Alexander Dybin, St. Petersburg
Mikhail Romanov offered to take the T-34 tank, which the Estonian authorities removed from the pedestal in the border town of Narva, to Russia and install it in the city of Kolpino (part of the borders of St. Petersburg).
“If a monument tank has lost its historical value in the eyes of a neighboring state, then it must be transferred to a place where this value is indisputable. In the museum of the state that dismantled the monument, the tank will have the actual status of a captured weapon. This means that the legendary car, one of the symbols of our country's victory over fascism in World War II, will become a sudden trophy of modern Estonia 77 years after its end. I have no doubt that the museum where it was transferred will take care of the appropriate annotation for the captured tank, and in the eyes of visitors it will become the personification of distorted interpretations of military history. We must not allow this,” the MP said.
According to Romanov, in exchange for a tank, Russia could promise Estonia not to touch the place names associated with this state and thereby not offend its national feelings.
“The question of the return of the monument tank to Russia lies in the ideological, and not in the economic plane, therefore, compensation to the Estonian side for the export of the T-34 can be expressed in an intangible format. Since the fate of the monument has ideological significance, and the permission for its free return to Russia by the Estonian authorities could be a gesture of goodwill, Tallinn, in turn, could count on reciprocity. For example, to preserve Estonian names in Russian, including St. Petersburg toponymy,” the deputy said.
So, according to Romanov, it is possible to rename the Tallinn Highway to Ivangorodskoye, the Narva Gates to the Na Narva!
As Novye Izvestiya previously reported, the Estonian authorities decided to move the monument to the T-34 tank from Narva to the Estonian War Museum. In addition, the dismantling of Soviet monuments began in the Baltic countries and Poland.