Fatigue

How to live knowing that in the next 6 years everything will be the same and nothing will change

Putin advanced, and what was implicitly present in the air immediately took shape, became physically tangible. Not just the course of the presidential campaign, but all the coming six years (let's pretend there are only six of them), their mood, content, atmosphere. Slightly slowing down and shuddering, the train firmly stood on the rails and continued to move, and in the measured sound of the wheels one word is heard:

"Fatigue".

Russian thinking is catastrophic, and in the events of the past six years - from Bolotnaya Street to the exclusion from the Winter Olympics - it was easy to see the realization of long-standing forebodings: that's it, the regime is finally bursting at the seams, or vice versa, throws off its masks and demonstrates its true essence. We can take the Kremlin, our MiGs will be in Riga, look how Putin is afraid of us; we can repeat - in the most different segments of the political spectrum, every now and then a feeling flashed that something irreparable and final was about to happen, filling with delight or horror. Passed the point of no return, life will never be the same.

In general, there were a lot of irreparable. Thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands who left their homes in the South-East of Ukraine. Completely, irrevocably damaged relations with the closest country on the entire globe. Endless prohibition laws and guilty verdicts - for dancing in the temple, for a single picket, for reposting, for sms. The defenders of “Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality” who have gone into the gap and independent editorial boards and cultural institutions tormented from all sides. And the more this terrible thing accumulated - vile, tragic, but not transferring the country to some other state of aggregation - the more terrible became habitual. The next six years will pass precisely under this sign - a thickening, but never resolved tension. Under the sign of the terrible, to which they are accustomed.

At the start of the election campaign, as informed sources unanimously said, the Kremlin was preoccupied with creating an attractive "image of the future" - well, it is fully formed. They will shoot in the Donbass. Security forces and courtiers will continue to eat each other. Relations with the West will balance on a dangerous edge. Cultural figures will be kept in a black body, Navalny will not be deprived of his freedom, but they will not give him freedom either. The same faces in politics, the same jokes on TV. Life will not become richer, but it will not sink completely to the bottom either. In essence, this is the only promise that the favorite of the presidential race can give today - live at least a quarter of a century, everything will be like that.

Putin's rule began to be compared with a late stagnation, even when the president did not really get used to the office. Well, from a rhetorical figure, this comparison turns into a medically accurate diagnosis. Everything, as in the last years of Brezhnev or under the late Nicholas I: apathy, lack of new ideas, depreciation of fixed assets and just human fatigue - when you don’t want not only to change the world, but even get out of bed. Actually, even now all these effects can be felt for yourself: at least go to Facebook and try to find there an absolutely self-confident person who has fully realized himself in recent years. About the sudden media waves that raise new heroes to the crest - Yuri Dudya or participants in rap battles - it is customary to say that people, apparently, “have absolutely nothing to write about”, in fact, people just instinctively feel who still has this energy, strength and anger, these days it is a rarity.

The next six years will pass precisely under this sign - a thickening, but never resolved tension. Under the sign of the terrible, To which they are accustomed

Sociologists and economists can measure the effect of such stagnation in percentages of GDP or confidence ratings, in numbers of capital outflows or in the number of people who left for permanent residence abroad, but it is not clear how to determine the coefficient of fatigue - lack of meaning, drive, energy. Probably, not for all professions and ages, the loss of drive is a disaster, but there are occupations where without them everything dries up and fizzles out: art, entrepreneurship, and partly even politics. Perhaps someday the scientists of the future will learn to determine how this social apathy is transformed into illness, into nervous breakdowns, into alcohol and suicide. Yes, God bless him, with alcohol - just into alienation, disunity, creeping into holes. In unborn ideas and unfinished business. Not started simply because no one is interested.

This is not the first time Russian history has entered this circle, and from the experience of past frosts it is known that the most difficult art is simply to survive them. Find your own energy reserves. Don't hit your forehead against the wall. Learn to think about the day after tomorrow. Clearly understand that in the near future we will have to go through all the same smoldering conflicts, argue for the hundredth time about the same thing, raise children with a mediocre education and no medicine, patch up the holes that the state has left behind by joint efforts - moreover that to agree on any kind of joint efforts in such an atmosphere is the most difficult thing. Do not attack each other for no reason, help those who feel bad, support those who do at least something. There is only one life, and if you happen to live it in Russia, you must understand that the winters here are long. But they are not forever.

It is not the first time that Russian history has entered this circle, and from the experience of past frosts it is known that the most difficult art is simply to survive them, Find your own energy reserves, Do not beat your forehead against the wall, Learn to think about the day after tomorrow. Winters are long here. But they are not forever

* The author is a journalist, former editor-in-chief of Afisha magazine (2003-2008) and chief editor of Rambler-Afisha (2011-2014), regular NT columnist