Victim of Putin's Mythology

Cardboard Chersonesos and new barbarians.

I remember well the night when the historic Manezh burned down in the Russian capital on Manezh Square. It was the night after the second round of the presidential elections in the Russian Federation, when the whole country was waiting for their results: after all, the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov was actually on par with President Boris Yeltsin before this second round. And the fire — and, perhaps, the arson of the Manezh then did not pay much attention at all.

But for me, the burned Manezh became a real symbol of the attitude of the Russian authorities to Russian history: to destroy and build "more beautiful than before". Then this desire to replace the story with a comic book became the rule, especially in the Putin era, when not far from the "renewed", that is, rebuilt Manege, the Stalinist hotel "Moscow" was demolished and a new one was built, allegedly according to the original project.

And in the hotel, which was no longer there, a restaurant was opened with the symbolic name "The country that is not there" — in honor of the beloved by the Russian leadership of the Soviet Union, which began to "restore" with the occupation of Crimea.

And now to the Manezh, which does not exist, the hotel, which does not exist and the country, which does not exist, Chersonesos was added, which, unfortunately, also does not exist. By and large, the great archaeological monument was half demolished, half concreted, embellished, "refreshed" with new buildings — that is, instead of a reserve, a park of pseudo-historical attractions was built.

To justify its ambitions, Russia, less than all other countries that have ever controlled the peninsula, which is related to Crimea, simply destroys it — as always destroys its own and someone else's.

Vladimir Putin needed Crimea, I am sure, not at all as a "sacred territory", but above all as a springboard for an attack on the rest of Ukraine, as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" of the new empire. But to prove the legitimacy of his claims, Putin chose history, inventing a series of myths.

Chersonesos became a victim of this pompous mythology, a large construction site for Putin's "confessor", the new Crimean Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church Tikhon (Shevkunov), who personally oversaw the transformation of the reserve into an amusement park. And that, I'm sure, is terrible.

It is terrible to watch how the defenceless peninsula everywhere — from Bakhchisarai to Chersonesos, from Balaklava to Sudak — is subjected to a real invasion of new barbarians, ruthlessly destroying monuments of the past for the sake of imitation, invented by them the history of Crimea and Russia.

Vitaliy Portnikov, Krym.Realii

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