Joseph, son of Ivan

In Russian history, gloomy as a crypt and bottomless as a black cosmic hole, there are two Monarchs of Darkness, kindred spirits: Ivan the Terrible and his heir and successor Joseph, the son of Ivan, and not some shoemaker. On December 21, the All-Russian mankurt, who had hung out giant portraits of him in Voronezh with the sanction of the authorities, decorated the metro station with his name and brought the hellish chords of his anthem back to life, made a pilgrimage to his grave. The bosses in high offices quietly clinked glasses in his honor behind the lowered curtains. The red Kremlin stars winked in greeting, and Lenin from the Mausoleum waved his embalmed pen, and Marshal Zhukov made a visor. The freshly painted "Worker and Collective Farm Woman" curtsied.

And all of them at the same time honor the memory of Ivan the Terrible, Malyuta Skuratov and other Chekists of the 16th century. It's time to figure out why these skeletons are constantly crawling out of our closet and rattling bones through the cities and towns of the country. No one understood this better than Pavel Lungin. In his great film "Tsar", he showed how similar they were, Joseph and Ivan, and how they were and will be sweet to the "aggressively obedient majority." Stalin, like Grozny before him, closed the country, making an attempt to escape from it a crime punishable by death. Stalin removed the mirror in which the country could see itself, and the window into human life was closed, and there was no alternative to the dungeon called "Soviet Russia". There was no scale of assessments and comparisons, there was no one to envy, and the hungry and cold barracks of the state seemed like a home.

It was a triumph of depersonalization - both for Stalin and Ivan: no private desires and comforts, one giant state anthill with an ant king in its head. The worker ant does not have its own will, it lives and dies so that its anthill is the highest in the world, and prays for the king on the chopping block, and shouts “Hurrah!” at the wall. generalissimo. No need to think, no need to decide, he does not have private success, there is a great mission to build an anthill where everyone will be happy, and there is faith in his chosenness. Like Ivan in Lungin’s film, who created a palace without windows because the End of the World is coming and there will be nothing to look at, Stalin created a world that lived for the sake of death for the cause of communism, giving all its means to the great War to conquer the world under the communist foundation pit and considering personal freedom and personal happiness, as well as personal satiety with crime. Big Brother was loved even by his victims, for his state took away not only life, but also the soul. Why does an ant need privacy? In the struggle for a common cause, you will find your right! Stalin returned to the people the community dissolved by Stolypin - and the majority rested their souls. And the minority, "kulaks and sub-kulaks", went to the Gulag.

Today, Putinists are exploiting this myth about a beehive and an anthill, only there are only drones in the hive and no one extracts honey, and no one works in the anthill, but everyone drags branches and chips in different directions, ruining the structure, leaving only insignificance and pride. Honey, on the other hand, is produced from free oil and gas. And the mirror was again hung in 1991, and constipation fell, and the fresh wind of the western coasts blows over the musty country, and smart and skillful people flee from Russia, they flee like from a plague hut. Vladimir Korotkevich wrote when - the story "The Boat of Despair" about the eternal torment that the shadow of Ivan the Terrible endures in hell. The term of his punishment is defined as follows: "As long as at least one of his admirers remains on earth." The same fate certainly fell to Stalin. And the anthill will soon collapse due to the efforts of his fans, and then we will see if there was anything in Russia beyond this anthill he built.