Leonid Gorobets , Olena Zhukova , Victoriya Konstantinova , Tetiana Nykyrsa , Yevhen Nikolaiev , Pavel Gol'din
Preservation of cultural and natural heritage, including collections, in an emergency is a globally relevant task. Emergency management in museums, archives, and libraries is actively developing, with plenty of specialized research on the topic. Institutions of several countries - the USA, Sweden, and others - base their emergency action protocols on it. However, this research usually considers natural and industrial disasters and such developments as happen in everyday life in most countries of the global North - fires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and, among the artificial, - brigandage, pogroms, terror attacks. In these usually local situations, the central government retains effective control of the territory where institutions are situated. Even during social or state upheavals, municipal and communal services, and social structures that ensure the continuity of social functions remain in place.
War, on the other hand, is a unique type of emergency. Policy and management of institutions in wartime differ from practices for managing emergencies in peacetime. Although the behavior of the sides of conflicts, including policies considering heritage objects, is formally regulated by international conventions, there’s the question: what to do when some large state or quasi-state starts an unconventional full-scale war? Moreover, what to do when armed conflict and occupation impact a territory highly saturated with heritage objects and institutions for their preservation, and the use of weapons of mass destruction is one of the existing threats? The managers and curators of Ukrainian institutions that host collections are facing these questions.
The joint mission of the institutions that preserve scientific and other collections is to preserve historical memory and experience, the creative heritage of humanity, and knowledge about the natural history of the Earth, to provide materials to conduct various research on nature and culture in time and space, and to create the material and immaterial components of the national identity in the country of origin. The collections contain, in particular, unique objects necessary for any professional research (for example, holotypes of the species new to biology). The societies whose national identity is growing — for example, due to the renewal of independence after its loss — are well aware of this ideological function of their heritage. It becomes, respectively, an object of tensions and arguments in the context of colonization/decolonization and even more so during a colonial war. Part of the strategy of the colonizer, described as cultural genocide, is to destroy different aspects of the victim nation’s identity, including the destruction and appropriation of its heritage. This way, the “narrowly” scientific and cultural problems gain political and legal dimensions.
From the resolution that summarizes the results of the International Forum on Cultural Heritage Security "WAR IN UKRAINE: THE BATTLE FOR CULTURE" from February 8-9, 2023:
Forum participants (around 200 experts from Ukraine and abroad) agreed on the urgent need for the formation of a national doctrine for the protection of cultural heritage – a strategic document that considers the Ukrainian and world experience of wars and emergencies... The key principle of the doctrine is that the preservation, transfer, promotion, and development of cultural heritage is an element of national security, along with territorial integrity, Ukraine's independence, its democratic and legal system, and environmental security.
This paper aims to identify the challenges faced by the institutions that preserve scientific and other collections due to the long-term full-scale invasion with the occupation of territories, the reactions, and actions of the defending side (in our case, Ukraine).
The tasks of this paper are as follows:
— describe and assess the threats and types of losses to the Ukrainian collections because of the Russian war since 2014;
— analyze the context and preconditions of the losses;
— analyze the actions of the actors of collections preservation;
— propose general recommendations to implement the policy on conservation that may be of use in similar situations in modern times.