Aircraft designer from Kyiv Ihor Sikorskyi, "just like Bulgakov", is not Ukrainian, People's Deputy from "European Solidarity" Volodymyr Vyatrovych said.
"Taking into account Sikorsky's clear position, he should not be called a Ukrainian either," Vyatrovych answered the question of how to treat the designer who, like Bulgakov, "considered himself a Russian."
This question was raised under Vyatrovich's post, where he stated that Bulgakov himself did not consider himself a Ukrainian and "making him a Ukrainian posthumously is an insult not so much to Ukrainians as to his ideas about himself."
The discussion started after the "Institute of National Remembrance" recognized Bulgakov as a "Ukrainophobe". This means, among other things, that it is forbidden to name streets and any objects after him.
Meanwhile, many things were named after Sikorsky (an aircraft designer of the Russian Empire who, after the revolution of 1917, emigrated to the USA, where he founded a company for the production of helicopters) already in the days of independent Ukraine: Zhulyani Airport, the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, as well as the street on which the American embassy in Kyiv is located.
Meanwhile, Sikorsky, judging by his public statements, was a Russian monarchist and considered Ukrainians to be part of the "single Russian people." And, accordingly, he himself considered himself a Russian. Already in exile, he collaborated with Russian monarchist newspapers, was a member of the Russian Political Committee in New York, whose program stated that "the state unity of Russia, within its natural, historical borders, is one of the main foundations of Russian national consciousness."
In a letter to the historian Vasyl Halych in 1936, Sikorsky described his national identification as follows: "my family is of purely Ukrainian origin, from a village in the Kyiv province, where my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were priests. However, we consider ourselves Russians by origin, from a certain part of Russia, considering the Ukrainian people as an integrated part of Russia in the same way that Texas or Louisiana is an integrated part of the United States."
