Results of the week. The price of an honest word

All week the country said goodbye to Solzhenitsyn. And if some admired his furious denunciation of the crimes of the Soviet regime, others pressed on Solzhenitsyn’s denunciations of the “damned 90s.” Where the former agreed with the latter was that Alexander Isaevich was an extremely sincere person, he said and wrote what he really believed in. And besides, when creating his main anti-Soviet works, he did not at all want to take into account the fact, obvious in the 70s of the last century, that the people (with the exception of a few renegades) were completely satisfied with the stagnation. Thus, born of the oil prosperity of that time, which, in addition to nuclear-missile parity with the United States (for which a huge part of petrodollars was spent), gave fellow citizens Yugoslav boots, sausage for 2.20 and a can of instant coffee on holidays. Solzhenitsyn, it seems, was not at all moved by the fact that he writes and speaks into emptiness, that a huge part of the Russian people have not read a single line of his (I suspect that they do not read him even now), and his name is known only thanks to lampoons published in Soviet newspapers . He did what he considered necessary, because he could not do otherwise.

I think that this is a completely inspiring example for the Russian democratic opposition. We need to finally stop having complexes about losing popularity among the people. And the constant fixation on PR, on inventing slogans that will magically return this popularity seems excessive to me. We need to focus on extremely clear criticism of the existing government, demonstrating its illegitimacy and ineffectiveness. And, most importantly, completely exclude for yourself the possibility of any alliance with this government.

The example of Solzhenitsyn generally makes us think about what role those who are commonly called moral and intellectual authorities can and should play. Those whose voices seem to be listened to by both society and even the authorities. In Soviet times, there was no question of such at all. Power itself was considered the bearer of the highest wisdom. At the same time, this wisdom seemed to be personified in the elderly and tongue-tied members of the Politburo, who in reality did not enjoy any authority. And the intellectual activity approved by the authorities was limited to the search for more and more evidence of the perfection of the Soviet system. Political science and most of economics have been reduced to pure scholasticism. As a result, the impending crisis went unnoticed. And when it came, it was not even out of ill will, but simply because of ignorance that there were no reasonable ways out of it.

All this means that the ruling party seems to have decided to engage in the intellectual sphere. With the active participation of United Russia, they are going to create a kind of Higher School of Political Science at Moscow State University. At the same time, no one even hides that the main task of this educational institution will be the training of ideological personnel for the party in power. And before that it turned out that a television department would be created at Moscow State University. We must understand that television is the most important of the arts, and the existing journalism department turned out to be rather weak in terms of ideological orientation.

There is some amazing mixture of ignorance and shamelessness in all this. The only thing the country needs political scientists and journalists for is to impartially study development trends and socio-political processes and warn in time about impending dangers. Let me return to the statement that struck me in the Pentagon's just published defense strategy, which seriously states that the country's security depends on the ability to rapidly deploy civilian expertise. But such an examination makes sense only if it is objective. America spends enormous amounts of money on the maintenance of its universities, which in every possible way cherish their independence and impartiality. These qualities are as natural to a policy scientist as frequent hand-washing is to a doctor. In the absence of these skills, both are dangerous for society.

One thing is reassuring - the cultural space of Moscow State University is such that it is able to digest even less ideological delights of the authorities. When, at the very height of stagnation, in the mid-70s, I studied at the journalism department, no scientific communism, no textbooks on the theory and practice of party printing played absolutely no role in our professional development. Literature played the main role. In such a case, there is only one way to ensure the ideological sterility of graduates - by deleting Chekhov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ibsen and Camus from the training courses. I don't think it will come to that. Although, who knows, what will happen to people who boast of their shamelessness.