Dmitry Bykov. Bykov-quickly: look-13

Previously , I always bought the newspaper “Zavtra” , and to my colleagues’ perplexed questions about how much extra profit I was spending five rubles on this crap, I answered with some standard phrase about the fact that you need to know the enemy by sight. In fact, all this is nonsense, of course. Most of my enemies (of which, in principle, there are very few - I am a tolerant person) work in the liberal press. Well, what kind of Prokhanov is my enemy? We are unlikely to live to see a personal collision with him, because we prudently rotate in non-intersecting orbits, and if we were to get into an extreme situation with him, I am almost sure that he would behave better than many of my so-called like-minded people. Still, he is a consistent person, unlike his closest ally, the liar and coward Bondarenko . So I can’t say exactly why I buy “Tomorrow”. This requires merciless introspection.

Well, for example: I love watching horror films , examining the structure of a disgusting insect, and reading graphomaniac texts. And not all of them, not those in which one can detect a spark of talent, but just the hopeless, grave ones, the kind that are exchanged between amateurs. I love the congratulatory poems in the Crimean newspaper Soroka. “Beloved son-in-law! I wish you: may your family be a cup full, I adore you with all my heart, like your mother and my daughter” - I can see a mustachioed mother-in-law with a pot of festive borscht. I generally collect books from the fifties. Probably, what attracts me to this art is the same thing that attracted all its deconstructors, starting with Sorokin : what Kharms called “purity of order.” The insect is flawless in its own way, perfect with all its antennae, stingers, legs, zu-zu-itching sound and whitish mucus inside; in the same way, Prokhanov is impeccable and perfect in his own way. Unlike Bondarenka, who every now and then let loose liberal roosters, he consists of pure, unalloyed substance, and it doesn’t matter what kind.

So a somewhat masochistic desire to enjoy a coherent and consistent style (even an executioner one - Sorokin teaches us that everything integral is repressive and vice versa) pushed me to buy “Tomorrow” somewhere until the last year, when the integrity was violated and the style disintegrated. They just can't decide on Putin . The sacred slogan of the Russian opposition, “The worse, the better,” was transferred to Novaya Gazeta, which absorbed all the integrity, repressiveness, brutality and irresistible attractiveness of the organ of the red-brown opposition. Now I'm buying a "New" one. And I feel deprived when, for one reason or another, I am not in Moscow on Mondays or Thursdays. In today's Russian press there is nothing more delightful than Novaya Gazeta , just as on modern television, including provincial television, there is nothing more perfect than TV-6.

Let us first outline the fundamental differences between “Tomorrow” and “New”: after all, unconditionally placing them on the same level is unthinkable. Tomorrow has a program of action on a national scale. Although this program is not sufficiently developed in the positive sense, in its repressive part it is coherent and easy to implement. Novaya Gazeta does not have such a program. Her religion is built on pure denial, on rejection of the sinful world in which we live.

The government not only appears as a monstrous monster: realizing that its sanity at the moment is clearly insufficient to form a serious opposition, the Guseberezovites from TV-6 and the Novaya Gazeta journalists have the goal (perhaps subconsciously) to provoke the authorities into repression, and As soon as possible. As soon as this happens, the a priori rightness of the oppositionists, in accordance with Russian tradition, will become obvious. The authorities, which in our country are extremely rarely right, are always wrong in any forceful actions against the opposition. The former NTV really hoped for these actions, organizing two rallies in a row. Novaya Gazeta is literally dreaming about these same actions: when one day a computer flew there, readers were immediately informed that intrigues had taken place. The machinations are generally constant: in the hidden background of all publications there are hints of some kind of inhuman pressure to which we are all subjected here... but everything will be told in due time, if, of course, we survive!

Novaya Gazeta is generally good with pathos. It is impossible not to recognize from the very first words this warm, friendly style of Komsomol publications from the times of the late stagnation, this word “buddy” flashing here and there, these short, chopped phrases. The style is extremely easy to reproduce and is immediately adopted by even the brightest journalists who come to Novaya Gazeta. Let's try to imitate the hysterically masculine manner in which Novaya would react to this text: “Our former colleague Mitya Bykov wrote an article about us. Vile. More precisely, mean-spirited. Because it’s petty. It’s bitter for all of us. Also because, that the colleague was an ex. He was betrayed.

It's painful and sad. But we will endure. Although you still have to endure a lot. And that’s why it’s especially painful and bitter when someone hits you in the back. Former.

But we have to do it. Take it out. For your sake, reader. Your eyes, your hands, your lips. After all, this is all for you. Only. For".

That's about it. And also with a takeaway from Akram Murtazaev from above: something like “Dima was there, but he all went on air.”

Only here any objection is interpreted as a stab in the back, as a denunciation to the authorities, as a betrayal... The logic is simple: ours is either a traitor. There is a people's war going on. There is nothing to argue with, there are no arguments. The role of argument is successfully fulfilled by the stigma.

And I really was at Novaya Gazeta. I never worked there, but I published almost all of 1999. I wrote television reviews, spoke a couple of times on other occasions - in general, I loved this newspaper. That’s why now I react to it with such horror (there is no pain anymore - I can’t root for people who themselves trumpet so much about their pain). The intonation of Novaya Gazeta today is determined by the discourse of Bossart, Albats, Politkovskaya: well-tempered hysteria.

Anna Politkovskaya has always seemed to me to be a very good journalist. And therefore I cannot read, see and hear the Politkovskaya of today - whose ability to hear the interlocutor and adequately respond to him has already completely atrophied. All that remains is pain, I admit that it is quite sincere (in fact, I cannot allow anything else), but such pain excludes any possibility of an objective view of reality. And I don’t know whether a journalist should write about a war when for that journalist even the objection of a potential opponent is an unbearable trauma. Politkovskaya has one ironclad argument: I was there, I saw it. I helped save old people and children. Yes, she was, yes, she helped, yes, the elderly and children - but as a result of this position, any opponent of Politkovskaya, who has a different view of the Chechen war, immediately turns into a murderer. Well, Novaya Gazeta knows how to poison its opponent.

Bullying is a favorite pastime of our liberal intelligentsia, a signature dish, compensation for countless grievances in the courtyard when we were bullied. And we can do it too! When there are many of us, we are not afraid either! And we’ll hoot as well as you! What the Podgusin and near-Gusin press did to Yeltsin in 1999 was persecution - frank and 100 percent. I first doubted the honesty of Novaya Gazeta when I discovered a curious correlation in it: in the sea of ​​anti-Yeltsin publications, there was not a single anti-Luzhkov publication. Agree, in 1999 such freedom looked rather strange. There was also persecution of Sobchak, no less frank. Novaya was the only newspaper that did not write a word about the death of this enemy. It just didn’t respond at all: there was no such event, that’s all. The reason can be guessed: I didn’t want to write badly, but no merit was found...

There are no ideal publications, each is dependent to one degree or another, but we are not talking about bias now. We are talking about a measure of self-respect, about treating oneself as the ultimate truth - and in Novaya Gazeta there is more than enough of this, as in any sect. Devotees, fanatics, heroes - especially among innovative teachers - have long been Novaya's favorite topic. These teachers - a well-known type of them - have long been my favorite: how they know how to instill in children the consciousness of their chosenness, distrust of the inert and vile world of adults, faith in their personal doom and the immortality of their work! A sect does not exist without an external enemy. Only its presence gives a warm, inexpressibly pleasant feeling of cohesion, clenching into a fist. Novaya never tires of emphasizing what a friendly community this conspiracy of the doomed represents. And people who come to work there, even if they are twenty years old, instantly acquire this style - the consciousness of their rightness and general total guilt.

I remember how a twenty-year-old girl interviewed Igor Dygalo, the unfortunate press secretary of the Navy, who turned out to be the last one in the Kursk tragedy. Oh, these girls with burning eyes, with eternally sorrowful faces, with a minimum of life experience and intellectual baggage, but with an indomitable willingness to judge, not forgive, to speak on behalf of the country! The way NTV speculated on Kursk is a separate issue. But I remember exactly that interview: there was such pathos of righteous anger, such pressure of accusation... Dygalo justified himself so pathetically - at least as described by the correspondent... Novaya Gazeta did not want to understand that Kursk was a common tragedy. Our opposition privatizes all tragedies. She is the only one who truly cares about the houses that were blown up in Moscow (Blown up, of course, by Putin). It is the fate of street children and poor old people that keeps her awake. They are to blame for everything - and here we are the suffering ones, who are never responsible for anything - we only suffer. This is the profession: to suffer.

In general, it is now very difficult for us to object to an oppositionist: the terrible stigma of “Putinolysis” and “Putinoid” is always ready. While maintaining power, even the smartest and most experienced authors fail: there is no tradition, what can you do. We are accustomed to vilify, but we do not know how to show solidarity and sympathize. Which, perhaps, is fair, but it is very irresponsible: it turns out that our own unsulliedness is more valuable to us than any result. It was my dislike for this logic that separated us, for example, from Yuri Shchekochikhin in October 1993 . I remember that press club very well. Shchekochikhin and Gutiontov back in September postulated a supra-grip position, which has always been quite dubious for me. In October 1993, I asked you to admit the only thing: yes, tanks are a disgusting, extreme measure, it is absurd to support it, tanks do not need solidarity and support... But admit it honestly: these tanks protected us all - you, me... And we, the Yeltsin-era press, did a lot to ensure that they went. Recognize this responsibility and do not make the authorities the only culprit of what is happening! Andrei Sinyavsky, who has not eaten from the hands of this government, has every moral right to condemn it. He - but not us, whose freedom she guaranteed. At that time, frankly speaking, few people approved of this position. Then some came to their senses. But Shchekochikhin to this day does not consider himself responsible for a single national tragedy - the pathos of righteous accusation, the pathos of white clothes sounds in every line of his. But it is he who defines the spirit of Novaya Gazeta. Moreover, Stanislav Rassadin, who has long since had absolutely nothing to demonstrate except gnashing of teeth - senseless, incoherent and merciless. But let's regret his past services in popularizing Pushkin's drama ...

What can I say, the authenticity of pain in so many of the authors of Novaya is indisputable. But these people can no longer live without this civil pain, without more and more new reasons for it - it has become their pleasure, their calling, the basis of their existence. Their justification, roughly speaking. Because having neither a worldview, nor a positive program, nor their own concept of history, these people get by through pathos. We don't know how to do it! What do we care? We only know that this is not possible! And, God, how predictable, how unbearably banal all the talk of these people about true values ​​is! The values ​​are unchanged: art song, asceticism, Iskander, Bitov, Shevchuk... In Novaya Gazeta it is extremely difficult to find a truly non-standard point of view and a truly fresh look - especially when it comes to art, which here is also deeply ideological. Spiritual opposition in its purest form. But “Tomorrow” didn’t shout so much about its spirituality...

However, there is another similarity. Prokhanov’s cross-cutting character is an honest intelligence officer, a seasoned, well-trained warrior who suffers from his uselessness. There are a lot of honest people in the authorities. These real people are Novaya Gazeta's favorite heroes. Nameless heroes. They transmit countless wiretaps, organize leaks of top-secret information, and come up on the street to quietly, unnoticeably shake hands. And thank you with tears in your eyes. For the newspaper. Honest.

There is no hint here of the secret service origin of a number of publications, God forbid. This is more likely a reflection of a certain religious idea, a dream of real, deeply secret allies... We, professionals, know perfectly well the whole truth about these honest security officers, rooting for the country and transmitting films. They go to many newspapers, but not everywhere they take money from them... But this is not about the security officers, but about a dream, a fantasy in which its authors almost believe. Somewhere there is a True Honest Servant. Extremely Soviet image. However, didn’t this falsely trusting style, this strain, come from “Komsomolskaya Pravda” of Soviet times, not from “Scarlet Sail”? This dislike for excellent students and love for street children? The latter is quite understandable; innovators also prefer to work with street children - it is much easier to fool them than children from prosperous families. And the beloved reader of Novaya Gazeta is also, in a sense, a homeless child, confused, declassed, offended and embittered by the whole world... Everyone is to blame for the fact that he is like this, everyone! This reader was transferred by “Zavtra” to “Novaya”, which before our eyes is becoming a model of marginality.

Oh, gentlemen, shouldn’t I understand how I look in the eyes of a certain part of the public, saying all this. Published in the pro-Putin Ogonyok , scolding the opposition press, which is already at risk - the press, which alone can be read against the backdrop of complete servility... Let’s immediately remove the last objection: it has long been impossible to read it, the opposition one. Both boring and dangerous: infectious. I'm tired of watching how people don't disdain anything, how they rub their eyes with onions, how they ask for a heroic ending - they ask for it, however, quite unsuccessfully. As for Ogonyok, in August-November 1999, publishing anti-Luzhkov and Agtigusin texts there was more dangerous than publishing anti-Putin texts today. I walk around both Putin and the Putin cult there quite calmly, whenever I want - no one has censored it yet. But in Novaya Gazeta there are taboo topics and taboo views. And I don’t think that Boris Kagarlitsky, with his rather complex biography and evolution, can look like a whiter character than his colleague, political scientist Pavlovsky ...

Perhaps it would not have been worth writing all this if the talented Murtazaev had not become before our eyes the embodiment of banality and pretentiousness. If only one of my favorite poets, Oleg Khlebnikov, were not listed as the editor of the culture department. If only all these girls with sparkling eyes were not, in essence, very good girls with a sincere readiness for self-sacrifice. The trouble is that it was precisely such good girls, with exactly the same logic, who subsequently made a significant contribution to the events of the seventeenth year - and built on their own and our heads a system that was no longer to be complained against. If they themselves really wanted a beautiful death, then they probably shouldn’t have decided for the others... I don’t mean that Putin will soon become completely enlarged. What I mean is that his enlargement is the ultimate goal of his enemies. Remember how Yavlinsky perked up when NTV was closed down. He will not have another chance to become a national hero...

I don't like wrestlers. I don’t like honest, clean and decent people who shout to the whole world about their honesty, cleanliness and decency. I hate the very phenomenon of a priori rightness - a purely sectarian phenomenon and therefore extremely seductive. It's easy for us to be right. That's why I never want to be right with anyone. To awaken thought, to force argument, to break uniformity - for God's sake. But just don’t ensure yourself moral integrity.

That’s why I wrote about Novaya Gazeta this time, and not about something harmless like newly published books .