In lava

“When you swim in lava, you don’t feel the temperature.” I think this is Yuri Trifonov.

More and more often I try these words by heart in relation to myself. Do I feel it adequately? Or does the quiet daily life, the dilution of what is happening, still deceive, as it deceived millions of people before me? After all, in some thirty-five, they also went ice skating in Sokolniki, and excellent beer was brewed next door to Dachau...

And only then, much later, did time become cemented in the consciousness as cursed.

I don’t want to intimidate myself and others. And it’s awkward: there are New Year’s sales all around, queues at the cinema for the sequel to “The Irony of Fate”, and you walk around in the middle of the holiday and mutter something alarming under your breath, inadequate, like Cassandra...

The irony of fate is that the measure of Cassander’s adequacy becomes clear after the destruction of Troy.

...Or maybe we’ll get through it - and when the pus accumulating under the skin today comes out, at least it will be without blood. There will be no GULAG, and there will be no Dachau - for exercises of this scale, a strong, real ideology is needed; criminal, but true. One for which millions of people will be ready to kill and die.

Those who rule Russia today are, thank God, cynics. According to Vysotsky, there are no real violent people, and all their babbling about great Russia is a pure imitation. “Baikalfinanskrupp” their ideology: take it away and cut it down.

But that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. A thief, driven into a corner, becomes a killer without any particular ideology. Forcibly screwing the nuts - the only thing they are capable of - breaks the thread despite the desire of the screwer.

Society could have stopped all this quite easily, but it seems that society in the European sense of the word is left in Russia as a fool. And with the population in power, something like a “social contract” arose, only with Russian specifics.

This is a thieves' agreement - an agreement according to concepts. These “concepts” do not imply contempt for the thief, but envy. They don’t like nouveau riche security officers, but not in the same way that an honest person doesn’t love a scoundrel, but in the same way that a weaker neighbor doesn’t love a stronger neighbor who has grabbed a piece of the common forest. If the weak man could, he would have grabbed it himself, but alas: he was not born in St. Petersburg, did not become a security officer, and blind villain fate did not push the orbit of his life into Putin’s in time... So he wanders around - however, in relatively good conditions: unprecedented in history, the oil freebie allowed the belts to loosen a couple of holes.

So it will be, it seems. At least until the freebie runs out.

The repressions, most likely, will be harsh, but targeted - only for “dissenters”.

Kasparov was shown in a paddy wagon who the elite are here today, journalist Natalya Morar was expelled from the country, the head of the Defense youth movement Oleg Kozlovsky was kidnapped and shoved into an army barracks; Sergei Konstantinov, who came to the Ministry of Defense for an authorized picket in support of Kozlovsky, was detained and beaten; so they shoved into cells for a day those who demanded compliance with the law in relation to Konstantinov... Now, finally, on the verge of death in prison - without a chance for medical help - the former vice-president of YUKOS Vasily Aleksanyan...

And on the occasion of the holidays, the population flocks to the premiere of the film “The Irony of Fate. Continued” - and does not feel, does not feel the temperature of the lava...