With the past on the neck

What past do we need? Only one that you can be proud of, or also the one you need to be ashamed? Can memory be selective, and patriotism is only positive? What is more important: myth or true? And is any myth harmful, but is it always useful? Are the states and peoples responsible for the crimes of their predecessors, and what is this responsibility expressed? ..

In anticipation of the magnificent celebration of Victory Day, the struggle for the past is aggravated again.

“Excess history is harmful to life” - Nietzsche still warned about this. He even called this redundant interest in the history of "historical disease." Where they fell ill with it, there people are “not able to use the past as healthy food,” they either overeat or poison.

Russia today is a “sick” country with “hot memory”. Unlike a “cold” memory that stores facts, but denying a change that can be preserved, the names, but depriving them of their significance for the present, “hot” tries to insert today's agenda. If the “cold” memory is limited to history, then the “hot” goes into politics, setting fire to the present. The struggle for the past acquires a worldview character, turns into a clash of myths and the competition of projects of the future. How sometimes I want a “warm memory”, when the past does not burn with passion, but does not have a cold of an insensitive fact ...

But there is another type of historical disease - “multiple” sclerosis. The country affected by him, like a sick person, often and suddenly suffers from the failures of historical memory. Much becomes vague and barely distinguishable, and it is already incomprehensible whether it was or was not. The shorter the historical memory, the faster the people try to get rid of all the ashamed and painful for themselves. History immediately surrounds majestic myths, sometimes turning into comics. By the way, such exaltation of the past is usually directly proportional to the crushing of the present.

But dropping, like a ballast, unpleasant truth, we get rid of conscience. After all, conscience always feels guilty. Otherwise, it is not. And she only dies with memory.

The prevention of such unscrupulous amnesia is our ability to empathize with stories and remember everything that happened to us and what consequences this led.
Many of our fellow citizens shakes at the mention of the word "repentance". It seems to them that this hurts their personal pride, that it is unfair, moreover, harmful, since it gives rise to a complex of inferiority, naits to the ground and deprives creative energy. They understand repentance literally and ask a seemingly reasonable question: what are we to blame if we were not in the world? It turns out: if you were born in Russia, then immediately with a kaina seal instead of a birthmark?

In the end, since we consider Pushkin’s “ours”, we will have to recognize the “our part” of Benckendorf, “ours” are Solzhenitsyn, Beria, and so on. If the basis of the identification of the modern nation is history, and this is how it happens since the Enlightenment, then it will have to be accepted by all - heroic and sinful. And here it is obvious that references to “their customs” do not work: Suetonius saw very well where Nero is a statesman and where Nero-Chudovich, and Karamzin, from the same moral point of view, approached the assessment of the actions of Vladimir Monomakh, that the personality of Ivan the Terrible.

Otherwise, we will resemble a teenager who remembers all his letters and medals, but easily forgets about two. Any teenage background is always fed with myths, it is interested in an enthusiastic story. And only a meaningful past reveals the world of adulthood. But if the nation is delayed in puberty, then an insensitive mass grows. Painful infantility, twisted drives often lead to violence. Fear or admiration for the past leads to an incorrect, deformed understanding of the present.

The “Fool itself” itself gives the same infantilism: they say, let the Inquisitions first report to the crimes, they will deal with their Bartholomew’s nights, repent of their lynchings, Hiroshima and Nagasaki will answer for the atomic bombing, and only then they show us. This is such a psychology of queue - we stood after you, first you, then we, are extremely popular now among Russian politicians and citizens. Although it is obvious that everyone answers, first of all, for himself and his own people.

The “children's” attitude to real life is also manifested in the fact that all issues of spirituality and value orientation are perceived as abstractions, intelligence, although extremely important, but still “abstract ideas” in relation to the life of “here and now”.

We have long settled at the stage of legends and teachings, without moving into the next, reflective, when the story, according to Konstantin Cavelin, becomes a “source and mirror of popular self -awareness”.

We do not think about our history, shy away from the unpleasant truth and paradoxically find ourselves with the past on the neck. We are hostages of our history, while we are looking for answers to all our questions today, and when we finally seem to find them, we immediately forget. And we embellish, or even completely deny everything negative, like children, when they, trying to deceive themselves, close their eyes when it is scary. And we must realize at least our recent Soviet past, to draw a clear line between people who tried to live their lives with dignity and provide the best future for their children, and the criminal regime, who developed, like a cancerous tumor, in the process of utopian experiment, and then methodically exploiting and eager for his people.
We need to smooth the corners without hypocritical attempts, without half -truths under the “different truth” to recognize the international crimes of Stalin.
It is time for us to publicly and again unequivocally condemning Stalinism as a murmur of ideology, akin to Nazism, to disown from it - both in the moral and in the legal aspect, legally determining this type of ideology and “methodology” as a criminal one.
We are obliged, if we do not obey, at least to persuade all the victims of the Bolshevik-Stalin regime, calculated by millions, most often honest, decent, talented people, and give them due in our memory-erecting memorials, restoring their honest names.
We can not do without a decilization of consciousness, as it was done in Germany in the process of denazification at one time. We need a direct and unpleasant dialogue in schools about the history of Russia in the 20th century. True, it is always more patriotic and courageous than a lie.
We need to finally understand the degree of the humanitarian catastrophe that brought with us a bloody, dictatorial, totalitarian regime that the Soviet people survived to really be horrified. To the depths of the soul. And rally. And to be ashamed of the glamorization of the recent history and its anti -heroes. And never to let yourself be deceived again.