My city
So my hometown. The city where I was born, grew up, where I left to study and to which I returned after seventeen years of military service, where I live and work and which I love, love with its rains and fogs, with winter winds and summer thunderstorms, with unprecedented clouds of mosquitoes and omnipresent seagulls and pigeons, from which there is no salvation for my cleanly washed car...
This is Vyborg. The last city of Russia on the way to harsh Scandinavia, filled with Finns on weekends, often old, weeping on the ruins of the houses where they, these Finns, once lived.
Our city dates back to 1293, when the Swedish ruler Thorgils Knutsson captured the ancient Karelian settlements and founded the Viipuri (Vyborg) stone castle on the island. By the way, now this is the only medieval castle in Russia (there were others in the USSR, but after the collapse of the country they remained in the Baltic States). The Novgorodians tried many times to drive the Swedes out of Vyborg, but they did not succeed. In 1703, Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg, and for the safety of the new capital, he drove the Swedes out of Vyborg in 1710, after which for 100 years, until 1811, Vyborg was part of Russia. Then in 1809, Russian troops during the last Russian-Swedish war occupied all of Finland, which was then a Swedish province. So already all of Finland went to Russia and the Grand Duchy of Finland was formed. Vyborg also went to the same principality.
In 1917, Lenin gave Finland its independence. He just took and handed over the decision of the Council of People's Commissars on the recognition of the independence of Finland. I always think, but if Lenin had not done this, where would I go for real cheese, butter and other natural products? Surely in our Finnish SSR there would have been the same dead roads and the same redneck compatriots... No, after all, Lenin is in some ways the right person. The Finns remember and respect Lenin, all the memorable Leninist places in Finland are well-groomed and equipped, the Finns know what would have happened to them if not for Lenin...
We digress. In 1939, the USSR offered Finland to peacefully give up part of the territory near Leningrad for border security. This formula amazes me: to give back peacefully. Es-sno, Finland refused. The USSR went to force it to peace, throwing over a million of our soldiers into this tiny country. In March, everything was over, the border moved away from St. Petersburg, and Vyborg went to the USSR.
In World War II, Finland fought against the USSR, only to maintain its independence, otherwise their entire country would have been under the caterpillars of our tanks. Vyborg again became Finnish, for 3 years. However, Mannerheim refused to storm Leningrad, the city where he (then St. Petersburg) studied at the cavalry school, where he attended the imperial balls in the Winter Palace, I think if he had decided to go to St. Petersburg from the north, a lot could have happened quite differently... I love and respect Finns for this directness. These are simple, a little naive and slow people, from whom you do not expect meanness and betrayal. If in the forties the Estonians, Lytysh and other Lithuanians had not fallen under us, but had gone to war with us just like the Finns, I would have respected them too. No, I can’t put these “proud” “Baltic peoples” on the same level with the Finns...
We digress again. In 1944, Vyborg finally and irrevocably went to the USSR. The Finnish population left Vyborg all, to the last person. They said that the soldiers who burst in found still warm pots of porridge and potatoes on the stoves, and things were stacked in perfect condition... Many of those same Finns are still alive (in Finland there is a rather long life expectancy and very good medicine), here they are - then they come to Vyborg and see their houses, successfully brought by us to a critical state.
In Soviet times, Vyborg began to fill up with people from all over the USSR, they simply sent people to work according to the order, it was necessary to fill an empty rather big city. This is how my parents got here: my mother from the Novgorod region and my father from Ivanovo, and here I was born safely, becoming a native Vyborg. The specificity of my city is precisely that there is no indigenous population from the old generation, not at all, all the old indigenous people are abroad, and every one of us are newcomers from different parts of the country. The USSR built the largest shipbuilding plant in Vyborg, which the Chubais reformers failed to destroy in the 90s and which continues to build ships, even platforms for sea space launches. The city has a large commercial sea port, modern enterprises for the production of roofing and heat-insulating materials, a large border service and customs. For these reasons, our unemployment is low, and because of the cold, there are not very many guest workers, we will not be able to live under a palm tree. Again, the free population tushkanit across Finland, which is only 30 km away.
What to see in my city? First of all, the Vyborg Castle is 64 meters high, standing on a beautiful island. Mon Repos Park, founded by the President of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, Ludwig Heinrich Nicolai (emphasis on the last syllable of the surname). Old majestic fortifications, Anninsky fortifications, old Finnish streets and houses. Clock tower, ruins of a Dominican monastery. Episodes of the film "Sannikov Land" were filmed on the Clock Tower, remember, there is a fatalist officer Krestovsky, who sang "Ghostly everything in this raging world... " in the film, and so he climbs the wall of the tower and hangs on an overturned grate at the very top... This is with us, on the Clock Tower. The Transfiguration Cathedral, built under Catherine the Great, and not destroyed by the Bolsheviks precisely because Vyborg was under the Finns at that godless time. The round tower of the 16th century on the Market Square, it is now a very good restaurant, chosen by the Finns. The shores of the bay, with huge pine trees, no different from overseas Turkish...
This is what my city is like.
