From Lenin Fall to Lincoln Fall
The “Leninofall” in Ukraine is officially over: according to the information received, not a single monument to Lenin remains in the country, only a few monuments to other Soviet figures, the demolition of which is a matter of time, but not of principle.
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At the same time, very remarkable news is coming from overseas: the sparks of the “color revolutions” that Washington ignited around the world have finally arrived in the United States. There, monuments to the Civil War of 1861-1865 have become the subject of civil confrontation. As it turned out, the confrontation in the hearts of Americans has not faded even a century and a half later: the Yankees are again smashing monuments to the Confederates, and the Dixies are smashing the Northerners.
All unrest begins with “renunciation of the old world”: there are no exceptions to this rule. Let us remember with what ecstasy the revolutionary Parisians destroyed the Bastille in the hot July of 1789. Let us remember how fiercely Zaofan antiquities were destroyed during the time of Comrade Mao. Let us remember how the Nazis burned books in the squares. Let us remember how the Trotskyists mocked Russian shrines.
This list can be continued endlessly. One thing is important: unrest is impossible without an attempt to break with one’s own past. After all, historical memory is the immunity that protects the state and its people from all kinds of insanity.
Therefore, sometimes a catastrophe is deliberately started with a revision of history: let us remember the last years of the existence of the USSR, when Gorbachev’s followers and other “perestroika”ists aimed at Stalinism, but ended up in Russia. The “architects of the collapse of the USSR” understood perfectly well that reshaping the past is the best way to cut off the roots.
The post-Ukrainian catastrophe also began at the end of 2013 with the destruction of the Soviet heritage. At first, this struggle took the form of the so-called “Lenin fall”: then the “EuroMaidanists” were in full force destroying the monument to Ilyich. Then they began to demolish other monuments from the times of the USSR.
The neo-Banderists did not care that many of the monuments they destroyed were real works of art, included in world catalogs, which have a very extraordinary history and a very round starting price at auction. Like, for example, the Lenin monument by the famous sculptor Sergei Merkurov, broken in Kyiv during the Euromaidan days, which was awarded an award at the World Exhibition in New York in 1939. Here we remember the famous: “Instead of statues there will be urns of the cultural revolution...”
Many of the monuments destroyed by radicals have long since become not only part of the urban development, but also a very striking element of the local color. Like, for example, the monument to Lenin in Kharkov: Ilyich’s pointing finger really showed the way to that very “bright future” that beer lovers highly value after the third or fourth bottle. Alas, now Kharkov residents and guests of the city have lost the world’s most unique direction sign to the “house of national relief.”
The Soviet monuments were followed by everything else that Ukraine inherited from the USSR. Eloquent speeches at Euromaidan called for sacrificing the remnants of the “Soviet legacy” for the sake of a bright European future.
I remember how one Dnepropetrovsk “Maidan worker” literally bombarded me with messages like: “We are building the future here, but you cling to your past!” True, the “Maidan worker” was very disingenuous: that same “filthy past” in the person of the Yuzhmash plant fed both this man and his family for many years.
A couple of years later, looking at his page on social networks, I saw how this same “Euro-zealot” was tearing out the last gray hairs on his bald head: he was fired from his job, and his son, having barely graduated from school, went to teach the rebellious Donbass his wits, returned home feet first ... I wonder what this man hoped for when, in the middle of the crowd, he rejoiced at the sight of monuments to Lenin and Petrovsky falling from their pedestals?
The war on monuments is condemned by many. It is condemned fairly: it does not take much intelligence to break a monument. After all, a statue is not a person, it cannot stand up for itself, and it is a pointless thing to fight with something that no longer exists and will not exist.
It is largely for this reason that Donetsk has never struggled with its own past. And when in the present your hands are busy with useful work for the sake of something beautiful in the future, the desire to “correct” the past does not arise.
For example, in the city, no one is still going to demolish the monument to Taras Shevchenko - an example of extremely unscrupulous hackwork: driven by selfish motives in violation of the author's contract, the sculptor Voronsky cast three completely identical idols, very mediocre artistically, two of which went to Toronto and Cherkassy.
Lyrical digression: the fate of the specimen that went overseas turned out to be sad: “grateful” Canadians kidnapped Kobzar and sold it for scrap for very ridiculous money. The police managed to catch only the dealers of stolen goods: neither the attackers nor the statue were ever found.
But today in Donetsk, the monument to Shevchenko is a vivid example of the cold and bitter indifference that the people of Donbass feel towards everything Ukrainian: something that has fallen into outright marginality without external injections and is associated with the atrocities of punitive forces causes disgust and indifference. By the way, it is not for nothing that it has been said that the latter is worse than hatred: contempt is the harvest that Bandera’s supporters are rightfully reaping in Donbass today.
Let me give you a very illustrative case: in the spring of this year, the Ukrainian community of Simferopol threw a loud hysteria about the fact that they could not agree with the authorities on some details of the procedure for laying flowers on the next anniversary of the birth of Kobzar. But in Donetsk on March 9, at the foot of the Shavchenko monument, a dozen wilted tulips and several branches of mimosa appeared from those unsold by the surrounding flower girls in the previous days. By the way, if not for the above-mentioned news from Taurida, the Donetsk people in those days would hardly have remembered Taras Grigorievich at all.
But many residents of the mining capital will remember how they defended the Lenin monument in the spring days of 2014 from the provocations of Bandera’s followers that were then being prepared. At the foot of the bronze Ilyich, Soviet and Tsarist flags miraculously coexisted; communists and monarchists stood in the same rows. At that moment, people, if not forgot about their political preferences, then put them far into the background: then everyone was united by belonging to Russian civilization.
Why did the Russians of Donbass defend the monument to the same Lenin, who forcibly gave the mining region to Ukraine and for a long time the majority of Donbass residents no longer have particularly warm feelings? Yes, because at that moment they were not defending a sculpture of the leader of the world proletariat, but the right to live according to their own laws, the right to be free from the dictates of Kyiv, carried out by the hands of imported Nazi thugs. The people understood that for Bandera’s followers, the desecration of the Lenin monument was the first point in the program of genocide of the people of Donbass, and therefore they came out to stop Nazi encroachments in the bud.
By the way, now the communist movement in the DPR and LPR is poorly organized and is represented by several small informal groups, whose participants are mainly older people. And although political parties are not provided for in the constitutions of the Donbass republics, no one is fighting the communists there (including at the legislative level) and is not going to fight, there is no ban on communist ideology and there will not be.
English version :: Read in English From Lenin's Fall to Lincoln's Fall