents Soviet and Nazi rule. “Culture is important like the army.”

Choosing heroes

At least, it’s one of the reasons Nazari Brezitskyy trains people to fight.

Mr. Brezitskyy, a wealthy Lviv businessman born in Kharkiv, founded a group after the war began that teaches military skills and self-defense. Ukrainian culture, he says, needs to be protected – in the country’s east and even around his white stucco villa on Tolstoy Street.

From his small porch beside a trim garden, Mr. Brezitskyy steps inside and returns with a red laminated folder. This, he says, is the history of his home.

Flipping through notes and photographs gathered from the city archives, he introduces the villa by its name – Gerta – and its architect, who he says also designed Lviv’s ornate opera house. Gerta is 100 years old (Mr. Brezitskyy lists the number of days as well), and its street used to be named after Polish poet Zygmunt Krasiński. It’s time for another change, he says.

“The best streets in Lviv ... were named by the name of legendary Russian people just to stick their culture inside our culture,” he says, suggesting streets be named after religious figures and politicians who have supported Ukraine’s military. “My children have to know people who helped Ukraine to stand on the road of development, on the road of new life.”

Last week, the mayor of Lviv wrote on his Telegram channel that Tolstoy Street was being renamed for the late Roman Catholic Cardinal and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Archbishop Liubomyr Huzar. It was one of eight street renamings he announced, saying, “This is just the beginning.”

To Mr. Moskalenko, the deputy mayor, the actual name of the street almost matters less than the motive behind it. A street honoring Tolstoy, for example, was never about the Russian writer’s talent or pacifism. It was about entrenching Russian culture outside Russia, he says.

“We’re proud of [our own heroes] but not of what Russia tried to force on us,” says Mr. Moskalenko.

Keeping history alive

But Ukraine isn’t like a document whose history can be edited out. Lviv itself has traded political ownership – Lithuanian, Polish, Austro-Hungarian, German, Soviet – for centuries. Notes of that history are everywhere, from its surviving Soviet compounds to its many cafes, an Austrian inheritance.

Those notes will remain.

For many Ukrainians, though, the question is not what history they have but what parts of it they should embolden. Movements to answer that question tend to follow rifts with Russia.

After independence in the 1990s, European-facing areas like Lviv attempted to erase their Soviet past. More than 1,300 monuments to Vladimir Lenin fell during the 2013-2014 Maidan revolution, which followed Russian sway over Ukrainian politics. Past movements around historical memory have been highly regional, mapping cultural ties to Russia. But the current invasion has instigated renaming efforts from the southern city of Odesa to the eastern industrial city of Dnipro.

“If not the war, if not Putin, this would hardly matter,” says Yaroslav Hrytsak, a historian at Ukrainian Catholic University. “The case of the renaming is a result of Putin bombing Ukraine.”

The country’s history is one of pride but also one of survival. Millions of its citizens died during Soviet and Nazi rule, due to forced deportations, human-made famines, and the Holocaust. Removing Russian place names is partially an attempt to “cancel” cultural ties with a neighbor. During a brutal war, it’s also an attempt to tell a history of Ukraine that includes more than the country being acted upon – a history of Ukrainians who helped build Ukraine.

Learning about the atrocities of early Soviet rule helped propel the country toward independence in the 1990s. Recognizing the value of their culture is motivating Ukrainians to fight today, and developing a new national identity.

“Renaming is necessary”

Soon after the war began, 15-year-old Sergey Sokol moved from Dnipro to Lviv. His family has relatives here, and they helped find a place for the new family to stay. They settled on Tolstoy Street.

Mr. Sokol loves Lviv’s old city, with narrow streets and aged buildings. Speaking to the Monitor last month, wearing a yellow backpack and jean shorts, he’d just visited the city’s centuries-old graveyard, where members of the Ukrainian resistance army rest.

“Renaming is necessary for me,” he says of his street. While Lviv was Polish territory for much of its history, he says, not all empires treated Ukrainian culture the same way. Their place names should honor those who helped build Ukraine, not destroy it.

“If a country doesn’t have its history, it’s not a country,” says Mr. Sokol. “People just want to forget [Russian rule] like it was a bad dream.”

Reporting for this story was supported by Oleksandr Naselenko in Lviv.