LONDON — The director of the Ukrainian Institute London, Marina Pesenti, gave the Kyiv Post a glimpse into how the diaspora organization she manages to successfully promote Ukraine in the United Kingdom without state funding, while Russia does the same thing with generous sponsorship by the Kremlin.
The Ukrainian Institute was founded in 1979. It is located in an affluent section of London, with neighbors including embassies, the Ukrainian one, among them and only five minutes away. The Victorian building where the institute is based regularly hosts Brits at events devoted to the Ukrainian history, culture and politics.
“We’re trying to present Ukraine as an exciting and complex country and we are not shying away from complicated topics,” Pesenti told the Kyiv Post.
No propaganda
One of the missions: Explain Ukraine to the non-Ukrainian audience. Telling the truth is the best way of doing so, believes Pesenti, a former journalist with BBC World Service. Her four years as the institute’s director has proven that the truth is not only the best approach, it’s key to selling out events, she said.
“We should encourage debate, not push a propaganda line,” Pesenti said.
Sometimes the institute’s work is criticized.
In October 2018, the institute invited Daria Mattingly, a Cambridge historian who researched the role of Ukrainian perpetrators of the Holodomor, the Josef Stalin-orchestrated famine that killed nearly 4 million Ukrainians to ruthlessly suppress their drive for independence.
“Strangely I got some comments on our social media saying ‘shame on you,’ that ‘you are trying to portray Ukrainians as killers of their own people,’ these kinds of things, you know. You cannot be 100 percent sure that everything you do will be welcomed by all segments of the Ukrainian community,” she said.
Since September 2018, the institute held 19 events, attended by thousands of people. “We do feel that we are doing something important that has to be done.”
New narrative needed
Ukraine made headlines in 2013, when the EuroMaidan Revolution broke out and, 100 days later, toppled Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014. It’s time to move on, she said.
“I think the problem for Ukraine is that it has to think of really a coherent narrative about itself. There was a very distinct narrative which came about after Maidan, that Ukraine is a country with deeply embedded European values, it is a victim of Russian aggression. And also, a country with a very strong civil society. But then after a certain time, the narrative wears off.”
Big on events
The institute promotes events on Ukrainian-Jewish relationships, Ukraine’s identity, cinematography, politics, and the country’s struggle for survival under the Soviet regime.
Pesenti suggests promoting Ukraine softly, through various cultural elements such as food, cinema and arts. She’s constantly thinking of new formats and ideas.
“You know, when the war is in its sixth year, we have to think of new angles. People just get tired of it,” said Pesenti, referring to Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, which has killed 13,000 people and left 7 percent of the nation’s territory under Kremlin control.
In April, Pesenti organized a talk on war songs and Ukrainian identity in Donbas.
Cultural diplomacy
Russian cultural organizations constantly promote their country in the UK with massive events at the most prestigious venues. “The Russian cultural presence is enormous here and I think it would be a mistake for us trying to compete with them.”
In 2017 Russia held a bunch of events in London marking 100 years since the Russian Revolution, the coup against Tsar Nicholas II. One exhibition exalting the arts of the revolutionary period was hosted by The Royal Academy of Arts. A lot of times the Russian exhibits appropriate Ukrainian artists and cultural achievements as their own. This theft of Ukrainian identity has been going on for centuries, including fabrications and distortions of the history of Kyivan Rus, World War II and countless other topics.
In Russian eyes, Kyiv-born painter Kazimir Malevich and Chernihiv region-born film director Oleksander Dovzhenko are theirs, not Ukrainian in origin.
To match Moscow’s might, Ukraine needs time and money.
“It is a question of how strong the cultural infrastructure inside the country is. We have to have some state programs and funding to support these key cultural institutions if we really plan to do some big exhibitions.”
Seeking money
The institute’s team: three staff employees and one volunteer. They do not have a permanent office and hold events at the premises of Saint Sophia Society, a Catholic organization located in an ancient building at one of the richest boroughs in central London. The building also hosts book club gathering and rehearsals of a Ukrainian Molodiy Theater.
The institute has to crowdfund money for its survival — the Ukrainian Catholic University, based in Lviv, is its major benefactor. In the 2017–18 financial year, it raised about $85,000, 10 times more than a year before. It also earns money selling tickets to events and running a Ukrainian language school of 20 students.
“It is a bunch of people — a diaspora that lost the language and would like to learn it again, people who are married to Ukrainians, people who professionally need Ukrainian for their work. And maybe the fourth group is British eccentric people who just want to do something quirky,” said Pesenti.
