Monuments and streets of Bulgakov fall under the law on decolonization, – conclusion of the UINP

The subject of the examination was the compliance of objects dedicated to Bulgakov with the requirements of the Law of Ukraine “On the condemnation and prohibition of propaganda of Russian imperial policy in Ukraine and the decolonization of toponymy.”

The examination notes:

Mikhail Bulgakov is an imperialist in his worldview, an ardent Ukrainophobe (a Ukrainophobe, according to the Great Explanatory Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language is “an adversary, a hater of Ukrainians and everything Ukrainian”). The writer, despite years of living in Kyiv, despised Ukrainians and their culture, hated the Ukrainian desire for independence, and spoke negatively about the formation of the Ukrainian state and its leaders. Of all the Russian writers of that time, he stands closest to the current ideologists of Putinism and the Kremlin’s justification of ethnocide in Ukraine. In his worldview he was in the position of Russian imperialism, White Guardism, and approved of the expansion of Russian communism.

In 1919, he deserted from the UPR army, where he was mobilized as a military doctor and joined the Volunteer Army solely for reasons of his own devotion to monarchism and the Russian Empire. Later mild criticism of the Soviet regime did not interfere with his sympathies for the Bolsheviks (he sang admiration for the Reds of Kyiv and the destruction of fighters for Ukraine – the “vile Petliurites”) and admiration for I. Stalin.

His obsessively declared disdain for Ukraine was rooted in the fact that his family was sent to Kyiv from the Oryol province for colonial activities. My father, a Russian theologian, teacher at the Kyiv Theological Academy, was a censor and was involved in the oppression of Ukrainian culture. His son continued his conscious strategy of blocking the right of the Ukrainian nation to take a separate path from Russia.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s tendencies are expressive – the ideological accents of his prose indicate the author’s bias towards the Ukrainian world. From the standpoint of Russian megalomania and defending a single indivisible empire, he does not present a single positive Ukrainian character in his works, parodies or mockingly distorts the Ukrainian language, laughs at the Ukrainian autocephalous church, and denies the very existence of the Ukrainian nation. The anti-Ukrainian content of the play “Days of the Turbins” was noted by domestic artists back in February 1929 at the congress of Soviet Ukrainian and Russian writers in Moscow.

M. Bulgakov’s reconstruction of the real events of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1921 in the story “On the Night of the 3rd” (1922) occurs from the position of an outspoken enemy of Ukrainians, Ukrainian statehood and language. The grotesque image of the soldiers of the 1st Regiment of the Blue Division, their uniform and appearance, parodic scenes of communication, and the author’s clearly declared hatred have a pronounced anti-Ukrainian orientation – almost propaganda. And in the novel “The White Guard,” through the mouth of Alexei Turbin, Mikhail Bulgakov presents his attitude towards the head of the Ukrainian State, Hetman Pavel Skoropadsky: “I would hang your hetman… for the organization of this nice little Ukraine! Long live Vilna Ukraine, view of Kyiv to Berlin! For six months he mocked Russian officers, mocked all of us. Who banned the formation of the Russian army? Hetman. Who terrorized the Russian population with this vile language, which does not exist in the world? Hetman. Who started all this scum with tails on their heads? Hetman”. Bulgakov’s descriptions of the soldiers of the UPR Army (“Petliurists”) are the source of their later caricatures in the communist press, and after the writer’s complete rehabilitation in the USSR, his texts, which supported the paradigm of Russian chauvinism, significantly contributed to the formation of the anti-Ukrainian campaign. Russian-Ukrainian war.

The inhumane discourse of the story “I Killed” (1926) fully resonates with the narratives of current Kremlin propagandists Dugin, Solovyov, Skabeeva and is the prototext of today’s calls for the extermination of Ukrainians. The story contains the ideology of fascism: a wounded Ukrainian military doctor is killed only for his nationality by the character-doctor, his alter Bulgakov. The author, a doctor by profession, artistically approaches the moment of murder and, guided by the idea of ​​ethnocide, proves an absurd thesis: the medical oath, the Hippocratic code, can be transgressed.

Bulgakov’s family imprinting due to the censor, who devotedly served the cause of banning the Ukrainian language, determined the fact that the writer and his circle did not recognize the existence of the Ukrainian language. The “vile language”, “outlandish”, “wrong”, “funny” Ukrainian language irritated them, and the so-called positive heroes of Bulgakov’s texts deliberately mocked it. In the 19th chapter of the magazine, the early edition of “The White Guard” (1925), it is said that the Ukrainian language was invented by V. Vinnichenko, that “no devil spoke” in this language. The well-known copy of this formula “Ukraine was invented by Lenin” and other similar slogans are implanted in the consciousness of the population of different countries. Bulgakov is one of those who laid the foundation for the current ideological manipulations with his denial of the existence of millions of Ukrainians, Ukrainian literature and culture.

The chauvinist writer also discredits the kobzar tradition: with a scene at St. Sophia Cathedral with a disgustingly devastating description of Ukrainian songs and their performers, he denies humanistic values ​​in general. M. Bulgakov and Nobelists J. Brodsky (“For the Independence of Ukraine”), A. Solzhenitsyn (“How Can We Build Russia”) abandoned humanism as soon as they came to the Ukrainian question.

Bulgakov’s attitude in general towards all Ukrainians, even those to whom he owed his well-established life, is openly disdainful. Thus, in “The White Guard,” the prototype of one of the characters is the Ukrainian Vasily Listovnichy, the owner of the house on Andreevsky Spusk, which the Bulgakovs rented. Portrayed as a bourgeois, an opportunist, a greedy coward, he appears too far from the person of Listovnichy. His daughter, Inna Listovnicha, was indignant and protested against such a caricatured portrait of her father. The writer did not find a kind word for homeowners and Kyiv intellectuals. Despite the fact that it is in Listovnichy’s house that there is a museum of his antagonist – the one who declared hatred of the democratic Ukrainian state, created negative stereotypes of “Petliurites”, propaganda cliches on language and culture, and thus supported and justified Russian imperial policy.

So, Mikhail Bulgakov had a biased and clearly negative attitude towards everything Ukrainian – Ukrainians, their language, culture, the right to their own state, etc., and his work is directly related to the glorification of Russian imperial policy and undisguised Ukrainophobia. The assignment of his name to geographical objects, names of legal entities, objects of toponymy, as well as the establishment of monuments and memorial signs in his honor in Ukraine was the embodiment of Russification – a component of Russian imperial policy aimed at imposing the use of the Russian language, promoting Russian culture as superior, compared to other national languages ​​and cultures, displacement of the Ukrainian language from use, narrowing of the Ukrainian cultural and information space.