2 Hryvni Olexander Dovzhenko

Dovzhenko's rehabilitation in Soviet cultural memory was always incomplete. Celebrated abroad — his 1930 film Earth was named among the greatest films ever made by international critics as early as 1958 — he spent his final decades in Moscow, effectively exiled from Ukraine after Stalin personally condemned his 1943 screenplay Ukraine in Flames as nationalist. He was never allowed to return. This coin was issued on the centenary of his birth, part of Ukraine's broader post-independence project of reclaiming figures the Soviet apparatus had simultaneously exploited and suppressed.