What the Crimea is silent about

Journalist, a native of Simferopol Inna Denisova - about what the inhabitants of the peninsula now feel

Crimea is no longer a safe resort. Since April, there has been a yellow level of terrorist threat, and after the impacts on the Saki military airfield in August the peninsula, de facto, became the territory of hostilities. This status was confirmed by the undermining of the Kerch bridge on October 8. A native of Simferopol, journalist, author of the film "Crimea. Return home ”Inna Denisova tells“ cold ”that her childhood friends think about what is happening and why they think that way.

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A long time ago, back in the USSR - or rather, in the Ukrainian SSR, in the Ukrainian Crimea - in Simferopol there was a house where I spent an absolutely happy childhood.

Our five -story building stood on Turgenev Street - shady, green and cool, as from the song of Yuri Antonov. Cars almost did not drive it. The only source of noise is the bakery in the lane, but it was not only noisy, but also the groin with sweet rolls. The ideal street began and ended with parks: one - “Children's”, the second - a square with a cinema “Mir”. The garden around the house was all in roses, the night sky - in the stars.

I carefully carried gratitude to this warm and generous place through my whole life, as well as friendship with those with whom I grew up in the same house. Nothing could destroy the connection that arose on the solid foundation of general happiness. Nothing violated our proximity for many years-not the distance (I left to live in Moscow, but came to the Crimea for the holidays), not a bar-paranatic border at the Cossack Lopan station-the Moscow-Simferopol train stood there for only 40 minutes-neither document management with a bureaucracy, nor Ukrainian, none of my friends, Russian-speaking Crimean, Ukrainian was not a stranger. And only in March 2014, they sharply contrasted their eyes from the inside from the outside: “Where are you with a swamp square, and where are we with Turgenev Street”; “The provincials like we are better to be“ far from Caesar, and from a blizzard ””; “The bad goblin (the head of the Crimea Aksenov is remembered here as a member of the“ Seillersky ”gang, who were engaged in a racketeering and setting up shops) is better than a good Maidan,”-in general, the new Russian oligarch is better than the old Ukrainian at least because of its surplus value of 228 billion rubles spent on the Crimean bridge.

The war in the Donbass, when the script similar to Crimean had another drama, Crimeans chose to not notice (where were you eight years old?). I think because she pointed to them the vulnerability of a local happy end. With wide-closed eyes, they walked along the Gref “Mriya” ( sanatorium-resort complex. - Approx. “Cold” ) without Sberbank cards and visas in passports, not looking either on the sides or to the future. While we were friends in the Ukrainian Crimea, there were no problems with mutual understanding. Once in one country, we spoke in different languages.

In the spring of 2021, perhaps the last time in my life, I went to my native Simferopol. I bought a train ticket, going 40 hours instead of the usual 22, and no longer through Kharkov, Zaporozhye and Melitopol, but through the new Kerch bridge. In the restaurant car, she read the infographic, compiled by some lover of large numbers and comparisons: 13 thousand kilometers of the reinforcement, from which the roadway was connected, is “the distance from Moscow to Sydney”; Well, “eight and a half million cars drove along the bridge in the first 19 months”; Wow, “15 thousand engineers built it” - the entire royal cavalry, the whole royal army. I liked my spiritual Ukrainian train much more than this pathos of great statistics, but now they do not cry for remembering - having removed my head in my hair.

Russia changed the appearance of the hometown. The mulberries disappeared. And the “shady” of Turgenev’s street is made only by high -rise buildings: the most ugly grew up in the place of the bakery, the most elite - in the place of the Mir cinema. In the city cafes, square, cut men in jackets and folders parked, having parked large black cars through the windows. In the Central City Square, the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral seemed to have grown and began to resemble the building of the regional committee of the Communist Party, now the City Council, standing next door. Literally: here is power, but here is the God from whom it comes. Confirmation is a sign in the temple with gratitude to the president. The headquarters of the Communist Party of the Communist Party on Karl Liebknecht Street was decorated with another sign: "Stalin was here." All this shocked me, but did not hurt my friends, explaining that their familiar nurse, who left Crimea for ideological reasons, lost much more - the Russian salary.

Despite the VPN, established by childhood friends in advance, while the Crimea Peninsula pulled the whole country in isolation, after February 24, our conversations were minimized. “The war has begun,” they scare them with a forbidden word in prohibited messengers. In response - an attempt to change the subject. “How is Paris? How to study? " - ask green men from the planet Crimea. Tanya’s common girlfriend from Turgenev’s same Street sleeps in a Kiev bomb shelter with children, but no one is interested in how she “sleeps” there. The art not to notice the inconvenient is brought to perfection, the muscles are trained. In August 2022, when the sky over the new-federation grows black smoke from behind the explosion at the airfield very close to Simferopol, I send SMS: "I am scared for you." And I get the answer: "It’s not scary not here."

There is an art museum in Simferopol: with Levitan, Kiprensky, Vasnetsov, Vrubel, Aivazovsky, Voloshin, Kuindzhi and even with the picture of Timur Novikov. The old building, the former officer assembly, is decorated with a double-headed eagle: here is a dropmer of Yakov Bogorad, who served in the 51st Lithuanian regiment, helped Trubach Agapkin to record the clavier of the march, inventing his name-“Farewell of the Slavs”. In my childhood, he was included after the trains leaving for Moscow: I cried, not wanting to part in the summer. The girlfriends comforted that soon we would meet again, and then fled the train.

Today, the military march at the Simferopol railway station is included in its intended purpose, seeing off the echelons of mobilized to the front. The friends have a husband of draft age, one has an 18-year-old son. But the only thing they are able to squeeze in a conversation with me is stingy: "There is no panic." Previously, in difficult life situations, we always called each other. Russia taught them not to believe, to be afraid and nothing to ask a person who went abroad.

Guessing about the reasons for their “restraint”, I do not exclude caution: we are not given to predict how our word will respond to the audition of Comrade Major. But another explanation seems more likely: my friends do not want to part with the illusion, are not ready to admit that they were mistaken. As before the last, our grandmothers did not want to part with the dream of the USSR - after all, it will turn out that life has been living in vain. As I myself do not want to admit that in my Soviet happy paradise were the KGB, Chernobyl, and the Cold War.

Meanwhile, Tanya’s friend is no longer in Kyiv, but in Germany and writes to me that her mother believes that her daughter and her family simply went to a tourist trip and lingered in her, God knows why.

The day after the anniversary of Putin, when the truck was mined by another lover of coincidences and large numbers, exploding , breaking the bridge, my Crimeans react again to the events neutral: "Everything is fine." In fact, much better.

The resident of the peninsula has an unenviable choice: on the one hand, the propagandist Soloviev, on the other, is a daring Ukraine, preferring the death of the Chekist power and despising adapters.

I am no longer trying to talk to anyone. We did not quarrel, we just became strangers in one day. This day - February 24 - does not live, not mourning and not felt together. Close for us once made the accommodation of general happiness, non-disagreement of trouble-it was separated forever.

The author’s opinion may not coincide with the opinion of the editorial office.