Volley in defense of Aurora

The communists ask to leave the cruiser under the control of the Baltic Fleet

An attempt to save the legendary Aurora from “demobilization” was made by the St. Petersburg communists on the 93rd anniversary of the October Revolution, which began with a salvo of guns from this cruiser. Yesterday, at a festive rally, they, together with graduates of the Nakhimov School, collected signatures for a letter to President Dmitry Medvedev, in which they asked the Supreme Commander-in-Chief to cancel the order of the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Vladimir Vysotsky, according to which, from December 1, the legendary ship would be withdrawn from the Baltic Fleet. Reassignment to civilians, the authors of the letter believe, will turn Aurora from a museum into an entertainment venue.

Let us recall that in the first half of October, Navy Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Vysotsky signed an order according to which the cruiser would no longer be served by a crew of naval officers and sailors. This function, like the cruiser itself, will be transferred to the Central Naval Museum (CVMM). The change of crew to civilians outraged the patriotic public. Activists of the Nakhimov Assembly public movement, which unites graduates of the school of the same name, believe that after this, parties will be regularly held on the cruiser, similar to the one organized by the Russian Pioneer magazine during last year’s St. Petersburg Economic Forum. Then the patriots accused the owners of the magazine of organizing a drunken orgy, the participants of this event claimed that everything was “decorous and noble”, the military prosecutor’s office, after checking the signal from the communists, found a violation of the regime on the ship, and the head of the Leningrad naval base, who authorized the celebration on board , was transferred to Novorossiysk.

The action in defense of the cruiser from the capitalists on the anniversary of the October revolution was as inevitable as the collapse of capitalism is in the eyes of Aurora admirers. At the communist demonstration, which yesterday at noon passed from the Finlyandsky Station to the ship's parking lot, red slogans interspersed with posters of Nakhimov activists “Hands off the Aurora!” At the rally, director Vladimir Bortko made a speech in which he stated that “Russia could be deprived of one of its main symbols, the oldest warship in our fleet.” He called for collecting signatures against this decision.

As Vyacheslav Ivanov, deputy chairman of the Nakhimov Assembly, told a Vremya Novostey correspondent, naval officers want to appeal to the president and commander-in-chief to achieve agreement on several points. “Keep the Aurora as part of the Russian Navy and deploy a naval ceremonial unit on board it. To revive the watch on the cruiser for students of the Nakhimov Naval School. And to restore at the Aurora base an exemplary training base for the Navy both for cadets of naval schools and for ordinary schoolchildren,” Mr. Ivanov listed.

However, TsVMM employees explained to the Vremya Novostey correspondent that the Aurora defenders did not quite correctly understand the essence of the commander-in-chief’s order. Since 1956, the cruiser has been a branch of the museum, which in turn is a unitary enterprise subordinate to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. The Baltic Fleet includes only a crew, which, unlike other military sailors, does not perform combat missions, but scrubs the decks of the Aurora. And the decision of the commander-in-chief to entrust the cruiser not to the fleet, but to the museum, will in no way prevent patriotic events from being held on the cruiser, refusing new Russians.

Mikhail TELEKHOV, St. Petersburg