In the regions

Fools

April 16, 2010 Viktor Shenderovich

Actually, what did I want? - ride in St. Petersburg, live a couple of days in a wonderful quiet hotel, get enough sleep with the phone off, see friends, take a couple of favorite routes, amuse, to amuse, to mutual pleasure, an venerable audience - and roll back to Moscow ...

Remembering the surname "Matvienko" these days did not enter my plans at all.

But three weeks before the concert, something was swollen somewhere. On March 30, the organizer of the evening, Mikhail Eliseev, called and asked a nervous voice to immediately send a guarantee letter that during Schenderovich’s speech there would not be political actions.

When asked who and why this stupid paper needed, on the other side of the wires began to poke their fingers up with a mysterious look, strictly vertically, in those stratospheric ones, where one lady, beautiful in all respects, lives on a resin on her head ...

Misha wrote a stupid warranty piece of paper and sent it with a fax.

- Does such a wording suit you?

“Not us ...” they bluntly answered the administration of the theater. Arkady Raikin.

- But suits?

“So far, yes,” they answered in the administration and asked to send the content of my speech: see texts.

The textics was lit even by Soviet standards, published, interpreted, but this did not help either. Two days later, the sale of tickets to my concert was closed - sudden problems were discovered in the stage of the stage ...

Pandora's box full of technological disasters, I have been driving around the country since 2000. This is how Putin attached a cap of Monomakh on Kumpol, so it immediately began. In apatitis, the pipe was breaking through, in Astrakhan, the light in the hall; Concerts in Yoshkar-Ola and in St. Petersburg were canceled-just on my last visit in the “Hall at the Finland Station”, a leak was formed.

That leakage, without a trace, overgrown after a small scandal in the media - to this, “Raikinskaya”, the next morning, the collapse of the ceiling in the lobby and the sudden need to repair, or a short (exactly on the day of my concert), or the capital ...

The theater directorate did not manage to agree on versions with the leadership of the Committee on Culture, and they lied each of their own. Mr. Usubiani and Mr. Gubankov were one alone-each lies of lies ended in accusing me of the desire of political PR.

And then! Do not feed bread, let me be trained. Sometimes, I’ll throw a bunch of nerves and money into the wind - and I’m piasy ... Such happiness! Nobody wants to join?

On April 6, on April 6, Mr. Gubankov began with a bypass maneuver: the Culture Committee sent information to the media about the transfer of my concert to the site of the Lyudey Theater. I was surprised: no one asked my consent. In the "lyceum" theater they were also surprised, because no one also asked them, and the site was busy that day.

Two mares-meanness and stupidity-sparked along the corridors of the Culture Committee of St. Petersburg the nostril in the nostril, but the stupidity still won.

I grabbed my head. Gubankov and Co., however, was also not sweet: after all, not North Korea, what kind of media in the country there were still, and by that time the authorities were at that time ...

On the morning of April 8, a parliamentarian with a white flag appeared from the Parkin pop theater. I gave the team not to shoot. The parliamentary came to the organizers of the concert and sobbed on their shoulder for a long time, complaining about the forced fate and asking to enter the position.

The situation was that they would all be fired because of me, and the theater would not be given money for reconstruction. They begged not to destroy. (I begged, I note, the same people who did not pick up the phone a week ago, and then rude and poured me with mud.) But - who would remake the old ... Moreover, they promised that they would certainly find a different site for the same number!

Of course, they did not find anything: no one wanted to contact me, Herod, the enemy of Matvienko and the Culture Committee.

Now we were asked by Christ and God to agree with the transfer of the concert, not to speak bad in the media, not to call people to the rally ... We answered with all the party straightforwardness that the only way to solve the question is quietly -immediately stop raining Vanka and open the sale of tickets to the concert. They will still be fired - why not be in the end decent people?

The answer was the termination of the comedy and the universal disappearance from the horizon.

The sale of tickets was never opened.

And so, honestly, I really feel sorry for them by separately - everyone, according to Valentina Ivanovna, whose nerves were aggravated to such a limit that my arrival in St. Petersburg causes her hysteria urban scale. But even sorry for me millions of normal Petersburgers who are forced to live serfs at the capricious lady at the beginning of the 21st century. It’s a pity, too, spending a life on overcoming feudalism in the city on the Neva ...

We found the site for the concert ourselves: in the Pulkovskaya Hotel, whose Western management, by a strange coincidence, was not at all interested in what they were thinking about Shenderovich in the Committee on Culture of St. Petersburg.

But I also tried the St. Petersburg administration to the Pulkovskaya to fall with the whole body! After the conclusion of the reservation agreement, they called there, tried to make them back ... Maybe they would also tear off the concert-that’s what, but they know how to put up ...

Behind the final of the plot, I’m going, the servant of God, to the Leningrad station ...

I’m going and asking myself: why are they doing this? Who exactly they are - not even so important (one Stirlitz, introduced on the old square, knocked that the legs of this story were growing from there). But, I repeat, it’s not the address: Smolny or the Kremlin is a particular, especially since, in any case, Moscow had enough time to sink on its party Saltychikha.

The main question: why are they doing all this?

Let us leave aside the moral aspect of the question: what is the moral here? Let us leave the aspect of legal: blackmail and abuse of power - the everyday life of this administration. But - why?

There is no rational explanation. It’s not even stupid, it is very stupid. Instead of five hundred peaceful spectators of Shenderovich, to receive a scandal, shame and hundreds of thousands of Russians, annoyed by another administrative paranoia at the exit.

Du-ra-ki.

And, by golly: this obvious mental degradation of the owners of the country scares me, perhaps, even more than their usual meanness.

Photo - "Daily Journal"