“Webster’s Dictionary” defines the word “bane” as deadly harm, ruin, death, distress, or the cause thereof.
For Ukrainians, Catherine the so-called “Great,” the Prussian-born empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796, was just that – a bane that wrought deadly harm, ruin, death, distress, extermination and destruction throughout the Russian Empire’s “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) lands, as well as its other foreign holdings to destroy peoples and their cultures; entire nations, in fact. Her goal was to incorporate what was left under a uniform and undifferentiated Russian continuum – a prison of nations, as many historians refer to the Catherine-era Russian Empire.
It is this monster, who many find no difficulty in likening to Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, that the local authorities of the great Ukrainian port city of Odesa have found worthy of elevating to the level of heroine of Ukraine, by erecting a monument to her on Saturday, Oct. 27.
By erecting a monument, a nation tells the world who it finds worthy of honor and praise, typically for contributing to the building or development of that nation.
The Odesa authorities’ act of erecting the Catherine monument now tells the world that Ukraine thanks, praises and pays homage to a villain for having been among Ukrainians’ greatest decimators, torturers and executioners.
Catherine the Curse stands behind the abolition of the Ukrainian Hetmanate and the liquidation of the Zaporizhian Sich, home to the Zaporizhian Cossacks, with both institutions largely regarded as the cradle of the Ukrainian democratic tradition. Following her destruction of the Hetmanate and Cossacks, this formerly minor Prussian princess imposed serfdom, turning Ukrainians into slaves.
As for her “founding” of cities on Ukrainian territory, according to Taras Chukhlib, a historian, and director of the Cossack Research Center at the Institute of History of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, this is nothing but a myth. This myth is perpetuated by interested parties who want to pull Ukraine back into the Muscovite fold by convincing Ukrainians that all the cities in eastern and southern Ukraine, as well as Crimea, were founded by the St. Petersburg government. No mention is ever made that long before their “founding,” there were Ukrainian Cossack settlements on the territories of Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson and Nykopil. Moreover, present-day Sevastopil and Bilhorod-Dnistrovsky have an ancient history that spans thousands of years, not 200.
Meanwhile, earlier hisotrical sources indicate that in 1415, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, Vytautas, founded a fortress town on the site of present-day Odesa and named it Kachybei (Kochubeiv in Ukrainian).
Because the Catherine monument speaks on a national scale, Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko must decree that the statue be removed. Otherwise, Ukrainians and the history of their ancestors who perished at the tentacles of the Bane will suffer disgrace and humiliation in their own country at the whim of political and geopolitical interests who would like to see nothing better than Ukraine lose its language, history and statehood and come back under the yoke of Russia.
