Kharkov: give a bridge named after Fandorin!
Three events showed the residents of Kharkov that there were, are and will be big problems with the perpetuation of memory in the city. And from different sides. I'll start with the official stuff. Addressed to the Chairman of the Regional State Administration Yulia Svetlichnaya a letter arrived with a request to name school No. 11 after Daniil Didik, who died during the explosion at the Sports Palace in February 2015. He actually studied there and was among the minor “activists.”
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The appeal was signed, as local websites report, by “some of the students, their parents and some of the school’s teachers.” The boss supported the initiative and approached the City Council with a proposal to consider the possibility of renaming. Now the City Council will have to consider it at the next session and pass another deflection test.
It is known that city authorities are reluctant to rename anything. For example, the streets of the regicides - the People's Will members Zhelyabov, Kibalchich and Perovskaya - have still not disappeared from the city map. And decommunization in Kharkov style, too, with rare exceptions, was not the perpetuation of unacceptable events and characters. The dirtiest spots, including the definitely brown ones, were put on the city’s map not by a decision of the City Council, but by an order from an appointee from Kyiv, the then governor Rainin. And here it is again.
In Kharkov, the UPA memorial sign was painted again. The stripes of white and red symbolize the Polish flag. And everyone remembers very well that it was the Poles, along with the Jews, who were the main target of the Bandera atrocities. The incident was reported to the Kiev regional police department on February 13 at 14.00. An investigative team immediately went to the scene of the incident (the stone is located next to the regional department and is visible from its windows).
And finally, the third event came from where no one expected it at all. The famous Russian writer Boris Akunin wrote the last novel in their series about Erast Fandorin. Titled "I'm Not Saying Goodbye". It says that this literary hero, beloved by readers, died within the current city limits of Kharkov in 1919. This happened near the railway bridge over the Udy River. So now, even without any decision from the City Council, the bridge is named after. Fandorin is there, and you can’t get him anywhere.
However, the Kharkov press remains silent about this event. It would seem that the author of the novel reacted favorably to the Nazification of Ukraine and in 2015 said the following: “I found myself in a large hall filled with people wearing embroidered shirts. The girls have wreaths on their heads a la Natalka Poltavka. Almost everyone shouts in unison: “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to heroes!" - and waving yellow-blue flags. And at the end, the whole hall, together with Vakarchuk, sang the national anthem “Ukraine, Glory and Freedom have not yet died.” Looking at all this, I experienced a strong feeling, the nature of which did not immediately become clear to me, and when I figured it out, I was very surprised. This feeling, it turns out, was fierce envy. You know, like when you were a child: you sit at home with a cold, look out the window, and there everyone is playing something unbearably interesting, and they are having a great time there. And you have a fever, your nose is running, your throat is sandpapery, soon you will have to drink nasty milk with soda and put mustard plasters on. After all, if we have a large crowd start yelling “Glory to Russia!” and waving flags, it will either be some kind of official patriotic action, or a gathering of aggressive xenophobes.”
Since then, even in Udy, a lot of water has passed under the bridge. Some of Akunin’s books were banned in Ukraine, and in the novel “I Don’t Say Goodbye” itself, Kharkov is shown almost as it was in 1919. There are few “blunders”, and they are forgivable to a non-local author. The main thing is that Akunin’s city and its surroundings do not suffer from Ukrainianness, and all the characters, including the Japanese Masa, speak Russian. And this clearly puts his defenders from among the supporters of the current government in an uncomfortable position.
PS Speaking of poses. Representatives of a nationalist organization with the self-explanatory name “Freikorps”, disrupted Anna Sharynina's lecture on the topic “LGBT movement in Ukraine and the world” in the Kharkov “Bookstore “Y””. In this establishment, which sells, among other things, openly Nazi literature such as the works of Dmitry Dontsov, the Nazis offended gays loyal to the current government. But on the Maidan they all merged in one impulse!
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