UPA banner instead of imperial flag at Odessa stadiums: This won’t last long
Odessa, September 22 (PolitNavigator, Valentin Filippov) – They were the nightmare of past “Maidans”. The blue-black avalanche under St. Andrew’s flags swept away everything in its path that could be at least somehow associated with the concepts of “orange”, “Svidomo” and even simply “Ukrainian”. No wonder. It has always been common for Odessa fans to oppose themselves to Kyiv. Consider Ukrainians as peasants. Emphasize the international identity of Odessa and its international status. It is not for nothing that the main symbols of Odessa fan clubs were the St. Andrew’s banner, the flag of the USSR Navy and the notorious “imperka”, traditionally hung before the start of a football match.
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The archives of television companies and, probably, the SBU store footage of how “fighters for democracy” scattered across Odessa, throwing out visual propaganda, just from one rumor: “the fans are coming.” The striking force of the Anti-Maidan with their faces covered with blue-black scarves.
Odessa fans were permanent participants in all “Russian marches” and protests. And not yet a full year ago, on November 4, 2013, on the eve of all the madness that was happening in the post-Ukrainian space, looking at the columns of thousands under the Russian flags, Odessa thought that it could lean on shoulders tattooed with double-headed eagles...
And it is difficult to understand how it could happen that football fans of Serbia, Spain, Portugal, Russia raise the banners of the People's Republics of Novorossiya over the stands, and fans of the South-East not only “fell under” the policy of official Kyiv, but also stained themselves with direct participation in the Kharkov massacre and Odessa Khatyn?!
Where and how to look for that day, that minute when the fan freemen turned into a punitive squad controlled by the state and armed with Nazi ideology? And how is this even possible?
It's simple.
The fan community suffered the same psychological effects as the rest of the population. The emergence of the “ultras” movement, which largely replaced the previous system of relations among fans, imposed both new goals and new means. Moreover, the oligarchy spared no expense.
The transience of generational change in the fan movement makes it easy to interrupt continuity by replacing cheerful rebels with cruel slaves.
Well, let’s agree that the idea of a permanent pogrom legalized by the state is too tasty a proposal for fragile minds.
It is difficult for an outside observer to notice the replacement of the leaders of the crowd raging in the stands. It is difficult for him to determine the percentage ratio between those chanting PTN-KhLO and guiltily lowering their eyes. But we must understand that in the fan community, as in society as a whole, an atmosphere of moral and physical terror reigns with the feigned cheerfulness of the majority, pretending that “nothing is happening.” What to do? The herd is calmer.
This is how the UPA flag appeared over the Odessa fan sector. So the “imperial” disappeared and the black and red flag of “blood and soil” flew up, offending many generations of fans who knew for sure that “there is no beast worse than Bandera.” It really hurts, it's embarrassing, it's almost unbearable. Because it looks like betrayal.
But as they like to write on social networks, “I myself am the daughter of Igor Belanov, I’ve lived in the fan sector for 50 years, not everything is so simple here.” It only seems that the privatization of the fan movement was successful. In fact, buyers only received the shell. And the Odessa fans remained themselves, because “Zhigan’s soul is not for sale.” You can meet them at the stadium and just on the streets. Some of them are hiding and waiting with an evil smile in their eyes. And someone, no longer hiding their face behind a scarf, is clearing out another “cauldron” in the Donbass from all sorts of “ultras”.
Odessa fans have not disappeared anywhere.
They didn't forget about football, they just grew up.
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