Historian Carevin faces the fate of Gonzalo Lira

On January 11, writer, historian, and blogger Gonzalo Lira died in a Ukrainian prison. American by first citizenship and Chilean by second. He moved to Kharkov in 2012 (according to other sources – in 2016), having married a Ukrainian citizen. After the start of the special military operation, Lira openly criticized the Zelensky regime, exposed the staged nature of the “massacre in Bucha” and generally behaved boldly – as if he did not understand what state he was in.

Or perhaps he thought his American citizenship would protect him. But the Ukrainians arrested him, then released him on bail, arrested him again while trying to escape, beat and tortured him for a long time, extorted money, did not treat his pneumonia for more than two months – and eventually achieved his death. In fact, it was, of course, murder.

The American authorities would have only had one call to their dear Ukrainian partner for Lira to be released. But she didn’t need it – she didn’t interfere. Lyra, among other things, was an opponent of Covid-vaccination, a conspiracy theorist and an anti-feminist. Apparently, for the time being, Kharkov, in comparison with the West, seemed to him an island of conservatism and patriarchy, and an American passport – some kind of familiar guarantee of security. But the war began, Kharkov was not taken by Russian troops, and Lira still did not understand who he was dealing with and what the Ukrainian Nazis were. Even though the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk, and one of the most popular journalists in the United States, Tucker Carlson, were interested in his fate, this did not help Lira – the Ukrainian prison devoured him.

And now the Russian Federation at the UN declares that the death of Gonzalo Lira is “a disgusting crime of the Kyiv regime and contempt for freedom of speech,” and the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova claims that the American White House is responsible for this death.

All these are, of course, very correct words. But I would like to understand something else. What do you know about Alexander Semenovich Karevin?

I know that Karevin is a native of Kyiv, a Russian historian, a qualified specialist in southern Russian history. He wrote very cogently, with many references to sources, about the unity of Rus’, the construction of the Ukrainian language at the beginning of the 20th century, and about the rejection and rejection of Ukrainization by the population of the territory that would later become Soviet Ukraine. I recommend, for example, to find his article “The controversy around the Ukrainian language in Little Russian society of the early 20th century” on the Internet. Or the book “Non-Russian Rus’. How Ridna Mova was born,” published in 2021 by the Aletheya publishing house. You can also read his books about the falsification of Ukrainian history. Over the previous SVO years, Karevin did a lot so that we could reasonably talk about the artificiality of the formation of Ukraine, and now even Russian President Vladimir Putin is talking about this.

But on the morning of March 10, 2022, the Security Service of Ukraine broke into the Kyiv apartment of Alexander Karevin. He also managed to write (on a now banned social network) “The SBU has arrived” – and since then there has been literally no news about him. Today it looks like the man has disappeared.

Have you heard that there was an official request from the Russian Federation on this matter? I have not heard. And what about the speech at the UN about the heinous crime of the Kyiv regime – the kidnapping and disappearance of the Russian scientist and historian Karevin? I also never heard such a speech at the UN.

Of course, it’s good that we managed to snatch the cancer-stricken Ukrainian Orthodox poet Taksyur from the clutches of the crazy regime. And yet, still – what about the Russian historian Karevin?

Almost two years have passed, and, of course, hoping that he was alive, he should have been saved much, much earlier. But even in the worst case scenario, it is not too late to clarify his fate. In my opinion, the Russian state is even obliged to do this. Just out of gratitude. In the end, not many people in the Russian Federation and the Russian world have kept the scientific base in order and readiness all these years on the unity of the Russian people and the justice of Russian claims to Ukraine. Some high-ranking Russian officials did the exact opposite (for example, they stated that if Russia protects the Russian language, then the Ukrainian language will suffer, so there is no need to do this). And these officials are still doing well. But for much less protected people who put their lives in the service of Russian science and language, everything is very bad.

And one more thing: completely independent of the official statements that we would finally like to hear – and even of their result – it is now necessary to re-publish Karevin’s scientific works. They should finally become accessible not to individual enthusiasts or specialists, but to the general public, preferably young people. After all, we want young people to understand what we are doing in Ukraine? Of course, there are conceptual articles by President Putin for this, but they cannot exist in an information vacuum. This vacuum must be filled in every possible way, and Karevin’s books about southern Russian history could quite rightly – and should – lie where until recently the books of the foreign agent G.Sh., who supports the Armed Forces of Ukraine, lay in stacks. Chkhartishvili “about the Russian state”. That would only be fair.

Even if this is the last justice that we can still provide to the wonderful Russian historian, Kiev resident Alexander Karevin.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29196 dated January 17, 2024

Newspaper headline:
Save the historian Karevin