The writer Isaac Babel is memorialized in the act of creative thinking, eyes on the horizon and pen resting on a stack of paper, in a bronze statue in downtown Odesa — his home city on Ukraine’s Black Sea shore.
The statue may soon be dismantled. To Ukrainian authorities, it is a threat that must be eliminated under a so-called decolonization law ordering the removal of “symbols of Russian imperial politics” to protect Ukrainian culture. The law ensnared the statue of Babel, who served in the Soviet Red Army and built part of his literary career in Russia early last century.
The planned removal has prompted strong pushback from many Odesa residents. They argue that in his classic “Odessa Stories” and elsewhere, Babel’s writings about the city’s Jewish heritage and its gritty world of smugglers and artists of every ethnicity helped make Odesa famous and showcased its multicultural identity.
Much as they oppose Russia’s war, they fear that the law will erase Odesa’s character. “You can’t remove Babel,” said Antonina Poletti, 41, the editor of a local news outlet and a sixth-generation Odesan. “If you remove him, you remove the soul of the city.”
The city is already enduring the ordeal of Russia’s invasion, with drones and missiles hitting it every other night. Now a cultural battle is dividing Odesa, with the Babel statue a flashpoint. The spark was the decolonization law, which was part of a broader effort in wartime Ukraine to sever ties with Russian heritage and build an identity free of its influence.
On the surface, the cultural dispute seems like any other dividing cities around the world. Political opponents seizing the issue to score points. University professors dismissing each other’s work. Street activists defacing statues. Local elites appealing to international cultural organizations.
But both sides say the outcome of the culture dispute in Odesa has outsize importance. Odesa was founded under the Russian empire and is home to a largely Russian-speaking population. The debate will shape the nation’s postwar identity and whether it is focused on Ukrainian roots and stripped of Russian influences, or embraces a broader, multicultural heritage.
“Odesa is a test for Ukraine,” said Artem Kartashov, an Odesa lawyer and backer of the decolonization law. “It’s a test of how we fight Russian influences — how we are fighting them now, and how we plan to fight them in the future.”
The decolonization law is the latest step in Ukraine’s decade-long effort to shed the legacy of its former rulers — first the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union. Previous laws banned Soviet symbols, toppling Lenin statues nationwide, and made Ukrainian the mandatory language in most aspects of public life.
Passed in spring 2023, the decolonization law targets lingering symbols of Russia’s cultural dominance. In most places, the process has unfolded without resistance: More than 25,000 streets and squares have been renamed and more than 1,000 monuments dismantled.
One prominent target has been the 19th-century Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. Censored and exiled under the czarist regime, he was later elevated by Stalin as a cultural icon to promote Russian culture in the Soviet Union, with statues erected across Ukraine. The Kremlin has revived that approach during the current war, plastering his image in the ruins of occupied Mariupol.
But in Odesa, many residents view Pushkin not as a symbol of Russian propaganda, but as the freedom-loving poet who spent a year in exile in their city, where he began work on his masterpiece “Eugene Onegin.” A bust of him, funded by locals in 1889, still towers over a seaside promenade.
Iryna Radian, 57, a French teacher in Odesa, said she supported removing statues of Russian military figures. “But great people and writers — what do they have to do with this?” she asked, standing beside Pushkin’s bust. “I think we need a much more nuanced approach.”
Around her stood monuments reflecting Odesa’s imperial and Soviet past, including the grand Potemkin Stairs, 192 granite steps and 10 landings that descend toward the port. Once a symbol of imperial ambition, they were later immortalized as a site of communist revolt in Sergei Eisenstein’s film “Battleship Potemkin.”
“Whether we like it or not, much of our city’s history is tied to imperial and Soviet periods,” said Ivan Liptuga, the head of the cultural department at Odesa’s City Council. “It’s impossible to erase, ignore or rewrite these facts.”
Mr. Liptuga said the City Council had done its part under the decolonization law, renaming 230 streets honoring Soviet generals and Catherine the Great, the Russian empress who founded Odesa in 1794. That represents one-tenth of Odesa’s streets — enough, Mr. Liptuga said with a smile, for taxi drivers to get lost.
Even before the decolonization law, the city removed a statue of Catherine in late 2022. It now lies horizontally in a metal box in the courtyard of a museum.
But the regional administration, which answers to the president’s office, deemed the effort insufficient: It renamed 83 more streets and designated some 20 monuments for removal, including those honoring Russian-speaking literary figures like Babel and Pushkin.
On a recent visit to Odesa, faint outlines of the removed Pushkin Street plaques were visible on building walls. The street has reverted to its earlier name, Italian Street, a nod to the Italian traders drawn in the 19th century to the city. Other streets were renamed after Ukrainian soldiers who died during Russia’s invasion.
Mr. Liptuga said he found it “incomprehensible” to remove names that “symbolize Odesa’s literary and cultural legacy.”
But Mr. Kartashov, who coordinated the regional administration’s enforcement of the law, pointed to what he called “the dark side” of Babel, including accusations that he had a role in the Soviet secret police and his praise for Soviet collectivization. “He did so much harm to the Ukrainian state,” Mr. Kartashov said.
Gregory Freidin, a Babel expert and Stanford University professor of Slavic languages and literatures, countered that the writer had condemned collectivization and that his involvement with the Soviet secret police remains unproved. Stalin’s forces executed Babel on fabricated charges in 1940.
Still, Mr. Kartashov said, the dominance of figures like Babel in Odesa reflected decades of Russia’s efforts to maintain its cultural influence over Ukraine, while hiding the contribution of other Ukrainian artists and writers. He noted, for example, that there was no statue honoring Lesya Ukrainka, a prominent, Ukrainian-speaking poet who spent time in Odesa.
“Russia has always understood this very well,” Mr. Kartashov said. “They marked Odesa with these monuments so that people would have the impression that the Russian version of Odesa is the right one.”
Opponents of the decolonization law have appealed to UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural agency, arguing that some monuments slated for removal fall under its protection. The agency is expected to deliver its conclusions on the matter this summer.
Supporters of the decolonization push in Odesa see it as a chance to finally rid the city of Russian influences. But erasing all traces of Russian heritage risks alienating Ukrainians who grew up speaking Russian and are steeped in its culture, yet remained loyal to Ukraine when Moscow’s troops invaded, said Ms. Poletti, a Russian speaker and the editor of the English-language Odessa Journal.
“The Ukrainian identity is a civic one, not an ethnic one,” Ms. Poletti said. “If you impose one ethnic model, you will create a big social conflict. I’m scared by this future.”