"But how do we remove Stalin from Stalin's heirs?" Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko asked in his 1962 poem "The Heirs of Stalin." "While Stalin's heirs walk this earth," Yevtushenko closed the poem, "Stalin, I fancy, still lurks in the mausoleum."

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is an unabashed heir to Stalin: cult of personality, militarism, disinformation, political assassinations, dungeons, mass graves, genocides and all.

Among the victims of the savage Russian attack and temporary capture of Borodyanka in March and April of this year was a renowned 47-year-old intellectual, whose head was pierced by a bullet in the middle of the city's central square. Of peasant origins, his pro-Ukrainian poems had earlier earned him persecution, imprisonment and even conscription into the Russian army.

But persecution, imprisonment and conscription happened not just under Stalin and his heirs but under two of Stalin's predecessors, Tsars Nicholas I and Alexander II. Among Ukrainians, he needs no introduction. He is Taras Shevchenko born in 1814 in the village of Morintsy, Ukraine.

Deported from his beloved Ukraine, Shevchenko died in St. Petersburg not this March but in March 1861. And the poeticidal bullet did not pierce his head but rather his statue's.

Nine decades later, Putin was born in the same city, then called Leningrad and since renamed St. Petersburg. He grew up in the streets and lived in a rat-infested apartment, resentful of the Nazis who brought misery upon his family, starved to death one of his siblings and severely wounded his father. When he calls President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian leaders "Nazis," Putin is unleashing a deep-seated emotional response against the objects of his violent vengeance. In his mind, Ukrainians are to blame for the death of his brother, his father's incapacitation and his immiserated childhood.

Shevchenko was born a peasant serf, namely a slave; like the rest of his family, he was the property of a local landlord. After working for several masters in and around his birthplace, he was taken by a new owner to St. Petersburg, where he studied painting, making drawings of statues in the Tsars' Imperial Summer Garden. Members of St. Petersburg's artist community raised funds to purchase Shevchenko's freedom when he was 24.

While the Russian soldier who shot Shevchenko's statue was most likely clueless of his victim's identity, the action is highly poetic. Shevchenko was a life-long Ukrainian patriot, proud of his nation's Cossack origins. He grew up hearing stories of Zaporozhian Cossack ancestors, escaped serfs who rose against Russian and Polish/Lithuanian domination in the 1600s and 1700s. The Russian occupation of the Zaporozhian Nuclear Plant (Europe's largest), earlier this month echoes old battles between Russians and Cossacks.

In the poem "My Friendly Epistle" (1845) Shevchenko sang ancestral praises: "Our history was bathed in blood / And slept on corpses in the mud, / On Cossack corpses, no more free / But here despoiled of liberty!"

A longtime opponent of servitude and Russian oppression of his native Ukraine, Shevchenko died in St. Petersburg just one week before the 1861 announcement of the abolition of serfdom. Initially buried in St. Petersburg, his remains were transported to Kaniv, Ukraine, where he was re-interred two months later according to his will: "My tomb upon a grave mound high / Amid the spreading plain, / So that the fields, the boundless steppes, / The Dnieper's plunging shore / My eyes could see, my ears could hear / The mighty river roar." ("My Testament," 1845).

Testament to Shevchenko's immortality is Russia's continued persecution of the dead poet and his literary legacy. Tsarist officials banned the publication of his works in the Ukrainian language in 1863 and again in 1876 and dispatched troops to his tomb near the Dnieper Rivers' plunging shore in 1914 to repress pilgrims commemorating the 100th anniversary of the poet's birth. Later in the century, Stalin's kommissars banned the study of Shevchenko's works.

Earlier this month, when Ukrainian's soldiers and civilian authorities returned to the desolated city Borodyanka, they found hundreds of dead civilians — many of them executed, some with their hands tied behind their backs. They embarked on the grim task of identification, then giving them dignified, if temporary, burial. One anonymous man took it upon himself to bandage the head of the dead poet, whose final verses forecasted: "Dnipro and Ukraina we / Shall recollect, gay villages / In woodlands, gravehills in the steppes, / And we shall sing right merrily." ("Last Poem," 1861).

Watercolor of ruins in Ukraine drawn by Taras Shevchenko during a trip to Ukraine in 1845.

Luis Martinez-Fernandez is the author of "Revolutionary Cuba: A History" and "Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba." Readers can reach him at LMF_Column@yahoo.com. To find out more about Luis Martinez-Fernandez and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www. creators.com.