Interview with Dr. Richard Kurin - Founder of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative
Courtesy of Smithsonian Institute
Dr. Richard Kurin founded the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake and has worked to safeguard cultural heritage endangered by natural disasters and human conflict, identify looted art and monitor terrorist activity and possible war crimes directed against cultural targets. He aided in the drafting of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, an international treaty to safeguard living cultural heritage now ratified by 180 countries. He serves on the U.S. interagency Cultural Heritage Coordinating Committee. He is a board member of the ALIPH Foundation (International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas). In the U.S. he leads the Smithsonian’s partnership with FEMA on the Heritage Emergency National Task Force that responds to damage to cultural resources in natural disasters. Dr. Kurin served as Acting Provost and Under Secretary for Museums and Research from 2015, and from 2007 served as Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution. For two decades before that, Dr. Kurin directed the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The interview was conducted on May 8, 2024 and has been edited for clarity.
Note from SF: There is no question that the immediate humanitarian needs in Ukraine must be addressed. However the goal of Putin’s unprovoked illegal invasion of Ukraine is to erase Ukrainian culture, language, history and identity. He has been clear in his speeches that Ukraine as a nation does not exist and its rich cultural heritage is a Russian heritage. What’s at stake here is the very existence of Ukrainian language, literature, art, architecture and history. As Dr. Kurin said in our discussion with him, “Culture is a reflection of freedom,” and freedom from Russia is what Ukrainians are fighting and dying for.
JT: When I say Ukraine what is the first word that comes to mind?
Wartime, bravery, resilience. The tremendous effort by Ukrainians to defend their country and way of life in light of the very severe attack from Russia is inspiring.
JT: What is the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative? What do you do in Ukraine?
Initiated in the wake of our response to the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative (SCRI) protects and preserves cultural heritage and communities’ identities and history threatened or impacted by disasters domestically and internationally. While I oversee it, SCRI is led by Cori Wegener, a former curator and U.S. Army “monuments woman” who served in Iraq, inspired our work in Haiti and whom I brought to the Smithsonian.
Since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the occupation of the Donbas, we have been closely monitoring the war’s impact on Ukraine’s cultural sites. In 2021, SCRI and the Virginia Museum of Natural History partnered to form the Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab (CHML) and began to geolocate and tag over 28,000 cultural locations (monuments, places of worship and cemeteries, museums, libraries, theaters, etc.) in Ukraine. Since the 2022 Russian invasion, the team—which also includes scholars from the UPenn Cultural Center and the University of Maryland—has had access to satellite imagery and remote sensing. This has allowed us to examine possible bombings, shelling, explosions and fires at or near cultural sites and evaluate before and after high-resolution imagery of damage and destruction. We share our findings with our U.S. government colleagues and Ukrainian partners—chiefly the Ukrainian Heritage Emergency Response Initiative, the Ukrainian Heritage Monitoring Lab and the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture. We use open source research to confirm findings and, where possible, trained experts go to the identified site to forensically document damage and/or destruction. The photographic evidence and analysis—including Rapid Site reports are published for broader distribution on the State Department’s Conflict Observatory and Smithsonian sites. To date we have found evidence of damage and destruction to more than 2,100 cultural sites. Among the most prevalent are monuments and memorials, followed by places of worship and cemeteries, and then museums, libraries and archives. UNESCO also keeps a list of damaged and destroyed sites. Ukrainian organizations compile information to help stabilize buildings or preserve collections, as well as for eventual repair and restoration planning.
One of our key partners in Ukraine is Ihor Poshyvailo, the director of the Maidan Museum in Kyiv. Ihor, a former Fulbright scholar at the Smithsonian, was in the first international class of cultural leaders trained in cultural heritage response work by the Smithsonian in partnership with the Prince Claus Fund (now Cultural Emergency Response) and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) in 2015. Given the Russian annexation of Crimea and Russian separatist conflict in the Donbas, such training was most timely. Ihor and his colleagues were rightly concerned about Ukrainian cultural sites and collections in the Russian-occupied areas, and in ensuing years prompted Smithsonian action like the geolocation project. A colleague at the Virginia Museum of Natural History launched a research project that documented the building of new monuments and memorials in public spaces in the occupied areas. More than 90 such sculptures and installations memorialized the 2014 Russian advance, Stalin, World War II victories over the Nazis and the Russian empire. Russians were marking the territory as theirs. The study was published in January 2022, and Russia launched its full scale invasion a month later.
maidanmuseum.org
Very early on, we received calls from Ukrainian colleagues requesting immediate assistance—they needed plywood and other materials to protect buildings and facilities as well as packing materials, boxes, bubble wrap and crates to carefully remove and store important art works, historical artifacts, archives and scientific specimens. Given the bombing and shelling of cultural facilities, fire extinguishers were a big need—and at one point I thought our various groups trying to organize aid exhausted the supply in Europe. But much had to be protected. There were manuscripts, books, paintings, sculptures and archival records, all of which embody the identity of the Ukrainian people, their history and their culture. Ihor and Vasyl Rozhko, who formerly headed the museum division of the Ministry of Culture, quickly organized fellow professionals into the Ukrainian Heritage Emergency Response Initiative (HERI) to respond to the cultural impacts of the invasion. The Smithsonian stepped forward as did many in the international community—particularly the ALIPH Foundation, which organized large scale and extensive shipments of supplies and materials and committed millions of dollars to improving facilities for the storage and preservation of collections. Bank of America, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Omidyar Foundation provided key support for the Smithsonian’s effort, supplementing SCRI’s federal funding.
The Smithsonian also joined with international partners such as UNESCO to hold training sessions for Ukrainian conservators and museum directors on protecting and preserving collections endangered by the war and perilous conditions.
We also work closely with the National Research and Restoration Center headed by Svitlana Strelnikova. The organization is under the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and is staffed by several dozen conservators who are responsible for the national collections. They are headquartered in Kyiv and have branch operations in other major cities. They needed supplies and equipment to take care of millions of items in museums spread across Ukraine. But they had a problem. Many of those collections in sites of heavy battle and bombardment were quickly packed and sent into storage in disparate, safer areas around the country. The Center’s vehicles were needed for civil defense purposes. So how to arrange for conservators to visit and care for those now dispersed collections without transportation? We tried finding vans at U.S. embassies and consulates in Europe that could be devoted to moving conservators around the country to take care of the collections, but to no avail. We looked at getting vehicles donated, buying used vans, even ordering new ones. Basically, vehicles from around Europe were being used help the war cause and the ferrying of displaced persons from the hot zones to regions and countries of refuge. Then, I got a lead from the State Department. They put me in touch with Uber, which was providing vehicles to move refugees. They agreed to help on the culture front and provide 8 person, 10 person, and larger passenger vans to shuttle conservators, their equipment and supplies around the country to check on collections stored in villages, churches, basements and other non-conventional spaces. o date, Uber has provided almost a thousand free trips, traversing tens of thousands of miles. Conservators have visited several hundred cultural sites, inventorying collections, doing condition reports, stabilizing collections and caring for the treasures of Ukrainian art and history. And these trips are not for the faint of heart. When Ukrainian forces took back Russian controlled territory, the conservators would go in pretty quickly and pass bombed-out tanks and destroyed buildings to get to collections and enable their preservation. These conservators—men and women-- are in the thick of the war and are serving their country.
JT: What has the Smithsonian done to highlight Ukrainian culture?
The Smithsonian has had a number of exhibitions that showcase Ukrainian history and culture. The National Museum of American History produced a fascinating exhibition of Ukrainian currency and coinage that illustrates the continuity of symbols of national identity over the centuries.
In 2023, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival included a concert by Ukrainian Village Voices an ensemble from New York City. Several groups from Ukraine-- Bozhychi, Katya Chilly, Mariya Kvitka, and Shchuka Ryba journeyed to Washington to give a special July 4th Independence Day concert entitled “De Libertate: Songs of Freedom and Hope” on the National Mall. Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova introduced the program. In an especially poignant moment, soldier Таras Kоmpanichenkо, a singer and bandura player, joined the performance by video from the front line of the war.
Soon after the invasion, the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum placed on exhibit a collection of Ukrainian stamps from 1918-1920 when Ukraine was an independent state. With the cooperation of the head of Ukraine’s Postal Service Igor Smelyansky, the museum also acquired stamps and first day covers issued during the war. Ukrainians have creatively issued stamp art to inspire morale at home and attention abroad. One of the museum’s acquisitions includes First Day covers signed by President Zelenskyy and First Lady Zelenska commemorating how early in the war Snake Island border guards bravely confronted a Russian battleship.
JT: What was one of the more challenging cultural heritage rescue initiatives in Ukraine?
Getty Images
Getty Images
Ukrainian conservators have dealt with hundreds of rescue projects. But, perhaps, the hardest one for me was in May 2022 when the memorial museum of Ukraine’s poet and philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda suffered an artillery strike. Skovoroda was a leading figure in Ukraine’s cultural renaissance in the 18th century. The memorial museum was located in a small village where he died, near Kharkiv and the Russian border. This was not a military target. There were no fortifications, no railway lines, no stored ammunition. This seemed purely like the case of a cultural heritage site being targeted. In a speech soon after the attack, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy quoted Skovoroda, “There is nothing more dangerous than an insidious enemy but there is nothing more poisonous than a feigned friend.”
When the building was shelled, the Ukrainian Minister of Culture contacted us and asked if we could confirm the reports he was hearing about the destruction. It took us days to confirm it due to the cloud cover so we couldn't get any good images. Finally onsite photos were posted online and the clouds cleared; the destruction was quite evident. It was so sad because there was no reason for it, other than the obliteration of a cultural icon of Ukraine. A statue of Skovoroda somehow survived and people in the area carried it out.
JT: How has the work of the Initiative in Ukraine changed since the start of the war in 2022?
Just like any situation in war, you’re trying to figure out what needs to be done, and how to do it. Everything comes at you all at once and it's overwhelming. So you do what you can yourself and look to see how you can join with others both internationally and domestically to help.
At the beginning, many experts thought that Kyiv would fall within a matter of days and that there needed to be an immediate an evacuation of Ukraine’s most prized collections. But Ukrainian colleagues said no, we’re going to defend our country—not give up, not declare defeat. Everyone was amazed at their bravery and courage. And continues to be.
Within days of the start of the invasion, the international cultural heritage community came together to support Ukrainian colleagues and immediately purchased and transported-- with tremendous help from Polish organizations, critically needed supplies and materials to Ukrainian institutions so they could try to protect buildings, sites and collections from bombs, missiles and fires. The fact that people in the international cultural community were able to come together and get aid, resources and supplies together and to those in need so quickly was incredible. But the real heroes and heroines were of course the Ukrainians who had to take care of their families while at the same time risking their lives to protect the touchstones and icons of Ukraine’s history, art and national identity. Imagine the effort and time it takes to say board up your house and pack up the scores or hundreds of keepsakes in your home so as to protect and evacuate them. Now imagine doing it for thousands or tens of thousands of items—priceless and irreplaceable artworks, books, archival records, historical artifacts and other national treasures, and doing it in just days or hours. That was what directors, curators, librarians, archivists, conservators and others faced in Ukraine.
After several months, with Ukraine forces fending off the Russian advance, the situation stabilized a bit. Supply needs shifted. As collections were stored in unconventional places, like underground in damp basements, there was a need for de-humidifiers to prevent mold. Facing winter, Ukrainian conservators sought advice from Smithsonian and international conservators. How best to store and preserve manuscripts when a building is bereft of electricity and heating or any climate control? Concerns shifted from short term packing and storage of collections to more long-term sustainable stabilization.
In the early stages of the war, communication with Ukrainian colleagues was by email, telephone and Zoom sessions. This has continued. But as the situation stabilized and Covid dangers also subsided, training sessions, meetings and conferences have also proceeded in person. The scope of cultural heritage protection work has also broadened. In 2023 the Smithsonian, which with the U.S. Army trains “monuments men and women,” hosted six officers from the Ukrainian defense forces alongside U.S. and other NATO military officers to learn how to comply with the requirements of the Hague Convention and other international treaties concerning the treatment of cultural heritage in conflict situations. This includes understanding and documenting cultural heritage looting, damage and destruction as possible war crimes.
We, along with Ukrainian partners and others are also and increasingly concerned with picking up the pieces after the war. Cultural heritage can play an important role in post-conflict recovery in rebuilding civic life and contributing to the cultural and creative economy. But much of it needs planning, infrastructure and support, and we and others will continue to help our Ukrainian colleagues in that immense task likely to persist for a very long time.
JT: What are the needs of the teams working to protect the cultural heritage of Ukraine?
Ukrainian conservators need monetary support for the ongoing work of documentation, conservation and protection of facilities, sites and collections. They need equipment, materials and supplies to do their work both in field and laboratory/studio settings. On site building stabilization work in some cases involves engineering, heavy equipment, skilled construction workers, and logistic support. Our colleagues also need funds for meals and housing while traveling to and from sites and for salaries to support them and their families.
Courtesy of National Research and Rescue Center
At some point the war will end and Ukraine will face a massive rebuilding effort. Obviously major international funding will be needed for the power grid, roads, bridges, housing, hospitals and schools. Rebuilding the cultural infrastructure will also be part of that. To do that our Ukrainian partners need to document and conserve cultural resources now—because once lost, valued art, important artifacts, crucial archives cannot be replaced. Numerous digitization and 3D scanning projects are underway. They also require equipment and personnel.
And it is not only things that need support. People—artists, musicians, culture bearers, those in the building arts, scholars, curators, archivists and others—the keepers of the living culture will also need help in restoring their lives, making their way, and contributing mightily to a vibrant and flourishing Ukrainian future. Contemporary civic life and booming economies are built upon cultural industries—food, fashion, tourism, performances, festivities, museums, media, digital productions and the like. If a post-war Ukraine is to prosper it will be important to plan for and encourage the creative use of its cultural heritage. Indeed, that heritage has been an object of war and even a wrongful rationale for it; that heritage has been targeted and damaged; and that heritage—embodying their identity and the basic freedom to be Ukrainian is precisely what Ukrainians have fought for and defended--and is indeed a resource for country’s future.
You can donate to the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative and its work in Ukraine here.