In the courtyard of Odesa’s Fine Arts Museum, a police officer unlocked a large, grey container and pulled back the doors to reveal Catherine the Great. She was laid out flat on a wooden support tray, one arm outstretched as if in indignation and the other at her side, holding a scroll ordering the construction of Odesa.
The Russian empress, or rather her bronze likeness, used to stand proudly on a pedestal in the heart of the city that she founded in the late 18th century. Now she is here, locked in a box away from public view.
The removal of Catherine, unthinkable before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, is a reflection of the mood in a city that is rapidly losing all sentimentality about the Russian-linked pages of its past as it comes under sustained fire from Russian missiles.
Odesa’s mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, was once strongly in favour of keeping Catherine in place, but changed his mind late last year amid public pressure and agreed to her removal.
“How could I explain to parents who have lost their children or children who have lost their parents why there is a Russian empress standing in the middle of our city?” he asked, in an interview at the city administration building.
Catherine’s removal is just one part of a programme of “de-Russification” that is going on all over Ukraine. It has a particular hue in Odesa, where it is not only the figure of Catherine that binds the historical and cultural landscape to Moscow. Many of the great Russian-language writers were from Odesa or spent time there, its residents largely speak Russian and its Transfiguration Cathedral was consecrated by Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, in 2010.
But now, President Putin is swiftly accomplishing something that 30 years of Ukrainian independence had previously struggled to do: he is turning Odesa into a proudly Ukrainian city.
A barrage of missile attacks over the past two weeks, the first time the centre of the city has been significantly damaged since the start of the war, is likely to only accelerate this process.
“Before the war, few people thought it was a good idea to pull down Catherine. But with every Russian missile that falls, the number of people who want to get rid of all this heritage gets higher and higher,” said Oleksandr Babich, a local historian who runs a volunteer organisation providing equipment to the Ukrainian army.
Trukhanov was himself long considered to be pro-Russian, and was even accused of having a secret Russian passport, but since the war started he has rebranded as a staunch Ukrainian patriot. Last Sunday, after missiles struck historic sights across the city, including the cathedral, he addressed Russians in a video.
“If you only knew how much Odesa hates you, not just hates you but despises you,” he said in Russian, face contorted with fury.
Many others who harboured pro-Russian sympathies have also been shocked out of them by the events of the past 18 months, and particularly the past two weeks.
In 2010, Kirill visited Odesa to consecrate the newly reconstructed Cathedral. Myroslav Vdodovych, then a young priest in the branch of Ukrainian Orthodoxy that answered to the Moscow patriarchate, was present at the service.
Thirteen years later, Vdodovych, now the cathedral’s head priest, stood wide-eyed, surveying the wreckage of the building that was hit during a Russian missile strike last weekend. He mused on the horrors of Russia’s war on Ukraine, which has been enthusiastically supported by the man he used to consider his spiritual leader.
“If people don’t respect sacred things, they are not people. The things Patriarch Kirill has said are against humanity,” he said. Later, during a service outside the damaged building, he burst into tears. Kirill’s name, etched in gold lettering onto a marble tablet at the entrance to the church, has been blocked out using white tape.
Babich said it was important to remember that while Odesa’s roots might be formally Russian, it has always been an international city. “Even in imperial Russia, it was the most anti-imperial city; cosmopolitan, open to the world and largely run by foreigners,” he said. The first city’s governor was French; the first newspaper was printed in Italian. At various times, the city bred Greek, Bulgarian and Zionist revolutionaries.
This history of rebelliousness also explains why the city’s loyalties were regarded with suspicion by many elsewhere in Ukraine. “It was never fully imperial, never fully Soviet and of course it has long been resistant to becoming just another Ukrainian city too,” said Babich. “But that is changing now,” he added.
One of the more visible elements of the battle against Russian heritage is a Ukraine-wide programme to rename streets, which have, over the years, reflected the frequent political upheaval that has come to this part of Europe. Catherine Square, where the monument to the empress previously stood, has been called Karl Marx Square and Adolf Hitler Square within living memory.
Now, many names are to be changed again, with Russian-influenced names replaced by Ukrainian names or simply topographical markers. In Odesa, a local council committee has regular meetings to discuss where changes should be made.
Even now, there is rather more tolerance here towards some Russian names than in many other Ukrainian cities. Many staunch Ukrainian patriots are in favour of leaving a few Russian street names, notably Pushkin Street, given that the Russian poet lived in Odesa for a year, and wrote many verses there.
“There were more than 200 streets named after Russian cities, writers and emperors, I don’t see a problem if we leave five of them, where there are real links to Odesa,” said Peter Obukhov, a local councillor.
“Pushkin lived in Odesa, Pushkin wrote in Odesa, this is part of our history too,” said Trukhanov.
How to disentangle this shared cultural heritage will be a question for many years to come. At the Fine Arts museum, the large collection of Russian and Ukrainian art was stripped from the walls on the first day of the invasion and put into storage at a secret location to avoid it being looted in the event of Russian occupation.
For now, the museum houses an impressive temporary exhibit of contemporary Ukrainian art reflecting on different experiences of the war. But when the war ends, the question will arise of what to do with the permanent collection. It includes plenty of ideologically tinged art, including a portrait of Catherine in the collection that was used as a backdrop in the Kremlin ceremony annexing several Ukrainian regions last year.
“We can say for sure that the collection is going to be very different when it reopens to what it was before,” said Kateryna Kulai, the museum’s acting director.
Cyrill Lipatov, the head of the museum’s scientific department, said he was against the idea of simply removing ideologically problematic works from the walls. “We don’t need to take everything down. We can curate these works to show how art used its instruments to support the ideological narratives that we are fighting against,” he said.
As for the Catherine monument boxed up in the courtyard, Lipatov suggested creative solutions could work here, too.
“I very much like the ‘fourth pedestal’ concept from Trafalgar Square. I’d like to invite different artists here to create rotating installations inside the museum using the monument as a base … it would be an opportunity to play with this history, to think about it properly,” he said.
