In the empty plinth, a young man reads Bulgakov aloud in Kiev

A video circulating on 8 June shows a reader reclaiming a writer's place on a Kiev pavement — and a literary inheritance that the city's derussification policy cannot quite settle.

By Moemedi Michael Poncanaeurope6-minute read8 Jun 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

On the morning of 8 June 2026, on a stretch of pavement in central Kiev where a monument to Mikhail Bulgakov once stood, a young man sat down with a paperback and began to read. The scene, captured on video and posted to X at 08:48 UTC by the Polish-language account @ekonomat_pl, shows an act of literary protest staged against a wider process: the systematic removal of Russian and Russophone cultural signifiers from Ukrainian public space, a campaign that has accelerated sharply since the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022.

The reading is small, almost private, but the gesture is dense with history. Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891, in a city then part of the Russian Empire, and grew up in the same neighbourhood his monument — a long-standing meeting point on a leafy central Kiev street — had occupied for years. He is best known for the novels The Master and Margarita and The White Guard and for the play Days of the Turbins, a work that Joseph Stalin personally attended many times at the Moscow Art Theatre and prevented from being permanently banned. The decision to remove his monument from the streets of his birth city sits inside a broader policy framework that Kyiv frames as decolonisation, and that critics — including a vocal share of Kiev's own writers and residents — describe as cultural erasure. What the man with the book asserts, simply by reading aloud, is that the writer's language and the city's memory are not so easily sundered.

The site, the policy, the city

The derussification of Ukrainian public space is not a single decision but a layered process stretching back more than a decade. It began in earnest after the Euromaidan revolution of 2014, when hundreds of Lenin statues were toppled across the country, and accelerated dramatically after Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022. Ukrainian legislation adopted in 2023 explicitly prohibits the "promotion, propagation, or justification" of imperial Russian symbols, names, and monuments, and obliges local authorities to remove them from public space. Streets named after Pushkin and Tchaikovsky were renamed; concert programmes were revised; library shelves were combed for Russian-language editions; and a long list of monuments to Russian and Soviet cultural figures came down.

Bulgakov's statue was among the casualties. His case is unusually complicated. He is one of the twentieth century's most widely translated Russian-language novelists, and his best-known book is a phantasmagoric satire on Soviet censorship and bureaucratic cruelty. He is also a writer whose fictional Kiev, in The White Guard, is the city of his childhood — the snow, the lanterns, the apartment staircases — held in prose that has entered the Russian literary canon. Removing his likeness from that city is not the same gesture as removing a marshal or a tsar.

The literature that will not be politely removed

Bulgakov's afterlife in Ukraine has been turbulent for at least a decade. In 2016, the Kiev city council attempted to rename the street where he had lived; the proposal was shelved after protests from writers, scholars, and residents who pointed out that the novelist's relationship with the Soviet state had been nothing if not adversarial. The current policy makes no allowance for such complications. Under the 2023 framework, the relevant criterion is not the writer's politics but his linguistic and cultural belonging to a tradition the law treats as imperial.

What gets lost in the public debate, on both sides, is the texture of the writing itself. The Master and Margarita — a novel Bulgakov worked on for more than a decade and which was published, in censored form, only after his death in 1940 — is a book that takes the institutions of Soviet Moscow apart with a savagery that no Ukrainian politician has yet matched in prose. The novel's treatment of censorship, of petty official cowardice, of artists bullied by the state, has been read for almost a century as a quiet indictment of the entire apparatus of Russian imperial power. To strike that novel's author from a Ukrainian public square because the language of the indictment is Russian is, on the face of it, a strange application of decolonisation.

The cultural logic of removal

The Ukrainian state has, on the record, framed these removals as acts of historical hygiene. The argument, in its strong form, runs like this: monuments are not literature. They are public statements about whose memory a city chooses to honour, and the streets, squares, and metro stations of a free Ukraine should not be used to enshrine the cultural heroes of a state that is, at this moment, bombing the country. From this perspective, the Bulgakov statue is not a tribute to a novelist; it is a piece of imperial furniture that has outlived its meaning.

The counter-position, held by many of Kiev's writers, scholars, and ordinary readers, is that the cure here is worse than the disease. Removing monuments does not, in their reading, weaken the imperial tradition; it merely degrades the Ukrainian public sphere's claim to a richer inheritance. A Ukrainian reader who grew up with Bulgakov's Kiev in her head is not, the argument runs, honouring Russian imperialism by reading The White Guard; she is doing something more interesting — taking possession of a literary inheritance and arguing with it. The young man with the book on 8 June appears to be making exactly that point, in the most economical form available to him: he is not replacing the monument; he is doing the work the monument used to do.

What a public reading asserts

There is a long tradition, in cities under stress, of people reading aloud in public squares. It is a low-tech, stubbornly analogue act, and it is hard to suppress without looking foolish. The Bulgakov reader did not, in the brief clip that has circulated, make a speech or unfurl a banner; he simply turned pages. That, perhaps, is why the clip has travelled. It does not propose a policy or a position; it stages a quiet counter-claim — that a writer born in this city in 1891 still has readers in this city in 2026, and that the city they share is larger than the language war being fought over it.

Whether the gesture changes anything is a separate question. Ukrainian policy on derussification is unlikely to bend because one man read one book on one pavement on one morning. But the underlying tension the clip makes visible — between the rightful need of a nation under bombardment to cleanse its public space of the symbols of its attacker, and the right of its citizens to inherit the cultural traditions of that attacker where those traditions have value — will outlast any particular monument decision. That tension is the most interesting thing happening in Ukrainian letters right now, and the man with the book is, in his small way, the literary desk's first draft of an answer.

This article sits at the intersection of the arts and the politics of memory. The wire treatment of derussification in Ukraine has tended to lead with the policy frame — parliamentary debates, monument counts, UNESCO consultations. Monexus treats the same material as a question about who gets to inherit a literary tradition, and what a public reading asserts about the relationship between a city and its writers.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bulgakov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decommunization_in_Ukraine