Renaming that weaken: how Ukraine gives Russia its outstanding past

The debate about the expediency of renaming place names in Ukraine has once again aggravated and led to a collision of two opposite thoughts. One of them is represented by the analyst Alexei Kopitko - he believes that thoughtless, renames cause enormous harm to Ukraine and give its past into the hands of Russia . . . The tape is clogged with disputes over "decolonization" of toponyms. What is in Kharkiv, in Dnipro, in Odessa.

Renamers will always provoke controversy, and I now do not have the opportunity to participate in this. I will note only two points. Already obvious is an absolutely low and peculiar approach to "decolonization", which is to gradually give Russia the whole topic of victory over Nazism. We will soon come to the fact that in the Second World War Ukrainians fought only in the ranks of the UPA. And from the captured cities, the Nazis went. They changed your mind! What happens next is quite obvious.

In the first elections after the war there will be a rollback, a new round of scandals and discord. It is very similar to someone's political workpiece that plays against the country. As a supplement to the aforementioned stupidity, there is a clear course for "decolonization" of all scientific and technical heritage created by Ukrainians in the Soviet period. Someone decided to give this layer of Kremlin too well.

For example, renaming in Odessa Akademik Glushko Avenue (a native of the city and honorary citizen of the city) to Yaroslav the Wise Avenue is something that requires a very serious explanation as for me.

Why? Are we ashamed of one of the most famous rocket engines in the world? We are ashamed that Ukrainians and natives of Ukraine largely built the entire Soviet space program? Are we ashamed that the son of an academician who lives in Moscow was entrusted with missionaries and got bored after 2014 to travel to Donetsk? But let it burn in hell! This is what I wrote about in the period of discussion about the name of the metro station in Kharkiv, that is, the issue of scale and the level of the bar we put.

The name of Yaroslav the Wise can be called anything. And it does not require any spiritual effort. It is a very decent name, it is one of the greatest figures of our history.

But when this name is washed away by the fact that Ukrainians are strong in science and technology, where we have blood from the nose to return the position - is it evil, isn't it? Are those achievements no longer value? Someone is explicitly infected with the idea to drive Ukraine within a narrow framework of "agrarian supervisor" without traditions and, accordingly, without the future.

It is time to realize: when society/country does not rethink, but simply gives away something earned by sweat and blood, it/it does not give a set of fables about the past, namely people and territories. First in the mental and then in the physical sense. We already have a tragic example of Crimea. Ukraine abandoned the Crimean War of 1853-1856, giving it to Russia. Although it was a war that the Ukrainian people pulled on their shoulders - from Odessa and Shostka to Lugansk.

And this is a lot of evidence. Moscow since 1954 has developed a myth about Sevastopol as a "city of Russian sailors". And even after 2014, they did not mind. The Russians have a monopoly. And in this direct wine of narrow -minded politicians and officials who were responsible for historical memory. It's time to draw some conclusions. The author expresses a personal opinion that may not coincide with the editorial position. The author is responsible for published data in the "Thought" section.