Tolstoy, Pushkin binned in campaign to ‘de-Russify’ Ukraine

Kyiv: At a recycling plant on the outskirts of Kiev, a short drive from the site of a helicopter crash that killed 14 people (including Ukraine’s interior minister) a week earlier, a group of sorters, most of them women, middle-aged, tearing apart hundreds of Russian books. Tolstoy’s cover Childhood, boyhood and youth, days away from being reborn as a coffee cup cover or an egg carton, goes in one garbage bag. The pages of the novel, destined to end up as paper for other books, in Ukrainian, or as cheap toilet paper, go into another. This is followed by a selection of poems by Mayakovsky. Then a Soviet physics textbook. Then biographies of Pushkin and Dostoevsky. And so forth.

Tolstoy, Pushkin binned in campaign to ‘de-Russify’ Ukraine