For the eighth time the bones of Grigorj Alexandrovich Potemkin have been stolen, this time by the Russians: why they are so important to Putin
BERLIN – That evening at the end of October, while the fighting was raging and the Ukrainian troops were now close to retaking the city, in the Cathedral of Saint Catherine in Kherson Father Vitalij was saying mass. They popped up suddenly, there must have been about twenty. All armed and masked. I was afraid for my life, the Orthodox religious says on the phone. While he continued to sing and pray with the faithful, another priest was forced to lead the Russian soldiers towards the entrance to the crypt, hidden by a marble slab that covered a trap door on the floor. They lifted it, went down the small staircase that led to the wooden sarcophagus, removed the lid and took out the small black bag containing the prince’s bones Grigorij Alexandrovic Potemkin, all numbered. They loaded her into a van and left.
The latest news about the war in Ukraine
As Sabino Cassese has written on these pages, the theft of the mortal remains of Potemkin, general and favorite lover of Catherine the Greatwas another demonstration of the political use of historical memory that belongs to Vladimir Putinfor which the past resounds or silences and therefore Russia is either imperial or not .
But what happened to the bones of the leader who founded Kherson and Nikolaev, convinced the Tsarina to annex the Crimea in 1783 by tearing it from the Ottoman Empire and invented the concept of Novorossia, the new Russia that extended to the Black Sea? Their current location remains secret. We transported them to the left bank of the Dnieper, now they are safe, Vladimir Saldo, the man Putin had put in charge of the Kherson region, in the meantime reconquered by the Ukrainian army, told Russian television. According to Father Vitalij, it is very likely that the patriarch of Moscow Kirill will proclaim Prince Potemkin a saint, thus confirming Putin’s obsession with the tsarist past, especially the one linked to the name of Catherine II and her quasi-co-regent. As he in fact explained to the New York Times Simon Sebag Montefiore, perhaps the most authoritative historian of the Russia of the Tsars, the Russian president seeks to merge the glittering majesty of the Romanov Empire and the somber glory of the Stalinist Superpower into a peculiar modern hybrid. The scholar predicts that the remains could be taken to Moscow, where they will probably be the subject of an ultra-nationalist celebration broadcast live on TV.
Montefiore recounted in his extraordinary book “The Romanovs” the symbiotic relationship between the Tsarina and the Prince, made up of open libertinage, will to power and total elective affinity. In her letters she called him my Leo, my soul mate. Both saw the outlet to the warm seas as the gateway through the Bosphorus and the Mediterranean which would definitively open the world’s routes to Russia, thanks to the new commercial and military fleets created by Potemkin. With one big difference, compared to their posthumous admirer: unlike Vladimir Vladimirovich, Catherine and Grigory did not want a sealed empire, but an open one. Kherson and Odessa, founded in 1794 a few years after the death of the prince, were supposed to be cosmopolitan windows wide open on the Mare Nostrum, magnets for every nationality and ethnic group, which flowed copious, starting with the Jewish one. Potemkin allegedly despised Putin and everything he stands for, says Montefiore.
Also why, the most recent research has established that Potemkin’s bad name, synonymous with deception and camouflage, linked to a historical forgery. In fact, it would have been his aristocratic enemies in St. Petersburg who invented from scratch the legend of the so-called Potemkin Villages, the scenes of clean and charming villages, which the prince allegedly had built on the banks of the Volga, on the occasion of the passage of the Tsarina.
The one that took place in the Cathedral of Santa Caterina was the eighth time in which Grigory Potemkin’s eternal rest was violated. The first in 1801, ten years after her death, when Tsar Paul I, son and successor of Catherine II, jealous of the fact that the tomb built in Kherson by his mother for her lover and companion had become a place of pilgrimage, ordered that Potemkin be removed and buried in an unmarked niche. Meanwhile put back in its place, the sarcophagus was opened again in 1818, 1859, 1873, 1917 during the Bolshevik Revolution, 1930 and finally in 1980 before the October theft. Will Grigory Alexandrovich ever have peace?
November 27, 2022 (change November 27, 2022 | 12:01)
© Time.News