War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy has been added to the list of banned books that are not to be taught in Ukrainian schools, by Kiev’s Ministry of Education.
First Deputy Ministry of Education Andrey Vitrenko appeared on TV Channel Ukraine 24 for an interview. “All these will be completely excluded from foreign literature. So, for example, ‘War and Peace’, this will not be studied in Ukraine anymore. Still working on a final list of works by Russian writers to be excluded from the curriculum.”
In May, Kiev’s Ministry of Culture and Information Policy, stated that works of literature that ‘promoted Russian propaganda’ was removed from Ukrainian libraries and replaced with Ukrainian books. At the time of the announcement, Deputy Minister Larisa Petasyuk posted on her Facebook “propaganda is a dangerous weapon. Russian lies are poisons all around today.”
In March of 2019, 40 Russian works of art were prohibited due to the mention of Russian businesses, artists, social networks, internet portals, USSR or Soviet political figures.
Mikhail Bulgakov novel ‘The Master and Margarita’ had also been censored in the USSR.