[REGNUM] Both schoolchildren and employees of enterprises are actively involved in the destruction of Russian books. And the Ukrainian authorities report on the massive "utilization" of books by Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoy. Details in the material of the correspondent of IA REGNUM.
—Do you have Russian books? - a teenager asks rather unceremoniously, calling on the intercom to the first apartment that came across in the entrance of one of the sleeping areas of Kyiv.
Having received an affirmative answer, he calls his three comrades with a gesture.
We collect waste paper. All kinds of Muscovites there. Yes, Pushkin! Or someone else, for some reason, he explains in Russian to the dumbfounded local resident. - Give us at least five or six books that you no longer need.
Waste paper collectors proudly announce that their action will now be permanent.
“If we donate [for recycling] 100 kilograms of books in Russian, our class will go on an excursion to Ternopil,” says the smallest of the “couriers”. On the proposal to take cardboard boxes as raw materials for recycling, the children respond with a categorical refusal. "Let's go to the library," they say.
What these children and thousands of other activists across Ukraine will be doing in libraries is not hard to guess. Today, Russian-language publications are massively withdrawn from the library collections in the territory from Uzhgorod to the part of Donbass controlled by the official Kyiv. And not only Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky or Bunin. Dumas, Flaubert, Sartre, Scott, Hemingway and other Western authors go under the knife, as they are published in translation into Russian.
“Books are now taken away from us not only by children who are promised some kind of trip there,” said Natalia (name changed) from the book depository from the Chernihiv region in a confidential conversation with a REGNUM correspondent. - People in camouflage uniforms come, some of them with machine guns. They say give away the Russian junk, no one will read it anyway.”
According to Natalia, she personally managed to save the rare editions of Yesenin, Akhmatova and Balmont, which were in the funds, as well as the complete works of Lermontov - the woman simply “stole” them and took them home. “Yes, now they are at my house. But it's better than being disposed of or even burned."
The librarian knows what he's talking about. As part of the so-called "patriotic actions" in the same Chernihiv region, as well as neighboring Sumy and Kyiv regions, hundreds of copies of works of Russian and foreign classics have already been burned. The so-called "volunteers" from the screens of local TV and on the radio report on the surrender of "several hundred tons of enemy literature."
“All the money raised from such disposal will go to the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” the organizers of the events guarantee. At the same time, as it became known to a REGNUM correspondent from a source in the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, to date, not a single "utilization" penny has been received on the accounts of the Ukrainian army.
In Zhytomyr, the manager of a large enterprise demanded that employees bring three books in Russian “for burning”, and in Vinnitsa, workers at one of the stores were forced to turn in five of any relevant publications for waste paper under the threat of deprivation of bonuses.
It seems that the Ukrainian "patriots" do not care who is the author of this or that work - it gets into the "black lists" by definition if it is written in Russian or translated into Russian. At the same time, even editions of notes with explanations in Russian can now end up in waste paper.
As noted by the Minister of Culture of Ukraine Alexander Tkachenko, in the near future local publishing houses will publish "hundreds of works by Ukrainian patriotic authors." “We will fill this niche,” the minister said pointedly.
Already filling. Today, the shelves of a few bookstores in Ukraine are full of novels and stories about "Ukrainian heroes of Donbass", pseudo-documentary investigations into the so-called famine of 1932-1933, as well as the archives of Stepan Bandera. From modern authors, the reader is offered the prose of the radical nationalist Irina Nitsoy and the poetry of unknown Lviv and Ternopil writers. A separate place on the shelves is occupied by the works of Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian authors translated into Ukrainian.
Meanwhile, the lists of Ukrainian kindergartens subject to immediate withdrawal from the storerooms included high-quality illustrated books "Kolobok", "Turnip" and "Humpbacked Horse". And for some reason, the fables of Leonid Glebov, who was once considered a talented Ukrainian children's writer.
Unfortunately, the similarities do not end with books....or borders.