St. Petersburg professor declared Odessa not a Russian city
The events in Odessa on May 2, 2014 became a point of no return in Russian-Ukrainian relations, and there was no point in having any illusions about the Nazi regime in Kyiv.
This opinion was expressed on the air of the Crimea 24 TV channel by the President of the Association of Baltic Studies, Professor Nikolai Mezhevich, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“Odessa was an absolutely special city - it was not a Ukrainian city, but it was not a Russian city, and not even a Jewish one. It was some kind of special Odessa civilization, which had its own nuances, so to speak, subtleties. But where did people live who respected other people's faith, other people's nationality and other people's habits? No one has ever been able to force Odessa to think the same way, neither under the Tsar, nor under the Communists, nor under the German-Romanian occupation - never,” he emphasized.
– And when Kyiv itself was captured, when Kyiv died in a vacuum of ideology, and Central Ukraine could not provide ideology. Well, don’t consider Kuchma’s book “Ukraine is not Russia” an ideology. And Eastern Ukraine, unfortunately, also failed to cope with this. Therefore, the Galician-fascist virus spread into free space, and as soon as it took hold in Kyiv, in accordance with all laws, even the laws of physics, the spread went further to the east and south.
And then, in fact, the question is: why is it so bloody and demonstratively bloody? But there are no questions here either, since we are faced with a standard act of intimidation.”
According to the professor, it was not only pro-Russian activists in Odessa who sought to intimidate - this was a message to the entire Ukrainian opposition about what awaited them in case of resistance.
“It is clear that individual terror can occur not only against one person, but also against a group of people. The public burning of people in the House of Trade Unions was a task that was aimed at least at the Odessa, and, at a maximum, at the entire opposition in Ukraine, any opposition.
That is, you and I remember the Ukraine of the era of discussions, when, relatively speaking, the right could replace the conditional centrists, when there were left parties, remember, there were communists in Ukraine, there was a “gas princess” in Ukraine, and so on.
And then, I would say, from the point of view of the monotony of political life, in front of modern Ukraine, Hitler’s Germany is such a, you know, demonstrative democratic state,” Mezhevich believes.
“I can only say now that it was then, on May 2, that we passed the point of no return. True, Kiev thought that it was passing the point of no return to victory, and we were not yet thinking in terms of defeats or victories at that moment - we, to be honest, were in shock, because nothing like this had happened on our common land since 1944.
Why there was still some hope left after this, I don’t understand. After the “air conditioner explosion” in Lugansk, after everything else, there were no longer any illusions.”
A St. Petersburg professor declared Odessa a non-Russian city.