Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 7 – Two delightful
jokes are now circulating in Moscow and the former Soviet space about the
statue of Prince Vladimir that Vladimir Putin and other officials have
dedicated, but both Ukrainian and Russian commentators say that the statue is
anything but a laughing matter.
The two jokes which are circulating
widely on the Internet run as follows:
The
first has it: “Have you seen the statue
of Vladimir in front of the Kremlin?” One asks.
“Finally,” his
friend responds. “He really deserves it.”
“Not that
Vladimir,” the first says. “Vladimir of Kyiv!”
“Wait a minute!
Have we already surrendered?”
The
second runs: “Now there are three
Vladimirs near the Kremlin wall: One (Lenin) is lying down. A second (Putin) is
sitting. And a third (Prince Vladimir) is standing.”
Sergey Gromenko, a specialist at the
Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, says that the erection of the statue of
Prince Vladimir in Moscow is “one element in the propagandistic war of the
Kremlin against Ukraine” (apostrophe.ua/article/society/culture/2016-11-07/pamyatnik-kievskomu-knyazyu-v-moskve-kakaya-zdes-ugroza-ukraine/8179).
Even though Prince Vladimir was a
ruler of Kyivan Rus, Putin called him “the spiritual founder of the Russian
state” and described his role as that of “ingatherer and defender of the
Russian lands.” Moreover, the current Kremlin leader said that the prince’s
approach was entirely appropriate for rulers now.
Thus, Gromenko says, “the opening of
a monument to Prince Vladimir is not the best signal for Ukraine” because it is
another indication that Moscow will continue to try to seize and/or distort historical
events beyond the borders of the Russian Federation to justify what it wants to
do now and in the future.
Given Russia’s punishments for those
who “slander” the official version of Russian history, the Ukrainian says, it
is clear that “Russia will consistently try to change its history to the better”
regardless of the historical record. “And this won’t make things easier for
Ukraine because in the canonical version of Russian history, there are no
Ukrainians and cannot be.”
As much of a threat as the erection
of the statue of Prince Vladimir in Moscow may be for Ukraine, dissident
Orthodox churchman Deacon Andrey
Kurayev says that the speeches Putin and Patriarch Kirill gave at the ceremony
portend disasters for Russia and its relations with the world (diak-kuraev.livejournal.com/1391477.html?utm_source=fbsharing&utm_medium=social).
Both speakers
accept the version of Prince Vladimir presented in the chronicles. Putin in
particular celebrated the role of the prince in fighting other Russian states
which involved the massive shedding of blood to build the centralized Russian
state. And the current Kremlin leader invoked the prince to support his ideas
of “a clearly utilitarian system of values,” to which: “Your morality must be a
means for the strengthening of our power.”
The Orthodox patriarch’s remarks
were “must more interesting,” Kurayev says.
They contain two dangerous theses: “pluralism and the relativeness of
opinions must not be tolerated” and “religion must not be only the personal
conviction of a ruler but must be imposed by him on his subordinates.”
Such bold declarations, the deacon
says, represent a dramatic departure from all the assertions Russian officials
and Russian churchmen have made for 25 years.
And they bode ill for Russia’s future:
all those empires that have tried to maintain this approach have made
enemies of everyone in the name of “’popular unity’” and they have disappeared
as a result.
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