Dmitry Olshansky. Son of the Fatherland

In the early forties, the Germans in France arrested the venerable, long-bearded, nationalist philosopher (at that time) Peter Struve. A neighbor reported that Struve was friends with Lenin. It was saved by the fact that one of the Germans knew Russian - Pyotr Berngardovich pointed out that one from Lenin’s collected works. They looked at what Ilyich wrote about his “friend” and immediately released him.

Struve is one of the main characters in Modest Kolerov's journalistic collection, dedicated to political, historical and economic problems - in their logical unity. It must be said that Kolerov’s book is only one of the neoconservative works that have appeared recently. Among others - “Poetic views of Russians on history” by Maxim Sokolov, “Two Reformations” by Dmitry Shusharin . All these publicists are united, in addition to the intellectual justification of our “new reign,” by the fact that they present themselves as “liberal conservatives” - individuals who insist, albeit gently and in a civilized manner, on the preservation of the existing order of things. On the greatness of Russia as it is.

The main target of the book by Kolerov, a famous historian of Russian philosophy, as well as a newspaper and magazine author, is socialism in its various manifestations, the subject matter ranging from the collection “Vekhi” to the bombing of Kosovo, from Umberto Eco to Chechnya. It must be said that in its first, initial premise, Kolerov’s pathos seems to be legitimate and worthy of approval - indeed, private property and personal freedom as defining values ​​can hardly raise doubts. In his extensive critique of socialism, Kolerov implicitly relies on one of the best political and economic books of the twentieth century - “The Road to Serfdom” by Friedrich von Hayek, who decisively opposed socialist doctrines half a century ago.

But further in his judgments Kolerov makes a colossal semantic substitution. When talking about liberal conservatism (with a taste of freedom), we must not forget about what exactly is subject to conservation. This kind of British philosophical thought is based on those democratic institutions that exist in England, and only in England, from time immemorial - and therefore such liberal conservatism in any other country cannot be produced naturally, but only transplanted from a cutting from the British tree. The Austrians von Hayek and Popper, in order to become ideologists of the “open society,” first had to forget about the imperial history of their native state; moreover, they had, generally speaking, to escape from there. Kolerov proposes to build a “liberal-conservative” ideology based on the centuries-old traditions of the Russian land - in other words, to bring back to life such fundamental examples of domestic conservatism as serfdom, batog beatings and Jewish pogroms. As Bulgakov rightly noted, “if it’s with ramrods, then what have the red bows got to do with it, but if it’s red bows, then you shouldn’t hit with ramrods.” Indeed, British respect for individual rights and private property is in no way consistent with Russian autocracy and the Russian community. Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing to conserve in Russia; it needs to be created from scratch - and Kolerov’s innovations are not satisfactory. “The right path of classical Russian philosophy” leads him to the following thoughts, for example: “The state is an organic thing, based on religious values, both absolutely otherworldly and relatively thisworldly: family, property, internal freedom of the individual . ” However, a state built on religious values ​​is, for example, Iran, while in other countries there is freedom of religion, including the freedom to be an atheist and at the same time not a suspicious person, like atheists in Tsarist Russia, but quite a good citizen. Kolerov is not satisfied with atheism as a social position. “A person of Russian culture, who has clarified for himself the issues of faith and God, has almost no choice: in relation to which religion he should determine his personal religious life ,” he writes with pleasure. One must think that a person who has somehow decided for himself “questions of faith and God” is no longer Russian.

As for freedom, here Kolerov reveals a special hypocrisy - talking about “inner freedom” . In eternally totalitarian Russia, talking about internal freedom is as base as talking about the benefits of a diet in front of hungry children. Internal freedom is an intimate matter, a person will somehow figure it out on his own, but the fight for external freedom is a real, pathetically speaking, duty of a politician or publicist. And here, using Kohler’s favorite analogy - the history of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century - the model may not be the gallows lover P.A. Stolypin, the all-powerful prime minister, who challenged the elected parliamentarians “You will not intimidate!” (almost like the sailor Zheleznyak - “The guard is tired!”), but the cadet leader V.D. Nabokov, who fought for the acquittal of Beilis: a matter, presumably, of little significance in comparison with “internal freedom” and the triumph of the “historical inevitability of Orthodoxy in Russia” - sovereign theses of the publicist Modest Kolerov.