The main access to the offices of the Factor-druk printing house It is dominated by a mural with portraits of the seven fatalities on May 23. Next to him is a bouquet of red roses and an old machine. The first to use the signature after the indindependence of Ukraine in 1991.
Tatyana Hryniuk knows that she too could have been part of that gloomy list. She was driving in her vehicle from her office to the assembly line of the immense complex when the rockets began to fall.
“I remember everything in fragments. There were four explosions. Everything started flying around me: the glass, the wood, the pieces of wall and metal. I was 10 or 15 meters away,” he asserts. In the vicinity you can see the large hole left by one of the projectiles next to the train track. Was the only one who made a mistake. The other three hit between the machinery and the sheets of sheets ready for binding.
The attack generated a devastating fire in which more than 50,000 books were consumed. Many of them were intended for teaching the little ones. The images of smiling animals – from the Ninja Turtles to the Lion King -, partially charred by the fire, are still a constant in the industrial warehouses, where dozens of employees work to rebuild the site by removing the remains left by the event.
Although several weeks have passed since what happened, the executive head of the huge factory moves between accumulations of paper reduced to little more than ash and twisted metal or riddled with shrapnel. Tatyana Hryniuk stops in front of another large water-filled cavity caused by one of the impacts. “An underground pipeline burst. I have been saying for a long time that I wanted to put a lake with swans here. We already have the lake. We just need the swans,” she says with the black humour that conflicts foster.
Tatyana’s tone becomes more somber as she approaches yet another pile of remains. “From here we took one woman and from there another. Five of the victims were so disfigured by the fire that They could only be recognized by DNA“he adds.
For decades, Kharkiv has been one of the cultural references, first of the former Soviet Union and then of independent Ukraine. In addition to being an example of architectural creations and ‘literary mecca’ – the newspaper’s expression The kyiv Independent-, the metropolis is, by far, the ‘capital’ of the local printing industry.
Official statistics estimate that between 85 and 90% of the companies in the sector they concentrate in Kharkiva town whose first printing press was established at the end of the 18th century.
“There are more than 200 printing companies here. We are very big, but there are people who have just one machine in a garage,” says Hryniuk.
The assault on Factor-druk is not unprecedented either. In March, another russian missile was directly shot down against the building of the Gurov and Company printing house, in an incident that caused the death of five people. According to local media, since the beginning of the invasion the Moscow army has attacked several printing presses and publishing firms in this same town, dealing a severe gattack on the production of texts in Ukrainianprecisely when the country is immersed in a historic transition to overcome an entire era of Russian cultural domination.
The restriction on the import of books in that language began in 2016, precisely after the start of the war promoted by Moscow in the east of the country two years earlier. After the 2022 invasion, kyiv banned the printing of texts in the language of the neighboring country.
“When Ukraine became independent, 80 or 90% of the books printed here were written in Russian. That trend began to change a little in 2000. In 2014 (at the beginning of the war) we were already at 60% of books printed in Russian and 40% in Ukrainian. In 2022, the trend had reversed: 50% of the books were in Ukrainian and 20% in Russian (the rest are now 100% books). in Ukrainian,” explains Hryniuk.
She herself witnessed this complex cultural change when she began her university career. She was one of the students who enrolled in the first course taught at Kharkiv University in Ukrainian. “The textbooks were written in Russian. There were no manuals in our language. The teachers taught us in Ukrainian but with books in Russian,” he notes.
The Russian withdrawal after the initial attack generated a resurgence of the publishing industry, according to the Ukrainian Book Chamber, and the circulation of this type of texts increased from 11.7 million in 2022 to 24.7 million the following year.
However, the repeated havoc being wreaked by Russian missiles has jeopardized the progression of this effort.
The textbooks
According to its owner, Serhii Polituchiy, the physical destruction of his company is as significant as what it has meant for the Ukrainian publishing industry and especially for the educational sector. “Don’t have no idea of How are we going to get school texts printed? (for the next course). I’m sure 30-40% of all those manuals were printed here. “We are looking for a solution to avoid the collapse of the (Ukrainian) publishing industry,” he said a few hours after the Russian attack.
Although there is no reliable proof that printing presses that generate works in Ukrainian have become a priority objective of the Russian army, several local and Western intellectuals have chosen to support this hypothesis.
“Russia bombed the pearl of modern European culture: the Vivat publishing house in Kharkiv. This is an example of genocide on a larger scale,” Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder wrote on social media after the event. May.
“They bombed so that these books would not exist. So that there was no market for books in Ukrainian. They achieved this for a quarter of a century with other methods (allusion to the Soviet Union era). Now they use bombs and missiles. And all so that we continue reading in Russian,” supported the Ukrainian novelist Oksana Zabunzhko.
Hryniuk indicates that on Russian social media it was argued that the attack on Factor-druk was justified as it was a “propaganda center.”
In that unique spirit that characterizes them, the Ukrainians have responded to Moscow’s assault on their written production with a peculiar revenge: numerous social groups and companies have dedicated themselves to collect the countless books in Russian that still exist in the country to sell them as “recyclable paper” and in exchange acquire military logistics for its army.
The Vivat publishing house, which printed most of its titles in Factor-druk, already announced a project in this regard in January of this year. In publicizing this initiative, the company’s general director, Yuliaa Orlova, estimated that Russian forces had destroyed nearly 200 million books in Ukrainian, in multiple bombings that have devastated hundreds of bookstores across the country.
“It is therefore not appropriate for Russian books to occupy a place in Ukrainian libraries. Instead they should be sent for processing and the funds used to purchase air defense trucks,” he added.
The bookstore chain of the same firm, Vivat, directed by Kateryna Volkova, joined this initiative that managed to collect “110 tons” of texts in that language, which the Ukrainian defines as “waste paper.”
“We started collecting in Kharkiv, kyiv, Lviv and Ivano-Francisco, but many more cities joined in. Spontaneous collection centers opened in the villages. They brought them to us in trucks to the bookstores,” he says in a telephone conversation.
For Orlova, the struggle over language and its reflection in writing constitutes a “basic” element of the “imperialist spirit” of Moscow. “They use Russian culture to impose their ideology,” she says.
The building that housed Dmytro Gurov’s printing house has also been reduced to blackened walls and machines, and scorched paper pulp. The rocket entered through a window, straight into the seven-storey building. “This is not a mistake. There is a clear intention to destroy our culture and the Ukrainian conscience,” says the owner of the company as he tours the completely devastated structure of more than 5,000 square meters. Not even the passage of months has managed to dissipate the smell of burning. “The fire lasted several days,” he adds.
The Russian rocket devastated his business but not Gurov’s perseverance, who Two months later he had resumed printing. With fewer employees and some of the few machines that were saved from the incident. The same thing has happened in Factor-druk, where the characteristic noise of the printing presses has returned.
“We are going to be reborn. My friends always told me that I had big balls,” Gurov concludes.
