In Kyiv, Soviet-era monuments to Russian-Ukraine unity still stand. But should they?

The Motherland Monument in Kyiv, lighted in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. Prior to the war, Ukraine, like other former Soviet republics, had embarked on a “derussification” and “decommunization” campaign to remove remnants of Soviet propaganda, such as the hammer and sickle on Motherland’s shield. A Reuters news story noted that as workers started dismantling one of the bronze heads, it “fell to the ground with a hollow clang.” Over at the Motherland Monument every Aug. 24 — Independence Day in Ukraine — officials typically spotlight the steel in the colors of the national flag, the city’s warrior and protector pointed toward Moscow in beams of yellow and blue. Forest music “Treelogy,” one of the year’s buzziest classical projects, has been touring California State University campuses this week — Chico on Tuesday and Sonoma on Thursday. ‘Pretty and grotesque’ Frieze is over, but staff writer Deborah Vankin was back on the beat, this time talking with painter Robert Russell about the subjects of his latest work at Anat Ebgi gallery in L.A.’s Carthay neighborhood: tiny animal figurines produced in Germany in the 1930s and ’40s by the Allach Porcelain Manufacturing Co. Russell, who is Jewish, was interested in the tchotchkes’ darker history: “Nazi Party leader Heinrich Himmler, through the SS, took over the company in the mid-1930s and used it to produce, among other things, porcelain statuettes that conveyed his love of Aryanism,” Vankin writes.