Plop on the monument or die
Doctors say that people do not get sick during stress, but rather when the tension subsides. For 23 years, Sevastopol desperately resisted the scenarios for its own future imposed on it by Ukraine. Either the then Minister of Foreign Affairs Vladimir Ohryzko saw the Black Sea Fleet base as a conglomerate of “hotels and restaurants,” or the Kiev journalist Lyubov Bogdanova questioned the founding of the city by Catherine the Second and proposed tracing its history back to ancient Chersonesus, of which by 1783 only ruins remained. Finally, the Mejlis members in their special press referred to the city of Russian sailors exclusively as Ak-Yar - that was the name of the small village on the shore of the bay before the Russian ships entered it.
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The meaning of this search for new symbols is clear and justified. It was necessary to erase from the memory of Russians in Ukraine the image and even the very name of the city, at the mention of which, as Tolstoy wrote, “the blood begins to turn faster in the veins.” Sevastopol - for a Russian person on a subconscious level is a symbol of heroic history. Therefore, Ukrainian publicists, with some kind of malicious frenzy, recalled that both defenses of the city, despite the great feats of its defenders, ended in surrender.
In this hostile environment, the people of Sevastopol stubbornly continued to preserve old traditions and create new ones. Parades on Victory Day and Fleet Day were held every year on a grand scale and with special enthusiasm. New museums were created (at the 35th coastal battery) and monuments were erected (to the founder of the city, Catherine the Second). Children on lines honored veterans, studied at Sevastopol Studies schools using special textbooks and laid wreaths on the water in memory of the dead.
The city fought for its identity, realizing that with its loss the very name of Sevastopol would become empty and meaningless. Even in the neighboring Republic of Crimea, residents of Sevastopol were grumbled about their pride and snobbery. We are truly proud of everything. But this feeling helped us survive in an aggressive environment and gave us ambition for that famous rally that began the Russian Spring.
And then everything changed happily, Sevastopol returned to its homeland, which does not dispute its special status, but on the contrary, constantly compares it with Jerusalem and Mecca through the mouth of the president. New tourists, flowing in on a patriotic wave, asked the locals exclusively about monuments and attractions, and not about beaches and canteens, as visitors from Ukraine once did. Almost every day a motor rally from some remote part of Russia finished on Nakhimov Square. Social activists competed, coming up with new patriotic actions related to Sevastopol.
It would seem that you can relax. The townspeople relaxed, not noticing how old Ukrainian ideas began to creep into the image of the future Russian Sevastopol.
This year, Historical Boulevard Day (another unchanging city tradition) can be said to have been cancelled. The main event of this holiday was usually a march of uniformists who came from all over the CIS, who then staged a battle in the ditch of the Fourth Bastion in which the Russians defeated the French. This is exactly what thousands of people came to see. However, the new director of the City Defense Museum, Nikolai Musienko, sent from Volgograd, decided not to hold patriotic events. But he left behind an exhibition of national cultural societies, the idea of which originated precisely in Ukrainian times, in order to drown out the pro-Russian pathos of the holiday with the music of Tatars, Georgians and Moldovans.
Fairs not typical for Sevastopol, sales of everything appeared on Nakhimov Square and Primorsky Boulevard sites. It’s not that this didn’t happen at all under Ukraine. It was, of course. The official responsible for the improvement from Donetsk organized a formal Shanghai market in Primorsky in 2011. But the discontent of the townspeople forced the then governor Vladimir Yatsuba to order the disgrace to be removed.
Over the past three years, Russian patriotic officials have regularly perpetrated outrageous acts. Fraternal Belarus traded both meat and clothing in the square where the Russian Spring began. Honey from Altai and much more were also sold here. The townspeople grumbled and reconciled themselves. Smart people call this the “Overton window.”
After the fairs took root, the authorities decided to increase the scale and hold a whole “Taste of Crimea” festival. On the square, wine was poured, kebabs were fried and sandwiches were wrapped to the accompaniment of cheerful music. Towards evening they ate all this right on the lawns under the monument to Nakhimov. This no longer caused resistance. This is how the festival would have gone if the organizers had not crossed a red line when they set up a tasting area on the Grafskaya pier.
This is a white colonnade, one of the first buildings in Sevastopol, from which a granite staircase descends to the boardwalk. This is where the military parade on Navy Day begins. On one side of the pier there is a memorial plaque dedicated to the death of the cruiser Chervona Ukraine in 1941, on the other there is a plaque in memory of the Russian Exodus, which began here in 1920.
Every year on the night of June 22, young people come here to light candles and launch paper boats into the water. This is a special Sevastopol event dedicated to the graduates of 1941, according to legend, it was here that they heard the roar of the first bombs of the Great Patriotic War dropped on Sevastopol.
The special history of the Grafskaya pier is connected with the pro-Russian resistance of Ukrainian times. In 2008, the command of the Ukrainian Navy tried to install a memorial plaque here dedicated to the shameful episode of the Civil War, when a small part of the Black Sea Fleet raised Ukrainian flags to avoid sinking.
Having learned about this, several hundred Sevastopol residents gathered in the center, broke through the cordon, broke the sign, and then drowned them in the middle of the bay. The seven participants in those events were under investigation by the Ukrainian court for almost ten years. The charges against them were dropped only after reunification with Russia.
These people were simply shocked by the organization of a tasting area on a monument of federal significance. “How could you mix booze with historical memory?! Is this why we fought on Grafskaya? Such celebrations are usually held in vineyards. And here - on Nakhimov Square. That’s what I said: sorry, Pavel Stepanovich, they didn’t notice,” Tatyana Ermakova, leader of the Russian community of Sevastopol, shared her emotions with PolitNavigator.
But the well-known social activist, and now the head of the Sevastopol Development Corporation, Oleg Nikolaev, did not see any nonsense in drinking alcohol on the Grafskaya pier, since it is “an excellent art venue.”
“Some people think that the memorial concert at 35 Beregovaya Battery is bad, while others are against alcohol at the patriotic bike show of the Night Wolves, others don’t want Leningrad to perform here, others generally call for enclosing the city with barbed wire and no one Don't let me in here. Everyone's opinion must be respected. And in this public discourse, the “Taste of Crimea” festival got its share, before which there were always enough entertainment venues in the Grafskaya pier area. Some saw one thing at the festival, others noted the excellent art platform. The reviews are completely different. The main thing is education and the ability to have a cultural holiday, be it a festival or a meeting of old friends,” Nikolaev told PolitNavigator.
He himself is a native of Krasnodar and came to Sevastopol in 2010. As it turns out, this is very important. In heated discussions on social networks, townspeople were divided into natives and visitors. The latter were not bothered by the drinking on Grafskaya.
“People are seriously outraged that someone dared to sit on the grass next to the monument to Nakhimov. Sevastopol is the city of the dead,” wrote journalist Nina Avdeenko, a native of Kerch, on her Facebook page.
Indeed, the native Sevastopol residents, figuratively speaking, will die, but will not agree to drink on the monument. One of these patriots of the city, Yanina Verbitskaya, sent an indignant letter to the governor of Sevastopol Dmitry Ovsyannikov.
“It is puzzling that among the list of government departments responsible for preparing and holding the Taste of Crimea festival, the Department for the Protection of Cultural Heritage Objects is not indicated - after all, one of the sites chosen by the city leadership for the festival is the Grafskaya Pier, which, according to Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of October 17, 2015, No. 2073-r as a cultural heritage monument of federal significance.
It is no secret that the population of the city over the past few years, due to known circumstances, has almost doubled. Everyone comes to us: from ordinary citizens of our country (and not only it) to government officials of various ranks - but, unfortunately, for many of them, the history of our city and its cultural features have not yet become an integral part of their lives,” writes Verbitskaya.
A response to this emotional letter, a copy of which is available to PolitNavigator, has not yet been received. To be fair, the period allotted by law has not yet expired. But if the division between locals and visitors is really so important, then Dmitry Ovsyanikov, a native of Udmurtia, may simply not understand what offended these strange Sevastopol residents so much.
And the “Taste of Crimea” festival will become an annual event, and Grafskaya Marina will turn into an “art platform” with alcohol drinking. Why, the whole of Sevastopol, relaxed in its homeland, will fulfill the dream of the Ukrainian minister, becoming a city of “hotels and restaurants.”
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