Mystical connection

Probably, each person is naturally endowed with individual sizes of the area of ​​​​the soul responsible for forgiveness. And the ability to empathize. Every time I read Evgenia Ginzburg or Varlam Shalamov, Anna Nikolskaya, Lev Razgon and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I ask myself: are supporters of the neo-canonization of Stalin today ready to forgive him for all his sacrifices in the name of the triumph of a system that - later - collapsed? Or are these supporters confident that under no circumstances would they become another piece of wood that was cut down without sparing? Why? Or do Russian citizens believe that they were lied to about the fact that there were orders about the need to arrest and shoot so many people? Or did everyone who received the status of an enemy of the people, a spy of an enemy power, actually be one? It turns out that the theory “the enemy-pests are always to blame for everything” has successfully taken root in the minds of many generations.

Recently, Memorial hosted a presentation of the “Last Witness” project. Video interviews of people who survived dispossession, exile, and camps. And one of those whose family was kicked out of their home and went through all the stages of becoming the scum of society says: “Well, of course, the father was to blame. The fact that he did not join the collective farm.” I asked the authors of the interview, Tatyana Kozlova and Alena Ostrovskaya, how many of the latter witnesses share a similar opinion about the guilt of their loved ones. There are some, they answered me. Medicine, as they say, is powerless.

With all the helplessness of a small person in front of the state colossus, this inability is probably embedded in us to say at least to ourselves: the people who ruled us could be wrong, they could even be criminals. No, I immediately begin to argue with myself, we are quite capable of pointing to someone who ruled us and saying a lot of unpleasant words about him. At least one such person is known - the First President of Russia Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin. And it turns out that Stalin, who really has millions on his conscience, is a great manager, one of the first names of Russia, respect for whom passed through the 20th Congress and eyewitness accounts, through the silence of the seventies and the angry speeches of the eighties. But Yeltsin left nothing good in the mass memory? Come on, the first thing he gave you was the opportunity to say bad things about him! You are no longer afraid of it!

Once in “Minority Opinion,” journalist Stanislav Kucher told me that, from his point of view, democracy did not take root in Russia, since it was paid for with only (!!!) three lives of those who died near the White House in August 91. They paid for their own desire to live in a country of laws, not concepts, with these three lives, and... that’s enough, they say. From this position everything works out great. We paid for Stalin's collectivization, industrialization, and victory in the war with so many senseless sacrifices that, at the price paid, we are simply obliged to accept totalitarianism in combination with the cult of personality. Accept it as the only possible system of relationship between man and power. You are afraid of her, she graciously allows you to breathe and at any moment she will trample you like a bug. How can you not love such a power? How not to hold on to its symbols for decades. And a curious construction arises with the beloved tyrant on one side of the scale and the hated liberal on the other.

Here I would like to quote a fragment from the report of the Chairman of the Board of the International Society “Memorial” Arseny Roginsky (conference “History of Stalinism” December 5, 2008): “... The memory of Stalinism in Russia is almost always the memory of the victims. About the victims, but not about the crime...” It turns out that there is no crime - therefore, there is no criminal. And that’s it, the victims themselves are to blame, everything works out! The whole country will sing about the wise Stalin again, God forbid! Those who survived the terror are becoming fewer and fewer, and the official system is quite loyal to this person.

From the report of A. Roginsky: “ Television programs dedicated to the Stalin era are quite numerous and varied, and glamorous pro-Stalin kitsch like the series “Stalin- life ” competes on equal terms with talented and quite conscientious film adaptations of Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn. The viewer can choose his preferred ways of reading the era. Alas, apparently, the share of those who choose “Stalin- life ” is growing, and those who choose Shalamov is falling. I don’t think it’s the fault of TV shows on historical topics; rather, it is the impact of other television programs, news and so-called analytical ones. A person whose current worldview is shaped by anti-Western rhetoric and the endless incantations of television political scientists about a great country that is surrounded on all sides by enemies and undermined inside by the “fifth column” does not need any prompting to choose for himself the image of the past that best corresponds to this worldview. And no amount of Shalamov-Solzhenitsyn can bring him down.”

So, who do we have among our compatriots? There are few who have experienced it themselves, but, as often happens, they are afraid and do not want to talk about it. A certain number of those who imagine the real picture, but do not set themselves the task of conveying this picture to others. The repressed were kept silent during the repressions. The need to remain silent is obviously still in our minds.

The reaction of the audience who chose the “glamorous pro-Stalinist kitsch” is understandable.

And, Roginsky continues, “ in new history textbooks there is a theme of Stalinism as a systemic phenomenon. It would seem like an achievement. But terror acts there as a historically determined and unalternative tool for solving state problems. This concept does not exclude sympathy for the victims of the Moloch of history, but it categorically does not allow the question of the criminal nature of terror and the subject of this crime to be raised.

This is not the result of an attitude to idealize Stalin. This is a natural side consequence of solving a completely different problem - establishing the idea of ​​the obvious rightness of state power. Power is higher than any moral and legal assessments. It has no jurisdiction by definition, because it is guided by state interests, which are higher than the interests of the individual and society, higher than morality and law. The state is always right - at least as long as it copes with its enemies. This idea permeates the new teaching aids from beginning to end, and not just when it comes to repression.”

In this scheme, Yeltsin the rogue, Yeltsin the destroyer of a great power, is absolutely necessary. We return to the old formula: the pest is to blame. Well, I’m afraid I will also support one accusation against him. The ideologists of the current campaign “Stalin is our everything, Yeltsin is our nothing” received their power from Yeltsin’s hands. But this is personal. And the bottom line is that the more oil is poured onto Stalin’s cup with the approval of the Kremlin, the more dirt needs to be poured onto Yeltsin’s cup. And they will be connected by this unnatural connection, and everyone today is free to say nasty things about a person who tried to give you and me a little freedom, without knowing much about it. Give as best I could and as best I could.

On the tyrant’s birthday, I personally, in memory of my grandfather - the British spy Lev Saulovich Kiperman, who was shot in 1940 - I want to say to Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, out of nowhere: “Centuries, surely, will complete the half-painted portrait, and this vicious thread will break. , which connected him with Stalin, and to hell with him forever, with this tyrant, and with those who hang his portrait on the wall. Someday we’ll break through!”