In society

The last battle of the USSR

April 18, 2018 Alexey Makarkin

Some time ago, I had an interesting conversation with one businessman. At first, it was about domestic politics - and everything was calm. But the situation has completely changed when it came to external affairs. Then I heard a lot of interesting things. And about the United States, kidnapping our citizens and throwing them in prisons (they meant hackers, which Americans really chase around the world). And about the elders who predicted the end of the world. And of course about my interlocutor himself, the purpose of which, it turns out, was the military industry. And he had already begun to follow this path (he graduated from the institute, entered the work as an engineer), but then the country was ruined, it was necessary to feed the family - so I had to do commercial. But the dream remained.

There are a lot of such stories. In the Union, not only pensioners are yearning, most of their lives worked in the USSR and in 1996 voted for Zyuganov in order to regain their country. And not only the guards in stores are the same captains who, due to the reduction of the army, will never be majors. But the people who in 1991 were in the ranks of the Democrats. In Yunna Moritz, the rubber hedgehog no longer goes to the name day to the puppy and does not whistle with his hole in the right side - his place was taken by the “beautiful pilot Viktor Boot” (in fact it is not at all a pilot, but that was not the point), who was seized by “cowboys”. And its own country cannot protect it, because "there is no country, a beautiful pilot." That is, there is no union, and Russia is powerless.

You can, of course, calculate this plot with the personal fate of the poetess. But there are a lot of such personal fates, and the phrase that “insanity is contagious” will not get off here. Here, the creator of a famously smashed communism of the “independent newspaper” Tretyakov, who became the singer of the USSR, whose faithful citizen was his father, who left his son three cherished books: the biography of Stalin, his own military speeches and the “selected places” of Gogol (that is, Gogol - statesman and conservative). And the author of the no less dashing alliance of the bestsellers “one hundred days before the order” (a blow to the army), “an emergency of a district scale!” (blow to the Komsomol), “Work on mistakes (a blow to the school) and“ Apofege ”(a batch of party, although already with skepticism against Yeltsin) Yuri Polyakov, now no less apologet of the disappeared power. And further on the list - probably, everyone can find an analogue if it is spraying in memory.

Another simple answer is career motives, the desire to please the authorities. For some, this is probably so, but explaining everything that happens, too, would be wrong. My interlocutor-businessman expressed his thoughts in a private conversation, without journalists and other witnesses. Tretyakov no one obligated to praise Stalin in conditions of duality to the attitude to this figure in the Russian government. Polyakov defiantly refused to enter the Committee on the Organization of the Celebration of the anniversary of Solzhenitsyn, who “has fallen Vlasovites and Bandera” - despite the fact that Putin refers to Solzhenitsyn.

At the same time, career considerations can be relevant for “tops” - but nostalgia spread in the bottoms. Hence the delight about the missiles that can be threatened with the United States and restore not only parity that existed in Soviet times (because the current Russian weapons will be enough to destroy the whole world), but also the Soviet status of superpower. And, at the same time, Alarmist formulations about the possibility and even usefulness of the end of the world - in the sense of not their seriousness (in reality, of course, very few people want such an outcome), but evidence of despair, also associated with the fate of the USSR.

All this seems amazing if you take into account the calm attitude to the collapse of the USSR of the vast majority of Russians in 1991. In March, they went to a referendum, voted for the Union, and already in December, without large demonstrations and other noise, the same union dismantled. The demonstrations began later (the first noticeable - February 23, 1992) - and the initial impulse for them was shock liberalization of prices, and not the collapse of the USSR. The All-Army Officer Assembly with the participation of about five thousand officers in January 1992 was not smooth for the Russian authorities, but not catastrophic-there were no people in uniform for the country that they swore. But even when it was about the subsequent mass actions of the supporters of the USSR, they nevertheless sympathized with the minority, which showed the results of the referendum won by Yeltsin in the spring of 1993.

What was it connected with? Is it only with the difficult economic situation and the general confusion of supporters of the USSR? All this was, but far from only that. A huge number of people were sincerely sure that the collapse of the Union was not for long. That is, of course, the USSR will no longer be, but something else will arise in its place, new and more viable. Perhaps the Baltic countries left us forever-although, who knows, maybe they will return in some form. For example, for the military and economic union - after all, no one in the West is needed. And a lot connects them to Russia: both membership in a single state, and economics, and culture. What can we say about Ukraine or Belarus - you can reunite with them better.

For the Democrats, the idea of ​​the possibility of reconstructing the USSR on a new basis was built not only on completely rational political, economic and other arguments, but also on the idea that the primary cause of the “run” of the republics was a communist ideology. It is enough to refuse it, replace the red flag with a tricolor, and we will agree with the elites of new countries. After all, for many years they talked, went to each other, drank Georgian chacha and the Baltic liquors, jamming, respectively, with barbecue and cephellins, read the same authors and hated the same Stalin. And under Gorbachev, together they opposed the aggressive-auditual congress majority.

The replacement of the flag was important in another context that went beyond the post -Soviet space. The great dream of the Russian elite was the presence in the “Club of the Selected”, who performed the fate of the world - hence the persistent desire to equally participate in the G8, which was thought of such a club. It was believed that the rejection of communism would provide modern Russia with the role of its royal predecessor in a community, which is something like an idyllic unification of the Entente and the Triple Union of the early twentieth century. And that within the framework of this community, it is recognized as a sphere of influence, which she agrees reasonably (in her opinion) to limit.

Fate was different. New states with one degree or another of activity were repulsed from the former metropolis, which, in fact, always happens (another thing is that then sometimes longing for the elegant empire of the Habsburgs comes, but after a few generations and without geopolitical consequences). Local elites are quickly accustomed to ministries, embassies, general posts and were not going to fully or partially return to the wing of Moscow. Joseph Brodsky felt this before many - hence emotional, bitter and largely unfair lines “on the independence of Ukraine”. When you understand that parting cannot be avoided, despite gas pipes and technological chains.

Moreover, after a short period of the first half of the 1990s, when the West was not up to Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria, it turned out that partners were not going to recognize Russia for no spheres of influence-not only formal, but also informal ones. The new generation of politicians did not consider oral (and, I must say, quite sincere - no one consciously deceived Moscow) the promises of their predecessors of NATO's non -expanding to the east. They thought in the categories of the Cold War - and for them the main thing was to prevent the loss of control over nuclear weapons. The new ones proceeded from the fact that the “real policy” should go down in history, and it should change the encouragement of the democratic competition of politicians, parties and ideas. And in the field of ideas, Russia hopelessly lost - even in the case of Belarus, which gradually became Belarus.

The realization that the USSR cannot be returned even to a reorganized, “tinted” form, has become a difficult test for many supporters of Russian democracy. It turned out that it was our generation that had to be revised by the well-known contracts that denoted the expansion of the Empire-Andrusovo, Nistadt, Kuchuk-Kainargi, Yassi ... Moreover, the arguments about the scattering of all empires met emotional rejection. The peculiarity of Russian consciousness in the perception of its country as heroic and sacrificial at the same time. Therefore, the inability to recreate in some form the usual community is perceived especially painfully-as an revision of the results of the Great War.

The painful feeling is added to this that the new generations of the USSR - the country of childhood, soda for three kopecks and open entrances - is perceived as a distant past, devoid of emotional coloring. They also want strong Russia, often support power, “cool”, self -assertive decisions, but they no longer hold the borders and representations familiar to their ancestors. Hence the neuro-hysterical reaction to Kolya from Urengoy and his speech in the Bundestag. But schoolchildren who express other judgments are no less interesting. Recently, Dmitry Bykov published a series of patriotic statements of current schoolchildren about the iron curtain, which are more remarkable than it seems at first glance. For example, a 15-year-old girl, reproducing the wording of Russians as a “people-warrior”, cites not an ice battle and not even a Stalingrad battle as an argument, but the fact that “Russian soldiers were valued in all countries, they tried to hire them, they were the best in the foreign legion.” In the Soviet Union, such a pragmatic argument would have caused a shock. It is not surprising that now the impression is: the USSR goes into its last battle.

Hence the emotions, and appeals to Stalin, and disappointment, and the trampling of the former ideals, and the idealization of his own past, and the emphasis of their impeccability. It is interesting that in 1989, the VTIME survey about whether there are enemies of our country, showed that the most popular answer is “why look for enemies when the root of evil is in our own mistakes” (48%). In 2011, only 19%thought so. However, all this does not lead to moral update - and cannot lead, since this is not about repentance (this word in modern Russia is perceived as abusive in relation to itself) and not about a sober view of itself and its history. We can say that Abel Arabidze does not throw the body of a criminal father, but builds a magnificent monument over his burial. But at the same time, not forgetting about their own interests in a market economy.

Some time ago, I accidentally dialed the number of the businessman, from the story about the meeting with whom I started the article. And he was surprised when he heard that the numbers no longer exist. Having looked on the Internet, I realized what was the matter: he was arrested, found guilty of an economic crime and sentenced to a long period of imprisonment.

Author - leading expert at the Center for Political Technology

Photo: Sergey Fadeichev/TASS