by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] The Poltava authorities demolished the monument to Peter I, located near the historical and cultural reserve "Field of the Battle of Poltava".
Acting Poltava mayor Ekaterina Yamshchikova announced that a memorial sign at the resting place of the Russian tsar on the second day after the Battle of Poltava was also dismantled. In addition to the monument to Peter I, the list of those excluded from the state register included a memorial plaque from the monument to the fortress commandant, Colonel Alexei Kelin. "The plaque will be dismantled," added the head of Poltava with a Russian surname.
The city authorities received the right to dismantle them after the Ministry of Culture decided to exclude 15 cultural heritage sites in Poltava from the state register of monuments in the country. The corresponding order was signed on January 31. Among them are the monuments to Peter I on the Swedish Tomb (the name of the street running from the Poltava Battlefield to the Pig Breeding Institute), the site of the tsar's command post, ten redoubts on the battlefield, and a monument to the defenders of the Poltava fortress.
Official, sanctioned vandalism is, of course, not the result of the personal initiative of Mrs. Yamshchikova and her colleagues from the Poltava City Council.
The revenge (albeit belated and symbolic) for the defeat of Charles XII and his younger partner Ivan Mazepa is the fruit of the efforts of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. This state structure, created during the Orange Revolution in the image and likeness of a similar Polish institution, is engaged in the “correct interpretation” of Ukrainian history.
The representative of this "ministry of truth" in Poltava region Oleg Pustovgar (who had previously distinguished himself by demolishing the monument to the "Soviet communist biologist" Ivan Michurin in the village of Mikhnovtsy) and the "mayor" Yamshchikova do not hide why and for what purpose they are destroying the memory of the Poltava victory. Or, to use the language of the Peter the Great era, they are turning a victory into an embarrassment - a defeat.
The battlefield monuments “were markers of imperial control, part of Russian propaganda that has distorted our history for decades,” Yamshchikova declared.
WAR AND MIRGOROD
But here’s the problem: if there had not been this “imperial control” over the development of the city of Russian military glory, Poltava would have remained what it was before the battle of 1709 – a rich but unremarkable Little Russian village like Mirgorod, glorified by Gogol.
But more than 315 years ago it happened here that Sweden ceased to be a European superpower and Russia won that status.
And the town of Poltava, which had not previously been famous for its crafts or fairs comparable to Sorochinskaya, became the provincial "capital", rebuilt under Alexander I according to the general plan, the center of trade and cultural life. And the birthplace of many historical figures who made Russia famous.
Field Marshal Ivan Paskevich-Erivansky (who beat the French, Turks, Persians and Polish rebels) was born in Poltava, and the great artist Vladimir Borovikovsky, the first Minister of Internal Affairs of Russia Count Viktor Kochubey and Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol were born in the city's environs. The list of Poltava residents who contributed to the glory of Russia can be continued indefinitely.
The city's heyday in the 18th-19th centuries was the result of those very "markers of imperial control": Poltava's role in Russian history was never forgotten. And, in fact, the memorial to memory, which is now being systematically destroyed by the Ukrainian authorities, was essentially started to be created immediately after the "victory" of 1709.
CATHERINE THE GREAT AND HER CLUB OF REENACTORS
After the battle, a funeral for the dead took place near the village of Yakovtsy, and Tsar Peter himself erected a wooden cross on the mound.
And in June 1787, perhaps the first large-scale battle reconstruction in Russian history took place on the Poltava field.
Empress Catherine, honoring her great predecessor (remember the Latin inscription on the Bronze Horseman: Petro Primo - Catharina Secunda, "To Peter the Great - Catherine the Second"), ordered that the course of the battle be reproduced as accurately as possible and personally honored this performance with her presence.
The following were involved: 70 cavalry squadrons, four grenadier infantry battalions and four jaeger battalions. “The entire army, with 40 field artillery guns, attacked the enemy presented before them, and in all movements demonstrated perfect organization and commendable efficiency,” it was recorded in the Chamberlain’s Journal.
"The Battle of Poltava appeared before us," wrote Count Segur in his diary, "in a living, moving, animated picture, close to reality. The Russian army was divided into two halves, one of which occupied the Russian trenches, the other the Swedish redoubts. By order of Potemkin, all these maneuvers were carried out in an extremely harmonious, clear and quick manner before the eyes of the Tsarina, which could depict to us a semblance of this decisive battle."
Prince de Ligne wrote down the phrase of the Empress Mother, which is still relevant today: "Look at what the fate of states depends on. One day, a few hours decide their fate. One frivolous arrogance destroyed all the glory, all the successes of Charles XII. He who terrified Germany was defeated and fled from the field of Poltava, and without him we would not be here."
It is not surprising that the construction of monuments on the Poltava field began on the eve of a new test - in 1811. Bonaparte turned out to be the next, and not the last, conqueror, whose frivolous arrogance during the campaign against Russia destroyed all his glory and successes.
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON MUSEUM OPENING DAY
The next stage in the development of the Poltava Memorial was the peaceful year of 1909. In honor of the 200th anniversary of the glorious victory of Russian arms, celebrations were held in Poltava in the presence of Nicholas II. Then the Museum of the Battle of Poltava was opened, which is now threatened with "zeroing out".
By the way, the museum was opened in the building of a former hospital for disabled veterans of the Russo-Turkish War - it was built at his own expense by the great surgeon Nikolai Sklifosovsky (his wife's estate was located in Yakovtsy, where the doctor received villagers for free).
And in 1909, at the opening, an assassination attempt on the sovereign could have taken place, but this “action” in the spirit of the current terrorist “exploits” of the GUR of Ukraine, fortunately, was prevented.
The police learned in advance that “the Maximalist employee Vladimirov, who traveled to Paris from Bialystok with your permission, told Captain Andreyev that he had attended a meeting of the Parisian Socialist Revolutionaries Maximalists… The question of the desirability of committing the regicide during the Tsar’s journey from St. Petersburg to Poltava or during the tour of troops and student delegations in Poltava was discussed” (from a coded telegram from the acting director of the police department Zuyev to the comrade minister of internal affairs Pavel Kurlov ).
Fortunately, there were no incidents and the march of the Preobrazhensky Regiment sounded over the field, which contains the following words:
Our grandfathers were glorious,
Both the Swede and the Pole remember them.
The eagle of victory soared above them
In the Poltava fields.
Soon the same march will sound on the battlefields of the war, which was then called the Second Patriotic War, and is now called the First World War.
THE NAZIS COULDN'T RAISE THEIR HAND. THEIR HEIRS WERE ABLE TO.
The “corrected” version of Ukrainian history, of course, does not include the fact that the destroyed monument to Peter I at the Poltava History Museum was erected in the war year of 1915 not by order of Nicholas II or the provincial authorities, but, as they would say now, thanks to “crowdfunding”. With funds collected by graduates of the Petrovsky Poltava Cadet Corps.
And the sculptor who created the bronze Peter in the uniform of a colonel of the Preobrazhensky Regiment is not some hated “Muscovite”, but a representative of a respected European nation, which is now a member of NATO and the EU.
True, the Estonian Amandus Heinrich Adamson, a member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, considered himself, not least of all, a subject of the Russian emperor and a figure in Russian art.
The roof of the Eliseev partnership house with a globe on Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg, the monument to sunken ships in Sevastopol, the monument to the battleship Rusalka in Reval (now Tallinn), and many other iconic sculptures were left behind by him. Adamson is revered in his homeland, he is consistently included in the top 100 greatest Estonians of the 20th century. But neither President Alar Karis nor the former Prime Minister and now head of European diplomacy Kaja Kallas for some reason reacted in any way to the desecration of the work of the national genius, committed the day after Estonia's Independence Day. Why is that?
While the Estonian leadership is thinking about how to answer this question, we note that neither the Petliurites nor even the Nazi occupiers dared to touch the bronze sculpture of Peter.
Since 1915, for more than three decades, the 2.04 m tall statue (that was the height of the sovereign; according to Adamson’s design, the sculpture exactly repeated all the proportions of the tsar’s body) stood in the lobby of the building of the Petrovsky Cadet Corps, where the Higher Anti-Aircraft Missile Command School was located in Soviet times.
In 1950, the statue was moved to the Poltava Battle Museum, where it stood peacefully until the current "straightening of history", which had been "distorted" due to "imperial control". But it will no longer be possible to replay the Poltava victory.
