The young Ukrainian philosopher Anton Drobovych has been appointed head of Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory, replacing Volodymyr Viatrovych a historian known for his nationalist views. Drobovych won the job after an official competition, and was appointed to the post on 4 December by Ukraine's cabinet of ministers. Viatrovych has described his successor's appointment as “a U-turn”: unlike Vyatrovich, one of the drivers of the move towards decommunisation, Drobovych proposes “creative decommunisation” – in other words, not an eradication of the USSR’s legacy but the creation of new research centres to reinterpret and preserve Ukraine's Soviet heritage.
One such centre, according to Drobovich, could be the I.D. Bukhanchuk Art Museum in Kmytiv, Zhytomyr region, whose collection was formed in the 1970-80s. In 2019 the contemporary art historian Yevhen Molyar, together with artists Nikita Kadan and Lev Trotsenko, began working on modernising the museum's collection to broaden its appeal. Kadan spent about a year working as Drobovych’s research deputy and ran a series of exhibitions under the heading of “Movements in the Making”, which brought a large number of artistic issues to the fore and revealed the enduring relevance of the Soviet context to today's Ukraine. For a while, Kmytiv even became the focal point of the intelligentsia of Ukraine's capital Kyiv, drawing Drobovych’s attention and interest in working with the museum. However, this work with contemporary artists and curators drew criticism from conservative groups, in particular the Svoboda and Samopomich political parties, whose members threatened museum staff and curators. Consequently, the museum’s leadership put their experiments on hold and reverted their old ways of work.
Kateryna Iakovlenko spoke to Anton Drobovich about his work with history and memory, what creative decommunisation might look like, and his thoughts on memorialising Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kyiv where Nazi occupiers massacred nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women, and children in 1941.
