The parallels of the 68th

2018 is the year of anniversaries. This year, the famous festival of the author’s song in the Akademgorodok was 50 years old - to the very one, on which Alexander Galich sang “Pasternak’s memory” and all the scientists clogged to capacity, instead of applause, simply got up to respect for the dough for the dough ...

I was lucky to work this spring in the organizing committee of the Forum "Place of Power and Freedom. Akademgorodok" , which was dedicated to the 50th anniversary of this iconic festival. I will not tell about all the vicissitudes of the preparation of this event, I will only say that the most difficult thing was to maintain the word "freedom" in the name of our forum ... "Well -wishers" constantly asked us - they say, what else do you need freedom? Remove immediately so as not to accommodate by accident “those who can pay attention” ... The funny thing is that these kindness of pre-prescription advice sounded from the lips of people who considered themselves our friends and associates. They ran somewhere, talked with someone, handed us “opinions” and other “important information”, and we simply prepared our forum-literally without a ruble of money, at pure enthusiasm and with great support from those for whom the 50-year-old festival was roads.

Prague Spring was suppressed by Soviet tanks, which clearly proved that socialism could not have a human face. The festival in the Akademgorodok ended with "institutional cleaning", "stricts" and duccessing conversations of participants with "committees"

As a result, our forum was full halls of the House of Scientists, and the touching retro show on the steps of the Academy Palace of Culture passed "with tears in his eyes" caused by either acute nostalgia or a cold March wind ... At the conference, which took place as part of the forum, they remembered, told, generalized, tried to look into the future. In one of the performances, the memories of the Prague Spring unexpectedly sounded, which is now also 50 years old. One of the largest historians studying the theme of the Stalinist repressions in Siberia, Sergey Alexandrovich Krasilnikov, performed in an unexpected role: he shared his memories of an eyewitness who visited Prague in August 1968 ...

And in July, guests from the Czech Republic came to me. One of them, with a funny name for the Russian ear, is the great -grandson of the Czech legionnaire, who participated in the events of the Civil War in Siberia. Today, they also have an anniversary-the 100th anniversary of the uprising of the Czechoslovak corps, which began with the city of Novo-Nicolaevsk, the current Novosibirsk. I showed Lenka the places associated with the “white -ches”, as the Soviet historiographic tradition calls them: the Metropolitan Hotel, where the head of the Radola Gaid, the “red barracks” housed, where the corps soldiers, a military town were located, where white Czechs and Red Hungarians fought at the end of May 1918 ... The uprising Kolchak, and then another wave of "red terror".

On the second day, we walked with Lenka and her friends in Akademgorodok, came to visit Nastya Neznososova, the creator of the Integral Museum, the daughter of Hermann Beznosov, the founder of the legendary discussion club "under the integral" , which in the 60s was one of the symbols of that Khrushchev thaw. It was Nastya Neznosova that became the real motor of our anniversary forum "Place of Power and Freedom." The guest handed over to Nastya to the touching letter of her father and a selection of the Czechoslovak press dedicated to the events of 50 years ago in Prague. Perhaps these were the same newspapers and “leaflets” that the young historian Sergei Krasilnikov could not import into the USSR due to the fear of “Shmon” at customs in August 1968. We talked for a long time in a cozy and hospitable flooring museum, and inevitably in this conversation there were parallels: their Prague Spring and an attempt to build "socialism with a human face", and our festival of March 1968, which embodied the spirit of our "thaw".

Prague Spring was suppressed by Soviet tanks, which clearly proved that socialism could not have a human face. The festival in the Akademgorodok ended with the defeat of the club "under the integral", "Institute cleaning", "stricts" and the species -saving conversations of the participants with "committertors". In the 68th thaw in the USSR, it ended. The country finally and irrevocably missed its chance to update and cleanse, plunged into stagnation and hibernation, when there was no freedom, but everyone had approximately "equally" poor Soviet happiness: sweets for the holiday, crystal in buffets and carpets on the walls. The Czechs had this happiness, maybe a little more - it is not for nothing that everyone who could, drove "shoe - dress - buy crystal." But the Czechs never forgave us the strangulation of his Prague spring

The numbers have magic. During the conversations, my Czech guests constantly used the phrases "before the revolution" and "after the revolution." It turned out that the “revolution” in the modern Czech Republic calls the events of November 1989 (if the numbers “68” turn over, just “89”), when the “velvet” overthrew the husak in Czechoslovakia, and with it the Soviet government and socialist prospects were sent to the damn mother. Then, I remember, there were congresses of advice, Sobchak, Sakharov, Yeltsin and also a bunch of hopes for updating and purification ...

Now Chekhov has their own problems: migrants, social inequality. Czech liberals do not like the current president of the country Zeman, consider him a "student and friend" Putin and longing that the country rolled back. We also have a lot of problems: the arbitrariness of security forces, prohibitive corruption, sanctions and antisancations, wars in Syria and Ukraine, pension "reform" and other methods of removing money from the population ... It turned out that it was not so easy to get out of the general past and separately. Although the Czechs along this path, of course, are much more. And we have to defend at least the last borders-for example, the word "freedom" in the name of the forum dedicated to the events of 50 years ago.

Andrey Pozdnyakov - marketer, Novosibirsk

The "Opinion" expressed in the heading of the point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial office