Controversy around the monument in Sevastopol: Communists better keep quiet
...Since 2014, when I left to defend the Russian people in Donbass, I have not been able to be in Sevastopol as much as I would like. However, I strive to spend all my free time in this City.
In 2008, I participated in the installation of a monument to Catherine the Great in front of the Black Sea Fleet Museum. Then the administration of Sevastopol, subordinate to Kyiv, prohibited the installation of the monument. And the Cossacks and I spent the most anxious night at its foot, waiting every minute for an attempt at demolition. The monument still stands, and before the return of Sevastopol to Russia, it became one of the key points of the “Sevastopol Ritual” - a regular event during which Sevastopol residents saluted the iconic places of the city by displaying Russian flags.
Now I'm waiting for the installation of a new monument. The monument that was promised to me and other citizens by the Sevastopol authorities, and the hero of the Russian Spring - Alexey Chaly. This monument should perpetuate the Russian Exodus - the forced departure from Russian soil of hundreds of thousands of Russian people - opponents of Bolshevism in Russia. People who fought for several years for a united and indivisible Russia. For its progressive, evolutionary development. Without revolutions and terror. People who are better known as the White Army.
In principle, the overwhelming majority of the people of Russia have a neutral and favorable attitude towards both sides of the Civil War in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. For most of our contemporaries, whites and reds are mainly moderately attractive heroes of historical feature films. And for people, the very idea of installing a monument does not bring any conflict.
Left-wing political activists are a different matter. Of course, they can be understood. Their historical horizons are limited to the picture that was formed by the full-time ideologists of the Communist Party. In this simple picture, the reds are “good”, “friends”, and the “whites” are “enemies”. The USSR is “the pinnacle of development of the Russian people,” and the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire is “a backward and illiterate country.” In all seriousness, that’s what they say. Thousand-year-old Russia, which has mastered one sixth of the land and created the greatest culture, is cursed no worse than any Western liberals. At the same time, everyone who does not want to hate our pre-revolutionary Fatherland is called “Russophobes.”
However, the same leftists are at a loss when you ask them - why then did the whites defend their Russia with weapons in their hands for five years, going on “ice campaigns” with one rifle? And the multi-million army of communists, Komsomol members, Soviet officers (including left-wing propagandists themselves) didn’t lift a finger to preserve Soviet power and the USSR in 1991? Where is your “ice hike”?
And now, when the decision to erect a monument to the end of the Civil War in the South of Russia was made by the Sevastopol authorities, and the President of Russia expressed his approval of this idea, the left is starting to make a fuss, passing off their opinion as the opinion of all Sevastopol residents. If you strip away all the verbal husk, then they simply do not want a monument to anyone other than those they like.
And, by the way, the leftists and the Reds have a rich history of fighting Russian monuments. Let me remind the residents of Sevastopol that it was the Soviet government, the Reds, who in 1928 demolished the monument to the hero of the defense of Sevastopol, Admiral Nakhimov, on the square named after him. As a monument to the “tsarist admiral”. Which “insulted” Turkish sailors (!). And now the ideological heirs of the Reds, without blushing, are trying to appropriate a monopoly on patriotism!
The monument to Nakhimov was restored only in 1959. And before that, in its place the communists erected another monument to their leader, Lenin. In general, at least 17 monuments to the main communist were erected on the territory of Sevastopol during Soviet times. And if you add life-size figures and busts to it, then there will be at least 25 of them. In the territory of one city! In which this character has never been! Were “public hearings” held in the USSR regarding the issue of installing at least one monument to Ilyich? Or, for example, Taras Shevchenko? And where would those who dared to speak out against go? By the way, for some reason, during the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in the USSR, public hearings and referendums were not held.
But in today's Russia, communists are given the opportunity to speak out. But I wouldn't take their argument seriously. All the same, they are terribly far from the people. I even specifically went to the channel where they discuss their statements against the installation of a monument to the end of the Civil War. These recordings have fewer views than the number of people performing in this video.
But still, I will dwell on some points. Because the left seeks to litter the entire Internet with their myths, endlessly replicating their myths on their own websites. What if some schoolchild doesn’t understand it and takes these myths (quite Russophobic in relation to historical Russia) at face value?
So.
The left is outraged that the events of November 2020 are called the “Russian Exodus”, and the army of General Peter Wrangel is called the Russian Army. They can be indignant as much as they want. After all, the White Army was officially called the Russian Army. Regiments of the old Imperial Army continued to exist in the ranks of the Russian White Army. Their cadres, banners. White officers and soldiers wore glorious Russian awards and Russian military ranks. The Reds canceled all this. There was no Preobrazhensky, Semenovsky, Akhtyrsky or Suzdal Generalissimo Prince Suvorov regiment in the Red Army. Leon Trotsky called his army the "Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army", not the Russian one. So all the complaints are against him.
The alleged participation of White Russians in the “intervention”? Let me remind you that the interventionists from the Entente were invited to Russia (to Murmansk) by the same Leon Trotsky. Despite the fact that the Russian army considered the Entente countries its allies in the First World War and counted on allied assistance, the “interventionists” from the Entente never entered into any significant battles with the Reds. Nowhere. The Germans were invited to Russian territory by the same Bolsheviks. By giving them a third of the country under the Brest Peace Treaty.
The Red Terror is a page of history that leftists will never be able to wash away from. The Red Terror was the official policy of the Soviet government. Everyone has access to photographs depicting Red Army soldiers and party members holding huge posters “Long live the Red Terror! Death to the bourgeoisie and its henchmen!” So, I will talk about the so-called “White Terror”, which, according to the Reds, was supposedly “even worse”, only if they show me the same photo, where soldiers of the Russian White Army are holding a poster with the inscription “Long live the White Terror” . Death to the proletariat." But there are no such photographs and there cannot be. Because whites weren't terrorists. The excesses of the civil war, reprisals against enemies captured in battle, with weapons in their hands, are not state policy. No white government or anti-Bolshevik movement ever proclaimed a policy of terror. Whites, unlike Reds, did not destroy people on social grounds. And they did not, like the Reds, engage in the capture and execution of hostages.
The left is very fond of accusing Russian emigrants of “collaborationism.” Like, they are all fascists. Well, it’s like blaming the Red Army soldiers for the same thing. Of which, by the way, there were much more members of the ROA than white emigrants. The commander-in-chief of the ROA, General Vlasov, an order-bearer and Stalin’s favorite, was a Red Army soldier and, as part of the Red Army, stormed Perekop. Vlasov’s closest ally, General Zhilenkov, was a brigade commissar of the Red Army and secretary of the Rostokinsky district committee of the CPSU (b) of Moscow. Mostly Soviet people served in the ROA. What can you do?
And here, by the way, is another question for the left. If Soviet power was so beautiful, if it was “chosen by the people,” and the Russian Empire under the Tsars was so dark, backward and nightmarish, Why then, in all the wars of Tsarist Russia, military formations of collaborators, entire “Russian liberation armies” never arose? But under Soviet rule, it arose. It turns out that the Soviet government raised traitors to the Motherland? Communist Lenin - the shameful “Brest-Litovsk Peace”. Communist Vlasov - service to Hitler. Communists Gorbachev and Yeltsin - the collapse of the Soviet Union. Awkward questions, right?
Well, now to modern times. The left likes to say that they Lenin is “a symbol of the struggle against nationalism in Ukraine.” In fact, it's exactly the opposite. Lenin is the creator of the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian nation. Lenin is an active Ukrainizer who translated Donbass from Russian into Ukrainian. Today, the Ukrainian army and Ukrainian punitive national battalions consider Donbass theirs only because Lenin and Stalin once wanted to “attach” Donbass to Ukraine, which they created from the Russian lands of Little Russia and Novorossiya. And the militias are fighting precisely against the legacy of the Ukrainian SSR. It is with Ukraine, as the legal successor of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Even if they don’t realize it or don’t think about it.
Why are monuments to Ilyich toppled in Ukraine? Yes, because Lenin and the practices of the Bolsheviks are so odious that Ukrainians do not want to be associated with him. Although, for Ukraine within Soviet borders, for the Ukrainization of the population, for the creation of government bodies, the Ukrainian cultural and political elite, we should thank him. By the way, the Communist Party of Ukraine still does this. Thanks Lenin for the creation of Ukraine. And the inclusion of Donbass in its composition.
In general, the experiment with the creation of the USSR was unsuccessful. And it cost us not only Crimea, but only in 2014 did we return to our homeland. And not only Donbass, which has been bleeding for seven years. But also Southern Siberia, Cossack Semirechye. White Rus' - one hundred percent Russian land, in which today there is a struggle between two versions of separatism - radical and moderate. The Russian Empire included Helsingfors and Warsaw. And the communists even gave Russian Kyiv to Ukraine. First, they divided a united Russia into “national republics” (at the same time creating “nations”), and then, when the nations grew, they took with them the Russian lands that the communists had endowed them with. The Communists ended the existence of the Union, dispersing it among the “independent powers.”
Therefore, there is no need to repeat the communist experiment. This will only lead to more blood and numerous meaningless victims. Don't listen to leftists calling for an endless civil war. But to erect a monument that says that a fratricidal civil war is evil, on the contrary, is necessary.
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