Dmitry Shusharin. Prisoners of the Gatchina Kingdom

Prisoners of the Gatchina Kingdom
Dmitry Shusharin

Publication date: March 10, 2004

So - a captive - they called Paul the First. Now I don’t remember whether this formulation is in Merezhkovsky’s play or invented specifically for Vitaly Melnikov’s film , but the definition is accurate. After the coronation, the autocrat remained in the fabulous kingdom of Gatchina, where he spent the first part of his life.

Do I want to compare the president, who from his youth was deprived of information about the history and modern life of the country, to the unfortunate Pavel? Yes and no. That is, exactly as much as Vladimir Putin is one of us.

On the one hand, he is surrounded by practical people. The St. Petersburg palaces are gradually being taken over. There are the most serious reasons to believe that Ivan Rybkin’s troubles began after careless statements about the business side of Putin’s activities. And Kasyanov, judging by many circumstances, was removed for not understanding the party line on issues of further privatization . It's like that. But at the same time, the arguments of those who consider the appointment of Mikhail Fradkov as insurance against the likely consequences of a completely incredible boycott of the elections sound very convincing.

However, what don’t they say! They are already predicting the removal of the “siloviki” from power . Why not? Anything is possible for the captives of the fairytale kingdom who find themselves free.

Although, it would seem... It seems that generations arrive, people are renewed. People - perhaps, but not the government, which surprises with its average age. The youngest are German Gref (born in 1964) and Alexey Kudrin (born in 1960). The rest are older .

This means that they come from a fairy tale, just like all of us. Biological age, of course, is not the main thing, although in this case it is an essential characteristic. And not status - if we are talking about the whole country. Western observers are surprised that people from the poorest regions and weakest social strata, whose situation has worsened over the past four years, would vote for Putin . Yes, because a fairy tale is more valuable than life. More precisely, no one ever made it to life. Everyone remained in their own Gatchina kingdom, and now the leaders of the European Union are discussing how to set up a cordon sanitaire against Russia, Syria and Iran .

Here we have the “Putin majority”, “administrative reform”, “conservative revolution”, “siloviki” and so on, so on, including terrorist attacks and self-destructing new buildings . For outside observers, the above means less and less. Europeans advise themselves to “keep an eye on the Russians,” but they understand that we are talking about some possible, future threat, but now everything is like that ...

The image of Russia merges into something single, indivisible, which went out of fashion back in the nineties, when Gorbymania was replaced by fear of the Russian mafia and other things unnecessary in everyday life. Since the Russians are not going to grow up, since they are carried away by their president, who does not part with the infantilism characteristic of all intelligence services in the world, and especially the Soviet ones , why drag them into the adult world? No, of course, it’s not bad that Chukchi boys who have become rich buy themselves expensive English toys, but we’ll stop there.

Ultimately, these boys and several journalists of different intellectual and professional levels will represent the entire Russian society. Observers there need to interpret the local fairy tale simply and clearly: once upon a time there was a perestroyka - and now the siloviki have come. There was Sovietology - now Putinology . Russians use a few more stamps, but they are for internal use, and the Russians themselves are not very interested. There is no interest in one's own life, there are only folklore clichés .

In general, this seems to be the most amazing thing: there is life , but there is no interest in it. Not quite like that, of course: books are written, plays are staged, and businesses are run. But you can’t wait to become seriously interested in the most important aspects of living together, national development, and political strategies. They prefer fairy tales - all of their own. And not to say that this is a specifically Russian trait: all nations live their own fairy tales, but every civilized nation has an institutionalized fairy tale common to everyone, and every free tribe has a common myth.

We have either an institutionalized myth or a multitude of fairy tales for almost everyone... For every member of the so-called expert community, writer, plumber, thief, and everywhere else. Yes, it seems unpleasant, not like with people, but one thing pleases: so far the evil storytellers have not united the magical people, although even the young and healthy seem to find the story about the “unbreakable union” and the “red project” very sweet and tender.

So for now there is a dead zone, a transition from a fairy tale to life, from pieces of an epic to, albeit fragmentary, but still an awareness of reality. And against the backdrop of these processes, the question of which of the security forces will take possession of the Ust-Zaplyuyskoye field may seem like a trifle. And yet this is life. In which completely folklore characters continue to act.

These are the semantic traps you encounter at every step. Where can Putinologists figure this out?