Kharkiv is one of the cities in Ukraine eliminating traces of the country's Soviet past by removing Russian art, symbols, books and language.
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00:00 Few cities in Ukraine are making as much effort as Kharkiv, a city with a Russian-speaking
00:05 tradition to erase their past. Hundreds of streets with Soviet names have been renamed.
00:10 Dozens of monuments demolished and countless books written in Ukrainian have replaced Russian
00:15 ones on bookshelves.
00:16 "For people, it's like a psychotherapeutic act, these books perform. That is, a person
00:24 is protected by reading that there is Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian art, there is a state
00:31 Ukraine, that there are prominent artists, artists, architects, sculptors, public figures
00:39 among Ukrainians. That is, all this is about us. In fact, in order to gain this identity,
00:48 people buy these books."
00:51 Kharkiv was traditionally a majority Russian-speaking city, but the outbreak of war caused many
00:56 citizens to turn to Ukrainian.
00:58 "I would say something in Russian, but it's like something unpleasant in the mouth, like
01:05 something rotten."
01:14 After a year and a half of war, it's difficult to hold a calm debate on the use of the invader's
01:18 language.
01:19 "I don't know, people lived here with this Russian language. Sometimes it was strongly
01:24 imposed. And it happened that, by their own will, not by their own will, people spoke
01:31 Russian to a greater extent. And if we talk about the fact that it was often done by force,
01:38 the settlement of the Russian language here, I doubt that it should be used as forcibly
01:43 as it is. Then we are no different from each other."
01:47 Fueled by Russian bombs and by Ukrainian authorities, the war has accelerated a de-Russification
01:52 process that began after the fall of the Soviet Union.
01:57 "We are not afraid. We are not afraid."
02:00 (whooshing)