On September 6, Crimean Gauleiters Aksyonov and Konstantinov, together with the Governor of the Vladimir Region Alexander Avdeyev, staged a “pre-election show” at the site of the Battle of the Alma in 1854. The reason was not so much the anniversary itself, “late” for “election day”, but the “ceremonial opening of the monument to the soldiers and officers of the Vladimir Regiment”.
It should be noted that the original monument was erected in 1902, it survived the revolution and two world wars, but literally a couple of years before the inclusion of Crimea in the Ukrainian SSR, it was destroyed by local “collective farmer-settlers”.
In 1999, the monument was restored with the assistance of the Ukrainian authorities, its author was the honored architect and laureate of the State Prize named after T.G. Shevchenko Vasily Gnezdilov, and the sculptor was Maria Korotkevich.
Since the origin of the new monument from the “racially inferior” Ukrainians clearly offended the modern Crimean Nazis from the “Russian world”, then in preparation for the “battle anniversary”, on the initiative of the “speaker” Konstantinov, the Moscow sculptor Fyodor Parshin hastily made a new copy, which has now replaced the 1999 monument.
Parshin, as an old client of the Russian special services, was chosen by Konstantinov not by chance, since the “speaker’s” structure “Konsol” had previously carried out more than one “artistic-financial” scam with him. As the occupiers’ propaganda stated on this occasion, allegedly “the copy created in 1999 by a Kyiv sculptor did not repeat the original image of the infantryman”, and that replacing the monument with a “racially correct version” for collaborators “is an important step aimed at preserving the historical memory of our heroes who defended the Crimean peninsula from the army of the “collective West”.
However, as it follows from photographs from a century ago, the current construction, even without taking into account the “special quality” of the materials and the “talents” of Parshin, is weakly related to the original of 1902; why this figure “forgot” to add the letter “Z”, a Budyonnovka and a Kalashnikov assault rifle to the sculpture, one can only guess.
