“The more people who will pay attention to mosaics, the higher the chances of protecting them,” explained Nikiforov. After the destruction of The Ocean mosaic in Lviv, the city council decided to introduce a register of mosaics, the same was stated by the Zhytomyr city authorities. In Kyiv, the mosaic, Wind by the legendary artist Alla Horska was given a protection status thanks to the work of local activists (before that, this mosaic was closed by a banner for decades). However, the registry is not enough and activists demand the proper legal protection for mosaics. 

As a person who works in the non-profit sector, in particular on legislative reforms and advocacy in Ukraine, the struggle for mosaics personally reminds me of Ukraine in miniature, where there is a strong work of activists and volunteers who have high competence in the issue, they form strong horizontal ties in the community, and unfortunately weak state institutions who do not keep up with the current agenda. It was told by many art historians: because the phenomenon of mosaics is not yet fully studied, the destruction of mosaics will be terrible damage to the Ukrainian heritage and its value has to be defined by professional art historians and researchers.

Returning to mosaics, the book “Ukraine. Art for Architecture. Soviet Modernist Mosaics 1960 to 1990” reveals to us the fact that a large number of mosaics were created by some of the best artists of that time. They are familiar to us mostly not for their mosaics, but for belonging to the Sixtiers, the generation of intellectuals with powerful political position who demanded the preservation of national language, culture, freedom of expression during the temporary weakening of totalitarianism regime in the 1960s and Khrushchev Thaw. Sixtiers organized informal literary readings and art exhibitions, evenings in memory of repressed artists, staged plays, and composed petitions in defense of Ukrainian culture. Later, many Sixtiers became active participants in the dissident movement in Ukraine and were subjected to brutal repressions by the totalitarian state, were imprisoned, expelled from their creative unions, and purged, their works being destroyed. In 1970, mosaics artist Alla Horska was killed during unknown events, according to rumors by KGB for her attempts to investigate mass killings in Bykivnia and human rights activities. The book presents three of her unique mosaics, two of which are located in the war zones on the East of Ukraine.

Such artists lived a double life that included official and unofficial art. They created state-sponsored mosaics that were supposed to depict given themes. However, according to art historians, unexpectedly, there was a chance in monumental art for greater creative freedom. For example, as art critic Alice Lozhkina in her book “Permanent Revolution” points out, in the world where socialist realism was the only official art style, there were many examples of mosaics that featured abstract art that was then banned in the Soviet Union (during the Manege Affair in 1962, when Khryschev saw the abstract art he called it “filth, decadent and sexual deviation”, after the visit he arranged a campaign to tighten the grip of the Party over culture). Today, examples of abstract mosaics can be found at 17-27 Peremohy avenue and Olimpiiska Metro Station in Kyiv. Apart from that, artists secretly created “unofficial art” in which they experimented and expressed their creative freedom, organized unofficial art exhibitions, and formed tight communities of intellectuals, who frequently gathered in each others’ kitchens. This was in spite of the fact that the atmosphere in Soviet Ukraine was harsher than in Moscow.