Unearthing Kyiv’s Buried 'Wall of Memory': The Suppression and Excavation of Melnychenko and Rybachuk’s Masterwork

• In Event: Dictated by Moscow: Art, Anti-Semitism, and Economics in Late Soviet Kyiv

Abstract

This paper will outline the little-known history of famed Ukrainian monumental artists Ada Rybachuk and Volodomyr Melnychenko’s “Wall of Memory,” a 400 m mural of bas reliefs in Kyiv’s Baikove Cemetery that was repressed and covered in cement at the order of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture in 1982. It will consider the artists’ intentions for the wall, the motivations for its repression during the late Soviet period, as well as its function as a symbol of Ukrainian historical memory.

Author

• Megan Buskey, Independent Scholar