he opening of the museum. “These memories will remain for ever in the hearts of our people. In liberated Mariupol, we honour and remember the true history of our country.”
In liberated Mariupol! "Liberated" by the bombing and killing and destruction done by Zhdanov's heirs.
To Kyiv this looks like Orwellian doublespeak because it was Russian forces that encircled and attacked Mariupol in 2022. The UN concluded that up to 90 per cent of residential buildings were damaged or destroyed and 350,000 people forced to leave the city.
An estimated 8,000 people died as a result of the siege, hundreds in a single incident when a Russian airstrike hit a theatre where civilians were sheltering. They had written “children” in huge letters in Russian on the ground outside….
Russian liberals are also angry about his rehabilitation. Nina Popova, a former director of the Anna Akhmatova museum in St Petersburg, called Zhdanov’s return “a violation of the moral norms of society” and “revenge” for his erasure during the 1980s.
“Zhdanov is being raised on a shield,” wrote the columnist Andrei Kolesnikov. “And not just anywhere but in Mariupol, a city whose fate is tragic whichever side of the trenches you’re on. They want to underline that tragedy by re-mythologising a Stalinist hangman. Why such cynicism?”
Because Putin. And now, because Trump.