Alexander Ageev. Hunger 95

Hunger 95
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: February 13, 2004

“And the huts burn and burn...” - that’s the line from last Friday that sticks, “showers the brains” worse than alcohol. And in general, against the backdrop of the almost everyday presence of death in our fleeting reality, one is drawn to quotes: the phenomenon of faith without churching requires permanent verbal self-determination. Knowing the New Testament fairly well, I still remember not Luke and Matthew, but, say, the half-mad Boris Sadovsky :

Why are the constellations all night
They look at us intently
As if they smell the day of retribution
And guess the time?

The stars remember God's word
Waiting for the day of punishment
What will come to earth again
In a stormy flame of fire.

The bad taste is amazing (“in a stormy flame of fire” - this is a masterpiece of romantic poetics eaten three hundred times and defamed three hundred times), but sincere - it was written already in the thirties, when Mayakovsky was no longer alive, and Mandelstam wrote “Stanzas”:

The heart needs to beat:
Enter fields, grow into forests.
Here is Pravda's first page,
Here is the strip with the verdict.

The road to Stalin is not a fairy tale,
But only - life without reproaches:
Football - for a young Basque,
Madrid is fiery life.

Well and further - understanding less and less why he puts words together, a sort of verbal binge for eight quatrains, and only the date - July 37th - partly justifies the “surrender” of the lousy intellectual to the mercy of extracultural entropy:

But this feeling of shifting
Happening over the centuries
And this Stalinist book
In hot sunny hands...

"Stalin's", damn it, Book! In my youth, I read two or three books by Joseph Vissarionovich, having previously dug them up in the barn, where my grandfather dumped the entire inheritance of the “cult of personality” in 1955 (he was a disciplined member of the party and reacted “correctly” to every sneeze of its leadership. Thank God, he didn’t burn it nothing, and all this, compressed and moldy, went to me, the “reading person” - homo lesens). Stalin wrote well: informatively, contextually, and without any “reasoning”. My editor-in-chief, from whom I will leave in half a month, would be very happy to hire such a correspondent, because he is firmly convinced that information is primary, and its interpretation is a tenth matter and its price is three kopecks. Well, it's such an old debate: what kind of journalism do we need? Founded in 1990, Kommersant tried to introduce into the Russian media space a very simple idea, one might say, Bartov’s: “the author has died,” and you never know who brings the news to your attention - with a straight face, without the slightest attempt to extract at least a moral - everyday root from the described situation. Just at this time, people began to appear in Russia: Rozanov-style observers independent of routine news feeds - Maxim Sokolov, Alexander Privalov, Valery Panyushkin. They, as best they could, mocked the process of pushing news into the mass consciousness, and laid out a certain range of interpretations: stylistically qualitative, essentially problematic, in the end meaningless, since it did not find and will not find a mass reader for a long time. For some time I tried to work in this dubious area: 120 texts in the “Profile”, which I am leaving the other day, testify to this. A hundred letters from grateful readers should also seem to have strengthened me in the idea that personal reading of news feeds is possible, but alas! They told me too - “get out”!

Well, off I went.

And he returned to the Znamensky laureate - Evgeny Danilenko with the novel " Dikopol " ("Znamya", 2003, #11). A man from Omsk, as I was told in the prose department of Znamya, came out of nowhere, by himself. Of course, there is no “novel”, there is a hair-raising story about betrayal - that is, about how our great power betrays its subjects at any moment, in any space and time: well, it is burdensome for us, even for those who endured for its sake the supposed good is serious torment - if she needs heroes, it would be better if they were dead.

Reading "Dikopol", I remembered different things - both "The Witness" (a novel by Vladimir Berezin , underrated by critics and readers ), and the stories of Oleg Ermakov , forgotten by criticism (and Oleg Khandus , who once said: “I was killed in 1980.” Who noticed then this creepy text? Let me quote:

I was killed in Afghanistan in 1980 - that’s the problem. And then they killed many more times, leaving not the slightest chance of return. I was killed in Afghanistan - I realized this later. They don’t return from war alive!

The “Lost Generation” is like money taken out of circulation; their fate is short-lived; they live a strange life, they are not thrown away - as if it were a pity, but they stop moving from hand to hand, they live calmly and quietly in their hidden places, like a memory, having neither value nor a more or less definite purpose... One day only by chance come into being when one is restlessly looking for something different and important that has suddenly disappeared - and then they appear, money that has gone out of circulation, between the yellowed pages of a book.

That's it.

Would you like to interpret this? Yes, easily! There is a certain methodological machine in the brain that decomposes the most bleeding texts into observable clusters, but the entire composition of the personality is in revolt: I will not analyze this! And I will not. For some reason, another thought suddenly grew into my subconscious: any government, I suddenly thought, lies. Where are the limits of power lies?

The relationship between the government and the people is somewhat similar to the relationship between spouses who have lived a long and difficult life in marriage: they are always dissatisfied with each other, but it is impossible to separate, and therefore various technologies are used to preserve the union, but at the same time not to sacrifice any important for sovereign existence by principles. One of these technologies is mutual lies: the authorities and the people always have something to hide from each other. There is no time for morality here, but a principled measure: the level of lies - especially state lies - must be at a constructive level, otherwise the marriage will fall apart and the country will go into disarray.

There have always been problems with measures in Russia, and this is understandable - there was a huge space available where, as it seemed, everything could be hidden - a million corpses, for example, or the sea drying up before the eyes of one generation. And there were also countless people, as it seemed only recently. Our authorities enjoyed the illusion of power, and the people enjoyed the illusion of ease of escape (to the Don, to Siberia, or even to the nearby forest) from the too intrusive tutelage of the authorities. The union was almost always under threat of collapse - and the people often fought with the authorities, and they never remained in debt. After each such war, the need was discovered to restore at least some kind of mutual trust, to achieve a mutually acceptable convention, and agreement to abide by certain rules of the game. For example, lying to each other correctly, in moderation, without leading to a public divorce.

In what cases and under what circumstances does the government have every right to lie to the people?

As historical experience shows, only in cases of a real threat to the existence of the nation itself, when, for example, it must be convinced at all costs that it is potentially stronger than it currently feels. There was such a moment at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War - for almost two years Russia was hanging by a thread, somewhere very close to disaster, but in addition to simple and crude levers, the authorities had a well-designed tool for communicating with the people - the “Soviet Information Bureau”, false reports who, from the battlefields (defeats), supported the nation’s high mobilization readiness and did not allow it to lose hope for an upcoming victory. The authorities deceived the people, but it was an inspiring deception, and in the end it was generously forgiven: the winners are judged, but not very strictly.

In recent Russian history there are many more examples of destructive lies, when the authorities deceived the people not for their own good, the people, but in obedience to the selfish instinct of self-preservation: let thousands of unsuspecting and innocent people die, let millions experience hunger and poverty , but the honor of the uniform will be preserved.

For almost the entire Soviet era, imperious lies were generally a constant background of life, almost a property of the atmosphere itself. However, a normal person, striving to survive in the circumstances offered to him by history, sooner or later adapts to such everyday, systemic lies, and this life may even seem quite bearable to him. Even though in fact this is also one of the forms of war between the authorities and the people, the war is waged as if “positionally”, without particularly high-profile victories and defeats. Without deceit and treachery. From an outside perspective, such a society may even give the impression of being stable and almost achieving “moral and political unity.”

But its vicious basis sooner or later manifests itself, the authorities forget about observing the rules, and the lie breaks through with some kind of prominence that is completely destructive for the fragile agreement of the parties. This was the case, for example, in 1986, during the days of the Chernobyl disaster, when thousands of lives were ruined just so that the authorities could “save face.” All that was needed was to tell the people the truth in time, but the malignant inertia of lies worked, which ultimately caused harm to the authorities themselves. After all, it is quite obvious that after Chernobyl, Gorbachev’s “perestroika” went much faster, and its initiator began to rapidly lose control over the process and authority. A vile and, most importantly, primitive lie in its motive somehow especially acutely offends the national consciousness, irreparably shifts something at its very depths and can be fraught with serious cataclysms.

The almost unanimous dislike of the population towards the reformers of the first wave - Yeltsin, Gaidar, Chubais - is also connected not only with a sharp drop in the standard of living of the majority, but also with the cowardly state lies, to the accompaniment of which the reforms began. These people knew for certain and in advance what price the people would pay for the transformations the country needed, but they were afraid to tell them about it. That is, they not only expressed offensive distrust of him, but also tried to disorient him at first, issuing comforting forecasts, promising to lie down on the rails if something happened, and promising an era of prosperity in the very near future. It is unlikely that Chubais will ever be forgotten about his pearl about the Volga for the voucher...

It is not surprising that the reforms immediately went extremely hard - after all, instead of preoccupied with strengthening their convention with the people before they began, the authorities, out of obvious cowardice, violated it. The reaction of rejection was not long in coming, and few people in the country felt the changes taking place as an important common cause. The government was rapidly losing its social base, and the people watched with hostility as it weakened. The premonition of an approaching catastrophe arose in the country long before the default and, alas, it did not deceive. The first post-Soviet elite was punished by bankruptcy, among other things, for cowardly lies to the people. It is still a miracle that the country did not turn 180 degrees at all and did not rush into the arms of the communists. Apparently, the memory of how they once lied was still fresh.

It seems that the current president has not yet made any obvious mistakes in the spirit of his predecessor and has not been noticed in petty, selfish lies to the population. Although at the same time he talks to the people much more willingly and more often than Yeltsin. Putin's high rating indicates that with his arrival the authorities concluded a new contract with the people and it is still being respected by the parties.

The people like the strengthening of the state, and they are still turning a blind eye to the obvious fact that, as it grows stronger, it becomes more and more hypocritical. Hypocrisy is a subtler tool than direct deception, but it is still a transformed form of lies and, therefore, a form of disrespect for subjects.

The political system built over these four years is hypocritical - with parties invented in the presidential administration and not expressing anyone’s interests, an obedient parliament and “constructed” governors who are completely dependent on the Kremlin.

The relationship between the authorities and business is hypocritical - and our entrepreneurs feel less and less confident in their future, since the state has questioned the very principle of the inviolability of private property.

The media, which until recently were proud of their independence, are becoming more and more openly imbued with hypocrisy - it seems that there is still freedom of speech, but the authorities are increasingly hinting that this freedom is not very pleasing to them. At the same time, the tone of communication between the authorities and the population is becoming more and more pathetic: the people from the highest stands are being too persistently told that they have never lived as well as they have in recent years. A typical TV news story - for example, the Minister of Labor and Social Development Alexander Pochinok (or some other minister) enthusiastically tells the president how much the real incomes of the population have grown this year (or, for example, at what a frantic pace our army is being reformed), and this is all starting to smell strongly of propaganda. Which, as you know, is also a form of lie.

You almost physically feel that the authorities are beginning to love themselves more and more, and we remember this specific love well from the Soviet years. And it contains a hidden threat to the contract between the people and the state, which is still in force. If this continues, then the authorities will very soon want to have in the people not an interlocutor and not an equal partner, but only a listener and performer.

For a country that still faces long and difficult modernization, this is not the most effective type of cooperation.