War has shown Ukrainians – and the rest of us – why museums are so important for telling our stories

The violence of war, and all its horror, has a clarifying effect on what really matters in every aspect of life. In the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, those caught up in the terrifying events found that language was reduced to its most fundamental function: telling loved ones they were alive.

The work of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in Kyiv was, similarly, refined to its most basic essentials: safeguarding the objects. Keeping them from destruction. Making sure that they would be there to tell their stories for the next generation.

The researcher Oleksandr Lukianov and his team lived in the museum for a month, rapidly dismantling displays of Greek pots and Scythian gold and sending them to safety. Later, after the Russians had withdrawn from the nearby towns of Bucha and Irpin, he and his team went into those places – once-pleasant commuter towns that overnight became sites of unspeakable horror – to collect artefacts. These objects – everything from abandoned Russian ration packs to the remains of weaponry – bear raw, bloodstained witness to the violence enacted there.

The work was made more urgent by Vladimir Putin’s ideological framing of the invasion: the denial that Ukraine exists as an independent culture, or has its own distinct identity or historical narrative. Under those circumstances, the Ukrainians’ impulse to collect material and quickly, pragmatically display it in the emptied-out museum is not just about amassing evidence for study by future historians – it is also about asserting that they actually exist; that this actually happened. Museums in Britain have not had to deal with equivalent threats to their physical existence since the second world war. It can be hard to connect what can seem like a tame British museum culture – jolly afternoons among the paintings, a trip to the cafe and shop – with the unvarnished task of memory preservation that I saw in Kyiv.

In fact, there is every connection. I think of the Imperial War Museum (IWM), which began in 1917. The first world war was still in full spate, but people based on the western front were asked to collect objects from the battlefield. The museum’s founders were convinced that one day the public would need to gather round the artefacts – again, the actual material evidence of what the country had been through. They were right.

More than a century later, that same museum has just opened an exhibition about the Troubles, a conflict whose ghosts have not yet been put to rest. The Ulster Museum has shown the importance of thoughtfully, carefully gathering and displaying the memory of the Troubles for its communities in the heart of Northern Ireland. The IWM is now doing something rather different. It is bringing the world of checkpoints and rubber bullets, of “peace walls” and razor wire, across the water – to a Britain that barely understood, and largely chose to avert its eyes from, the savage “normality” that the Northern Irish lived through day after day during the most violent periods of the conflict.

That the IWM decided to make this exhibition reminded me of something said at a recent set of conversations among museum directors convened by the charity Art Fund, to mark the shortlist announcement for this year’s museum of the year prize. “We make things visible. That’s what we do,” said Sally Shaw, director of Colchester’s contemporary art gallery Firstsite. “We put things into the public realm. And we do that with other people; it’s a collaborative effort. So what we have to concentrate on is: what it is that we want to make public? And how do we do it?”

Shaw’s statement of the function of museums is almost naive in its simplicity, and yet cuts to its heart. What is to be made public? With whom? How? These are questions that increasingly demand different kinds of answers in the UK, just as they have abruptly required a different kind of answer in wartime Kyiv. Amid the highly variegated landscape of museums in Britain, there is a growing awareness that museums can no longer offer a singular, lofty, purportedly neutral view. Unless, that is, they are content to be mistrusted, or understood as irrelevant to, some of the communities around them. Equally, since there is no such thing as a “neutral” curatorial position, there is a growing realisation that museums should be more honest about their own intellectual processes, and more generous about sharing their power (that of amassing, keeping, selecting and displaying objects) with those outside their walls.

The IWM’s Troubles exhibition addresses some of these issues by including “curator’s notes” – short wall-texts in which Craig Murray, who organised the show, explains his approach. At the same time, the exhibition acts above all as a convener of ordinary people’s voices, allowing them to play out through sound recordings in polyphonic disagreement.

In an age when identity politics, if not usually as violently as in the Northern Ireland of the Troubles, have flooded through all parts of society, treading into this kind of contested area isn’t easy. It takes guts to run a civic museum or gallery these days. They are increasingly institutions where memory and history are argued over, sometimes angrily. For former imperial powers such as Britain, restitution is a subject that is not going to go away any time soon, and will form part of a wider post-imperial reckoning that will continue to play out for years to come.

That makes museums less comfortable places than they were in the days when they could be more or less relied on to be the slumbrous resting place of a few neolithic tools and medieval coins, and no one openly questioned the presence of, say, the African artefacts gathering dust in a corner. But it does make them more vital – because society needs places where debates about history, identity and culture can be enacted, without violence.

Related: Ukrainian heritage is under threat – and so is the truth about Soviet-era Russia | Anna Reid

We need museums. Imagine the void that has been left in, say, Kherson, a city whose museums have been plundered and emptied, where display cases and plinths have been left blind and blank, from which collective memories have been ransacked. In the UK we are not under threat of such extreme and sudden depredations, but of losses of a different, more incremental kind. What rang out all too strongly from the Art Fund conversations among museum leaders was that there is no lack of appetite to serve communities in more imaginative ways – but a huge lack of resources.

An unintended potential consequence of the museum of the year prize is that, by focusing attention on the good news of the museums that have, against the odds, achieved success, the real crisis in museums is overlooked. This crisis is not one of aspiration, of intelligence, or of ambition, but of day-to-day resources. Diane Lees, the recently departed director-general of IWM, said she feared a sinking of Britain’s museums to a situation akin to that in the early 1990s, when many were depressing places decades out of date, unable to adapt their displays or ways of working, through sheer lack of cash. It’s a slower death than being looted or bombed. But it’s still a death.

• Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer. She will be speaking about the future of museums at the Hay festival on Saturday 3 June