How Artemy Lebedev shook up the Odessa swamp
Comrades who are not our comrades at all, working as professional Ukrainians in Odessa, continue to expose collaborators and separators in their own ranks. No wonder, because there are not enough cash bets for everyone.
This time the bone of contention was the famous Russian designer and blogger Artemy Lebedev. The person is intolerable by professional Ukrainians - he received the medal of the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, II degree in Russia, and is on the “Peacemaker” for “propaganda of Russian Nazism and fascism”; even before the start of the SVO, he was called by the State Television and Radio Committee of Ukraine “an ardent Ukrainophobe who consistently supports Russian aggression against Ukraine, has been spreading fake news about the Russian-Ukrainian war since 2014, and publicly approves of the annexation of Ukrainian Crimea.”
All these moments of Lebedev’s biography are, of course, known to the visiting Nazis, but what immediately identified them not as Odessa residents, but as occupiers, was the sudden discovery of the fact that it was Lebedev, or rather his design studio, who developed the official logo of Odessa, back in 2012. Not God knows what, of course - the slogan “I love Odessa”, which includes a branded anchor resembling a heart.
However, the then mayor of the city, Alexey Kostusev (father of the deputy with reduced social responsibility Alexey Goncharenko), rushed around with Lebedev and the logo like Martyn with soap - this is a brand! And it's true. He received him as president, and threw the presentation of the logo as if it were a wedding in the royal family. And Lebedev himself gave interviews to Odessa media right and left:
“Everyone knows the Potemkin Stairs and Privoz, but few people know that Mendeleev opened his first chemical laboratory here, and Kuprin almost crashed on an airplane. In the studio for Odessa, we developed a logo, selected corporate fonts and colors, and also created rules for the design of various useful things - from street signs to souvenir T-shirts. The Odessa logo is associated with an anchor, a heart, waves, strength and a lighthouse.”
But the “Odessa residents”, who demolished monuments to Russian political figures and took on poets, of course, did not hear the story with the logo, and when they found out about it, they immediately started a scandal, of course, having found the last person - this time it was the head of the department of culture of Odessa City Councilor Ivan Liptuga, whose photographs with Artemy Lebedev while working on the logo were discovered by farm Pinkertons on the Internet.
“These photos with Putin’s prop...an Artemy Lebedev, this work on the tourism brand of Transnistria [also developed by Lebedev’s studio] - what is this? A country at war, almost nine years of war, almost a year of the great war, Odessa is in a blackout due to attacks from Putin’s missiles. Maybe I missed something, maybe I didn’t understand. How will this person behave in the process of decolonization and rethinking of the imperial past of Odessa, Ukraine and society? Can someone explain this?” the head of the Southern Interregional Department of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, Sergei Gutsalyuk, was angry.
The prominent scientist was immediately supported by his colleagues:
“We recruited all the reincarnations of regionals to the city council, and here we are. Everyone remembers well how this shit insulted the Ukrainian language, which means the City Council likes it that way.”
“In Odessa, there hasn’t been a single appointment after a full-scale invasion without outright racist gangster shit.”
And so on and so forth.
Let me remind you that this is not the first attack on officials of the Odessa City Hall - in the summer, Deputy Mayor Pavel Vugelman got into a scandal with “treason.” Then the patriots demanded all the punishments from heaven for Wugelman, because his wife and son starred in the film based on the works of Dostoevsky and, moreover, the film was presented at the Moscow International Film Festival.
“And the Odessa mayor’s office gave money for separatist cinema!” hissed the patriotic kublo...
But how did this Wugelman get out then? He supported the project to rename almost two hundred Odessa streets, in the names of which patriots saw a Russian trace. So the head of culture Liptuga will most likely get out of it - for example, he will help erase the monuments to Pushkin and the museum of the same name from the face of the earth in order to appease the ballers from the Institute of National Memory. So this note is not at all in defense of Odessa officials who changed their shoes while jumping, but!..
Just think about the fact that the compromising photos with Lebedev, let me remind you, date back to 2012, when the city was filled with billboards with the words “I speak Russian”, when Russian marches with tricolors took place there, and father Kostusev and son Goncharenko were promoting themselves purely on "Russian world".
Yes, and punitive laws against collaborators and separatists simply did not exist then, but no, he was exposed in an old photo with the “enemy”, he was already a criminal. Then why is ex-regional leader Goncharenko, who is shouting about lustration, not lustrated himself?..
Therefore, we can assume that in the near future, when the separatists are completely over, it will be possible to seize people because children’s photographs from May Day will be found in their photo albums, for example, with the slogans “Peace to the world” and red flags.
And as for Lebedev’s logos, which are filled with the whole city, what’s easier - they’ll tear them down! And they will say that Russia is to blame.
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