Andrey Madison. The city is not tired

The city is not tired - and chose the best
Andrei Madison

Publication date: May 17, 2000

What happened was what should have happened - Vladimir Yakovlev won the gubernatorial elections in St. Petersburg by a clear advantage. Simply put, he knocked out his main competitor, Igor Artemyev, using Tai Chi rather than boxing methods, without coming into direct contact with his opponent.

It is characteristic that the trust of voters, expressed in numbers, gave almost the same picture as in the mayoral elections in Moscow - this indicates at least a trend, if not a constant: people want to work and not engage in demagoguery, and therefore prefer those to whom the semantic field of the word “work” extends not only on paper or on the air. Moreover, people who want to work show a clear reluctance to be manipulated.

In his interview with the Baltika radio station, Yuliy Rybakov, a candidate from the Union of Right Forces, who lost the so-called “primaries” to Yabloko Artemyev (who became the only “democratic” candidate), said that he regrets the choice of the townspeople. And then he performed the usual number: ah, again the Democrats reached an agreement late, ah, again they conducted the election campaign in the wrong way. It is obvious: disrespect for the opinions of their fellow townsmen and, as a result, reliance on this very manipulation.

Therefore, it’s time to call a spade a spade: Yakovlev was the democratic candidate, and Artemyev was a candidate from anything but democracy.

The methods used by unlucky manipulators are evidenced by a leaflet that I found taped to the arch of the General Staff, i.e. in the very heart of the city, exactly on election day: “The Communists are for Yakovlev. And you?” - with a crowd over which Stalin towers, and all this against the background of a muted Lenin. Signature: "Youth Anti-Yakovlev Coalition."

I will not qualify either the moral or legal side of the matter - they are obvious. I will focus on bare technology: communist intimidation no longer works. Those who use it must either change on the outside, or, what was more correct, turn inside out.

Because St. Petersburg needs something completely different - investment and, thereby, stimulation of those processes that are already gaining strength and which can be reduced to a simple definition: calm creative activity.

The city has an extremely friendly atmosphere: when I drove into it, on the fences surrounding the Izhora factories, I saw four times large-letter graffiti “I adore you.” In the Summer Garden, where I got into conversation with a retired trombonist of the military orchestra of the school named after. F. Dzerzhinsky, based in the Admiralty, next to the bench where we sat, there was a dry tree, on which was written not some nasty or stupid thing, but - “I wish you love and happiness.” The entire time we were talking, a button accordion player sat at the garden fence, playing Bach and Mozart. A janitor in uniform carefully swept the playgrounds and alleys, cheerful schoolchildren ran along them in an orderly manner, and in response to my direct question whether, in his opinion, Putin is the right person for Russia, the retired trombonist replied: “Putin is the right person.” .

Therefore, the attempt of some media to present St. Petersburg as the “criminal capital” of Russia and thereby cast a shadow over Yakovlev from the murders taking place there turned out to be extremely inadequate: “Nezavisimaya Gazeta” (dated 05/06/00) came out with an editorial about St. Petersburg: “The Land of Unfrightened Killers,” On the eve of the elections, NTV launched the series “Gangster Petersburg”. In the words of Vysotsky, “there are no more of them there than in Moscow” - and in Russia as a whole. This is our common problem.

As for the demarche of the St. Petersburg “Unity” (which, by the way, was not welcomed by its State Duma faction), which suddenly - within a few days - spoke out against Yakovlev and for Artemyev, the voting results clearly showed: unrealistic statements do not have a real impact on the city’s electorate.

And from the point of view of common sense, attempts to link the name of the St. Petersburg governor to the failure of our hockey team at the World Championship looked completely absurd - well, of course, this was also a way to hit his popularity.

Meanwhile, the reasons for this failure, if you really want to understand them, in my opinion, are as follows.

At the turn of the 80s - 90s, the outflow of our hockey players to the NHL began - in pursuit of a long dollar, because there were no other reasons for this: the level of our hockey was in no way inferior to that of North America. In parallel, some (and not the most honest) hockey players launched a campaign to defame our best hockey coach at that time, Viktor Tikhonov (to whom they owed much of their skill), which was readily picked up and inflated by the liberal press. As a result, the spat upon Tikhonov found himself on the sidelines of the hockey process.

The Russian team won its last gold medals at the highest level under the leadership of the great hockey players from the CSKA star team, Boris Mikhailov and Vladimir Petrov. And this is no coincidence. In the Soviet Union there were two real hockey coaching schools - Dynamo and TsESkov, which were symbolized first by the names of Arkady Chernyshev and Anatoly Tarasov, and then by Vladimir Yurzinov and Viktor Tikhonov.

Absolutely all our successes in the international arena since 1963 are connected with these people. Just like the domestic successes of Spartak and Krylya Sovetov are associated with Vsevolod Bobrov and Boris Kulagin, who were nurtured by army hockey.

Both Mikhailov and Petrov are students of Tarasov and Tikhonov. Since they were removed from the national team, and Petrov, as a result of intrigues, was removed from the post of head of our hockey federation (replacing him with a man named Sych, about whose relationship to hockey until then absolutely nothing was known and who was subsequently killed in the dark circumstances), continuity in the hockey team was completely interrupted.

The current coach of the national team is Alexander Yakushev, who was also an excellent hockey player, but as a member of Spartak, and in the national team’s matches he shone almost exclusively against the Canadians, has no direct connection to this tradition. He has already proven his inconsistency as a coach by leaving his club again in one of the lower leagues last season.

Consequently, there were no professional reasons for appointing him as coach of the Russian national team. Just as there were no such reasons to remove Vladimir Yakovlev from the governor’s post.

I have no clear desire to delve into what exactly these reasons are. The job must be done - both gentlemen and comrades!