Half life

Take a sniff, dear fellow citizens. You feel it smells rotten. And you can’t get rid of this smell by tightly closing the windows in your apartment or car. Because this is what our whole country smells like today.

A modern state in which large-scale conflicts on ethnic grounds begin is simply doomed to collapse. In Russia, with its widespread corruption, clan system of power, the omnipotence of an ineffective and thieving bureaucracy, the lack of real communication between regions, and widespread xenophobia among representatives of law enforcement agencies, the process of decomposition will proceed at such a speed that we will not even notice how the country will be plunged into chaos.

On Thursday, on Dobryninskaya Square in Moscow, a group of about two hundred people, mainly representatives of the DPNI (Movement against Illegal Emigration), held a rally demanding the eviction of Chechens from Moscow hostels. The reason was a fight near the Timiryazev Academy, in which Chechens allegedly killed a Russian student.

Let's say not "allegedly". Let's assume they really killed him. So what? This, I note, was a fight. That is, in principle, the Russians could also kill a Chechen. Agree, this is still not the same as if groups of shaven-headed Chechens wandered around the capital in search of some late Russian. Having met the latter in a deserted metro lobby or in an underground passage, he would have been killed immediately. And this is exactly what Russians do in Russian cities with representatives of other nationalities. And just because these nice people are called skinheads, they don’t stop being Russian, right? And, of course, there are students among them. Let's say, nationally concerned young people who blew up the Cherkizovsky market studied at a very prestigious university. In other words, African, Chechen, and Armenian students have much more grounds to demand the eviction of Russian students from the dormitories of Russian universities, institutes and colleges. Because the danger that threatens them is not random, but systemic.

Now such a non-trivial question: do you and I seriously believe that Kondopoga, Volsk, Moscow are all coincidences? It just happened so unexpectedly, they say, that various groups of citizens in different Russian cities suddenly realized that they were no longer able to live side by side, excuse me, with “blacks.” That's all they don't like. I don’t like the way they talk, I don’t like that they are united, I don’t like that they drive Mercedes, etc. And the “indigenous residents” unanimously decided to express this dissatisfaction in the form of pogroms, which, in order to be fully justifiably called “Black Hundreds,” still lack only priests with banners.

It is strange that no one paid attention to such a blatant fact: the events in Kondopoga were covered in detail by federal television channels. With nuances, with details, with comments from all kinds of politicians, with expert opinions in news stories and in final analytical programs. They were covered harshly and, most importantly, objectively. But this topic is extremely slippery, directly destroying the myth of that notorious stability that came with the advent of a new political era. That is, causing direct ideological damage. After all, it was possible to attribute everything to “criminal showdowns” or simply ignore this story, which happened in some distant bearish corner. If the central channels had behaved as they usually do - as they behaved in the case of Beslan, Nord-Ost, Kursk, the situation in the Caucasus - who in Russia would have known about Kondopoga? And no one would have known, with the possible exception of a few newspaper readers and Internet users. So what caused this unprecedented surge in freedom of speech? Obviously, the TV channels received instructions to cover Kondopoga to the fullest extent possible. Today such instructions are issued only in the Kremlin.

But why did the Kremlin need the whole country to know about Kondopoga? Well, I don’t know... Maybe so that thousands of people across Russia, inspired by the example of the Kondopozhans, would ask a simple question: if “blacks” can be beaten in one city, then, probably, it’s already possible in ours?

The authorities obviously believe that the fascistization of the situation in the country will help redirect the nation towards the fight against terrible evil and convince it that maintaining the status quo is the only possible option. In fact, what kind of change of power can we talk about if nationalist pogroms are raging in the country? When windows are being smashed under your windows and cars are being burned, there’s no time for elections, is there?