【Text/Observer Network columnist Guo Yang】
In the past two days, a Russian "mutiny" has attracted worldwide attention. While most people relish the main figures and key nodes in the events, they invariably ignore one place - Rostov-on-Don.
The author has studied in Rostov-on-Don for nearly eight years, and every brick, grass and tree, customs, and changes in this southern Russian city have left an extremely deep impression on the author. While everyone's attention is focused on the "Wagner" armed men who blocked the neighborhood and occupied the building, I felt very close to the once familiar main roads of the city, the landscape pedestrian street and the related units in the vicinity that appeared many times in news photos and videos.
On 24 June, members of the Wagner Group stood guard in front of the headquarters of the Southern Military District, located at the intersection of Budyonny and Pushkin Streets, in Rostov-on-Don
Based on the city's long history and important practical position, the author believes that for Prigozhin and his "Wagner" group, the "uprising" incident may be a temporary anger, but the choice to take the city of Rostov-on-Don and the headquarters of the Southern Military District as the "blood" of its entire "military advice" operation is obviously not arbitrary. Therefore, taking this incident as an opportunity, the author also wants to talk to you about Rostov-on-Don, which passively acted as a "background plate" in this incident.
Aerial view of the city of Rostov-on-Don
First of all, let's talk about the region of Rostov and the city of Rostov-on-Don.
The city of Rostov-on-Don is located in the southwest of Russia and is ranked in the top ten of Russia's large cities. Today it is the administrative center of Rostov Oblast and the Southern Federal District of Russia, the main industrial, scientific and cultural center of southern Russia, an important hub of the southern land transportation artery, and an important port city "connecting the five seas", known as the "capital of the South", "the city of the Don" and "the gate of the Caucasus".
Electronic map of the city of Rostov-on-Don
The lower Don region has had a mild climate, fertile land and abundant fish resources since ancient times, so there are sites of human activity from the late Stone Age to the beginning of the Bronze Age. Through archaeological findings, the ancient city of Tenaiis (Танаис) in the Don River Valley retains the remains of human civilization around 3000 BC, and the related excavated cultural relics have a strong ancient Greek civilization style.
Thanaiis Archaeological Park
And the birth of Rostov as a city dates back to the time of Peter the Great. As a generation of heroes of the Russian Empire and the founder of the Russian Navy, Peter attached great importance to the development of the naval fleet and the construction of military ports. Thus, after the official creation of the Russian Navy, Peter established the military port of Taganrog (Таганрог) at the mouth of the Don River on the Sea of Azov and used it as a base for advance against the Ottoman Turkish Empire.
During the Battle of the Sea of Azov with the Ottoman Empire, Peter led his army through the steppes of the Don River, and on the way he found a sweet and delicious spring that Peter used as a camping water source for his army and called it "Tomi" (Богатый Колодезь).
Peter also envisaged building a large central fortress based on "Tomi", but due to the unfavorable progress of the war with the Ottoman Empire, he could only sign the Treaty of Prut (Прутский договор) with the Ottoman Empire to end the war and move some of the inhabitants of the nearby Taganrog port and the fortress of Azov (Азов) to the "Tomi" area to shrink the defenses. Of course, it was precisely because of the obstruction of the war on the southern front that Peter turned around and opened the Baltic Sea outlet to the north, and built the port of St. Petersburg on the coast of the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic Sea, which is also a later story.
Ruins of "Tomi" (in Rostov-on-Don)
As early as around 1570 AD, the Cossacks built the Cherkassk stronghold on the lower Don River, which later developed into the Don Cossack Ataman Dominion ("Ataman means chief"). At the same time, the Don Cossacks were officially "recruited" by the Russian Empire, and every Cossack man aged 14-60 was obliged to join the Russian army to serve the tsar. In return, the tsar exempted the Cossacks from conscription and taxes other than military service.
Due to its location on the border and crisscrossed by rivers and seas, commerce and trade in this area began to flourish. Therefore, during the reign of Peter I's daughter Empress Elizabeth, it was decided to set up a customs office here to manage commerce and foreign affairs in a unified manner. Thus, on December 15, 1749, the Empress signed a decree establishing the Temelnik Customs Office (Темерницкая темерницкая таможня) at the confluence of the Don (Дон) and the Temernik River (Темерницкая таможня) west of the "Tomi" region. This day was later recognized as the founding anniversary of the city of Rostov-on-Don.
The Temelnik Customs Office on Riverside Avenue in Rostov-on-Don was built as a monument
Soon after, the fortress fortress built on the basis of "Tomi" officially appeared in the 60s of the XVIII century, and by order of Empress Catherine II, the fortress was named "Rostov" after the Orthodox saint Dmitry Rostovsky (Димитрий Ростовский). In order to distinguish it from the city of Veliko Rostov (Ростов великий) in northern Russia, the place was named Rostov-on-Don (Ростов-на-Дону) according to its geographical location.
Schematic map of the Rostov Fortress, the general location of which is located in the eastern part of the city of Rostov-on-Don today
After the formation of Rostov-on-Don, in order to compete with the Ottoman Empire for regional hegemony, Empress Catherine II set her sights on the Crimean Khanate under the control of the Ottoman Turks, and decided to "draw the bottom of the cauldron" from the demographic and economic aspects.
In 1779, the Russian Empire allowed Armenians living under the Ottoman Empire to migrate from the Crimean Peninsula to the lower reaches of the Don River, which on the one hand weakened the economy and population of the Crimean Khanate, and on the other hand brought Russia a "high-quality immigrant population" that could promote the economic and social development of the region. About 12,000 ethnic Armenian settlers moved here and founded the city of Nakhichevan (Нахичевань) east of the city of Rostov.
In 1807, by decree of Emperor Alexander I, the Russian Empire officially established a city in Rostov-on-Don and issued it with a coat of arms symbolizing the status of the city. It is worth mentioning that according to official Russian historical records, Alexander I himself died in 1825 during his convalescence in Taganrog, Rostov province.
Coat of arms of the city of Rostov-on-Don
At the same time, after entering the nineteenth century, Rostov's urban construction and economic and social development also ushered in rapid development. By the middle of the 19th century, the city of Rostov-on-Don had 53 light and heavy industrial enterprises, and the city's population increased from more than 3,000 at the beginning of the century to more than 13,000.
During this period, Rostov-on-Don became the central hub of five southern postal routes of the Black Sea, the Caucasus, Bakhmut, Odessa and Kharkov. Water lines were laid in the city, telephone services were put into operation, electrified lighting and tram operations were realized at the end of the 19th century. The food fair in Rostov has also become one of the largest food fairs in Russia.
Postcard showing the city of Rostov-on-Don in the XIX century
The local cultural and educational undertakings also developed greatly at this time. In 1860, the "king of short stories" Anton Chekhov, who had a great influence on the world literary scene of the nineteenth century. Чехов), born in the city of Taganrog, Rostov region; As a result of the war, the Russian State University of Warsaw was relocated from Poland to Rostov-on-Don and reorganized into Rostov State University (Ростовский Государственный Университет). In the years that followed, the school played an important role in the Soviet and Russian educational systems, and after entering the new century, it was again merged and reorganized into my alma mater, the Russian Southern Federal University (Южный Федеральный Университет). To say more, Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn (А.И. Солженицын) studied and graduated from the physics department of the university; In the second half of the twentieth century, chemist Yuri Zhdanov (Ю.А. Жданов) was the rector of this university for a long time (the father of this Yuri Zhdanov was none other than Andrei Zhdanov, member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU and secretary of the Central Committee; The wife of the old rector was called Svetlana Alilueva - yes, his wife's father, that is, his old husband, was called Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin).
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the population of Rostov had exceeded 110,000. The sustained development of capitalist industry and commerce has also led to a continuous expansion in the size of the urban working class, which, coupled with the imbalance in Russia's socio-economic development, naturally led to the development of class contradictions. In 1902, the first political strike movement in Russian history took place in the city of Rostov-on-Don; In 1905, with the rise of the revolutionary movement, two more large-scale strikes took place, which eventually developed into armed workers' uprisings, adding a strong touch to the history of the Russian Revolution.
Monument to the 1902 strike in the railway district of Rostov-on-Don
During the 1917 revolution and the subsequent civil war in Soviet Russia, the situation of revolutionary struggle in the region was extremely complicated. As mentioned earlier, the Don River basin is one of the six major Cossack settlements in Russia. Due to the traditional Orthodox concept and the idea of "loyalty and patriotism", plus the fact that they are not engaged in industrial and peasant production, most of the local Don Cossacks are not interested in the Bolsheviks' idea of "proletarian revolution", but rather agree with the White Guards represented by Denikin and its ideas. Coupled with the aggressive group character of the Cossacks, a large number of Don Cossacks chose to join the White Army, which also made the Rostov region once the center of the "White Guard movement" in the south. In this process, only a small number of destitute Cossack peasants chose to support and join the Bolshevik-led Red Army of Soviet Russia.
In 1919, the famous "1st Cavalry Army", dominated by the fighters of the Don Cossack Red Army, was established, with Semyon Budyonny (С.M. Будённый) and Klimant Voroshilov (К.Е. Ворошилов) as commanders and commissars, respectively. As the "fist force" of the Soviet Red Army, the brave and combative 1st Cavalry Corps continued to move south, defeating the powerful White Army led by Wrangel and Denikin, and made great contributions to the defense and consolidation of the Red regime.
This extraordinary revolutionary history, especially the process of choosing the fate of the Don Cossacks at the turning point of the times, was later also used by the famous Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov, who was born in the Rostov region. Шолохов) is written in its entirety in the four-volume historical novel Тихий Дон (Quiet Don), for which he won both the Stalin Prize in Literature and the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The pride of the people of the Don - Mikhail Sholokhov and "Quiet Don"
In 1920, with the end of the Civil War, Soviet power in the Rostov region was officially established. During the period of vigorous socialist construction, the city became active, and later the famous large-scale agricultural machinery and equipment manufacturing enterprise "Rostov Agricultural Machinery Plant" (Ростсельмаш) and the largest theater complex in the USSR at that time - "Bolshoi Theater" (Большой театр им. Горького) also began construction.
Here we will focus on this Rostov "agricultural machinery factory", that is, the enterprise that successfully designed and developed the production of "Combein" (Комбайн) combine harvester, and now its market share of related products can still account for about 60% of the Russian agricultural machinery market. In addition, in the "Sino-Soviet honeymoon period" in the 50s of the last century, Rostov Agricultural Machinery Factory also participated in 156 large-scale industrial projects aided by the Soviet Union to China, directly responsible for the construction of the famous "Luoyang One Trail", which can also be said to indirectly help promote the birth of a generation of classic products - "Dongfanghong " tractor.
In 1928, with the economic and social development and the expansion of the size of the city, the border between the cities of Nakhichevan der Don and Rostov had basically disappeared, so it was officially merged into one large city. In 1937 the city of Rostov-on-Don became the capital of the Rostov region and the central city of the Don region. At the same time, in recognition of the great achievements of the "1st Cavalry Corps" and its commanding staff, in the process of urban construction during this period, the city of Rostov-on-Don named two parallel north-south arterial roads of the expansion of the city center "Budyonny Street" and "Voroshilov Street".
Interior building of the Rostov Agricultural Machinery Plant (Ростсельмаш).
During the Great Patriotic War, like many Soviet cities, the people of Rostov fought to the death in defense of their homeland and homeland against the invading Nazi German army, achieving great victories and paying heavy sacrifices.
In the autumn of 1941, Rostov-on-Don was occupied by German troops; A week later, the invading German army was killed by the commander of the Soviet Southwestern Front Semyon Timoshenko (С.К. Тимошенко) led the troops to repel. In July 1942, Rostov was again occupied by Nazi German forces as the Soviet defeat on the Kharkov (Харьков) front led to the collapse of the southern line. The remaining Soviet forces retreated along the Don River to the intersecting Volga River Valley, and finally relied on the city and the river bank in the "X" crossover of the two rivers to fight a battle, desperately resisted, consumed a large number of German forces between the ruins and broken walls, and then mobilized reserve military forces to outflank the Don River Valley in the enemy's rear, encircling and annihilating the remaining German army and its servant army and winning a complete victory.
Yes, this hard-won victory gave way to the fame of another heroic city at the intersection of the Don and Volga rivers, Stalingrad (Сталинград), which also allowed Rostov-on-Don to be liberated in February 1943.
Historical photographs of the Battle of Rostov in the Great Patriotic War of the USSR
But the fall of the city, which lasted only half a year, caused huge losses to Rostov-on-Don. During the Fall, Nazi German soldiers committed crimes here, killing more than 40,000 civilians in urban and nearby suburbs, including some 27,000 Jews, and about 53,000 people were forcibly taken to Germany for hard labor. The Rostov Agricultural Machinery Plant, almost all city bridges, streets and more than 12,000 houses were destroyed. It can be said that the entire city was almost completely destroyed by the invaders, becoming one of the ten cities most damaged by the war in the whole Soviet Union.
However, the heavy losses did not prevent the city from recovering quickly. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in the socialist family, Mrs. Rostow, who survived the disaster, "ushered in a peaceful and happy life with industrious hands and selfless work" as sung in the traditional Russian song "Slavic Send-off".
By June 1945, the first tram had resumed operation in the city. In 1947, the first phase of the Rostov Agricultural Machinery Plant had been repaired and produced the first combine harvester "Stalin Fighter 6", and the cigarette plant and the auxiliary locomotive repair plant had resumed production. The reconstruction of other industrial plants, mining enterprises and social infrastructure is also continuing, and the engineering program is carried out according to the master plan of the architect Academician Simonov.
Located in Gorky Park in Rostov-on-Don (Парк им. Горького).
Since Rostov-on-Don was listed as one of the priority cities for reconstruction after the war, 36 specialized organizations carried out special construction work in it. From 1948 to 1951, a total of 378 buildings were restored and newly built in the city, of which 228 were residential buildings; The Don Avenue was renovated and expanded, the theater and the "House of Soviets" were rebuilt from the ruins, and a 450-meter-long Neo-Voroshilov Highway Bridge reconnected the north and south banks of the Don. In the 50s of the 20th century, when the Volga-Don Canal was built, Rostov-on-Don also became the "port of five seas" connecting the Sea of Azov, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the White Sea and the Baltic Sea. In 1987, the city became a city of "one million people".
Riverside Street in Rostov-on-Don (Hабережная)
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the process of economic and social construction and development in most parts of Russia, including Rostov-on-Don, was greatly affected and hindered. According to the author's experience of studying and living in the local area for many years, it can be said that from the early 90s of last century to the second decade of this century, the appearance of Rostov-on-Don has basically changed little, and the old series of infrastructure has rarely been updated.
However, from another perspective, on the one hand, after many years of construction during the Soviet period, Rostov's urban construction and development framework and planning have basically taken shape, so although the city has not significantly promoted construction and development, the existing municipal resources can still meet the basic needs of urban residents; Second, when the Soviet Union collapsed, although Rostov-on-Don also experienced a certain degree of "changing the flag and changing the course", it did not tear down the city name and the name of the street facilities of the entire city like St. Petersburg, and even most of the "red culture" landscape relics in the city have been better preserved and protected.
The statue of Lenin in the "Gorky Park" in the center of Rostov-on-Don is still well preserved
As mentioned earlier, today it is the largest city in the southern Russian region, the center of industry, culture, education and science in the region, and an important transport hub in the southern region. Rostov-on-Don is a multi-ethnic and multicultural city, where people from all walks of life have come and gone throughout history, and where languages, cultures, religions and ideas have been exchanged. In recent years, with a slight improvement in the economic situation at home and abroad, the city of Rostov has also done a lot of work to restore historic buildings, improve streets and parks, and solve housing problems.
With the continuous development of tourism, the local area is also constantly striving to improve its own image and strengthen its promotion. In particular, in 2018, the World Cup was held simultaneously in several cities in Russia, and Rostov-on-Don was one of them. When the CCTV Sports Channel film crew filmed the feature film "Russian Action" in several Russian cities, the author also participated in the filming of the episode "Rostov-on-Don" as a guest host, and took this as an opportunity to introduce some relevant information about Rostov-on-Don to the national TV audience.
In addition to its economic status and geographical location, Rostov-on-Don is also a "city of military honor" (город Воинской Славы), which attaches great importance to its long and glorious military history. From a realistic point of view, Rostov-on-Don is also a Russian military town close to the eastern Ukrainian region, which can carry out military projections and provide support in the direction of Luhansk, Donetsk, Mariupol and other directions. This place is the headquarters of the Southern Military District of the Russian Federation, and most of the combat forces and military equipment of the Russian army are also assembled.
In addition, the strength of relevant local military-industrial complex enterprises cannot be ignored, for example, the famous "Russian Helicopter Manufacturing Company" is located in Rostov-on-Don. From the Soviet era to the present day, the company has been deeply engaged in helicopter design and manufacturing for many years, from the original Mi-1 and Mi-6 helicopters, to the Mi-24 and Mi-35 multirole helicopters, to the Mi-26 heavy transport helicopter, and the latest Mi-28H night gunship, all designed and produced in the Rostov region.
Military location and strategic projection direction in the Rostov region (picture from Station B up main "Shuo Yi Bian")
Therefore, there is reason to believe that Prigozhin first captured Rostov-on-Don, firstly because it was close to the military assembly point of his Wagner group, and partly because it had a high military-strategic value. It can be seen that the relevant specific actions of Prigozhin and his Wagner Group have also been carefully planned to a certain extent.
In subsequent articles, we will focus on the basic situation of the command of the Southern Military District of Russia and its affiliated military forces stationed in Rostov-on-Don based on relevant materials.
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