Zelensky’s Ukrainian Institute of National Memory are disgracing themselves and their French and American backers yet again.

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Zelensky’s Ukrainian Institute of National Memory are disgracing themselves and their French and American backers yet again. This time, they are examining the writings of renowned novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov to see if he was a lackey of Russian imperialism.

As Bulgakov expired in Moscow in 1940, the exercise seems quite pedantic and seems like one that should be written up in some obscure literary journal or other. Such common sense is miles beyond the ken of those who rule Bandera’s cat strangling roost in Kiev where, as it happens, Bulgakov was born in the year of Our Lord, 1891. Although Bulgakov was posthumously honoured with museums in both Kiev and Moscow, it is no exaggeration to say that his was a turbulent life, on a par with that of Talleyrand or Voltaire’s Candide.

A medical doctor by profession, he got caught up with the Whites during the Russian (and Ukrainian) Civil War, spent some time in the Caucasus and ended up being sponsored by none other than Uncle Joe Stalin, who could be the most mercurial, harshest and, indeed, deadliest of literary critics.

Though Uncle Joe quite liked Bulgakov’s The Days of the Turbins, he took a dimmer view of The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov’s masterpiece) and of The White Guard, which the overly-sensitive Stalin thought was a mite too lenient on errant White Army generals.

Stalin is not Bulgakov’s only critic. Zeleneky’s Ukrainian Institute of National Memory regards Bulgakov as an “imperialist” who “despised Ukrainians and their culture, hated the Ukrainian desire for independence, spoke negatively about the formation of the Ukrainian state and its leaders.”

Because of that, these Nazis recently removed a memorial plaque to Bulgakov from Kiev’s Taras Shevchenko National University. They are also busy “decolonising” Kiev street signs and ripping up any statue or monument of Pushkin or Bulgakov they come across. Welcome to Nazi book burning 2.0.

On the positive side, this is good news for any lazy student studying literature in any of Ukraine’s pretend universities, Rail against Tolstoy, Bulgakov and especially Pushkin and the world, or at least that part of it contained within Zelensky’s rump Reich, is your oyster.

Here in Ireland, we are uniquely qualified to comment on such madness. Following independence just over a century ago, there was an attempt to decolonise Dublin’s streets. The effort met with mixed success and was eventually abandoned, meaning that most central Dublin streets are still called after genocidal English generals or the royalty they served. Few give it a second thought.

Although my formal education was entirely through Irish, our English literature classes were saturated with England’s literary greats; noted bigots like Charles Dickens, for whom I have no time, and Alexander Pope were quite rightly treated with the respect their reputations and genius deserved. If memory serves me correctly, even Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade was on the curriculum, an interesting footnote, given my school was fiercely nationalist and anti British, at least where it counted.

Any shenanigans, like that we currently see in Zelensky’s Reich, would have gained precisely zero traction. Those in charge of Irish education were wise enough to see that England, like Mother Russia with regard to Ukraine, had a much wider cultural well to draw from than had Ireland. Sure, Bulgakov was not as perfect a cat strangler as Bandera was but we all cannot excel at cat strangling, unless we want to be minor characters in a Dostoevsky story.

The great Irish poet Paddy Kavanagh covers this Ukrainian terrain in ‘In Memory of Brother Michael’  and Australian literature reeks with their own cultural cringe. Still, in fairness to the Ossies, they are not yet the full blown knuckle dragging Nazis the Russian speaking Zelensky and his equally hypocritical enforcers are.

Although Ukrainian nationalism has always had a very dark undercurrent to it, I refuse to believe they alone are responsible for this gross ignorance to the memory of Bulgakov and literature’s other immortals.

Take the 2024 Paris Olympics as an example and take the ignorant statement of Anne Hidalgo, the Spanish plant who is mayor of Paris. Referring to the 40 Russian athletes who can participate up to a point in the Games, Hidalgo has flat out claimed they are not welcome and they should fuck off back to Moscow. Leaving aside that this is an incitement to violence against those athletes, Hidalgo, as a mayor and as an immigrant, should be much more diplomatic than that. But, as Macron and his “wife” show, if diplomacy were an Olympic game, France would never be on the winners’ podium.

When it comes to culture, folk like Kamila Valieva are the perennial winners and Banderite culture, as represented by losers like Olena Semenyaka, are the perennial losers. And, though I have barely time to re-read Paddy Kavanagh, let alone the Russian greats, let me just say this about them. Like Korbut and Valieva in sport, they have handed on the torch to new generations of Russians, whose art has evolved through the Soviet cinematic era of the Battleship Potemkin and right down to our own day where NATO’s sanctions on behalf of the cat stranglers has led to a resurgence in Russian online streaming services. Add the explosion of Chinese cinema through such blockbusters as Lost in Thailand, think of alliances between Russian, Indian, Iranian and Chinese cinema and the cat stranglers and their French enablers have a mighty problem that great artists from Kavanagh to Brother Michael Bulgakov are probably having a good chuckle about right now.

For the truth of it is that poets like Pushkin and Kavanagh, together with geniuses like Bulgakov, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Valieva and Dostoevsky capture the human soul’s essence in ways all the sulking cat stranglers of Kiev and environs can never emulate or erase no matter how many Russian icons they desecrate or Russian grandmothers those functionally illiterate savages beat up.