{"id":155397,"date":"2026-02-16T11:47:23","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T10:47:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/?p=155397"},"modified":"2026-02-17T10:42:57","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T09:42:57","slug":"a-ukrainian-painter-the-creation-of-nova-kakhovka-and-a-looted-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/en\/155397-a-ukrainian-painter-the-creation-of-nova-kakhovka-and-a-looted-gallery.html","title":{"rendered":"A Ukrainian painter, the creation of Nova Kakhovka, and a looted gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As we approach the 4th<\/sup> anniversary of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, we take a look at the war against cultural heritage. Russia is accused of looting art collections. A crime seen as a direct attempt to eliminate Ukrainian\u2019s identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Albin Stanislavovych Havdzynskyi was born<\/a> in 1923 in the village of Bobryk Pershyi, Liubashivsky district, Odesa region. When he was five years old, his family was deprived of their property and forced to move to Odesa, where he lived his entire life. There he established himself as an artist and later became a renowned Ukrainian landscape painter and specialist in genre and portrait painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1950, after graduating from the Odesa Art School, Havdzynskyi travelled to the construction site of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. There, he created a series of works dedicated to the construction of the power plant, but also recreated on canvas the destruction of Velykyi Luh, the spiritual capital of the Zaporizhzhia Sich, a semi-autonomous state of Cossacks in the 16th<\/sup>-18th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The construction of the Kakhovka power plant lasted from 1950 to 1955 as part of the \u2018Great Communist Construction\u2019 project, designed to implement Stalin\u2019s ambitious \u2018Great Plan for Nature Transformation\u2019 initiative. The project included large-scale hydroelectric power plants, irrigation systems, and navigable canals, but it came at the cost of flooding lands of unique historical value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1961, Havdzynskyi was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of the new city of Nova Kakhovka. An art gallery was founded<\/a> on 4 November 1967 as the art department of the Kherson Local Lore Museum. The artist donated<\/a> all 300 of his paintings to the city of Nova Kakhovka, and they became the core of the new art gallery that was eventually named after him in 2003 while he was still alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, during the Russian occupation of Nova Kakhovka in 2022, the art gallery was looted<\/a>, and the works of artists that had been preserved there for decades were taken away<\/a> by the Russians to an unknown location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The artist Albin Havdzynskyi at the opening of his exhibition \u2018Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant\u2019, 1961.<\/em> Photo: \u00a9<\/em> Linda Strautman<\/em>' sarchives<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The work of his life<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Syla Hromad\u2019s editorial team met with the artist\u2019s granddaughter, Linda Strautman, an art historian who founded a small gallery in the centre of Odesa, where she keeps some of her grandfather\u2019s works, a self-portrait and archive photos. She described her grandfather as a man whose life and work capture the historical tragedies of the Ukrainian people during the Soviet regime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Havdzynskyi\u2019s first drawing was published before WWII in a Soviet magazine when he was 15 years old. But he dedicated most of his paintings to the so-called \u2018construction of the century\u2019: the building of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. In a way, he became a record keeper of this construction, documenting every stage of its development. \u201cIn the early 1960s, there was no colour photography, so the construction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant can only be seen in Havdzynskyi\u2019s paintings: machines, pipes which, interestingly, were already rusty when they were installed and were painted later. He captured this fact on canvas,\u201d Strautman recounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, Havdzynskyi arrived at the construction site of the power plant before it was even built, in the 1940s. At that time, there was a village called Kliuchove, so he began to depict the area even before the construction began. \u201cHis first paintings date back to 1949, when the first wooden houses for party leaders and barracks for workers were under construction. That is how the town of Nova Kakhovka was founded,\u201d Strautman says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to historians, the Soviet regime never took into account<\/a> human losses. People were forced to<\/a> work either for free or for a small wage. Strautman recalls that, according to Havdzynskyi\u2019s stories, among the builders of the power plant were German prisoners of war and political prisoners who had been forcibly brought to the Kherson region. Many of them, unable to withstand the workload, poor conditions and hunger, allegedly died during construction. Strautman says that <\/a>her grandfather would only whisper about this because he was \u201cafraid of Stalin\u201d until the end of his life. \u201cThere were incidents when people fell into the dam during construction, but no one searched for them afterwards, so human bones continued to be found on local beaches up until recently,\u201d she says. \u201cThat was the high price of construction, which many people knew about but remained silent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn 2003, the collection of artworks was expanded when my grandfather donated another 63 paintings to the museum. The pieces were from different periods and depicted landscapes of Poland, Great Britain, and Germany. Other additions to the collection were works brought in by local residents, who had preserved his early sketches. I don\u2019t know any other artist who had an art gallery named after him during his lifetime. He was very touched by that,\u201dthe artist\u2019s granddaughter recalls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The looting<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Strautman is critical to the management of the gallery before the Russian invasion. \u201cMost of [Havdzynskyi\u2019s] paintings were kept in storage. When we would visit Nova Kakhovka, we would see 20-30 works framed on the walls, while all the others, about 200 small-format paintings, were kept separately. They were stored, overlaid with paper, some with cardboard, canvas; and among them were unique miniatures, quite small in size, but depicting the city, the Dnipro River, and everything that was being built. Any museum in any country in the world would envy such paintings,\u201d Strautman says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the very first days of the full-scale war [in February 2022], Nova Kakhovka fell under Russian occupation. The Havdzynskyi Art Gallery remained intact during the shelling of the Kherson region, but it stopped working. Then on 1 November <\/a>2022 the Russians looted the collection of paintings and took the exhibits to an unknown location, as reported<\/a> by the City Council. Witnesses told Strautman that the occupiers took all the exhibits without any regard for their preservation or integrity. \u201cThey didn\u2019t even wrap them, they just threw them onto the back of a truck, as people told me. Even the slightest touch could tear or puncture the canvases, but no one cared, they just took everything away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After Kherson was liberated in June 2023, the Russians blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant<\/a> to disrupt the Ukrainian Armed Forces\u2019 offensive, thereby destroying the dam. Almost 70 years after the construction of the power plant, the story of Ukrainian villages being flooded repeated itself. The artist\u2019s granddaughter is convinced that if the gallery\u2019s collection had remained in Nova Kakhovka, it would not have escaped the destruction caused by the floodwaters.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Recommended reading<\/div>\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\tKakhovka dam: Ukraine pioneers prosecution for ecocide<\/a>\r\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\n

Havdzynskyi\u2019s paintings resurfacing in Moscow<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In 2024, Havdzynskyi\u2019s paintings suddenly reappeared in Moscow, at an exhibition in the Transneft office, Russia\u2019s state-controlled oil pipeline company. It was reported<\/a> by the Centre for Investigative Journalism. Among the people in the photo, the journalists recognised Volodymyr Bodelan, the son of party leader and former mayor of Odesa Ruslan Bodelan, who fled Ukraine back in 2014. (In 2016, Ukrainian authorities issued a warrant for Bodelan\u2019s arrest on suspicion of <\/a>negligent performance of his duties, resulting in people\u2019s deaths.) Bodelan Jr. was now a representative of the occupation administration<\/a> of the Kherson left bank region, standing side by side with the so-called \u2018Gauleiter\u2019 Volodymyr Saldo, and bragging about the stolen relics from the occupied Ukrainian lands. The creator of the paintings was now referred to as a \u201cSoviet artist\u201d. The occupiers made no reference in the TASS news report to the fact that the paintings exhibited in Russia belonged to the Albin Havdzynskyi Art Gallery in Nova Kakhovka.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI recognised his works, of course! There were self-portraits of my grandfather, and not only works from Kakhovka, but also those he donated to the museum later, in 2003 \u2013 landscapes he created in Poland, Germany and Kyiv. We thought they had already been sold on the black market,\u201d Strautman says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the very beginning of the Kherson region invasion, the occupation administration of the Kherson region\u2019s left bank established its representation in the Russian capital. \u201cThe occupiers appointed collaborator Volodymyr Ruslanovych Bodelan as the institution\u2019s leader,\u201dUkrainian media reported<\/a>. Bodelan was appointed deputy<\/a> to the so-called \u2018governor\u2019 Volodymyr Saldo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2025, a Ukrainian court sentenced Bodelan Jr. (in absentia) to 10 years in prison<\/a> for collaboration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\t\t