Lev Gursky. Who killed grandpa?

Chubais in Russia is bigger than Chubais. It's a sign. Magic bogeyman. Masonic brand. Code walking on its own. It is not for nothing that Deputy R., a moderately well-fed politician in full bloom, led his deeply patriotic bloc “R” to victory only thanks to a simple mantra repeated from the television screen in non stop mode: Chubais must be imprisoned... Chubais must be imprisoned... Chu must be imprisoned... by... This mantra, like a mathematical axiom, did not require proof from the speaker. The population of Russia was already convinced from a young age that “the red-haired, red-haired, freckled one killed grandfather with a shovel!” Therefore, any attempts to justify themselves (“I didn’t beat my grandfather, but I loved my grandfather!”) were not taken on faith. Even though the mentioned grandfather himself tried to defend the freckled man, from time to time announcing that he was, in fact, alive and his handshake was stronger than ever ...

However, jokes aside. Even if we discard our black humor and the “red factor” that excites the superstitious masses, over the last decade Chubais has traditionally been charged with a considerable list of atrocities of varying degrees of severity. Among them are global ones: the sale of the country for candy wrappers, the total robbery ( together with the vampire Gaidar ) of poor old women and failed owners of two Volgas for a voucher. Lesser (though no less offensive) sins: taking away green money in a Xerox box and incredible fees for an unwritten, unread book about the same robbery of Russian old women. Don't forget to add to this the rolling blackouts in Russia (as well as Georgia and, it seems, the USA). And poorly hidden Jewry. And friendship with the terrible Koch. And a dozen nails in the coffin of communism (some are angry that he hammered them in, others that he didn’t finish them off). And the brilliant victory of the right cause in the 1999 elections (why did you support Putin?). And the striking defeat of a just cause this December (why did you criticize Putin? Why didn’t you criticize Putin enough? Why did you stick your head out at all? Wow!). In general, based on the totality of anti-merit, it completely resembles the infernal title of the One Who Eternally Wants Evil, and It Eternally Works Out, As Always.

Agree, this is impressive. Awe-inspiring. Inspires. That is why the desire of the first official biographer of Chubais, Izvestia columnist Andrei Kolesnikov, to shake mass phobias and create a book “complimentary to its hero” already a priori looked like a brave act and worthy of respect (albeit quite suicidal, like goring a calf with an oak tree or Mohammed's duel with the mountain). Moreover, the journalist himself burdened himself with an unnatural double task. On the one hand, the author intended to publicly change the sign of the myth, turning inside out the black magical cloak of his hero and exposing to the public the sparkling white (but also magical!) underside of the “living symbol of Russian liberalism.” On the other hand, the author dreamed of performing a miracle in the spirit of the finale of Aksakov’s “The Scarlet Flower,” that is, to peel Chubais out of his gloomy miraculous chitinous shell and reveal to the surprised world a mere mortal, with his “natural vulnerability and sensitivity.”

As a result, the inevitable happened: Tyanitolkai could not stand the two. The two hypostases of the hero remained to coexist separately in the book, without intersecting, like two parallel lines in Euclidean geometry.

Like the author of the book, its reviewer certainly sympathizes with the main character. And it’s all the more annoying to read Kolesnikov’s awkward text. On one hundred and sixty painful pages, Man-Chubais and Demiurge-Chubais continually replace each other, like characters from two different theatrical productions, entangled in the dusty scenes. Where Kolesnikov puts on stage the touching, thin-necked, long-haired, long-eared Tolik, where he sculpts the leafy image of an everyday impractical manee (a loving husband, an obedient son, a father trying to be caring, a passionate kayaker, a sincere bardo-lover, etc., etc.), there it turns out purely Soviet biographical lisp in the genre of a school play about a pioneer hero. The author’s attempts to write, as they say, “artistically” add a bit of Mexican “soap” to the pioneer play, which is why at other moments “an outwardly unsmiling (and, of course, kind inside. - L.G.) man with a steely gaze” can suddenly materialize. , a kind of spontaneous twin of some sternly fair and also internally crying Luis Alberto. In those few cases where the biographer clearly departs from the usual journalistic cursive and resorts to metaphors, their effect is unpredictable. One example. “The air of freedom in Budapest played a cruel joke on Chubais,” Kolesnikov says sincerely, and the reader is already thinking about the completely inappropriate analogy of the book’s hero with Julianseman’s Professor Pleischner...

It turns out even worse where the author begins to forge the medal profile of the iron knight of privatization. It immediately becomes clear that even from the cradle our hero was a rare workaholic, that he showed outstanding organizational qualities in his distant youth “on potatoes”, and was noted for his ability to understand people almost in his first year. Soviet hagiographical vocabulary here sometimes just goes off scale. Kolesnikov has little real biography of the hero. With disastrous delight, the author imagines how Chubais the People's Commissar "would have managed the same electric power industry during the years of industrialization, going from the director of a power plant to the head of the industry. There are no irreplaceable people, but such a person would be thrown into the most difficult areas: a crisis is a natural environment for Chubais." Sometimes it seems as if the author completely forgets that he is writing a popular biography with the average reader in mind (the circulation, by the way, is 20 thousand - like that of a well-promoted detective story). “No one at that time could have imagined that all of them were destined to reject economic gradualism... A period of conference-based international communication, no less significant from the point of view of the crystallization of ideas about economics, began... In this context, the content of the report itself is important... The mental situation presupposed only three types of understanding of the current moment..." If the author thinks that all this dull Volapuk from distant economic newspaper pages will captivate the reader's imagination, he is fatally mistaken.

The constant reproaches addressed to our democrats in power for their inability to explain their actions to the people are more than applicable to the text of Kolesnikov himself: even the initial, hottest period of privatization is spoken of vaguely and sluggishly, according to obligation. "Sturm and Drang" cannot be felt. Dozens of pages are devoted to routine, particulars, economic nuances of long-forgotten days, listing the names of respected ones - who would argue? - human associates. But the most interesting, from the reader’s point of view, moments (connected with the same xerox box, with the dynamics of relations with Yeltsin and the oligarchs, with the “writing business”, etc.) are given a few lines. Here Kolesnikov defends his hero in such indecent haste and in such general terms (otherwise we didn’t read the newspapers!) that it’s time to think: either the biographer doesn’t know everything about his hero, or he doesn’t say everything. Unfortunately, neither one nor the other brings honor to the author of the book, but only harms the main character.

In the end, there is a strong feeling that the biography of Anatoly Borisovich should have been written by another author. I do not mean, God forbid, that instead of journalist Andrei Kolesnikov, the book “The Unknown Chubais” should have been entrusted to Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolesnikov. I mean that the Zakharov publishing house, which published the book, has its own rich talent pool: the famous fiction writer Boris Akunin, who has just been born with the Japanese adventures of Erast Fandorin and a great doc in the bushido code. It seems that Akunin, creatively starting from his Fandorin, would be able to write a well-artistic and fascinating biography of Chubais, clearing the hero of suspicion (it is clear that Azazel killed his grandfather!), reducing boring economic figures to a minimum and favorably highlighting the main qualities of his new character - samurai inflexibility, courage, loyalty to the goal, the ability to turn defeat into victory. It would be very useful to remind about these things right now, at a time of confusion and vacillation. Otherwise, it’s really unpleasant to hear the lamentations of our democrats: “Eh, Tsushima-Hiroshima! Life is completely unbearable.” Yes, it's a problem. But not a disaster. Yes, horror. But not horror-horror-horror, damn it! Chubais happened to fall even lower - and nothing, in due time he rose again.