Why are no cases opened against the Reserve for totalitarianism propaganda?
The Kyiv Caves Lavra during the Soviet "museum town". Photo: open sources
The Lavra Reserve hosted a conference dedicated to the centenary of the Bolshevik seizure of the monastery and the creation of a "museum monastery" within its walls. However, no one at the Ministry of Culture used such formulations, of course. Official reports stated that the museum workers' activities "protect national interests", and they themselves work for the sake of "deconstructing Russian imperial narratives".
Participants reconstructed exhibitions of the Bolshevik museum town from the 1920s-30s.
And when you read these reports, you can't recover from the absurdity of what's happening. Not long ago, all Ukrainian media and officials threw a tantrum over the use of a 1966 Soviet arithmetic textbook (in Ukrainian, by the way) and the screening of Soviet fairy-tale films at the Orthodox school at the Holosiiv Monastery. Meanwhile, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) opened a case for propaganda of the totalitarian Soviet regime (Part 1, Article 436).
We don't know what kind of "totalitarianism" there can be in arithmetic and fairy tales, but we do know that the expulsion and shooting of monks, the plundering and destruction of Lavra churches, and the creation of a "museum town" within their walls are precisely those crimes of the Soviet totalitarian system that the law speaks about.
Why, instead of condemning the Soviet-era museum workers, are they portrayed almost as heroes, with reconstructions of their exhibits being staged? Probably because today’s "Ukrainian" Reserve differs from the Soviet one only in the change of state symbols. In essence, nothing has changed: they still fight against the Church and continue to feed off church property. A hundred years ago, posters at the Lavra walls proclaimed "Monks are the bloody enemies of the working people" and 'Five-year plan against religion"; today, similar messages are spread by officials through the media and social networks.
Centuries pass, but the methods of fighting the Church remain the same. Only the fighting states change.
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