Charlotte Higgins

Pushkin in it, usually on a very prominent boulevard or in a beautiful park.

And there was always a street called Pushkin Street.

And all those streets have been renamed.

All the sculptures have gone.

And last week, I was going to have coffee with a really interesting archaeologist, as you do.

I was walking down a street called Andreevsky Descent, and it's lined with beautiful 19th century buildings.

One of these buildings is the Bulgakov Museum.

So obviously in the UK, we absolutely love Bulgakov.

And I can't remember whether any of his novels hit the Guardian's 100 best novels, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Master of Margarita was on that list.

However, in Ukraine, he is not so popular.

despite being someone who was from Kiev.

Because particularly in his novel, The White Guard, he is seen as really embodying ideas of Russian imperialism.

And he was tremendously against ideas of Ukrainian nationhood.

So he's not the most popular writer in Ukraine right now.

And as I was going for my coffee, passing his house museum, I just happened to see...

that a large sculpture of him that sits outside his museum was being winched onto a flatbed truck and taken away.

He's out of there.

I mean, we look at this war through a military lens, very obviously.

We look at it through an economic lens, also very obviously.

We look at it through a political lens, of course.