In society

The results of the year. In a corkscrew

January 4, 2016 Viktor Shenderovich

The past, 2014, I actually commented on on-line.

The false “thaw”, with the loud liberation of the political prisoners in front of the Sochi Olympics, he very soon fell into a political catastrophe.

Stunned by reports of “polite people” in Simferopol, I could only utter the obvious: “We will pay dearly for it.”

It was obvious-to everyone who is at least somehow able to correlate the course of things with the lessons of the past: Prague, Afghanistan ...

Everything that happened since then - one way or another, was almost inevitable. That is, a fork of options, of course, was available (and we realize - for now - not the most catastrophic), but in fact: saying “a”, Putin condemned himself to “b” - and further along the alphabet.

War, isolation, economic difficulties, an external enemy, the “fifth column”, Russia in the front of the fronts, a change of vocabulary, new challenges, new answers of the West, a new screw of nuts ...

Having taken up the disaster diary and announcing it as a book (“Blocade of the brain. 2014”, ed. “Zakharov”), I recorded that year, day after day, funny, disgusting, vulgar, stupid, terrible ...-in the genre range from Ms. Simonyan, which took us to teach us to teach us the example of refusal from Parmmezan, before The terrible phenomenon of the “monkey with a grenade”, mass deadly in the sky over Ukraine ...

I brought that diary to the end, but this year I could not force myself to comment on all this at least more or less systematically. And not even because he was tired of articulating the dull Putin alphabet, simply: the historical catastrophe, in essence, has already taken place.

Russia entered the imperial corkscrew, and there can simply not be a way out of it, in a situation with a crazy pilot locked in the cabin. When the situation changes, the door will be hacked and the madman will be tied with towels - let me know, and until then, you see, it is strange to comment on the fall separately every second.

The political landscape of the late 2015 - the landscape predictably monstrous: only the lazy did not predict the tightening of political repression, the collapse of the ruble, foreign policy madness ... All this was predetermined by the Putin corkscrew. And that by December there will be exactly 70 rubles, and not 60, and for a single picket they will not be fine, but planted; That Russia will begin to bomb Syria and supply hay to North Korea is already details, vignettes on the lid of this state coffin with music.

What next?

Yes, all the same, alas.

There will be (alternately) repression and simulation of liberalization, there will be foreign policy attempts to “play”, as in courtyard football, the history with Crimea and Donbass; There will be a search for the guilty of the collapse of the economy (speculators are already named, hello from Ilyich; there are still sabotages in the reserve; will we reach the Jews?

In short, there will be everything that the doctor prescribed to all the inching authoritarian regimes. What are we better, actually?

Last spring, in Los Angeles, I had the honor and pleasure of drinking tea with the legendary academician Vyacheslav Ivanov. We talked about Russian prospects and options for the development of the situation. And it came out with us - three: bad, very bad and catastrophic. And already escorting me, Ivanov issued the fourth:

“And also,” he said, “a miracle can happen!” Russia after all ...

I am not against a miracle. I am even ready to wait ... for a while ... sitting at the porthole.

Although, it should be noted, the native land is getting closer.


Graphics of Mikhail Zlatkovsky