Leonid Maruschak: The Evacuation of Art, Museum Bureaucracy, and Responsibility for Heritage

In the new episode of the UFDA podcast, historian and curator Leonid Maruschak talks about how the full-scale war has changed museum work and attitudes toward cultural heritage in Ukraine. The conversation touches on the evacuation of collections, bureaucratic dead ends, private archives, the story of Zhanna Kadyrova’s deer from Pokrovsk, as well as the role of initiatives like UFDA in preserving art.

Leonid’s connection to the museum sphere began during his studies, when he wrote his thesis on the Vinnytsia Regional Art Museum. The focus was the “treasures” of this institution and the history of how the collection was formed at the beginning of the 20th century, amid revolution, the formation of Ukrainian statehood, civil war, and the nationalization of private collections.

This experience gave him an understanding of the price paid to assemble and preserve these collections and became an internal point of reference: later, the memory of those who saved artworks under much harsher conditions became Leonid’s motivation to take risks today.

After 2014, following the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in Donbas, an initiative group emerged that traveled to Sloviansk, Sievierodonetsk, Mariupol, and other cities newly liberated from Russian forces. They asked simple yet fundamental questions: what was here, what is here now, and what is planned next?

The team looked for answers in city councils, libraries, museums, and markets—places Leonid calls “the biggest communication hubs in Ukraine.” Museums turned out to be the spaces where information could be accessed holistically—through collections, texts, people, and local histories.

In 2016, this activity developed into the project Museum Open for Repairs, though preparation had begun back in 2014–2015. The first partners were two institutions: the Sloviansk Local History Museum in Donetsk region and the Lysychansk City Historical Museum in Luhansk region.

For Leonid, the key temptation in working with museums lay in their collections, especially the unique holdings found in regional institutions. One example is the collection of ceramic artist Nataliia Maksymchenko in Sloviansk: after her death, a small museum was created in a dormitory room, and in the 1970s the collection “mysteriously” moved to Sloviansk—something Leonid sees as a unique case.

The Museum Open for Repairs project had several main directions:

A telling moment, according to Leonid, was the 2016 workshop Modern Methods of Museum Work, which gathered representatives of 25 museums from Donetsk region. For the team, this was an important indicator of trust and proof that there was real demand for education and change within the museum field.

Two days before the full-scale invasion, the team held a major online seminar for museums in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, along with representatives of the Ministry of Culture. The topic was stated bluntly: “The whole world is shouting that war will start soon. We don’t want to alarm anyone, but let’s talk about whether we are ready.”

At first everyone replied that they were prepared, but within half an hour it became clear that there were no real invasion plans. During the discussion, they began drafting letters and lists: who is responsible for what, what needs to be done, where to run.

On February 24, Leonid was woken by his wife saying, “That idiot has attacked.” They gathered the cat, documents, and essentials and left Kyiv for the village of Moshny—his wife’s home place. The journey took a day, against the backdrop of mass movement of people from central, eastern, and southern Ukraine.

Already on the road, Leonid started planning his return to Kyiv: first to take care of his own collection left at home, and then to deal with far more valuable private collections whose owners had left the country before the invasion.

A separate layer of stories concerns private collections. Leonid recalls calling the Sloviansk museum in the first weeks of the war to ask whether the Maksymchenko collection had been evacuated—expecting that after 2014 everyone would be prepared. The answer was: “What evacuation? We still have no order.”

Another case involved the collection of Viktor and Alla Zaretsky, cared for by their granddaughter Olena. She was abroad, lacked the “human resources” for evacuation, and Leonid’s team took responsibility—despite some owners continuing to insist, “Who needs this anyway?”

Gradually, the realization came that some relocations were absolutely right, even if at first they seemed overly cautious: when Leonid later returned to places where collections had once been stored, locals told him those very buildings had later been hit and storage rooms destroyed.

Leonid describes absurd situations where a humanitarian hub worked in the same cultural center that housed a museum: on one side, the team was packing museum objects, cataloguing and preparing them for evacuation; nearby, dozens of people were hauling humanitarian boxes.

On top of that came looting in the combat zone, pressure from people who had “set their eyes” on museum objects, and the constant need to negotiate with local authorities to secure even minimal safety. Leonid calls this another front—the communication front—no less exhausting than physical danger.

One of the central themes concerns the role of rescued objects in shaping memory after the war. Leonid speaks about collections from cities that no longer physically exist, and tiny museum rooms in village cultural centers that have disappeared from the map.

Even an “ordinary” embroidered towel gains special weight if it hung in a local museum for decades and formed part of the lived experience of generations. For Leonid, it is important that such items eventually return “home”—not necessarily to the same building, but to the environment where future generations can see and understand that this is part of their story.

At the same time, he notes that many rescued collections remain in boxes: they are “aired,” but there is no state program ensuring at least researchers’ access—let alone public display.

Parallels with the “mythic evacuation of the 1940s” are resurfacing: back then, many works were simply never sought again; today there is a real risk of repeating that history.

Leonid speaks sharply about the Ukrainian cultural sector’s dependence on donors. In his view, cultural heritage has been “handed over to external support” instead of being backed by internal programs and mechanisms.

He asks: if the state can build schools with shelters and meet all safety standards, why in three years of full-scale war has not a single proper storage facility for museum collections been created in major cities, including Kyiv? For him, this signals not a lack of resources, but a lack of political will and priorities.

Another issue is missed opportunities for museums in international discourse. Leonid cites a U.S. President’s statement about WWII losses made without reference to Ukraine, and wonders why, for example, the Museum of the Second World War did not respond with a project or public statement.

When the conversation turns to selling museum or other valuable works abroad, Leonid is firmly skeptical. In his view, everything that leaves is “doomed never to return,” and physical contact with the object as a carrier of information is crucial.

He gives the example of Poland, where the state has priority purchase rights for cultural assets: a private owner can sell only after the state declines or cannot raise funds in time. For Leonid, this is a model where the state takes responsibility so significant works do not dissolve into private foreign collections.

In 2018, the artist was invited to create an object for an empty pedestal in a park where a jet—symbol of military power—had once stood. Zhanna Kadyrova had already worked with concrete origami-like sculptures (including a heron in Ivano-Frankivsk), and in Pokrovsk, a deer appeared as part of the search for a new urban identity, alongside a monument to Mykola Leontovych.

When mass civilian evacuation was announced in Pokrovsk, Leonid’s team arrived at the local museum proposing to evacuate the deer. Amid constant shelling, locals reacted with, “What deer, come on,” but Leonid insisted: this was the work of a leading Ukrainian artist and a symbol of the city’s contemporary story.

Eventually, a plan was developed and both the deer and the Leontovych monument were evacuated to Vinnytsia. Later, the deer’s story became the core of the Venice Biennale proposal—not just about one sculpture, but about continuity of narratives, the transition from Soviet monumentalism to garden-park sculpture, the Budapest Memorandum, and the question: what comes next?

Toward the end of the conversation, Leonid speaks about UFDA as an initiative focused on digitizing and documenting artworks that were evacuated and require proper visibility.

He states directly that from 2014 to 2022 little was done in Ukraine in terms of digitalization—and not much more from 2022 to 2025. The biggest problem, he says, is that “there is no resource where you can go and see everything,” and UFDA is one of the few teams clearly saying: we are the ones doing this work.

For him, digitization is a way to provide access to information about rescued works while physical collections remain in storage or in a “temporary” holding mode without any clear long-term strategy.

Listen to the episode “Leonid Maruschak: on the evacuation of art, museum bureaucracy, and the role of rescued collections after the war” on all podcast platforms.

It is a conversation about what art rescue during wartime really looks like—and why, without human persistence, solidarity, and initiatives like UFDA, many of these stories simply would never have happened.