Kharkiv, from our correspondent. A little more than eighty percent of Ukrainian books are printed in the Kharkiv area, and about one in three books on bedside tables or bookshelves across the country was produced by Faktor Druk. On May 25, the Russians threw two bombs at the large Faktor factory in Kharkiv, killing seven people, five male and two male workers, destroying the Italian and German machinery and setting fire to the large rolls of paper and volumes. “Eighty-three thousand books burned in one day,” he tells Il Foglio Serhii Polituchniythe director of Faktor. At the time of the bombing there were fifty workers inside the factory. The first bomb exploded in mid-air into many small pieces of metal that flew towards the workers at the speed of the bullets. In addition to the seven dead, there were twenty-two injured and some are still in hospital in serious conditions; the second bomb crashed into a wall and caused it to collapse. Kharkiv is the literary capital of Ukraine: “I never believed that all the books destroyed in this war were a side effect, it seems to me that for Putin’s army they are rather an obsession”, continues Serhii.
Kharkiv, from our correspondent. A little more than eighty percent of Ukrainian books are printed in the Kharkiv area, and about one in three books on bedside tables or bookshelves across the country was produced by Faktor Druk. On May 25, the Russians threw two bombs at the large Faktor factory in Kharkiv, killing seven people, five male and two male workers, destroying the Italian and German machinery and setting fire to the large rolls of paper and volumes. “Eighty-three thousand books burned in one day,” he tells Il Foglio Serhii Polituchniythe director of Faktor. At the time of the bombing there were fifty workers inside the factory. The first bomb exploded in mid-air into many small pieces of metal that flew towards the workers at the speed of the bullets. In addition to the seven dead, there were twenty-two injured and some are still in hospital in serious conditions; the second bomb crashed into a wall and caused it to collapse. Kharkiv is the literary capital of Ukraine: “I never believed that all the books destroyed in this war were a side effect, it seems to me that for Putin’s army they are rather an obsession”, continues Serhii.
One of the first actions of Russian soldiers at the beginning of the total invasion was a targeted bombing of an archive in the city of Chernihiv. An archive famous for being the place where documents on the KGB’s repression against Ukrainian dissidents were kept, as well as those produced by Stalin’s Soviet Union and which concerned the Holodomor. A hundred kilometers from here, in Kupyansk, immediately after the liberation, the teachers said that the Russians had amassed and destroyed all the middle school history books. In Mariupol, after the Russian conquest of the city, a mountain of books was created on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to Pryazovskyi University. The windows on the library floor no longer existed, the bombs had taken away the glass months earlier, and the Russian soldiers had thrown all the books onto the street directly from those holes in the walls. In the first year of the war, the National Library of Ukraine had counted over three hundred regional libraries and thousands of school libraries destroyed, and the president of the Library Association, Oksana Bruy, said: “It is definitely too high a number for this kind of destruction to be included in the case of involuntary damage, this is systematic destruction.”
Serhii Polituchniy believes that the bombing of his plant is part of the same campaign and says: “The Russians are fascists. I am a Russian born on the Volga, I have lived half my life in Russia, but I am not a fascist and they know it well there. But they can’t stand me anymore because for a good part of my former fellow citizens there is only the great homeland – larger than the others and which has the right to crush the others – and its leader. And I am neither a patriot in the perverse sense in which they understand it, in the fascist sense, nor a Putinist. I would just like to print my books in peace”.
Andriy Kalanchuk, the production director at Faktor Druk, left the factory twenty-five seconds before the bombs hit on May 25. “When the explosion was heard, everyone ran away and I ran inside instead. I don’t know why, probably because I was alive, but all the others, all these people that I put to work, I didn’t know if they were alive too. I dragged two bodies out of the smoke, one is still in intensive care.”
A collection has started in Kharkiv, the Italians and Germans have said that there is no need to worry about printing and binding machinery, that a solution can be found. The organizers of the collection say they moved immediately because the Ukrainian response to the systematic destruction of their books was clear and must not stop: last year one hundred new bookshops opened in Kyiv. According to the Ukrainian Publishing Chamber of Commerce, book circulation more than doubled in 2023 compared to the first year of the war, from eleven million copies in 2022 to twenty-four million the following year. The titles that can be read in Ukrainian today are more than fifteen thousand, when the invasion began there were nine thousand. “We plan to get the factory back on its feet in six months. Forty percent of the school books in this country are made by us at Faktor Druk, and we cannot afford to stand still because we cannot allow Vladimir Putin to stop our children’s schools again”.
