Here’s Why Russia Stole Ukraine’s Prince Potemkin’s Bones

With Ukrainian forces advancing on the occupied city of Kherson in recent days, local leaders installed by the Kremlin have sent a team to an 18th-century stone cathedral to carry out a special mission: to steal the bones of Prince Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin.

The memory of the 18th century conqueror still lives on among those in the Kremlin determined to restore the Russian empire. It was Potemkin who persuaded his lover, Catherine the Great, to annex Crimea in 1783. Founder of Kherson and Odessa, Potemkin sought to create a “New Russia”—a domain that stretched across territory that is now southern Ukraine, bordering the Black Sea.

In February, when Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, he evoked Potemkin’s vision.

Now that his army has failed to march on Odessa and is threatened with being driven out of Kherson, grandiose plans are in jeopardy. But for the Kremlin’s staunch followers, belief in what they see as Russia’s rule of law is still strong.

That’s why a team descended into the crypt under a white marble headstone inside St. Catherine’s Cathedral. To reach Potemkin’s remains, they would have opened a trapdoor and descended a narrow corridor. There they would have found a simple wooden coffin placed on a raised platform and marked only with a simple cross.

Under the coffin lid, a small black bag contained Potemkin’s skull and bones, carefully numbered.

Kremlin representatives did not try to hide the theft — quite the opposite. Russian-appointed Kherson region chief Vladimir Saldo said that with Ukrainian troops approaching the town, Potemkin’s remains were taken from the town, situated on the west bank of the Dnieper River, to an undisclosed location east of the city. river.

“We took the remains of the holy prince who were in St. Catherine’s Cathedral,” Saldo said in an interview broadcast on Russian television. “We transport Potemkin himself.”

Local Ukrainian activists confirmed that the church was looted and that, in addition to the bones, statues of venerated Russian heroes were taken. According to the accounts of historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of the book “Catherine the Great and Potemkin”, this was the ninth interruption of the peaceful rest of Potemkin’s remains.

In an interview shortly after the release of his book in 2000, Montefiore said the Kremlin had contacted him to say how much Putin admired his work. Last Thursday (27), he said that Putin’s historical reading is profoundly wrong and that the war has reduced Ukrainian cities such as Mariupol and Mikolaiv – which Potemkin and the first Russian imperialists helped to build – to ruins.

(The term “Potemkin Village” was coined to describe a striking facade built to hide an undesirable reality. But Montefiore says the term was incorrectly attributed to the prince, whose achievements in present-day Ukraine were real.)

“Potemkin would despise Putin and everything Putin stands for,” says the historian. According to him, Potemkin and Catarina saw the region as a cosmopolitan window to the Mediterranean, populated by a vibrant mix of people of different ethnicities and national origins.

For him, with the destruction of the cities that the prince helped to build, the Russian leader is playing the role of destroyer of these previous triumphs.

The looting of the tomb follows the same pattern as Moscow’s efforts to annihilate Ukrainian identity. Russian forces have been systematically destroying and looting Ukrainian treasures, including Orthodox churches, national monuments and sites that are part of Ukraine’s cultural heritage. They sent experts to steal gold artifacts from Scythian culture dating back 2,300 years.

As of October 24, UNESCO, a United Nations agency, had documented depredation and damage to more than 200 Ukrainian cultural sites.

But the bones of the famous statesman and military commander are of extra importance to the Kremlin. Montefiore, who described in his book Potemkin and Catherine’s “libertine lifestyle and exuberant political triumphs”, highlighted the special place in history the two hold for Putin and the ultranationalists in their effort to fuse “the golden majesty of the of the Romanovs with the dark glory of a Stalinist superpower, to form a peculiar modern hybrid”.

While researching to support his book, Montefiore went to St. Catherine’s Cathedral to see Potemkin’s remains, which he wrote were still stored in a plain black bag inside the wooden coffin.

It is unclear where they are now or what the Kremlin intends to do with them. Montefiore predicts that Potemkin’s remains will eventually be taken to Russia, where it could be part of a “television show of gross ultranationalism.”