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2022-08-18 Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
About the board to Bulgakova and the Ukrainian cross in Sandarmokh
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.

Commentary by A. Stepanov

[ZenYandex] According to media reports, on August 15, a memorial plaque to the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov was removed from the facade of the Kyiv National University. The initiative to remove the board was taken by the founder of the public organization "Expert Corps," Tatyana Shvydchenko. In her opinion, Bulgakov is a symbol of Russian culture, having nothing to do with Ukrainian. In addition, the activist believes that in all his works the writer belittled Ukrainian culture and "poured mud at it." Shvydchenko also said that she would fight for the removal of a memorial plaque from the facade of the KNU in memory of the students and university staff who died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War.

I do not like the phrases about “ball-shaped” inspired by Bulgakov’s work. If only because I consider Bortko’s film a dull perestroika propaganda, and there is an alternative, “Heart of a Dog” by Italian Alberto Lattuada. In it, Professor Preobrazhensky and Bormental are vile and cynical types, and Sharikov is a sincere being who, although he does stupid things, does it without malice and evokes sympathy. The film ends as the victory of the eternal masters of life over the desire of "every cattle" to become a man. symbolically ends.
Soviet filmmaker Vladimir Bortko released his rendition "Heart of a Dog in 1988.
However, I digress. After all, it turns out that the image of "Sharikov" as a miserable, vicious, deceitful and thieving person is applicable just to liberals, nationalists and anti-communists. They glued it to us, but in reality they, the "de-communizers," turned out to be the real "balls." And it is very symbolic that the memorial plaque about Mikhail Afanasyevich suffered precisely from such people.
Sharikov is the name of the recipient of the dog's heart. Mikhail Afanasyevich is the given name and patronymic of the writer Mikail Bulgakov.
But remembering Bulgakov, I remembered one of his wonderful stories about the civil war in Ukraine, which I advise everyone to read. The story with the provocative title "I Killed" was written and published in 1926. The plot in brief is as follows: Doctors are arguing about their guilt in the death of patients, and suddenly one of them, Dr. Yashvin, tells how he did not manage to leave Kyiv in time and ended up being mobilized into the Petliura army. He observes the atrocities and murders taking place there, and when he treats Petliura's colonel Leshchenko, he can't stand it and shoots his patient...

After a silence, I asked Yashvin:
"Is he dead?" Did you kill him or just hurt him?
Yashvin replied, smiling his strange smile:
- Oh, be calm. I killed. Trust my surgical experience.
Symon Petilura was a Ukrainian politician, statesman of the Ukrainian People's Republic, and national leader who led Ukraine's struggle for independence following the Russian Revolution of 1917 (1918-1921).
Mikhail Bulgakov was not a Bolshevik and did not incite class hatred towards his enemies in his story. He simply described the Ukrainian reality of that time. By the way, if Petliura's colonel Leshenko, or rather his prototype, had remained alive then, with a high degree of probability his life could have ended in the Karelian Sandarmokh. From the category of "murderers and participants in genocide" he would automatically move into the category of "innocent victims of Stalin's repressions." Yes, I remind you that the largest group of 1,111 people actually shot in 1937 near Medvezhyegorsk are Ukrainian nationalists. Petliurists, and not ordinary ones, but officers and even ministers of the Petliurist government, involved in the genocide of the Jewish population of Ukraine in 1919-20.

According to historian Artem Kirpichenok, the Jewish pogroms of those years were the largest extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe until the Second World War. Over the course of several years, up to 200,000 Jews were killed and maimed. However, for some reason, modern politicians are in no hurry to name the perpetrators of this massacre, there is a certain conspiracy of silence around this topic.

Why? Because various atamans also participated in it, and the Volunteer Army of General Denikin, whose remains were “patriotically” transferred to Russia at the expense of the budget. So it is extremely inconvenient for the current Russian fans of the “white cause” to remember the pogroms.

However, Symon Petliura's Ukrainian formations distinguished themselves most of all in the pogroms. For example, in 1919, in one city of Proskurov, they killed 2,000 people - mostly representatives of the local proletariat. This is how one of the participants, who later became a famous Ukrainian poet, Vladimir Sosyura, described what happened:

"They stuck a bayonet between the legs of one schoolgirl… And they shot like this: they shoot and look not in such a way as to get fatally, but somehow, they fire a volley and run in a race to the still alive shot. And they grab from the clothes what everyone marked on their victim before the volley ... they said that the Cossacks of the first kuren swore under the flag not to take money, but only to cut. They went to the city and slaughtered almost all of Proskurov's Jewish poor, tailors and shoemakers. They did not look into the bourgeois quarters. There was one Cossack who knew Hebrew. He approached with his comrades to the locked door and addressed the frightened inhabitants in Hebrew. He opened…"

However, after the Euromaidan, the Ukrainian authorities erected monuments to the Petliurists, naming streets and squares in their honor. And in the Karelian Sandarmokh, the monument to the "sons of Ukraine" was erected more than ten years ago. After all, including on this topic, two generations of Ukrainian nationalists were brought up, who were told how the "flower" of their nation was shot in distant Karelia. Although they were nationalists, among whom there were enough real killers.

Therefore, it would not hurt, following the example of Katyn, where a stand was erected in memory of tens of thousands of captured Red Army soldiers tortured by the Poles, to establish a similar stand in Sandarmokh, next to the Ukrainian cross. A stand that would tell about the numerous victims of Ukrainian nationalists during the civil war. With statistics, quotes and photographs. This would be an adequate and civilized response to the liberal and nationalist "Sharikov" for a memorial plaque to Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov.

Posted by badanov 2022-08-18 00:00|| || Front Page|| [1 views ]  Top

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