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How difficult was the task that Andrey Piontkovsky, a regular contributor to Novaya Gazeta, was doing when he was preparing for publication a collection of his selected publications, For the Motherland! For Abramovich! Fire! ”, I know well for myself: not so long ago ...

How difficult was the task that Andrey Piontkovsky, a regular contributor to Novaya Gazeta, was doing when he was preparing for publication a collection of his selected publications, For the Motherland! For Abramovich! Fire! ”, I know it well for myself: not so long ago I decided the same. And, re-reading even relatively recent (not to mention old) articles, I looked at what was written with some apprehension.

What if the point of view on what is happening has changed radically since then? What if he hit the sky with his finger, predicting what will happen next? What if the politicians, whom he spoke of with sympathy, managed to show up as the last scoundrels during this time?

Judging by what Andrei Piontkovsky writes, none of these dangers threatened him. And in 1998, and in 2000, and in 2005, he is still the same: smart, ironic, merciless and fearless.

Few people are able to write with such a sense of inner freedom, without thinking: will the First Person or any of his henchmen get angry? Will it not hint that it is time to shorten the emboldened critic? And wouldn't it be better to lightly step on your own throat, muffle the sound and lower the tone?

“No better,” Andrey Piontkovsky firmly answers himself and his readers.

It is unlikely that Putin will ever pick up his book. It's a pity.

“The Stasi is our president”, “The colonel who made a mistake in a century”, “Guarantor of the security of the Kremlin toilets” – this is all about the one whose name on state television channels and in the mouths of statesmen has long been no longer supposed to be pronounced without an enthusiastic aspiration.

Yes, and about others - without embellishment and with the removal of "all and sundry masks."

For example, about the "jug snouts and lascivious grins" of the president's closest associates.

Or - about Boris Berezovsky, who "discovered a new kind of political business - to blackmail the authorities by exposing his own crimes."

Or - about Mikhail Fradkov, who, "like a universal soldier, was a true-believing communist, then a democrat-reformer, then became a firm Putinist"...

And one more quote that is immediately remembered:

“The ten-year liberal revolution did not give birth to a free man, it gave rise to a new generation of slaves. Weighed down with the property they have acquired and therefore capable of much more servility and much more meanness ”...

Publicists, about whom such antipodes as Andrei Illarionov, Lilia Shevtsova, Eduard Limonov speak almost in the same - and very flattering - terms, are extremely rare. But even more so, they are valuable.

Academician Yury Ryzhov called Andrey Piontkovsky's articles "a breath of oxygen".

Read his book when it gets hard to breathe.