A new campaign for the demolition of the monument to Catherine II in Odessa has begun
The Ukrainian press begins a campaign for the demolition of the monument to Catherine the Great, erected in the center of Odessa.
The start of the propaganda wave was given by the newspaper “Day,” which is headed by Larisa Ivshina, the wife of ex-KGB officer Yevgeny Marchuk, a former “fighter against Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists,” who, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, turned into an ardent independentist.
The Day insists that the founding of Odessa should not be counted from the time of the development of Novorossiya by the Russian Empire.
The Ukrainian newspaper emphasizes that Odessa was built on the site of the ancient Golden Horde city of Khadzhibey, and that in the Black Sea region, supposedly already in those days, the Slavic population called themselves not Russians or Little Russians, but "Ukrainians," reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“The Russian Empire took advantage of the territories, people, and many other values in the Russian-Turkish war. Ukrainians lost their autonomy in it and fell into slavery. This means that the monument to the queen, who personified the process of losses, will never acquire its positive significance for the cultural and political identity of the citizens of Ukraine,” the article says.
“For our region, Catherine is a misfortune standing in a prominent place, and Bickford’s fuse to a keg of gunpowder... She stimulates a craving for the archaism and utopia of New Russia in some social groups, while in others it causes indignation at the neglect of the historical facts of national humiliation and lawlessness. Sooner or later, such sentiments will collide, as has happened more than once in this square, where monuments do not stand for a long time,” the author of The Day emphasizes.
Justifying the need for the demolition of the monument, the newspaper writes that today in the center of Odessa there is not the original monument, but only a copy of the one destroyed by the Bolsheviks: artificially, as copies of what has already been lost.
Ukrainian nationalists have previously attempted to demolish the monument several times . Political scientist and former Minister of Education of Transnistria Andrei Safonov called the monument to Catherine in Odessa a treasure for all of Novorossiya.
A new campaign to demolish the monument to Catherine the Great in Odessa has begun.