Once upon a time Putin, Prigozhin and some little mermaids. All wallowing in the summer solstice.
In 1922, the Russian Alexander 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 propelled by scarlet sails will arrive from which a prince will disembark to take her to happiness.
Grin died ten years after writing the story, slowly, sick with cancer, lacking almost everything, with critics swarming over him. His imagination repelled the new Soviet society under construction.
In the bright year of 1968, inspired by Scarlet Sails, several Leningrad high schools came together to celebrate a festival that ended in a beautiful tradition: every last Saturday of June they would cross the Neva River in a scarlet sailboat, from the English pier and the from the Admiralty to the Winter Palace.
In the impressive setting of St. Petersburg and its canals, the passage of the sailboat – framed in the White Nights festival – was gaining more and more strength, with millions of people fascinated by the scarlet sails, the story that the story conveys, fireworks artificial and the parade of pirates, marine creatures and… Putin, who, as usual, yesterday planned to join the party.
In fact, his plane took off from Moscow in the direction of St. Petersburg at 2:16 p.m., but it disappeared shortly after from radar without anyone knowing where it landed. The little mermaids are still waiting for you.
Like all great tragedies, this one began with people in need. On Friday evening, when Prigozhin silently began his march towards Moscow, citizens of the middle class of the large Russian cities – that human part of the empire that will never go to fight in Donbass, which is most hurt by the closure of Ikea that the impact of the missiles on Kyiv – happily contemplated the arrival of the scarlet sailboat, the vessel from which all dreams disembark. In the waters of the Neva, so far from the Black Sea.
Yesterday, moreover, was the 55th anniversary of the ritual. Eighty thousand graduates from all over Russia had arrived to celebrate, and as fate would have it, it coincided with another anniversary. As Wagner approached Moscow, blockaded by the Kremlin, Berlin commemorated the 75th anniversary of the start of the blockade imposed by Moscow: between June 24, 1948 and May 12, 1949, the Russians sealed the land borders and rivers in the western part of the fallen capital of Germany.
The United States organized the largest airlift in history. From the heavy to the tiny: even miniature handmade parachute candies and chocolates.
A blockade summarized by the photograph of Berlin children watching the planes take off, as if wanting to go with them. As if they were scarlet sailing ships.
