Victor Popkov and Children's Day

“Children, don’t cry, the Russians will not come today! ..” The article with this name was published in the fall of 2000 “New Gazeta”. Her author, human rights activist and peacemaker Viktor Popkov, literally handed over in the title the words of the school teacher from the Chechen mountain village, by nationality - Russian. But in the minds of children, her students, the combination of the “Russians will come” was no longer associated with the Russian literature that she taught them (and which they were happy to study!), Nor with the nationality of the teacher herself. For them, the result of these words was a panic fear on the eve of the “cleansing”, gnashes of the caterpillars of Baterers, the swear screams of armed people in masks, automatic queues, desperate cries of women, the ringing of a broken household ... Perhaps the breaks of shells during artillery shelling did not frighten children as these “cleansing”. On that Sunny September day, schoolchildren scared the distant sound of an exploding landmine, they clogged under the desks and cried, and the Russian teacher consoled them: “Children, do not cry! Russians will not come today! .. ".

“And, believe me, this is the result of the impact of the facts of the life that the children live, the“ sweeps ”and shelling, and by no means a consequence of the anti -Russian or anti -Russian propaganda of adults,” wrote Viktor Popkov.

The position of children in the mountain villages of Chechnya then shocked the human rights activist. Continuous cannonades, the inability to grow crops on fired fields, to extract firewood in a mined forest, the lack of medical care for many miles around ... Children suffered from vitamin deficiency, from chronic diseases obtained in cold basements during bombing and shelling. Many lacked clothes and notebooks for the school, and the school building itself regularly had to restore after the “sweeps”.

On the next trip to Chechnya, Viktor Popkov went with a load of humanitarian aid and distributed a large batch of new jackets and boots to schoolchildren of mountain villages.

The last time Victor Popkov arrived in Chechnya in April 2001. He managed to raise funds to provide medicines with residents of mountain villages and for paying for the work of a doctor. On the very first day of the improvised first-a-aid post in the Mountain Selo of Yalhoy-Mokhkh, children who urgently needed hospitalization were identified ...

Viktor Popkov was shot on the morning of April 18, 2001, when he left the suburban village of Alkhan-Kala to the destroyed Grozny in order to achieve these children in the administrative structures of hospitalization. The doctor Rosa Muzayev was seriously wounded with him. After a series of automatic bursts, the car with the killers without hindrance drove past the nearest block floor, and the car with the seriously wounded was detained for several hours, thereby delaying the vital first aid.

The doctors managed to save Rosa Muzayev. Victor Popkov died from wounds a month and a half later in the hospital near Moscow.

On June 2, 2016, it turned exactly 15 years since his death.

This tragic date is preceded, as you know, International Children's Day. It is widely celebrated with us. But how many people remember on this day about the children of Chechnya, killed or crippled by our shells? We continue to live in a country where the authorities calmly fired on their territory dense settlements with civilians, and then did not take any actions in order to provide them with first aid. And the person, at the call of the heart of giving humanitarian aid for the injured children, was shot point blank, and this crime has not yet been disclosed.

What was surprised after this “Nord-Ost”, where a musician girl adopted by poisoned gas was thrown into the floor of the bus, and the bodies of adults were laid on top of the one-and the girl died a few meters from the arrived ambulances who could save the lives of all the persons asleep, but they blocked the path. And two years later-Beslan, where a school filled with hostages-will, the military, by order of the authorities, was shot from heavy artillery literally under the lenses of television cameras.

Is it surprising that in a country where the authorities can afford this, the ever -existing structures of protection of motherhood and childhood, which once existed, gradually collapse. That the echo of the Chechen war and Beslan can touch almost every family with some elusive echo.

On June 1, 2016, a small rally was held in Moscow in defense of children , where teachers and doctors voiced SOS signals: under the blow were children with disabilities due to “optimization” of medicine, social housing programs for large families were frozen, the maternity hospital, children's clinics, hospitals, kindergartens, schools ... Free extracurricular education is practically liquidated. School enlargement destroys quality education. A sharp deterioration in school nutrition affects the health of children. “Optimization of the social sphere is a crime”, “Closing a school is a accomplishment of child crime, the opening of a new prison,” sounded at a rally. And only one of the speakers spoke about the children of Syria and Donbass, about the military expenditures absorbing the budget, about the criminal attempt to a new jerk to Mariupol ... But it was heard how it was stopped: they say, not on the topic of the performance.

“We live, under us not sensing the country ...”-the poet once said. It seems that so we still live ...

Photo of the site svoboda.org and Elena Sannikova (photo report)