Not someone else's troubles. One day - one year (collection). Introduction to the topic. "Let them finish their dreams"

© Zakhar Prilepin

© AST Publishing House LLC

Instead of a preface

Let's start, it would seem, from afar (in fact, no, we start with what is at hand).

Old Russian literature was in the cycle of sacred history.

Despite everything, Old Russian literature gives a feeling of peace, humility, justification of the world. In the middle of any of these words is peace.

With peace in our hearts we live in the midst of the earthly world. These feelings were inherited by Pushkin, Tolstoy, Blok, Yesenin.

Since ancient times, the Russian people lived from one Gospel holiday to another.

The events of the New Testament were perceived as happening - here, now and every time - anew.

This is how we began to perceive our history. This is how our history began to perceive us.

Happened once a century a great victory- another salvation of Rus', or a great shock, or another unprecedented thing, like a trip to India or into space. These days and the days of the Russian saints replenished the gospel cycle, but did not change it.

Some say it's a vicious circle. Well, okay, it may be a circle, but it’s not a dead end.

This is a carousel of Russian history that never gets boring.

In the fourteenth year of the third millennium, it once again seemed to us that we were flying into tartarar. And we just entered another circle.

The weather was clear, and everything around was especially sharply outlined.

Squinting a little, you could see all the same faces familiar to us from our so young, so ancient history: warriors, righteous people, rebels, publicans, nobles, holy fools.

Thank you that we were not surrounded by this cup again.

Dwell in detail on certain events last year no need. The more you look at them, the more clearly you realize that they have already happened more than once.

It’s just that we haven’t seen them yet in our earthly life - but now they have shown us a lot.

In this book, much more often we will talk about how the same events looked before.

There is no point in being responsible for someone else’s history, but we now once again know for sure about our own - it has no “progress”. This very word is funny and inflated, like balloon. Touch it with a sharp one and it will burst, making the children laugh.

Can there be “progress” for eternity?

Spin, carousel.

Before everything

This year was brewing, and one day it fell like hail.

A short dystopia about how Ukraine has split into two parts and is going Civil War, I wrote back in 2009.

I won’t say that I was the only one tormented by such premonitions. Any sighted person could have foreseen this.

In May 2013, we sat in the middle of sunny Kyiv, not far from Khreshchatyk, with Ukrainian “leftists” and other reasonable guys from among the local intelligentsia - who, however, due to their lack of “Orangeist” illusions, were classified as marginalized by the patented Ukrainian elitists .

Then, six months before the Maidan, we talked a lot about everything that six months later came true in a strange and terrible way.

Our conversations were recorded and soon made public.

When the events, now known to everyone, began, we did not have to invent our speeches in order to turn out to be the most perspicacious after the fact, and shout: but we knew, but we knew!

We knew it.

Perhaps I’ll give a few quotes from our conversations - you can easily check that their publication took place when not a single tire was smoking in the center of Kyiv.

You sometimes come, I said, to some not very distant country - one of the republics of the USSR or the countries of the Warsaw bloc, and after some time you catch yourself with one painful feeling: in this country there is a quiet rehabilitation of fascism.

Does no one notice anything?

Do not think that this is expressed exclusively in Russophobic rhetoric, often characteristic of other foreign media - we have long been accustomed to such things. They don’t have to love us, and there’s also a reason not to love us: we’ve inherited, we’ve accumulated.

The problem is different. For some reason, these countries are looking for their own identity in those times when they wore fascist uniforms, caught local Jews and transported them wherever they were ordered, and then fiercely fought with the “Bolshevik occupiers.”

And at the same time, as soon as, for example, I find myself in Europe, the local press immediately begins to bully me about “Russian despotism”, all sorts of National Bolsheviks and the latest Stalinism.

“Fear God,” I always want to say, “half of you here neighboring countries the police dress in such a way that you can’t tell them apart from the policemen of 1941, they erect monuments to pro-fascist thugs - and all of you in Russia are looking for what is right next to you.”

But they don’t really want to see what they have at hand - all these countries are gradually creeping into various European Unions, and in general, unlike Russia, they are perceived as completely civilized.

Another surprise of mine is related to the fact that if you meet a Russian liberal in the country described above - either at a civil forum or in a cafe - he often sits in the circle of the public, among whom he, in principle, should not be.

In Russia, our patented liberals have done their best in the fight against “fascists”: they look for (and find!) them under a bench, in the attic, in a newspaper, or at a rally; but as soon as they get out of the cordon to the nearest neighbors, their sense of smell disappears.

Or, on the contrary, is it getting worse?

In our country, all they do is talk about “authoritarianism” and “nationalist revenge”; outside its borders, they do not distinguish anything like that upon the closest examination.

…While drinking Kiev draft wine, we discussed all this with one Ukrainian guy from the “left,” Viktor Shapinov.

“Russians generally don’t understand Ukrainian politics; they think in clichés,” said Shapinov. – Fans of the UPA, the Nachtigal battalion and the SS Galicia division are often written about in the Russian liberal media as “democrats.” We even sent it to the editors of Echo of Moscow open letter, when the news service of this respected radio station wrote about masked Nazi militants in masks and with knives who came to the meeting room of the Kyiv City Council as “civil activists.” These “civil activists” also unfurled a banner there with “ Celtic cross” – a well-known European neo-Nazi symbol. So, “Echo” never answered us... At anti-Putin opposition rallies, I myself saw the banner of the “Svoboda” organization a couple of times - and this is an ultra-right, neo-Nazi party. One of its leaders, now a member of parliament, published a collection of articles by Goebbels, Mussolini, Röhm, Strasser and other fascist criminals for “party study”.

– What motivates some Ukrainians political elites look for your predecessors precisely in those times? - I asked, referring to the Second World War and direct defectors to the side of our then common enemy.

I knew the answer in advance, but I checked my feelings with what my Ukrainian friends thought.

– The key point“This is anti-communism,” they answered me. – Everyone who fought against communism should be heroes and “fathers of the nation.” And in the thirties and forties, the flagship of the fight against communism was Nazi Germany. This is why Bandera, Shukhevych and other collaborators are heroized. The history of the Ukrainian state must be traced back to these “heroes.” Otherwise, we will have to admit that today’s Ukrainian statehood is a product of the late Soviet bureaucracy of the Ukrainian SSR, which found it beneficial not to obey the all-Union center in the conditions of the beginning of the division of public property. Simply put, the Ukrainian part of the Soviet bureaucracy wanted to determine for itself what and who would get on the territory under its control. It was this selfish motive, far from national spirituality, that was the basis for the creation of independent Ukraine. And nationalism was just a convenient screen to cover up a massive redistribution of property.

– What do they think here about Russian liberal figures – why do they need all this? – I asked.

– I think that the same anti-communism is the cementing link here too. The cooperation between Russian liberals and the far right in the former Soviet republics is not an accident, it is a system. For us, the saddest thing is the support, primarily from the media, of the Svoboda party, the former Social National Party. The xenophobic and racist program of the Freedom party, the aggressive rhetoric of its leaders, in different years calling on their supporters to “fight the Jews and Muscovites”, advising Russian-speaking children in kindergartens in Lvov to “pack their bags and leave for Muscovy”, is known to everyone in Ukraine. Why they turn a blind eye to this is a big question.

Our so-called opposition is a bloc of liberals (Klitschko), national liberals (Yatsenyuk) and, frankly speaking, fascists (Svoboda Tyagnybok). By concluding such an alliance, the liberals dragged the fascists into big politics. The government also supported the arrival of the fascists in parliament, giving them a place on TV that was disproportionate to their then rating. And directly financing them - there is evidence of Tyagnybok receiving money directly from the Administration of President Yanukovych. There are facts when Svoboda events were held in premises owned by deputies of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. The problem with the authorities is that they think to outwit everyone, to “divorce” everyone using some cunning political technology technique. The fascists have long acquired their own dynamics; this is no longer just a “power project”, as many thought a year ago. The rise of fascists to power is more real than we think.

Soon Andrey Manchuk, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian “left” party “Borotba”, joined our conversation:

– Nationalist ideology has always been reverse side medals of Ukrainian capitalism,” Manchuk shared. – It is designed to assert the right of the bourgeoisie to dominate in our country, bringing the tradition of its power straight out of Trypillian pots and from the trousers of Cossack hetmans – and also legitimizing the results of the privatization of Ukrainian productive assets, created by the labor of millions of people in “totalitarian” times.

You need to understand that in Ukraine propaganda demonized the “left” to a much greater extent than in Russia, where the bourgeois elites use certain images or fragments from the ideological heritage Soviet era. The leftist idea itself appears in Ukraine as something a priori alien to everything Ukrainian, brought here at the bayonets of the “Moscow horde.” An entire generation is growing up here who were taught that communists were treacherous, cruel, depraved aliens who were brutally and deliberately destroyed by hunger and repression. Ukrainian people, its language, culture, etc. This position is the basis of the right-wing liberal consensus, which is the alpha and omega of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie.

Of course, these statements are false - because most classics Ukrainian culture, including Ivan Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, Kotsyubinsky, Tychyna, Vinnychenko and others, were people of socialist convictions, Ukraine gave a brilliant galaxy of communist revolutionaries, the Ukrainian lower classes actively supported the Bolsheviks, and victory Soviet power became a prerequisite for the unprecedented flowering of Ukrainian culture, for the first time emancipating Ukrainian language and putting Ukrainian education on its feet. But now this is being hushed up in the most cynical way - and shameful myths are being used that the communists allegedly shot a congress of kobza musicians specially assembled for this purpose, that in the fifties Kharkov students were executed for demanding to take exams in Ukrainian, that Ukrainian soldiers were given before the attack on the Germans with bricks instead of weapons, and so on. But the level of education is low, the level of propaganda is high, and there are those who believe it.

A month later, in September, we discussed the same topics with the Kyiv literary critic, whose name is Efim Goffman.

They talked, still laughing, still joking, about a very strange phenomenon: “Kiev Russian Orangeism” - that is, about people who were brought up within the framework of Russian culture, but, going out to the Maidan (I remind you that there were still a few months left until the Maidan itself), lead themselves as inveterate Russophobes.

“I still remember the times when the concept of “liberalism” among the intelligentsia did not mean what it means now,” said Efim. – It was about respect for human rights, about freedom as the most important universal value, about pluralism, tolerance... It is no coincidence that the adjective “liberal” in everyday life is associated with manifestations of gentleness and tolerance. But the current liberal-party mentality is completely different. From the entire set of human rights, one single thing is isolated, regarded as the main one: the right to private property and her integrity. The guarantee of its observance is a stable market economy regime.

As for the remaining rights, a very interesting situation is emerging. The newly minted liberals hate everything that smacks of “scoop” and are tuned in to the wave of total anti-communism. But the logical-conceptual apparatus of these people works in the mode of... the so-called Marxist way of thinking, which they so vehemently reject. In fact, it is not Marxist, if we mean genuine Marxism. The whole question is that they think in the spirit of simplified schemes from the Soviet university barracks course of social disciplines. They believe that there is a basis - market economy, and there is a superstructure - everything else. If a stable market is established, then the remaining freedoms and rights will automatically come into effect.

It is absolutely clear that the United States of America is a strict reference point for today’s Russian-speaking-Ukrainian liberals. It is significant that neither the disastrous results of the Russian Yeltsin-Gaidar experiment of the nineties, nor the fate of many “third world” countries that have been in a situation of “wild capitalism” for centuries, did not sober up the Russian Orangemen. This environment is not prone to doubts. Independent thinking among Russian Orangemen is not prestigious...

Well, it would seem: the same Internet now makes it possible to access a variety of information sources. So many new points of view have appeared, calling into question the system of ideas at the turn of the eighties and nineties. The Orangemen don’t give a damn about all this! They prefer to hold on to the old dogmas, artificially inflating both themselves and each other.

Returning to America, its foreign policy course for the Orangemen is also a non-negotiable issue. Be equal - at attention! This implies their a priori dissatisfaction with Russia, and their a priori loyalty to the “Ukrainian idea.”

* * *

“It’s all obvious,” I said, but I also tried, almost jokingly, to explain what was happening with at least some rational things. – Some mercantile considerations – do they have a place? – I asked. - Grants, this and that?

– Partly, yes. But only partly,” answered Hoffman. – Among the Kyiv Russian Orangemen there are quite a lot of disinterested fanatics. Those who do not pursue any personal benefits and do not belong to the category of successful people. And, most importantly, completely resigned, accepting as the norm the process of discrimination against their native Russian language, their native Russian culture. In Ukraine, this process has been taking place for more than two decades, but under the rule of Viktor Yushchenko, the anti-Russian propaganda bacchanalia reached its apogee.

In Kyiv today there are only a few Russian schools. Opportunities for obtaining are blocked higher education in Russian. That is, opportunities for spiritual, professional, creative realization of a significant part of the population. And the Kyiv Orangemen, who speak exclusively Russian in everyday life and have no intention of switching to Ukrainian, look at such things with some amazing Olympic calm.

Take last year’s speech by the famous Kyiv film director Roman Balayan in one of the Kyiv newspapers...

“This is one of my favorite directors, I must say,” I clarified. – I’ve watched all his films, starting with Biryuk, and half of them are masterpieces. He still films them, as I understand it, at Mosfilm.

– Yes, the man produces his films exclusively in Moscow, at Mosfilm, works with the most famous Russian actors, adapts Russian classics. And in an interview he states that the need for the Russian language in Ukraine is felt only by people over forty years old, who “cannot read instructions for medicines, tax payments, bills utilities»…

– But now it’s not the orange ones who are in power, but Yanukovych. How are your notorious Kyiv Russian Orangemen doing?

– Our influential groups are still orange, nationalist.

In their hands - not in power! – leading electronic Ukrainian media: both television and radio. And most Ukrainian newspapers.

The mood among the Kyiv Orangemen did not waver at all. In the foreseeable future, most likely, only the surname in Orange election chants will change: it was “Yu-schen-ko!”, It will become “Ya-tse-nyuk!” And another surname fell into the same rhythm: “Pull-to-side!”

“The absence of a serious layer of the aristocracy, and then of the intelligentsia, had a detrimental effect on the development of Ukrainian culture,” continued Yefim. – Whatever talented phenomena may happen there, they, unlike the Russian situation, do not yet have a chance of becoming self-sufficient and influential world-class events. This requires a corresponding powerful atmosphere within Ukrainian society, but it does not exist. Because there is no social environment that creates such an atmosphere. The formation of such an environment is a matter of the future. But this formation cannot occur either through isolation, or – especially – through squeezing and ousting other, developed people from the territory of the country. cultural traditions. Nothing productive will come of this!

– Will the situation in terms of relations with Russia only get worse in the near future? Is there a chance that the Russian language and Russia as such – not the current one, but Russia in general – will no longer be perceived as a harmful hell next door?

“In essence, the general political situation in Ukraine has not changed at all,” Hoffman answered. – Half the country is for the nationalists, half the country is strongly against it. This means: these second half of the country do not at all perceive Russia as, in your words, hell next door. Let us also take into account that this half includes a significant part of the population of Kharkov, Donetsk, Lugansk, and Simferopol. By the way, in Kharkov today there are much more real intelligentsia than in Kyiv. Both scientific and creative. Even in Donetsk, from which the Orangemen create some kind of inadequate scarecrow, there is an excellent intelligentsia.

But Kyiv, although it has the formal status of a capital, is in fact a very middle-class city.

As for the broad masses of the Ukrainian-speaking population, it seems to me that they would not at all perceive Russia as an enemy if such sentiments had not been instilled by influential nationalist politicians and ideologists. And they implement it. And they provoke.

I would very much like the Russian enlightened and creative community to show more sensitivity to our problems. Didn’t show, as is often done in liberal circles, an inaccurate picture: Ukraine is a ray of light in dark kingdom. I did not selectively listen to the voices of only those forces that stroke the fur of the liberal, party consciousness.

In fact, the forces in Ukraine who do not want to understand what is really happening in Russia, and the same different Russian forces who do not want to understand what is happening here - specular reflections each other.

It is hardly possible to dispute that all the events of the approaching year were, in one way or another, touched upon in these conversations: the persistent Ukrainization of the country, which is by no means entirely composed of Ukrainians, but at best half, and the crafty behavior of the intelligentsia - both Russian and Kyiv - unwilling to see the obvious nationalistic tilt of the newest Ukrainian opposition, and even the key names of the impending Maidan are named, and a line is drawn along which one half of the country differs from the other, and specific Donetsk and specific Lugansk are named, which even then caused irritation in the Kyiv environment, and a trend total anti-communism, behind which elementary Russophobia and economic redistribution were hidden, was also indicated - there was very little time left until monuments to Lenin began to be knocked down all over Ukraine, and at the same time, memorials to Soviet soldiers-liberators began to be destroyed.

I don’t know about others, but for me - six months later, when the cry began that Russia was fooled by its own seething propaganda and is to blame for everything that is happening in Crimea and Donbass, and Ukraine is united as never before and is not to blame for anything , and new people came to power here, but there is no trace of Bandera’s followers here - ... I was both funny and sad.

No one heard us in time, and when everything happened, they didn’t bring us a glass of vodka with the words: oh, guys, it’s a shame we didn’t pay attention to your words earlier.

Yes, now there’s no time for that anymore.

Since the end of 2013, I have been keeping records of someone else’s turmoil, which has become my own turmoil, not so much describing events as considering my feelings, the main one of which was: “This has already happened to us! It's not the first time!" – and immediately published these notes wherever necessary, most often on his own blog.

It turned out that a wide variety of events from Great Russian and Little Russian history are directly related to what is happening, even if they took place a hundred, two hundred or a thousand years ago.

That Russian literature, poetry and prose, the views and judgments of national classics amazingly illustrate everything we saw, heard and experienced throughout the year.

Zakhar Prilepin

Not someone else's troubles. One day - one year

Instead of a preface

Let's start, it would seem, from afar (in fact, no, we start with what's at hand).

Old Russian literature was in the cycle of sacred history.

In spite of everything, ancient Russian literature gives a feeling of peace, humility, and justification of the world. In the middle of any of these words is peace.

With peace in our hearts we live in the midst of the earthly world. These feelings were inherited by Pushkin, Tolstoy, Blok, Yesenin.

Since ancient times, the Russian people lived from one Gospel holiday to another.

The events of the New Testament were perceived as happening - here, now and every time - anew.

This is how we began to perceive our history. This is how our history began to perceive us.

Once a century, a great victory happened - another salvation of Rus', or a great shock, or some other unprecedented thing, like a trip to India or into space. These days and the days of the Russian saints replenished the gospel cycle, but did not change it.

Some say it's a vicious circle. Well, okay, it may be a circle, but it’s not a dead end.

This is a carousel of Russian history that never gets boring.

In the fourteenth year of the third millennium, it once again seemed to us that we were flying into tartarar. And we just entered another circle.

The weather was clear, and everything around was especially sharply outlined.

Squinting a little, one could see all the same faces familiar to us from our so young, so ancient history: warriors, righteous people, rebels, publicans, nobles, holy fools.

Thank you that we were not surrounded by this cup again.

There is no need to dwell in detail on certain events of the past year. The more you look at them, the more clearly you realize that they have already happened more than once.

It’s just that we haven’t seen them yet in our earthly life - but now they have shown us a lot.

In this book, much more often we will talk about how the same events looked before.

There is no point in being responsible for someone else’s history, but now we once again know for sure about our own - it has no “progress”. The word itself is funny and inflated, like a balloon. Touch it with a sharp one and it will burst, making the children laugh.

Can there be “progress” for eternity?

Spin, carousel.

This year was brewing, and one day it fell like hail.

I wrote a short dystopia about how Ukraine has split into two parts and there is a civil war going on there back in 2009.

I won’t say that I was the only one tormented by such premonitions. Any sighted person could have foreseen this.

Then, six months before the Maidan, we talked a lot about everything that six months later came true in a strange and terrible way.

Our conversations were recorded and soon made public.

When the events, now known to everyone, began, we did not have to invent our speeches in order to turn out to be the most perspicacious after the fact, and shout: but we knew, but we knew!

We knew it.

Perhaps I’ll give a few quotes from our conversations - you can easily check that their publication took place when not a single tire was smoking in the center of Kyiv.

“Fear God,” I want to say every time, “here in half of the neighboring countries the police dress in such a way that you can’t tell them apart from the policemen of 1941, they erect monuments to pro-fascist thugs - and you are still in Russia looking for what you yourself have sideways".

But they don’t really want to see what they have at hand - all these countries are little by little creeping into various European Unions, and in general, unlike Russia, they are perceived as quite civilized.

Or, on the contrary, is it getting worse?

In our country, all they do is talk about “authoritarianism” and “nationalist revenge”; outside its borders, they do not distinguish anything like that upon the closest examination.

…While drinking Kiev draft wine, we discussed all this with one Ukrainian guy from the “left,” Viktor Shapinov.

Russians generally don’t understand Ukrainian politics; they think in clichés,” said Shapinov. - Fans of the UPA, the Nachtigal battalion and the SS Galicia division are often written about in the Russian liberal media as “democrats”. We even sent an open letter to the editors of Echo of Moscow when the news service of this respected radio station wrote about masked Nazi militants wearing masks and carrying knives who came to the meeting room of the Kyiv City Council as “civil activists.” These "civil activists" also unfurled a banner there with the "Celtic cross" - a well-known European neo-Nazi symbol. So, “Echo” never answered us... At anti-Putin opposition rallies, I myself saw the banner of the “Svoboda” organization a couple of times - and this is an ultra-right, neo-Nazi party. One of its leaders, now a member of parliament, published a collection of articles by Goebbels, Mussolini, Röhm, Strasser and other fascist criminals for “party study”.

What prompts some of the Ukrainian political elites to look for their predecessors in those times? - I asked, referring to the Second World War and direct defectors to the side of our then common enemy.

I knew the answer in advance, but I checked my feelings with what my Ukrainian friends thought.

The key point here is anti-communism, they answered me. - Everyone who fought against communism should be heroes and “fathers of the nation”. And in the thirties and forties, the flagship of the fight against communism was Nazi Germany. This is why Bandera, Shukhevych and other collaborators are heroized. The history of the Ukrainian state must be traced back to these “heroes.” Otherwise, we will have to admit that today’s Ukrainian statehood is a product of the late Soviet bureaucracy of the Ukrainian SSR, which found it beneficial not to obey the all-Union center in the conditions of the beginning of the division of public property. Simply put, the Ukrainian part of the Soviet bureaucracy wanted to determine for itself what and who would get on the territory under its control. It was this selfish motive, far from national spirituality, that was the basis for the creation of independent Ukraine. And nationalism was just a convenient screen to cover up a massive redistribution of property.

What do they think here about Russian liberal figures - why do they need all this? - I asked.

I think that here, too, the cementing link is the same anti-communism. The cooperation between Russian liberals and the far right in the former Soviet republics is not an accident, it is a system. For us, the saddest thing is the support, primarily from the media, of the Svoboda party, the former Social National Party. The xenophobic and racist program of the Svoboda party, the aggressive rhetoric of its leaders, who in different years called on their supporters to “fight the Jews and Muscovites”, who advised Russian-speaking children in kindergartens in Lvov to “pack their bags and go to Muscovy”, are known to everyone in Ukraine. Why they turn a blind eye to this is a big question.