Is the president the property of the state or the people? Or why the first one is alone I did not vote for the presidential candidate V. Putin. I do not like President V. Putin, and I have never hidden this attitude of mine. However, when after 11...

Is the president the property of the state or the people? Or why the first is one

I

did not vote for presidential candidate V. Putin. I do not like President V. Putin, and I have never hidden this attitude of mine. However, when after September 11, in defiance of most of his entourage and the Russian political establishment, he, without losing a single soldier, solved the most important task of ensuring Russia's security in the South through the Americans, I supported and defended him. During this period, I was repeatedly offered to join the pen to the administrative vertical. I answered with the words of a well-known literary hero that somehow it happened that all my friends were sick of the dullness and stupidity of building an administrative vertical, topped with a Monomakh's hat, in the middle of the scorched desert of Russian public life, and among those who lined up to kiss the authorities on the shoulder and below, there are none of mine. friends, not a single person whose opinion I would appreciate. Therefore, I would be thought badly by some and badly received by others.

But it is supposed to say good things about the hero of the day. About one, perhaps the most important, I have already said. The geopolitical choice that he, as president of Russia, made in September 2001 will be positively evaluated in all future Russian history textbooks.

Vladimir Putin's pragmatism, his ability to learn and abandon outdated and time-tested ideas are undoubted, even if he shared them deeply and sincerely.

The book "Conversations with Vladimir Putin" recorded by journalists is conceived as a confessional story about the hero's life, his childhood, youth, and spiritual development. From such a text, you expect to find out what books the young hero read, what he thought about, what people and ideas influenced him. Here Vladimir Lenin, for example, said that he was plowed by the novel by N. Chernyshevsky “What is to be done?”. It's also not a masterpiece of world literature. Vladimir Putin, judging by his confession, plowed "Shield and Sword" (the only book that he remembers), making him a perfect soldier of the Communist Party and its armed detachment. What he remained until he was once again plowed by the first business trip abroad and especially German beer, to which the only bright and emotionally rich pages of a rather boring story are devoted.

Apparently, while sipping this tempting, indestructible bourgeois drink, the young officer came to important ideological conclusions about the economic doom of the Soviet communist system. This was the first revelation of Vladimir Putin.

Such sentiments were quite common among V. Putin's colleagues at work in the late 1980s. They blamed the communist ideologists who imposed an inefficient economic system on the country for the historical defeat of the USSR in the confrontation with the West. But at the same time, they did not question either the very idea of ​​fighting the West as Russia's eternal geopolitical adversary, or their role in this heroic struggle.

In the first year of V. Putin's presidency, our foreign policy acquired a pronounced anti-American character. It seemed that its main goal was to counter the United States in all azimuths. Suffice it to recall the deliberately insulting statement on breaking the arms trade agreement with Iran, the defiant visit to a military base in Cuba, attempts to create an anti-American coalition with China and India, the long-term exaggeration of a deliberately false version of the Kursk colliding with an American submarine, etc., not speaking of the rabid tone of our foreign policy journalism.

However, the immeasurably great responsibility that traditionally lies in Russia on the first person did not allow him, apparently, to remain too long in the virtual world of complexes and fantasies, which are so dear to the heart of the Russian political establishment.

And in the real world, there was a serious military threat today in the South, and tomorrow, perhaps even more serious in the East. And besides, there was a backward army of poorly armed recruits inherited from the superpower that existed in the last century, all of whose combat-ready units were shackled in one rebellious province, and all of whose doctrinal guidelines were oriented towards a phantom confrontation with the same West.

The events of September 11 and their consequences dramatically accelerated the process of foreign policy maturation of the top Russian leadership.

Russia has discovered in practice that the United States, as an ally, can become an effective tool in the 21st century for solving the problems of its national security.

This new knowledge can radically change the geopolitical thinking of the Russian political class. The President, earlier and better than many others in his circle, appreciated the new realities and new opportunities.

So, Russia must make an economic breakthrough and return to the level of the leading powers of the world, not in order to fight the West again, but in order to become a strong and respected ally of the West. This was the second revelation of Vladimir Putin.

But, according to the President, the philosophy of managed democracy, the dictatorship of law, the administrative vertical saturated with people from the special services, the obedient self-censorship of the press, the party building of the Yediots and the Putin Youth “walking together” should lead Russia to this bright future.

The idea of ​​a strong police regime was not born in the head of a humble colonel. She just fell in love with him when, due to a combination of circumstances, he ended up as president of Russia. The idea matured for ten years in the minds of "intellectuals" who dreamed of a Russian Pinochet who would lead Russia with an iron hand to a bright future of a market economy.

Such a project would have a chance of success if the essence of the reforms was to force the disadvantaged population to dig as many canals and pits as possible and erect “giants of industry”. This is how the industrial revolution of the 19th century took place in the West, this is how the Stalinist regime carried out the modernization of Russia in the first half of the 20th century, and the countries of Southeast Asia carried out their breakthrough in the second half of the 20th century with similar methods.

In the 21st century, Putin's project to revive Russia is doomed to failure both economically and politically.

A year and a half ago, I wrote: “The lack of alternatives to today's Putin is an extremely dangerous thing both for the authorities and for society as a whole. The entire political structure of modern Russia has turned out to be suspended on a thin thread of the Putin myth” (“Novaya Gazeta”, 05/14/2001). Today, G. Pavlovsky, one of the architects of this construction, literally repeats me: “Now trust is depleted and hangs exclusively on Putin. If it weren’t for him, statehood would simply vanish into the wind” (“MK”, 3.10.2002).

Vladimir Putin is still a young politician. The best wish for his fiftieth birthday is to experience the third revelation. The revelation is that the economy of the 21st century is an economy of free creative people who have unlimited access to information and who really do not like to walk together, especially in formation.

And it would be wrong today to keep silent about the most tragic page of Putin's presidency - the war in Chechnya.

There was a fairly popular theory that, having effectively used the war as an instrument of his election campaign, Putin, having become president, could now, as a sober pragmatist, turn to a political solution by starting negotiations with the side opposing us. Indeed, the conflict has entered an absolutely hopeless stage of guerrilla warfare, which will last for years, bringing no dividends to the authorities and depleting the human, economic and moral resources of society. The Chechens hated, hate, and even more so will always hate us, and sooner or later we will have to enter into negotiations with them. Better sooner than later, unless we're going to kill them all, of course.

But, unfortunately, as far as Chechnya is concerned, V. Putin is not at all that absolutely pragmatic politician, cold and prudent operator of special services, as he is often portrayed, but a man of passions. Watch how he transforms, how his eyes light up, how his jaws play, how an emotionally charged thieves fenya breaks through diplomatic etiquette when he addresses this painful topic. And in this he is deeply popular.

One of Putin's lackeys was right, without even suspecting how much, when he exclaimed obsequiously: “Putin is Russia! Putin is us! The attitude of Russian society towards the Chechen war is extremely irrational. The war as a television product turned out to be such a winning PR move because it touched painfully sensitive deep layers of the Russian collective subconscious.

By killing the Chechens, we are taking revenge on them, and above all on ourselves, for the lost 20th century, which promised to become the century of Russia, for the loss of colonies and satellites that fled from us at the first opportunity, for the collapsed superpower and for the bandit capitalism we built on its ruins, in the realities of which oligarchs, former dissidents, and former KGB investigators feel equally uncomfortable.

Yes, of course, terrible things happened in Chechnya - hostage-taking, the slave trade, the attack on Dagestan. But wasn’t it our Berezovsky fussily scurrying down the gangways of planes with cases with millions of dollars, but weren’t there cases when our officers and old-timers sold their soldiers into slavery, and wasn’t it our Tretyakov who admired in his newspaper “the brilliant operation of our special services, who lured Basayev and Khattab to Dagestan,” and wasn’t it our Patrushev who conducted “exercises” in Ryazan?

Chechnya is our collective neurosis, our collective diagnosis. Our "mad" colonel, who raped and strangled an 18-year-old "sniper", is a psychoanalytic symbol of the Chechen war.

Chechnya is our catastrophe, to which we are moving together, firmly holding hands, cheering ourselves up with loud cries that we will not let anyone stop us.

Vladimir Vladimirovich is just one of us.