Following the emperor

Persistent attempts to present to society the project "Putin 2.0" many were really embarrassed. Alexey Kudrin is especially convincing - perhaps the chief architect of this project. “This will happen,” he inspires the public. “It already begins.”

What starts? “Liberalization of political freedoms, tough discussions and political competition”, “opposite key issues” ... Already the Ryzhkov party has been almost registered, and the main anti -Putins Illarionov, Nemtsov and Kasparov, and the governors will soon be chosen almost democratically ... either after the presidential election! The main thing is do not touch the elections.

Well, yes, they may not be entirely honest and even completely dishonest, well, for a short while. This is already persuaded by a fashionable fiction writer. “It will be a very weak president who is unlikely to last long,” he predicts, a beautiful -hearted grades, and persuades the brothers in the middle class to rush: “I would prefer that the Putin regime not collapse too quickly. Let it be at least a year old.”

I just want to cry from tenderness and pity for a doomed regime, which, it turns out, has not yet compromised itself. But after a year he compromises just right.

All this campaign to process public opinion, in the fairway of which the leaders of the "White Ribbon" were also attached, most of all resembles the Russian thaw of 1880, the famous "Dictatorship of the Heart" of Count Loris-Melikova. The formidable winner of Shamil and conqueror of Kars, the pacifier of the plague in the Volga region and the tamer of Kramola in Kharkov appeared at the court at the time of despair, when the authorities decisively did not know what to do with the revolutionary underground, and the heir wrote in the diary: "We are experiencing the insanity of power." The heir to the count first of all liked it. There was no question of any "name days" - Loris -Melikov was appointed a dictator with unlimited powers. “Not a single temporary worker - neither Menshikov, nor Biron, nor Arakcheev - never had such comprehensive power,” he wrote later.

What did he do to this power?

The proposals were the following:

Send all socialists to the island of Sakhalin and block it with warships, and transfer higher educational institutions to the provincial outskirts, thereby isolating revolutionary students from the people.
Organize all -Russian raids in all cities and towns and turn all of Russia into one huge trap.
The author of the second proposal is not some kind of District there, but the Kharkov professor of Platonov’s law.

As long as they did not turn into a trap, wealthy subjects went abroad. The terrorists who arrange explosions in the Winter Palace scared the townsfolk to such an extent that, according to Saltykov-Shchedrin, "without horror it was impossible to think about the coming of the night."

But there was a note by another jurist, Sergei Muromtsev, many quotes from which at least now to newspapers. That's what, in particular, was written by Lorisa Muromtsev and his co -authors Scalon and Chuprov:

The government does not want to listen to the voice of society itself, does not tolerate truthful indications of its mistakes and misses, neglects the opinions of knowledgeable people, as if pursuing some special goals, alien to the needs of the people ... Distrusion for the government has formed quite. The administration is incapable of scattering such distrust, not showing enough knowledge, nor moral strength, nor any ideal. Her powerlessness does not escape the attention of society and even more annoying it, because for people there is nothing more humiliating and insulting, how to feel without mandatory subordination to people who, with rare exceptions, do not inspire either respect or trust. Under such conditions, no matter what the authorities do in the types of forced restoration of their authority, its efforts will only have an annoying effect.

There are still a lot about the independence of the courts, the constraint of the press, the "healthy forces" of society that cannot find applications in the suffocating atmosphere, the absence, as they would say today, social elevators ...

Mikhail Tarielovich heeded. First of all, he invited the chief editors of St. Petersburg newspapers and magazines to his own and completely fascinated them. “They, in their own words, literally as they flew out of his office on wings,” says a modern historian. And this despite the fact that the count, as Witte writes, recommended that they "not to embarrass and not worry in vain public minds with his dreamy illusions." Loris’s program was so vague that “everyone,” Witte remarks melancholy, “could deduct anything from it, that is, all or nothing.”

The PR did not end there. Loris published an appeal "to the inhabitants of the capital." In it, paying tribute to the “fruitful inside and glorious reign of the greatest of the monarchs” and “not giving place for exaggerated and hasty expectations,” he assured: “I look at the support of society as the main force that could promote the authorities of the proper course of state life, from the interruption of which the interests of society itself suffer.”

And then good deeds fell from the sleeve of Loris as from a cornucopia. He fired the most odious ministers, weakened censorship control, was going to reduce redemption payments and cancel the subsidiary. He finally released them in prisons a lot of people sitting there for what political prisoners and abolished the hated third department.

Instead of an ominous department, trying to embrace the immense and therefore not seeing the conspirators in his own office, the cunning count created the security department, led by virtuoso of political investigation by George Sudeikin, who filled the revolutionary organizations with agents-provocateurs.

The crown of Loris’s career was the so -called “Constitution” - a project to convene a commission of elected from zemstvos to participate in the development of bills with the right of deliberate vote.

Petersburg society fell into euphoria. From the Anichkov Palace - the residence of the heir - they looked at the brisk count with a mixed sense of fear and hatred. The novelist Smirnova -Sazonova wrote down in the diary: “They write in foreign newspapers ... that the question of the fall of our dynasty is the question of only time ...” How similar to her fellow pen!

The thaw ended with the murder of Alexander II and the change of reign. The bomb of the Narodnaya Volya so accurately corresponded to the hidden aspirations of the slanderers of the heir and was so meaningless for the revolution that inevitably the doubt crept in: did Zhelyabov fulfill the order of the Anichkov Palace?

In our case, it will end with a new election of Putin.

Vladimir Abarinov

Source: facets