Fiaduta on the Paskevich monument in Gomel: He will stand with an iron foot on the border with Ukraine, demonstrating that Petersburg will no longer give up Belarusian land

Somehow, information about new historical markers is suddenly falling upon us. Bloggers were taken to the site of the former Volodarka. That is, Volodarka as a street named after Volodarsky remained, it is nothing of the past. Pishchalau Castle simply lost its proud title of pre-trial detention center No. 1 and is turning into a completely modern entertainment zone.

No, unlike my neighbors in the pre-trial detention center, I am not outraged that a food court or hotel will be opened in the premises 'where we were tortured.' Perhaps because I wasn't tortured there, and what happened, I considered not torture, but a natural test in modern Belarus for an elderly man who had managed to travel a certain path in politics.

But — it coincided.

History is being rewritten before our eyes, and not just on paper.

In the old city of Königsberg, where, perhaps, the steps of old Immanuel Kant can still be heard and where my mother was taken from Belarus to Germany, a monument to Mikhail Muravyov was erected. The very one. The 'executioner.' It is unlikely that Mikhail Nikolaevich was ever in Königsberg — perhaps in transit, during the foreign campaign of the imperial army of 1813–1815.

But the monument was erected not to that young officer who survived a severe wound, but to the old general of infantry — an exact copy of the monument once installed in 1898 in Vilnius, as an alternative to the jubilee monument to Adam Mickiewicz erected at the same time.

As if to say: take that! And now the monument to Muravyov there, in the Kaliningrad exclave, is the same thing, the same meaning: take that! To Poland: take that! To Lithuania: take that! To the residents of Latgale: take that! Well, Belarusians are a gentle people, they will swallow it without even thinking.

Now in Gomel, preparations are underway to erect a monument to Field Marshal Ivan Fyodorovich Paskevich. Also — a symbol. In Poland, from 1831–1856, disobedient children were frightened with Paskevich. I didn't invent this: Osip Przhetslavsky wrote it in an essay dedicated to Henryk Rzewuski, which was preserved for over a hundred years in the manuscript department of Pushkin House in St. Petersburg. And Przhetslavsky knew exactly what he was writing: he was acquainted with Paskevich, as he held a prominent official position in the Kingdom of Poland.

Paskevich was an excellent PR man. His relative Griboyedov signed peace with Persia — but the glory went to Paskevich (hence — the count's title of Paskevich-Erivansky). Having taken exhausted Warsaw in three days in 1831, he sent the grandson of Generalissimo Suvorov to report to the emperor.

And Nicholas I appreciated this symbolic gesture: Suvorov-grandson was pardoned forever (because he was tainted by participation in the Decembrist conspiracies — yes, imagine that), and Paskevich received the title of Prince Paskevich-Warsawsky.

Now a monument to Prince Warsawsky will stand in Gomel. Remember how people were outraged by the tactlessness of the lines on the pedestal of the Pushkin monument in Mogilev — those with 'To the Slanderers of Russia.' Then it was possible to fend them off.

Now — we won't fend them off. His Serene Highness Paskevich-Erivansky-Warsawsky will stand with an iron foot on the border with Ukraine, demonstrating that Petersburg will no longer give up Belarusian land.

That imperial Petersburg, from which the current Russian elite wants to trace its genealogy. And at the same time — that bandit Petersburg, from which it actually originates.

And all this — with imperial-bandit pomp, with solemnity! Only the grandson of Generalissimo Suvorov is missing, to send him to the Kremlin basements with the corresponding dispatch. You can't send Gryzlov. He's not Suvorov, but rather Novosil'tsev, assigned to watch and report.

Kant, whose grave I visited even in pre-Muravyov times (my mother took me as a child, and then led me through the streets in search of the house where she worked in 1944–45), said: there are two wonders that I never cease to be amazed by — the starry sky above us and the moral law within us. I am not Kant, of course.

But there is another wonder: the endless attempt of the Belarusian ruling elites to step on the rake of their own memory, pretending that they do not know what they are doing.

Yielding history (inch by inch, pedestal by pedestal), rewriting history for momentary conjuncture, they surrender the very thing they claim credit for. Sovereignty. Independence.

From whom — independence?

From Paskevich?

No, gentlemen, it doesn't work that way. The shadow of the field marshal will appear in your grandchildren's dreams. As he is, in epaulets. Even if they don't know who Paskevich was.

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