Potemkin evacuation is a defeat for the “Russian world”
Able statesman: Potemkin (1739-1791)
Quelle: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
In southern Ukraine, the occupiers dismantled monuments and took them with them when they retreated. Prince Potemkin’s statue and bones are already gone. The process is highly symbolic. Because Potemkin played a big role when the region became Russian.
Serhii Khlan, an adviser to the ousted Ukrainian chief of the Kherson region, posted a photo on his Facebook page of the empty plinth of the monument to Prince Potemkin (1739-1791), who founded the city in the 18th century and is buried here. Khlan writes: “After Ushakov and Suvorov, Potemkin was also ‘evacuated’ from Kherson. The only thing left for the Russians is to steal his remains from the cathedral.” The Kherson publication “Most” also published a photo of the empty pedestal.
In fact, not only the statues of the tsarist generals Suvorov and Ushakov, the Soviet general Margelow (who drove the Wehrmacht from Cherson in 1944 and was ennobled as a hero of the Soviet Union) or the Potemkin monument from Cherson were removed, but also the mortal remains of the city’s founder from St. Catherine’s Cathedral – because the Ukrainian army is advancing and the battle for the city could also be imminent.
The head of the occupied part of the region, Volodymyr Saldo, who was collaborating with the Russians, announced Potemkin’s reburial on the Krim24 television channel. Also, local Russian authorities claimed on October 24 that they had decided to remove the monuments from Ukraine “due to constant bombing and sabotage.” The Russian occupiers are dismantling the cultural assets in Cherson and other towns and are retrieving their cultural and historical heritage from Ukraine. Or, as they would say, they “evacuate” it.
When you talk to Ukrainians from the south about tsarist heroes like Suvorov, Ushakov or Potemkin, there are voices who say that they were just leftovers from the Soviet Union that they no longer want to see in the city. These old heroes stood in public places, but they were actually ripe for the museum, fit to be banned from public space. Because they embodied the Russian empire and its expansion. They stood for the “Russki Mir”, for the Russian world and its culture.
For the Russian empire, southern Ukraine was “New Russia”, a place for development and colonization. Historically, however, this region was anything but undisputed. Before it was incorporated into the Russian Empire under Catherine II, the area of ”New Russia” was fought over between Poland-Lithuania, the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire for a long time. Until 1774 the region belonged to the Crimean Khanate, i.e. to the Crimean Tatars.
Prince Potemkin is known today for the proverbial dummy villages used to simulate advances in civilization for the tsarina (a legend that goes back to envious people) or for the armored cruiser named after him from Eisenstein’s classic film.
Historically, Potemkin was a central figure in the development of southern Ukraine. Under Catherine II he rose to become general and supreme administrator of the region. In 1778 Kherson was founded; Streets, squares and buildings were arranged in a chessboard pattern in accordance with the progressive spirit of the time. Other foundations followed, such as Odessa, Sevastopol, Dnipro, Zaporischschja, Mykolaiv and Mariupol.
For the Russian occupiers, such icons of the Tsarist Empire are now part of their supposed heritage and thus legitimize their claim to southern Ukraine. On the one hand, the current dismantling of cultural assets in Cherson is tantamount to a defeat of the “Russian world”, i.e. the ideology of the cultural totality of Russian. From a Russian point of view, of course, it is also a desperate attempt to save this past colonial world.
Suvorov, Ushakov or Potemkin are heroes of a Russian empire that wanted to assert itself among the other major European powers and Russified entire regions through deportation. The theft of these cultural assets is a defense of Russia’s sovereignty in interpreting history. From Putin’s point of view, the historical-cultural power of definition must under no circumstances be left to the victim of this imperialism, which has persisted to this day, Ukraine.
However, Cherson and southern Ukraine were never entirely Russian, but have always been distinguished by their diversity. Already in the 19th century the streets of Cherson were filled with Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, Moldavian, German, Tatar and Russian.
In August 2012, the city administration announced that 110 nationalities live in Kherson. The removal of cultural assets in Kherson is just an attempt to symbolically preserve the “Russian world” by saving its heroes. But southern Ukraine is multiethnic.