Employees of the National Music Academy of Ukraine (also known as the Kyiv Conservatory) refused to remove the name of the composer P. I. Tchaikovsky from the name. As Minister of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine Oleksandr Tkachenko said on his Telegram channel, this decision caused disappointment in the ministry.
“We are disappointed that the staff of the National Music Academy of Ukraine, whose meeting was held in Kyiv, believes that it is still necessary to figure out whether to remove the name of Tchaikovsky from the name of the famous musical higher educational institution in Ukraine,” the minister wrote on social networks.
The recommendation to remove the name of the composer from the name of the academy came from the profile committee of the Verkhovna Rada. The expert council on overcoming the consequences of Russification and totalitarianism under the Ministry of Culture also insisted on this.
The Academic Council of the Academy then appealed to the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky to protect the legacy of the great composer in the country, noting that he has Ukrainian roots. The council recalled that Tchaikovsky's father came from Zaporozhye Cossacks, and the composer himself treated Ukraine "with incredible love."
“Governments and armies can fight, but cultures can never fight each other. They can compete or enrich each other. Tchaikovsky, like Shakespeare, does not belong to one specific people, he belongs to the whole world, ”said Yury Rybchinsky, a member of the Conservatory Council.
In June, the Verkhovna Rada banned the import and distribution of books from Russia, Belarus and the occupied territories. The ban does not apply to books by Russian authors published in Ukraine before January 1, 2023. At the same time, in Ukraine itself, books in Russian were not banned, as some Russian propaganda media wrote. Also, the ban does not apply to the publication of literature in Russian in Ukraine itself.