[...] With unprecedented zealotry in implementation of what they believe is their new cultural and ideological identity, Ukrainian authorities did not find a better solution than ‘black lists’. They are enthusiastically blacklisting everything and everyone now – people, books, films. Those lists are telling, too.
The new Ukrainian authorities have 554 people on their black list of cultural personalities, mostly Russians, but also Steven Segal and Gerard Depardieu, and even the American boxer Roy Joyce Jr. who opted to move to Russia. Blacklisted writers, artists, actors and singers are officially declared by new Ukraine as ‘imposing a threat to its national security’. The Ukrainian authorities do know how to amuse effortlessly, it seems. Many of those very dangerous people are in their 60s, 70s and 80s; they had been the most prolific culture figures for millions of viewers and listeners for decades.
The films with all those enemies of Ukraine, including Segal and Depardieu, are banned too, of course. The French star laughed at the ban and thanked the Ukrainian authorities for what in his view is an honour.
In comparison, the white list of those whom they listed as their friends contains 34 names. Some of them, like the famous Russian actor and poet of Jewish origin Valentin Gaft, has declared that he had been white listed without his knowledge and is officially asking the Ukrainian authorities to black-list him, please. Another, the cult Soviet and Russian satirist writer Mikhail Zhvanezki, also of Jewish origin, has stated that “he is stunned by the decision, and does not quite know how to treat it, to cry or to laugh.”
The new Ukrainian authorities’ attacks on literature and cinema are unprecedented for the beginning of the XXI century. In June 2015, the Ukrainian State Cinema committee proudly reported that “while they banned 161 films in previous months, by now the figure is 384”. The ban has been carried out following the special law passed by the Ukrainian parliament in February 2015, and followed by another special decree of the president in June 2015. The law has banned for good the films produced by Russia from 1991 onward and having anything to do with police, army, special forces, etc. , including practically all films on the Second World War, on the First World War, and many historical ones. The presidential decree has banned all Russian film production from 2014 onward, including cartoons.
They are banning books and banning writers en masse and they are banning the film versions of their own Gogol – who wrote in Russian and escaped from his place of birth first to St Petersburg and then to Italy, and their own Bulgakov for ‘unfavourable depiction’ of Ukrainians. [...]
