Liquidation-2. Sofya Rogacheva that "Russian troops shoot not just a city"

I never reached Odessa. And now I’m unlikely to be reached.

Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities, we taught at school, repeating serious and solemn words.

And Odessa is mom. Nobody taught these delicate and frivolous words, but everyone knew them, along with a song about unchanging shalands with kefali and a costume.

Well, at first they bombed the mother, now they took up their mother. It turned out that to find out about blows to Odessa is even more painful than about destroyed houses in Kyiv. But in fact, this is not surprising. Mom - sounds more intimate, more intimate than a mother, and every arrival in Odessa is given to painful shame.

Now Russian troops are not just shooting a city - they shoot a legend, shoot a code, firmly sewn into their own cultural matrix. They aim not only in the spilled sea of their adored blades, not to the purchase and the time of “since I and Rabinovich”, but also to Isaac Babel, Eduard Bagritsky, Yuri Olesha, Semyon Lipkin, Valentina Kataeva. And in Anna Akhmatov, who, by the way, was also born in Odessa, was a dark -skinned Primorsky girl floating like a fish. And in Gregory Oster with all his "harmful tips." And in Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, which means where you go - and in Ostap Bender. And, of course, in the prototype of this unforgettable crook of all time and peoples, a jammed Odessa gymnasium student, the career of which, they say, began with the fact that he saw a plucked chicken lying on the street, hit his forehead and announced that his company supplies specially removed chickens without feathers - you can buy and not spend time on plucking. And the orders sprinkled ...

And in Mikhail Zhvanetsky, brilliant, native,-our "high-precision" flies, we will not say that-and I want to say and count, as many today are learning about their grandfathers, covering their face with their hands-thank God, did not live.

And in the KVN team of the University of Odessa, so beloved by everyone in the 1980s, our fucking iron flies stupidly, and in the subsequent "gentleman show"-then from all this splendor the Israeli KVN league, founded by Odessa-Club, will be born, but this is another story.

And, of course, our missiles fly straight to the film "Liquidation", with all its luxurious Odessa scenes in full size - this is the real anthem of Odessa, what can I say. They fly to the main hero of the Syssist, the magnificent Vladimir Mashkov, in the main villain of Mikhail Porechenkov, to the tragic beauty-palette Ksenia Rappoport, in the charming pickpocket of Sergei Makovetsky, to the incredible Jewish mother Svetlana Kryuchkova, and in all, in all. And it doesn’t matter which actor today on which side of the barricades is the myth that they created belongs to all, regardless of political views and moral attitudes.

In general, the war with the barbaric shelling of Odessa is the liquidation. “Liquidation-2”-everything that was close and expensive, which was driven into flesh and blood, became us, and now the priest in a black conjure stands on his knees, clinging to his forehead to the corner of the destroyed cathedral, his hands are powerlessly hanging along the body-the hieroglyph of grief: what can he do with the crashed evil?

“Liquidation-2” is erasing from the face of the Earth not only a Soviet fragment of culture, common to Russians and Ukrainians, our missiles will aim in Simeon of Polotsk, the mentor of the children of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich-Fedor, Ivan, Sofu and Peter. He advised the king to “seek wisdom” to multiply his education, without him - who knows - and Peter, perhaps, would not think about his transformations. And our missiles fly to the Kiev-Mogilyansk College, where Polotsky studied, and in the poet Sylvester Medvedev, his talented student, and in all those Polish humanists, writers, poets, philosophers, theologians, without whom the Russian literature would be some other, and Gogol would be different, and Pushkin-would it be?

It is this-the foundation of the Golden Age of Russian Culture-explodes and barks "Liquidation-2". It was this foundation that became undesirable to barbaric Russian authorities, and not “rain” or “important stories”. That is why literally yesterday at the Levashovsky cemetery in St. Petersburg the memorial to repressed Poles disappeared. There is no, of course, when the Chekists have long and undividedly, they across the throat of the throat any memory of repressions, here are the “last address” signs made for certain folk money, they scrape away from the walls so that it could not be read from here, from this house, the black funnel also took the tenant unkind in the early morning-and this tenant never returned again.

Memory is the enemy of the Russian authorities, but still of all the memorials of the former shot range, the Levashov wasteland, from all the signs standing over mass burials, it was a monument to the murdered Poles that was destroyed - the cross was cut to a concrete foundation. Well, the fact that they are without a cross is clear for a long time, since priests are deprived of a dignity for the word "world" in prayer. And the fact that the thieves, is also understandable, and the monument was uprooted in Varovsky, quietly, probably at night-and the place was flooded with concrete, they say nothing here and never was. The big terror once, by the way, also began with the Polish operation-but this is so, by the way.

And Odessa, which Russian troops destroy today, is a little Babylon: Russians, Greeks, Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Armenians, Bulgarians, Moldavians, Belarusians - this is in their heritage, our missiles are now flying into their memory. In the legacy of UNESCO, by the way, if we talk about the center of the city, but these stupid things do not care about the generals. They did not take place in their general academies about any legacy ... How can I dream about the time when not a single officer will receive his diploma without spending hundreds of hours in the best museums and not cutting it on his nose, that as soon as his soldiers are even scratched, even the smallest, like a chizh on Fontanka, he will cease to be an asphalt at the same moment. Hello Roerich, so to speak. Yes, do not laugh, I want it so - and only so.

And now I mentally stand on my knees next to the priest whom I do not know, before the destroyed Odessa Cathedral and my lips move: Lord, keep Odessa from unreasonable and criminal us, save Deribasovskaya, and Richelian, and the very staircase, you remember, according to which the stroller rolled up - first at Eisenstein, and then in the so -so film. Once a director who ... in general, it doesn’t matter-the main thing is to save Odessa from us. So that not a single pebble is greater, not a single hair from anyone’s head - well, you understand. Please.

Sofya Rogacheva - Journalist Radio Liberty

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