The Legend of the President

The new novel by the former director of LogoVAZ, Yuli Dubov, “Lesser Evil,” which will be published one of these days by the KoLibri publishing house, continues the previous bestseller of the writer-businessman, “The Big Ration.” One important point, however, has undergone changes: if in the first book the charming leaders of Intercar (LogoVAZ) Platon (Berezovsky), Larry (Patarkatsishvili) and others like them were primarily engaged in solving economic problems, this time they switched to politics . Moreover, they got stuck in it up to their ears: a simple and seemingly win-win combination of electing their longtime acquaintance, the honest and narrow-minded former security officer Fyodor Fedorovich Rogov, as president, leads to truly catastrophic consequences. Houses are exploding in Moscow, the Chechen campaign is entering yet another bloody turn, and the “tsar-makers” themselves are unexpectedly and unmotivatedly subjected to a painful equidistance procedure, described with great psychological certainty.

However, let’s leave aside the undeniable artistic merits of Dubov’s book and pay attention to one non-trivial plot detail. As the novel progresses, it turns out that Plato and Larry only think that the initiative to make Fyodor Fedorovich the president of Russia comes from them. In reality, they are just pawns in the game of some powerful and terrible force, embodied in the mysterious figure of the Old Man - the actual arbiter of all Soviet politics in the second half of the twentieth century. It is easy to see that the Old Man is, in fact, not a person at all, but a personified idea of ​​Russian statehood. Accordingly, it turns out that Fedor Fedorovich’s calling to the throne is not the result of the intrigue of nosy captains of domestic business, but a natural consequence of the evolution of the Russian state idea.

To suspect the pragmatist Dubov, who, in addition to everything, has not the slightest reason to sympathize with the current government, of wanting to sacralize the image of Putin, would be strange, to say the least. However, the desire to present Vladimir Vladimirovich’s rise to power as a result of the intervention of almost transcendental forces is very revealing. Let me remind you that three years ago a similar attempt was made by another writer, Alexander Prokhanov. In his novel “Mr. Hexogen,” Putin was pathetically called “The Chosen One,” and he was brought into the political arena by certain behind-the-scenes dark forces, just like Dubov’s, fixated on the ideas of Russian statism.

In general, it is not difficult to understand where this kind of view of Putin comes from. To recognize the current president as an accidental product of the era of late-Leltsin lawlessness, flesh and blood of the then loose and stupid government, would be insulting not only to his supporters, but also to his opponents. After all, it is much more pleasant to realize that you are ruled (optionally, you are opposed) not by a rootless upstart, who, due to a fateful combination of circumstances, found himself in the right place at the right time, but by the Chosen One of mysterious - even dark - forces, the crown of political creation, shone, moreover, with a rainbow halo (as in the final scene of “Mr. Hexogen”).

Similar legends, designed to camouflage the actual rootlessness of certain statesmen, have arisen at all times - the origins of a variety of rulers are shrouded in myths, starting from the Persian king Cyrus or the 15th century London Lord Mayor Dick Whittington, who became a character in English folklore, and right up to Joseph Stalin , to whom popular rumor persistently attributed a relationship with the traveler Przhevalsky. However, for the first time we can observe the formation of such a legend, so to speak, on current historical material. The talk that Putin was brought to power not by specific and therefore prosaic political and economic forces, but by some secret Rosicrucian conspirators who took an oath to preserve Russian statehood, will not surprise anyone. Look, in a couple of years, rumors will spread that fifty years ago, the pious but childless worker Vladimir Putin found a joyfully cooing, grey-eyed child in a basket washed up by the waves on the shore of the Neva near the spit of Vasilyevsky Island. And where this basket came from - whether from Windsor Castle, a local choral synagogue or a remote Siberian monastery - everyone will decide for themselves.