Here is Putin, Prigozhin and some little mermaids. All rolled over at the summer solstice.
In 1922, the Russian Aleksandr Grin wrote a children’s story entitled Scarlet Sails. It is his most popular work, the story of a girl to whom someone predicts that one day a ship with scarlet sails will arrive with a prince who will take her to happiness.
Grin died ten years after writing the story, slowly, sick of cancer, missing almost everything, with critics raging on him. His imagination repelled the new Soviet society under construction.
In the bright year of 1968, inspired by Scarlet Sails, several secondary schools in Leningrad joined together to celebrate a festival that ended in a beautiful tradition: every last Saturday of June they would sail the Neva River on a scarlet sailboat , from the Moll Anglès and the Admiralty to the Winter Palace.
In the impressive setting of Saint Petersburg and its canals, the passage of the sailing ship – framed in the festival of the White Nights – became more and more powerful, with millions of people fascinated by the scarlet sails, the story that the tale conveys , the fireworks and the parade of pirates, sea creatures and… Putin, who, as usual, planned to join the party yesterday.
In fact, his plane took off from Moscow in the direction of St. Petersburg at 2:16 p.m., but disappeared from radar soon after without anyone knowing where it landed. The little mermaids are still waiting for him.
Like all great tragedies, this one began with people in despair. On Friday evening, when Prigozhin quietly began his departure for Moscow, middle-class citizens of the big Russian cities – that human part of the empire that will never go to fight in the Donbass, who are hurt the most by closing of Ikea that the impact of the missiles on Kyiv – they happily watched the arrival of the scarlet sailboat, the ship from which all dreams disembark. In the waters of the Neva, so far from the Black Sea.
Yesterday, moreover, was the ritual’s 55th anniversary. To celebrate, eighty thousand graduates from all over Russia had arrived in St. Petersburg and fate wanted it to coincide with another anniversary. As Wagner approached Moscow, blockaded by the Kremlin, Berlin was commemorating the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the blockade imposed by Moscow: between June 24, 1948 and May 12, 1949, the Russians sealed the borders land and river of the western part of the fallen capital of Germany.
The United States organized the largest airlift in history. From the heaviest to the tiniest: even candies and chocolates dropped by hand-made miniature parachutes.
A blockade summed up by the photograph of the Berlin children watching the planes take off, as if they wanted to go with them. As if they were scarlet sailboats.
