Aggressors may deliberately destroy the physical and intellectual objects that shape national identity: museums, architectural monuments, cultural institutions, archives and written heritage, shrines and necropolises. Erasing material evidence of the past and forcibly removing national symbols from public space allows the colonizer to create a cultural vacuum, which is subsequently filled, with no alternative, by the artificial narratives of the metropole.
A covert operation by Muscovite emissaries disguised as monks to destroy ancient documents of the 11th–17th centuries: "The enormous archive and library burned down; the charters and grants… of princes, magnates, and hetmans perished"; "The fire destroyed the written memory of the Lavra's independent Ukrainian political and spiritual life"[3].
The issuing of Catherine II's August manifesto, officially erasing the very memory of the Sich: it was destroyed "with the extirpation for the future of the very name of the Zaporozhian Cossacks," for the empire resolved "to destroy the Zaporozhian Sich and the name of the Cossacks derived from it"[4]. Hrushevsky: "The Sich was destroyed, and on 3 August a tsarist decree announced its abolition, 'with the annihilation of the very name of the Zaporozhian Cossacks'"[5].
The erasure of the memory of national heroes: "In January 1914, minister of internal affairs Nikolai Maklakov signed a circular by which he forbade throughout all governorates of the empire 'public celebrations of the Little Russian writer Taras Shevchenko'"[6].
Institutional destruction of national historical scholarship, closure of research schools, and removal of the works of Ukrainian historians from scholarly circulation[7].
On the land emptied by the deportation of the Chechens the colonizer destroyed the urban markers of their history: it ransacked the republican local history museum and blew up the monument to the Chechen commander Aslanbek Sheripov[8].