One institution that has largely resisted industrial degradation and violence in almost every town of eastern Ukraine is the local museum (called Kraeznavchiy Museum in Ukrainian). Kraeznavchiy museums are one of the backbones of the education system and a key institution when it comes to building a sense of attachment and identity. But how can these museums deal with the violence of the past years? How does the war in Donbas fit in along with stuffed animals, archaeological troves and Soviet heroes of labour? Does something that is not heroic or beautiful have a place in the museum at all?
Since violence broke out in Donbas in the spring of 2014, many local museums have freed up a corner in one of their exhibition halls to make space for exhibits that document the ongoing war with Russian-backed separatists. Often the museums are gifted the items on display by soldiers and former volunteer fighters. This is one of the reasons why the conflict is illuminated mainly from a military viewpoint. Most such exhibitions sport exploded shells, camouflage nets, disused weapons, military badges and the portraits of deceased soldiers.
On the lookout for places to organize an exhibition about human rights violations committed in the course of the war, representatives of the Eastern Ukrainian Centre for Civic Initiatives have visited museums in Slavainsk, Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, Izyum, Pokrovsk, and Dnipro.
Curators and workers of the museums to whom we spoke have told us that people in their towns are sick of the topic already. One reoccurring message was that if people come to a museum, they want to see beauty and life.
In Izyum and Dnipro, we also encountered museum workers with a very different opinion; that people who live near the contact line feel forgotten and want to be reminded that something unprecedented has happened in their region. They feel that what has happened will need further investigation and discussion, a discussion that should be held first and foremost among the people who endured violence through the conflict.
Local museums are in most cases state institutions subordinated to municipal or oblast departments of culture. They are, however, open to collaborating with non-state actors such as local civil society initiatives. This will be an important connection especially when it comes to the representation of the war in Donbas. Not only has the number of civil society organizations grown rapidly, but also, along with the church, civil society organizations and volunteer initiatives are among the most trusted institutions in Ukraine. They enjoy much more trust than the government, the parliament or even the media. Teaming up with civic initiatives has, therefore, become one of the ways local museum engage with the still volatile situation in eastern Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Association of Local Historians, in which many of the local museums join their forces, explicitly states the goal to engage with the present and to collaborate with civic initiatives. The museum workers to whom we spoke agree that dealing with an ongoing war was much more difficult than most other topics local historians come across.
Their deep roots in local communities as well as in Oblast and city structures make local museums a logical player in education and identity building. Human rights violations, on the contrary, are not a typical subject of Kraeznavstvo. The scarce display space in museums is usually dedicated largely to achievements, not to suffering. Human beings appear in the Museum usually once they have committed great deeds or have died for a noble cause, not after they have become the victims of a violent conflict. Every Kraeznavchiy museum, even in the remotest of towns, celebrates the life and times of one of the city’s sons or daughters, who has made a name for him or herself in the world. The lives and actions of simple people are usually considered museum-worthy only after a hundred years have passed. Then the tools that they have worked with and the clothes they wore have acquired sufficient exoticism to be displayed in the museum.
What if we would start to look at human rights as a tool that people work with to enhance their lives, not so much different from the arrow heads and wooden ploughs of earlier generations? A tool that will hopefully look to our descendants as self-explanatory and primitive as the agricultural tools of a century ago look to us now. With such an attitude to human rights, they would appear as one of the technologies people adopted at a certain period. The process how this technology was fine-tuned and its achievements were defended, would produce many interesting exhibits, like the fight of citizens to regain their property lost in the war or the story how parents insisted on their children’s rights to an education even while they were sheltering from grenades in the basement.
The collaboration of state and non-state actors in the local museum would provide very good preconditions to display human rights violations as they occur in the war. If we manage to show the protective effect of human rights through the example of individual stories, their value and use will become just as clear as the use of artifacts that previous generations created to make their lives easier. It is time to make human rights a museum-worthy exhibit and for the people who stand up for them to appear alongside the heroes of war and labour of past centuries.
On November 1, 2018, the Ukrainian Ministry for the Currently Occupied Territories and Internally...
Stepan Chubenko, a 16 year old youth from Kramatorsk believed in justice and he was an ardent...
The Soviet period was destructive on Ukrainian culture in Donbas. The peopling of the region with...
On October 2 at 16:00 in Poltava Art Museum human rights defenders presented the publication "City, where the war had started" about...
On October 2 at 16:00 in Poltava Art Museum human rights defenders will present the publication "City, where the war had started" ab...
Interactive exhibition of testimonies "On the Rift" about the violation of rights of civilians during the war in Donbas was presente...
The Secretariat of the Coalition «Justice for Peace in Donbas»
04060, Kyiv, Ryzhska str., 73 G