In 2015 Russia marks the 1000th anniversary of the day of the death of St. Prince Vladimir, the Christianizer of Russia. Solemn events will take place in Moscow, Veliky Novgorod, Vladimir and Pskov. One of the hundreds of events is due to be the construction of a monument to Prince on the Vorobyevy Hills. However, Muscovites are against the site.
Therefore, experts of the Russian Military-Historical Society chose three sites out of the ten which were considered for erection of the monument: Zaryadye, Borovitskaya and Lubyanskaya Squares. At the moment, there is a special website where people can vote for one of the options.
Voting is going on from July 20th to August 20th.
The head of the scientific sector of the Russian Military-Historical Society, Yuri Nikiforov, says that “today it is necessary to explain the role of Prince Vladimir in our history to many citizens of Russia, why this idea appeared, how this is justified from a historical and political point of view. Events of such a scale are not a matter merely of experts and historians, they concern the whole of civil society, it is a part of the historical policy of modern Russia. By erecting such a monument we state that Russia did not start appearing 25, 100 years ago, but more than 1000 years ago.”
The monument, created according to a project of People’s Artist of Russia, Salavat Shcherbakov, will be unveiled in Moscow on November 4th, the Day of People’s Unity.
Nikiforov thinks that “in today's world, all these games with historical memory and historical policy led to the fact that in many regions and countries of Eastern Europe the privatization of once shared history has begun. The creation of an appropriate new mythology is going on. Prince Vladimir is an origin of our history. I looked through the pseudo-historical works on this issue. People who construct some kind of alternative history in the spirit of the ancient Ruses, who allegedly suffered as a result of baptizing, as a result of the reforms of Prince Vladimir, are against the monument. By analogy, it is the same thing that was done to the mythology of the ancient Ukrainian Ukrahs.”
According to the historian, “these are anti-Russian, anti-state, anti-cultural activities and do not correlate to reality at all, this kind of use of history for political construction. At the level of monumental art and strengthening of our identity formation in an appropriate, adequate representation in a scientific way to help the installation of the monument, so that our children and grandchildren know of this idea, the idea that our history is one of the oldest today on planet Earth, it is inextricably linked with Christianity as a religion, and it says the Russian people formed in the Middle Ages within this cultural space in general. This idea must be broadcast not only through books, of course, but also throughout the rest of the cultural space.”
