We woke up in a garbage dump

In an old, albeit new Russian actor's joke, the director explained to the performer: "You are a billionaire. You live in a castle on Rublyovka, on weekdays you communicate with the president and members of the government, and on weekends, taking a break from state affairs, you bathe whores in champagne." But then August came, the accountant ran in with a twisted face and, showing the director some piece of paper, ran headlong away. “So,” the director dropped after a pause at the Moscow Art Theater, “the surroundings are changing. You are a homeless person. You live in a garbage dump. On weekends you beg near the Biryulevsky department store.

The fact that on December 8 we can wake up in another country with a different landscape, Anatoly Chubais warned us for a long time, but to no avail. We did not believe, and in fact we were right. For in that other country they had been living for more than four years, starting from the day when the sick Grandfather saw in his director of the FSB the heir and continuer of the glorious democratic traditions. We lived in all this, watching mysterious explosions in Russian cities, the "exchange" of journalist Babitsky, the pogrom on NTV, the cleansing of TV-6 and the arrest of Khodorkovsky, listening to the Stalinist hymn and speeches of the heir about circumcision. However, in the lower house of our parliament there were still people who thought alike about the era, although sometimes they were embarrassed to pronounce their thoughts aloud. Now they are not there. And although we did not sleep with them on Rublyovka, we woke up on December 8 in the same place where they did. And together with them we begin to get used to the role.

It was possible to judge what words were written in the new script already on the post-election night. There, on that night, on live television, when the mercury column of Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces had already frozen to 4 percent forever, one democratic journalist gloomily said: “Vladimir Volfovich is honest in his own way - he says what he thinks. unlike Glazyev and Rogozin.

It was a new liberal vocabulary, which we now, after the defeat of Yavlinsky and Nemtsov, will gradually learn. We will look intently into the faces of the new people's deputies, sometimes revealing in them some human traits and secretly rejoicing. We will discover that the most right-wing faction in the Duma is, on the face of it, the terrible gentlemen of United Russia, kind inside, and sometimes we even want to bathe them in champagne. We will note, ashamed to admit even to our mistresses, that in our hearts we laugh at the funny antics of Zhirinovsky, and we will rejoice for Glazyev, because he is not Rogozin. We will marvel at Zyuganov's civic courage when one day he comes out and says that he does not agree with Putin on everything, and that his government is generally an anti-people regime. We will worry about the oligarch Vidmanov if he is imprisoned.

... One can, of course, complain about the electorate. To be amazed at how millions of representatives of the God-bearing people vote for a politician with the appearance and tricks of a small-town brawler. They vote for the velvety Zhirik even after he publicly shouted in the face of the Russian paratrooper general that he rejoiced at the death of his son in Chechnya. One can be saddened by the stupidity of this crowd, which votes for the stupid crowd of politicians from United Russia, who have no ideology at all, only love for Putin as an economic program. One can be surprised how in a country that defeated Nazism and laid down millions of lives in the Gulag, they vote for the Nazi attached party and for the Communist Party. You can, I say, clutch at your head, refusing to understand what is happening, but it’s better to try to understand it anyway.

For example, to understand those seemingly normal people who were leaving the polling station in Yessentuki under the guns of TV cameras. They were not shy and did not hide their choice after the terrorist attack: for Rodina, or at least for the Liberal Democratic Party. It was a sociology of direct action: voting for the Nazis in response to terror. So our Motherland, without quotes, fell in love with Putin after the Dagestan war and the bombing of houses in Moscow and Volgodonsk. So voted citizens in depressed areas, sitting without heat and light. This is how the Germans voted, protesting against the Versailles humiliations and their economic consequences. And in Russia, the connection between terror, poverty, frustration and voting for brown and colorless is the most direct.

The departure of liberals from big politics is a planetary phenomenon. As well as the appearance on the stage of a small, not a damn thing and no longer willing to understand a frightened, embittered person. And the stronger the fears fomented by the state, the lower the standard of living, the clearer the mediocrity and helplessness of the power policy of the special services that govern the country, the sharper the craving of citizens for these politicians and these special services. All the more hopeless are the cases of parties with a clear human rights ideology and adherence to liberal values. Even in those cases when they try to cling to power, either rejoicing at the "revival of our army", or trying to serve this government as economic specialists under the police regime. Late. Their "historical mission has been completed," as they now say in the Kremlin administration.

Election night is over. We woke up in a garbage dump and will rub our eyes for a long time, examining the new scenery and listening to fresh smells from the left, right and above. They especially hit in the nose after nine years had a chance to breathe the air of freedom. However, it was a long time ago, it's time to wean. "When you sit in the closet for a long time, you stop noticing the smell," once said a classic who had not seen a century of freedom. Let's trust the classic quote, find solace in it.