In the United States, a book by the famous historian Peter Novik, "Holocaust in the life of America", was published. The theme of the catastrophe that has befell the Jews in the current century occupies an increasingly noticeable place in the national consciousness of the American people, and Novik partly explores the evolution of the image of the catastrophe in this mind, and partly criticizes this evolution.

If you evaluate the situation is impartial, you can’t at least not be surprised. Although the participation of the United States in the Second World War was largely decisive for its outcome, the country itself and its population suffered in this global conflict relatively little, and the economy even won: the labor mobilization of the war years withdrew it from a long-term crisis and laid the foundations for the bo boom of the 50s. The war, which required the unprecedented tension of productive and spiritual forces from America, nevertheless did not become a disaster for her, as it was for defeated Germany and Japan, for most European states and, of course, for the Soviet Union.

As for the Holocaust itself, during the war years, as you know, the Anti -Hitler coalition paid inspection of information about the mass extermination of the Nazis of European Jews. Private Americans first ofhand personally convinced of the monstrous reality of the Nazi “final decision” when they liberated the death camp, primarily Auschwitz. A comparison of the productive power of the Nazi death plants with pre -war demographic statistics made it possible to determine the approximate scale of the crime: from five to six million destroyed Jews.

The unprecedentedness of this action, undertaken with the only purpose of exterminating the ethnic group, - for Hitler considered Jewry precisely as an ethnic group, and not as a religion, gave rise to a new term and a new corpus delicti in international law: genocide. In the action itself, alas, historically new was not enough - it is enough to recall at least the massacre of Armenians in Turkey. Nevertheless, a demonstration of the effectiveness of modern technology and state planning as an instruments of genocide required new methods of struggle and prevention.

Let's get back to the book of Peter Novik. Explaining the goals that he set for himself in his work on her, the historian wonders: "Why in America of the 90s, fifty years after the fact and a thousand miles from the scene, the Holocaust took such a significant place in our culture?" Hence, according to the Novik, another question follows: "Is it so beneficial as, apparently, the majority thinks the most influential role that the Holocaust occupied both in the American-Jewish and in general American public consciousness?"

Already from these formulations is visible the deliberate polemicity of Novik’s book, and it is not surprising that among the reviews for it were also very critical. Let us explain what he means.

Immediately after the war, despite the shock made by discoveries in Auschwitz, the Holocaust, as Peter Novik convincingly demonstrates, was, albeit a large, but only one of the problems in a number of others. We will call at least the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - not to mention the Cold War, which for many years almost monopolized the agenda.

But the Cold War has been behind for ten years, and nuclear death since the time of Hiroshima has become more likely than a probability. As for the genocide, it still remains not only a probability, but also with reality. Even excluding controversial examples, it is enough to name Cambodia or Rwanda.

Each year, books on the Holocaust are published in America, dozens of scientific articles are published, special departments for the study of the Jewish disaster have been established in many universities, discussions are underway on the pages of influential magazines. Perhaps this academic and journalistic activity is not very noticeable to a foreign observer, but Stephen Spielberg’s film “Schindler's List”, regardless of his artistic merits, had a wide resonance around the world.

The central event confirming the place of the Jewish catastrophe in the collective memory of modern America was the opening of the US Memorial Museum in 1993 in the US capital. And although there was no doubt about the wide public support of this action, some nevertheless expressed bewilderment. Indeed, American history had its own catastrophe, much closer to the house - centuries of slavery and lawlessness of the country's black population. And although in time this purely domestic catastrophe is further delayed, its consequences are also quite acutely felt - there is no reason to be an expert, it is enough to take a tourist walk along the New York Harlem. Meanwhile, the national memorial of the American of African origin in the United States is not yet possible - it is only planned.

The reproach that Peter Novik throws the country's public consciousness in connection with the unjustified, in his opinion, fetishization of the Holocaust, charges this consciousness with a gap from historical proportions and “instrumentalization”. By historical scale, Novik implies the idea of the Holocaust what it was in the 50s: one great catastrophe among others. As for the “instrumentalization”, although the author himself carefully avoids this term, the examples are sadly typical: the use of the terms “Holocaust” and “genocide” in the daily controversy for the most inappropriate reason, their “landing”, desecalization. As an analogy to the Russian public, the label of the “fascist” or “communist” is closer to the Russian public, who is hung in any stubborn opponent in the heat of the dispute, regardless of his real point of view.

As for the opponents of Peter Novik himself, they primarily point out the meaninglessness and impracticality of returning to the "historical" content of the concept of the Holocaust - being in the center of the national memory of the Americans, it is almost unqualified conscious manipulation and adjustment. Knowledge of the history of yesterday complements today's experience, but does not cancel it in any way; Resorting to mathematical formulations, such knowledge is a necessary condition, but is not sufficient.

The erects of the Holocaust come to the forefront of American public self -awareness to purely pragmatic interpretation is poorly. It is known that in the United States there are more Jews than in the rest of the world, and they could influence public opinion, but this argument does not stretch the thesis, because in the 50s the situation was the same. Even thousands of Jewish refugees who arrived in the United States before the war and after from Germany and other European countries did not cause a radical turn in public opinion, what time and history had achieved.

Simplified pragmatics, to which Russian publicists and so -called experts in the interpretation of American motifs, primarily foreign policy, indicates a misunderstanding, often comic, but fraught with Russia and the world by far from comic consequences. Usually they unfold the doctrine of state interests, extracted from Naftalin of the last century, but are always powerless to explain these interests. Historically, the so -called state interests were either in territorial expansion or in restraining the expansion of the opponent. Try to apply this doctrine to Somalia or Bosnia, and its hopeless naivety becomes obvious.

The Holocaust problem has become central to modern America precisely because it naturally closes with the idealistic principles of the declaration of independence, the constitution, the League of Nations and the United Nations - these fruits of American social imagination, regardless of their historical embodiment. Indeed, the historical manifestations of idealism often leave much to be desired: the Vietnamese war illustrates the proverb about the path to hell, prayed by good intentions. But to believe that good intentions always lead to hell is to abandon them at all.

Everyone is free to interpret America’s history and actions in their own way, taking into account all the facts, without closing their eyes on uncomfortable. The publicist has more freedom, than the statesman, because there is less responsibility. But the ideas of irresponsible journalism tend to leak upstairs to the parliamentary chambers and government rooms. The national idea and memory are very fragile matter and, as we will see now, borders on mythology. Understanding other people's motives help not prejudice, but imagination.

As for the facts, here is one of them. Speaking at the opening ceremony of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Eli Visel suddenly interrupted his speech, turned to President Clinton sitting behind and said:

"Mr. President, I can’t sleep after my eyes saw in Bosnia-Herzegovin. Please, Mr. President, you must do something to stop this terrible extermination of the innocent."

When the Ambassador of the Holocaust says, the President of the United States is listening.

In Russia, the Holocaust was and remains on the periphery of national consciousness. You can determine its center in one word: war, war with a specific article, if one existed in the language. The history of the Russian century is replete with conflicts and blood, but the word "war" without epithets is not applicable to either the First World War, the civil, nor to Afghan, nor to Chechen. When they simply say “war”, everyone instantly understands what is at stake.

The word "Holocaust", still sounding in Russian Barbarism, is apparently not to choose a home equivalent. The word is Greek and means "all -burning", mass sacrifice. But it came to the Russian language from English, clearly from America, and the Jewish "Shoa" never got a chance.

To talk about why one of the greatest disasters of the century is pushed into Russia into the background of history, it can be noted for a long time, and it is easier to note that the war as a whole was a huge disaster for everyone. The general disaster obscured the private, albeit disproportionate, trouble of one people. In addition, the official, party doctrine of the war scrupulously seized all the information about the electoral extermination of Jews, which brought the idea of Nazi gas chambers to absolute absurdity: could Hitler even occur to destroy hundreds of millions of people living east of the Reich?

The war now is the only real shrine that the Russians have preserved, even though the direct participants remained a growing handful. It is not difficult to understand these direct participants: in their life, crippled and deceived by the regime, there was the only indisputable moment of truth when they knew that they were at risk for the sake of real human values, and not for ideological phantoms. And their conviction was captured in the memory of new generations, devoid of their own shrines. In order to make sure of the centrality of war for Russian national consciousness, it is enough to expand any newspaper on Victory Day, regardless of its position in the political spectrum: where all the ethnicism and wise go! Together with clever, however, the very mind, rational reflection, but such is the specificity of the shrines.

And yet, if nevertheless, it is easy to resort to reflection, it is easy to see how deeply mythologized the war in the national consciousness is not only because of the natural processes that the shrines are subject to, but also by the direct will of ideologists, monopolists of information throughout Russian history, and in the Soviet period - the undivided owners of the fact. The war is called the Great Patriotic War and dates back to Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, while in Europe, in Africa and the Pacific Ocean it raged for almost two years. The artificiality, the logical insolvency of the concept of the Great Patriotic War is obvious even from the most well -known facts: where do these gall reproaches to the Allies, who were slow with the opening of the so -called "second front"? Is it reasonable to consider the United States and Great Britain by the Patriotic War, that is, by definition of a private war? And it is completely inexplicable why, as a result of the victory over Hitler, Russia got the Kuril Islands, which previously belonged not to Germany at all. It is impossible not to recall that Hitler and Stalin by the occupation and the dismemberment of Poland unleashed the Second World War, and therefore it was necessary to separate his private war from the general, in which everything is fair and sacred. Even with Japan, it would not have been so sacred.

It is in such an edited form that the image of the war is captured in the Russian national consciousness. That is why it is so harsh in it the contrast between the impudence of the aggressor and the valve of the defender. And with this contrasting template, regardless of the official doctrine, the events of a close and distant story are addressed - alas, not always in favor of truth.

Before going to Kosovo, where the whole logic of this comparison entails us, we will see how the Russian and American public consciousness in each other is reflected, and how objective these reflections are.

The United States has long drawn attention to the centrality of the image of war in the Russian social psyche. This centrality during the Cold War was one of the main arguments of the supporters of the “soft” attitude to the Soviet Union: they say that Russia has repeatedly been subjected to aggression in its history, and some suspicion of its reaction to the outside world is explained and logical, it just needs to be taken into account. It is significant that one of the prominent supporters of this doctrine of peace was the then journalist, and now the deputy Secretary of State Strogub Talbot.

Rejecting this argument and appealing to statistics, the American "halves" noted that of all the armed conflicts in which Russia participated since the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the majority the instigator it itself was, and that, regardless of which of the parties was an aggressor, Russia as a result has always expanded its territory.

As for Russia itself, its attitude towards America sometimes changed sharply, including before our eyes. But both the location and hostility usually relied on a historically established and rather caricature idea of America: the country of Hollywood, Miki-Mouse and McDonald's with an admixture of completely mythical cowboys, gangsters and robbers-robbers, the mirror reflection of Russia in targeted boots and sheepskin coats, with bulbs of domes and bears on urban. streets. There is no place for the Holocaust and generally a spiritual measurement in this picture - spirituality in any case was considered the prerogative of the Russians.

This analysis allows you to better understand the reasons for the tension that arose between Russia and the United States about Kosovo and the Yugoslav problem in general. In Kosovo, and before that, the Americans did not come to Bosnia from imaginary state interests, and not even from the need to help Europeans or defend NATO prestige, although both of these motives were present. They were brought there ultimately the request of the former prisoner of Nazi concentration camps, publicly addressed to the president of the country. Russian newspapers do not get tired of repeating that the average American has no idea where Kosovo is located. But the average American knows very well what the Holocaust is.

As for Russia, although the reaction of the authorities to the intervention of NATO in Kosovo was publicly motivated by state interests, albeit quite fictitious, the reaction of the people, generally very negative, determined the national archetype of war, the dichotomy of the aggressor-victim, with the confrontation of not so much NATO Serbia as the USA-Russia. The black and white contrast of the folk faith with the long-term retouching of ideology does not allow that the war may have a completely different algebra.

Hence the automatic correctness of NATO and America does not follow, and the analysis will be incomplete, if you do not turn on the player who made the first move: Serbia itself - for the actual desertion of Montenegro Yugoslavia has turned into a fiction.

The Serbian myth, this source of national claims, in recent years, although this is not the first time, circled the whole world, and repeat it almost too too. But still, we recall. In 1389, a battle between the Serbs under the command of Tsar Lazar and Turks-Sosmans, led by Sultan Murad, took place in the heart of Kosovo, in the east of Kosovo, in the heart of the medieval Serbian Empire. The battle ended with the defeat of the Serbs and the death of Lazarus himself. But until its end, the brave Serbian warrior Milos Odilich leaned into the tent of the Sultan and killed him with a dagger with a blow. The battle could end differently, if it were not for the betrayal of the son of the king, Vuka Brankovich, at the height of the battle of the Turks who went over to the side. Nevertheless, the victim of the Serbian people was not in vain, and although he himself paid for freedom, the path to Europe was closed to Europe.

And here is a completely different picture, from the book of the British historian Noel Malcom "Kosovo is a brief story":

"The little that is known about this battle for sure, you can state in a few words. The battle was tense, and both sides suffered heavy losses. Both Lazarus and Murad were killed. At the end of the battle, the battlefield remained behind the Turks. His son Baesit, who commanded part of the Turkish forces during the battle. Lazar was replaced by his minor son Stefan. Лазаревич, который, наставляемый матерью, вдовствующей царицей Милицей, позднее согласился стать турецким вассалом".

Все, так сказать, идеологические обстоятельства, столь важные для сербской национальной идеи - вымысел. Не было измены Вука Бранковича. Не было никакого Милоша Обилича, которого до девятнадцатого века именовали Кобиличем, но затем решили облагозвучить. Вместе с сербским ополчением против турок сражались и албанцы, коренные жители этих мест. Возможно, что контингент албанцев был также и у Мурада, но почти нет сомнения, что в его войске были сербы, в том числе один из главных героев сербского эпоса, давний турецкий вассал Марко Кралевич. И уже совершенно достоверно, что битва не закрыла османам пути в Европу - скорее широко распахнула, и лишь триста лет спустя австрийцы и поляки остановили их под стенами Вены.

Но зато хорошо известно, что было на самом деле с тех пор, когда Сербия вновь возникла на карте Европы и принялась осуществлять права, якобы дарованные ей мифическим "косовским заветом". В течение этих ста двадцати лет она регулярно, десятками тысяч, вырезала косовских албанцев, передавала их землю сербским колонистам, подвергала насильной депортации, превращала мечети в конюшни, запрещала обучение на албанском языке и вообще его употребление. Парадоксальным образом, годы правления Тито были для косоваров передышкой - коммунистическая идеология в сплаве с австро-венгерскими и османскими уроками оказалась куда более щадящей, чем националистическая мифология Сербии. Но и Тито и Югославия - в прошлом. Косовары остались один на один с палачом.

Полагать, что имя этому палачу - Милошевич, наивно, и еще наивнее думать, что с устранением Милошевича все успокоится. Не Милошевич придумал "косовский завет", не он писал ученые книги, доказывая, что у албанцев до недавнего времени были обезьяньи хвосты, не он отрезал тысячам косоваров носы и уши. У него были предшественники - отчего ему оказаться без последователей? Смерть фюрера не заменит необходимости искоренить нацистскую мифологию. И если у кого-то есть терминологические сомнения относительно последних сербских мер в Косове, вся история албанцев в границах Сербии приводит на ум несомненное слово: геноцид.

Публикация книги Питера Новика в Соединенных Штатах показывает, что в истории и в общественном сознании этой страны нет неколебимых постулатов. Ученым коллегам и просто читателям Новика предстоит разобраться в справедливости его сомнений. Зато хорошо известна по крайней мере одна страна, где публикация подобной книги пока немыслима. А Россия все еще движется посередине, но до перепутья между идеалом и мифом уже недалеко. И если всерьез заходит разговор о национальных святынях, горе тем, от кого эти святыни примутся защищать.