The author of “Master and Margarita” is accused of having shown contempt for Ukrainian nationalism. The municipal council validated the removal of the commemorative monument.
This Thursday, June 4, the statue of the famous Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, located near the museum dedicated to him in kyiv, was removed from its base. This dismantling is the result of a decision approved by the municipal council in December 2025. It was based on the conclusions of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, which considered that the objects in homage to the author of theMaster and Marguerite  sont «symbols of Russian imperial policy”. Already in June 2023, a commemorative plaque in honor of the writer, located on the facade of his childhood home, had been sprayed with red paint.
According to the Meduza website, fifteen other monuments and commemorative plaques in memory of cultural personalities, such as the writer Anna Akhmatova or the composer Mikhail Glinka have already been removed as part of this policy of «dérussification». Several intellectuals questioned on this subject by the independent Russian-language media, Suspilne, agree with this method. “These imperial symbols unconsciously contribute to a feeling of cultural subordination among Ukrainians“, indicates a history professor, while a writer sees it “a way of purifying oneself from the monumental propaganda of the Kremlin”.
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“The White Guard”, a novel targeted by its detractors
What exactly is Mikhail Bulgakov accused of? For having professed, in some of his works, a certain contempt for Ukrainian nationalism, Ukrainian culture and language. In his novel The White Guard (1926), regularly cited by its detractors, it tells the destiny of a family of officers of the Russian imperial army, whose members fought the Ukrainian People’s Army of Symon Petliura, a figure of Ukrainian nationalism, who briefly managed to seize kyiv in 1918 before being defeated by the Bolsheviks. Bulgakov regularly makes fun of the Ukrainian language – for decades, numerous extracts were censored in the Soviet version – and highlights the violent anti-Semitic attacks of Petliura’s supporters.
According to a commission of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, Bulgakov’s literary heritage contains manifestations “a biased and negative attitude towards the Ukrainian world”. “He abhorred the Ukrainians’ desire for independence and was critical of the formation of the Ukrainian state and its leadersthe report says. Of all the Russian writers of this era, he is the one who is closest to the current ideologues of Putinism and the Kremlin’s justification of ethnocide in Ukraine“, he concludes.
Mikhail Bulgakov, writer of Russian origin, born in 1891 in kyiv, son of a professor of history of religions, was raised in a bourgeois environment. After studying medicine and enlisting in the Red Cross during the First World War, the revolution, then the Russian Civil War, he decided to pursue a literary career. From his first publications in the 1920s, he found himself confronted with implacable Soviet censorship. The Master and Margueriteconsidered one of the greatest masterpieces of Russian literature, was not published in full until around thirty years after the author’s death in 1940.
After its dismantling by the Ukrainian municipal authorities, the statue of Bulgakov was handed over to the sculptor’s grandson, Nikolaï Rapaï. For the moment, the management of the museum dedicated to the work of Bulgakov has not commented on the dismantling of the monument. Last March, a petition in favor of the preservation of the monuments of the Ukrainian capital was published on the town hall website, but it had not been received enough votes to be taken into consideration.
