Not just “Matilda”

Is it necessary to be afraid of a man with a banner

The religious procession in St. Petersburg in memory of the transfer of the relics of St. Prince Alexander Nevsky suddenly became an occasion for long conversations among quite secular people, who attend church only on major holidays or never at all. Secular people are scared. Headlines are flashing on the Web - “The religious procession has become a demonstration against Matilda! There are even suggestions to run away from this country. The intelligentsia again discovered bad people and is happy to tell how hard it is for her, vulnerable and tender, to live next to bad people.

Well, by the way, conversations also have a serious component: endless streams of threats that people who have appropriated the right to broadcast on behalf of the entire Orthodox Church and even on behalf of the entire Russian people will confuse anyone, especially in a country where it is customary to judge for words much more innocent . For some reason they are not judged. And behind the words - hot deeds: a burned cinema, a burned car. All this, of course, provokes strong generalizations.

The procession on the Day of the Transfer of the Relics of the Holy Prince has been held in new Russia since 2013. In the old one, it was completely established in the 18th century by the frivolous Empress Elizabeth. Tens of thousands of people visit it every year. And only now, two posters with a mention of the film by Alexei Uchitel have turned the holiday into some kind of rally of obscurantist and terrible power in the eyes of the progressive public. Which, apparently, wants evil, but does not do good.

AND JUST NOW TWO POSTERS REFERENCED TO THE FILM OF ALEXEY UCHITEL TURNED IN THE EYES OF THE PROGRESSIVE PUBLIC THE HOLIDAY INTO A RALLY OF AN OBSCIOUS AND TERRIBLE FORCE

The well-known journalist Alexander Timofeevsky, a witness who has no reason not to believe, observed what was happening with his own eyes. He says: a small group with posters against "Matilda" did not even reach the end of the procession. The Tsarbezhniks, having made sure that they had been photographed and filmed a hundred or a thousand times, the posters were rolled up and went about their business. They have already done the main thing - they convinced the gullible spectators that all one hundred thousand people came to Nevsky to strangle freedom, and at the end of the event they will apparently move to burn cinemas.

To stab society, as in the past they used to stab sugar with special tweezers in order to drink tea with it as a bite, is the Kremlin's favorite game. The top of the Russian Orthodox Church, dreaming of turning the Church into some kind of propaganda ministry, is glad to play along with the Kremlin. The leadership of the Church is in no hurry to rebuke the most zealous priests like the odious Dmitry Smirnov and does not even publicly condemn the theoreticians and practitioners of the new pogroms. The purpose of church leadership is clear. But why the liberal public (let's say this phrase means something) is eager to play along with the Kremlin is, frankly, a mystery.

They like to reproach the Church for exceeding their own influence, counting how many people come to churches on major holidays and how many are able to answer the question of whether the Holy Spirit comes from the Son (if you suddenly don’t know, this is one of the key dogmatic issues that has quarreled us for centuries with Catholics). And these are probably justified accusations. But no matter how you count, the Church still has millions of our fellow citizens. The most diverse, of which far from the vast majority are eager to burn someone (otherwise they would have been burned already) and are ready to accept the aggressive nonsense of various radicals with a bang.

They have the right - the same as all other citizens of the Russian Federation - to hold, for example, rallies and marches, gathering peacefully and without weapons. So it is written in the Constitution, and so it was in St. Petersburg. Well, the fact that some kind of boss got out on the stage and said nonsense is an absolutely inevitable feature of Russian life. There is no need to be indignant, but to have fun.

And certainly it is not necessary to write down these millions of fellow citizens in bulk in obscurantism, to delete them from life, to look out for enemies in them. This is a false opposition, another stage of racing around fictitious problems, which is necessary only for the current government, but certainly not for the inhabitants of the Russian Federation, regardless of whether they are believers, atheists or agnostics.