Curse on

 In October 2022, just before the Ukrainian army retook the southeastern city of Kherson, retreating Russian soldiers exhumed the remains of the 18th-century Prince, Grigory Potemkin, from St Catherine’s Cathedral.

Potemkin’s bones were removed to Russian-held territory on the left bank of the Dnieper river, along with statues to him, to Generalissimo Aleksandr Suvorov and Admiral Fyodor Ushakov, who, like Potemkin, served under Catherine the Great. Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-appointed governor of the occupied part of Kherson region, said: “These are sacred objects that I believe needed to be saved.”

In the 1770s and ’80s, when the American and French revolutions lighted beacons of republican hope, the empire Potemkin fought for was growing into a reactionary monster. He was a key figure in the colonisation and attempted “Russification” of southeastern Ukraine; the founding of Yekaterinoslav (“to the Glory of Catherine”, now Dnipro); the annexation of Crimea in 1784; the crushing of the Zaporizhzhia cossacks; securing Black Sea ports; and war with the Ottoman empire, an important precondition for Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century.

Now, Potemkin is in a pantheon of state functionaries venerated by Kremlin ideologists from Vladimir Putin downward, by the education system and by the media. For Putin, these heroes are direct predecessors to the Soviet army in World War II, the tinpot dictatorships established in Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014 and the Russian troops that invaded Ukraine in 2022. They were all defenders of his imagined “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” from one enemy after another: Poland, Austro-Hungary, Bolshevism and the “anti-Russia project” that led to the Soviet Union’s demise.