Valery Hiltunen. Leap Chronicle

Leap Chronicle
Valery Hiltunen

Publication date: March 1, 2004

For those who are born once every four years, namely on February 29, it is more appropriate to live away from Russia - where there are still wild tribes who dance at funerals: freedom, la, freedom, another lucky one has suffered to the envy of those who will continue smoke the vault of heaven with tobacco smoke... These paradoxically thinking dancers have one more feature: they come to name days empty-handed - it is customary for the hero of the occasion to give gifts to everyone who remembers and loves him. No matter how many of them come.

Big savings, we agree, for tight-fisted leap year Pisces.

Let us, however, walk with a cheerful pencil through the February pages of the world calendar.

Although it is not autumn, this month is very fruitful.

Especially at the very end of the centuries. It was in the nineties that, as a rule, there was a changing of the guard at the royal chambers and public places, the new kings ascended on foot to the throne, to the bed, to the buffet table and wherever after... The second Nicholas, the first Peter and Paul - and further into the depths times

Boris the First did the same at the end of the 16th century; Many people still know him by his last name: Godunov. Since he was not appointed, but was elected through the shouts of several basses, baritones and trebles, he can, in general, be considered the very first Russian president. The voting, however, was not that popular, and even then, who would have been able to collect two million votes in support of a candidate across the valleys and hills of the great swampy plain at the end of the 16th century? There was no such word in the Russian language - million, any large number was called “darkness”. Yes, the voters proudly said, there are tons of us, and tons of us, and tons of us, try, fight us! Yes, we are Scythians , yes, we are Asians with slanted and greedy eyes... By the way, the percentage of strictly Russian-speaking population in Godunov’s Moscow - this is for the information of skinheads - was much lower than today.

It just so happened.

Godunov still inherited that legacy. In 1584, the brilliant, educated (seventeen foreign languages, musical madrigals of his own composition), but very unpredictable and formidable Ivan forced himself to be respected (that is, speaking in prose, he gave an oak). He once killed two people at once with one blow of the knob - his own son and the last of the Rurikovichs, his own grandson, who was not yet born at that time: the Tsar's daughter-in-law suffered a miscarriage from horror when she saw her dead husband in a pool of blood. By the way, that quarrel over a woman, immortalized by the artist Repin, began. Ivan the Terrible did not like the frivolous tights in which the young princess was parading around the Kremlin, he reprimanded her in a rude manner, she, the fool, ran to complain to her husband, this and that - Cherche la femme, in general.

After Ivan the Terrible, for fourteen years, Fyodor Ivanovich, who knows what, was nesting on the throne, not at all formidable, but, they say, impotent. In Rus', every baton has long been passed on in this way, in complete, 100% contrast: after the bald man - the curly one, after the lean ascetic - the sleepyhead, the glutton and the drinker...

Under Fyodor, the people completely blossomed, there was almost no fear at all, and there was generally little shame or conscience in the Middle Ages. Crowds of homeless people roamed around Moscow, although not as smelly as they are today - the stench comes from meat, and our ancestors ate more on peas and turnips, so it was like in India, where even in Bombay, perhaps the largest in the world of slums - if there is not quite a fragrance, then the stench does not reign.

Godunov's first and most ingenious undertaking was the Stairway to Heaven. He gathered the capital's homeless people and ordered them to build the bell tower of Ivan the Great. There were no elevators then, and there were no Turkish migrant workers either, so things went slowly, thoroughly, and if Godunov had ruled us for more than seven years, you see, Moscow would have already acquired the highest point on the planet, although what happened is - impressive: for several centuries it was impossible to look down on that bell tower from anywhere. But she looked down on the markets and vegetable gardens.

It’s very important that the main point of reference is above the people’s heads, and not under the grunt.

During this grandiose construction, many former homeless people began to respect themselves and almost united into civil society, but that time it didn’t work out. Poles, Swedes, Shuisky, Mnishek, Susanin I. The usual whirlwind began, in which the Karelian miracle stone shungite , rubbed against it in exile played a special role: the unfortunate (seven children died one by one!) future mother of Mikhail Romanov, who, since he was also chosen , can be considered the second president of independent and sovereign Russia; between him and Boris II there were no presidents for almost four centuries. True, in 1917, both the right and left duo persuaded Prince Kropotkin to take the reins of power, but the prince was fearless, and he refused.

With his first act, Mikhail Romanov decided to benefit Ivan Susanin and all his descendants - a free economic zone was organized for them near Kostroma, no taxes for you, no police - just work, get rich. But such human trash quickly came to this forest offshore from all over the country, and so she drank and tumbled that this place turned into something like Courchevel , where the public does not work very hard, but eats quite a lot, just not so glamorous and without Ksenia Sobchak (she was born later in another place). The kings had to endure this disgrace out of respect for the will of their ancestors, but then they closed the shop, it wasn’t all Shrovetide for the cattle.

There were other significant events in February. In particular, the pioneer Cook being eaten is one complete joke. Nicholas II began the fight against Russian alcoholism - they say, under the influence of Nilus , who told him that Russia was not being drunk according to protocol by the non-drinking Elders of Zion. Yeltsin publicly yelled at Gorbachev. At the Moscow House of Cinema, ticketless spectators broke out a window at the long-awaited premiere of Andrei Rublev. About a hundred years before, the public was first allowed into the Hermitage, but without galoshes. Alexander Nikolaevich abolished slavery in Russia, Strauss performed his Danube Waltz for the first time, and one Englishman dug up a potato weighing half a pound in his garden, and this was in 1795, just a year before poor Pavel started his five-year plan for quality. Not everyone, by the way, knows that one of the first decrees he banned throughout the empire was piracy - in the sense of unlicensed reprinting of texts, which aroused the general discontent of the reading public and all sorts of malicious St. Petersburg citizens, who, having conspired, died of Pavel Petrovich from apoplexy with a snuff box according to a chapter overflowing with all sorts of projects. And at the head of this puzzling guard stood the emperor’s greatest favorite, Count Palen. He, however, was from Riga.