Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 22 – In ever more
cities and towns beyond the ring road around Moscow, tanks and guns occupy
places of honor where statues of Lenin and other Soviet heroes stood, a change
that underscores the ways in which militarism is the new ideology of the Putin
regime, Iskander Yasaveyev says.
The Higher School of Economics
sociologist focuses on how this has occurred in Tatarstan where he serves as
coordinator of the City without Borders initiative group. Over the past year alone, he says, local
officials have competed with each other to install military equipment in their
main public squares (delreal.org/a/29892209.html).
The militarization
of Russia is manifested not only in the president’s rhetoric, the budget of
‘the military state,’ the programs of patriotic education of citizens with
their accent on the defense of the state and the establishment of the Young
Army but in the way in which cities, settlements and villages look,” Yasaveyev
begins.
What is worrisome, he continues, is
that often these military objects are being installed in ways that destroy
various historical monuments and not just survivals from the Soviet
period. Tanks, artillery pieces, APCs,
and even planes are destroying the traditional image of the places where
Russians live and children are growing up.
Many residents of the places where
these monuments have gone up have complained most often on social media, noting
that they had no voice in the decision to put tanks and guns at the center of
their cities and towns and do not like what these weapons say about them and
their country.
Such machines of war cannot fail to
have an impact on the way in which children growing up near them will think.
And for that reason if for no other, there should be a serious public
discussion of this new militarist architecture which Yaseveyev clearly hopes
will lead to this trend being stopped and possibly reversed.
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