What is not ours is against us

Russian mentality after the war

Back to the scoop. Children, I suppose, no longer know what “anti-Sovietism” is - that was the name of all living things, and it was criminally punishable, because life went underground more and more, and by the time Gorbachev came to the surface, there was practically nothing left on the surface. “Len, let's open the borders,” Kosygin said in a joke to Brezhnev. - "What are you, we'll stay here alone." - "No, Lyon, you will be left alone"

In a nightmare, one could not dream that anti-Sovietism would return, only the word had changed. “Anti-Russian” statements are becoming criminally punishable, and amateurs collecting dossiers on “enemies of the people” are growing like mushrooms. They just opened a case against Dmitry Solovyov from Oborona for “anti-Russian” entries in LiveJournal: “You are trembling that everyone will find out what you have turned a free country into in eight years. How many innocent people are sitting in a pre-trial detention center, waiting for an unfair sentence for years. How many were crippled and how many were killed in the police department, from whom confessions were knocked out of what they had not committed - and all for the sake of monthly indicators of the fight against crime. Here is your success in the fight against extremists: since the beginning of the year, there have already been 37 ethnically motivated murders in Moscow.” (Since then, the killings have increased, they happen almost every day.)

Repetition of the past

The word became ambiguous: the anti-Soviet was against the Soviet regime, and the “anti-Russian” was sort of against Russia as such. Is it just a linguistic accident (“anti-Putin” does not take root, since it is far from just a matter of Putin's personality)? The language doesn't really make mistakes. The intervention in Georgia and the entire policy of recent years do not fundamentally differ from previous Russian history. Caucasian wars, forcible annexation of lands, arrests and executions of dissidents who were forced by pressure from above to take up arms. I read the documents of the Narodnaya Volya — as if it were written today: “Conscience, the consciousness of what is honest and what is vile, filled the air so much that even the government agents themselves were ashamed of their role. Much was done outrageously vile and cruel, but at least people understood their own vileness. The prosecutor was ashamed to look his victim in the eyes; the warden of the prison positively lost himself in front of the prisoner, for he felt himself to be an executioner. The mass pressed on them and paralyzed their impulses. And now? You look around you - it becomes sickening ... The revolutionaries, as always, fearlessly and without looking back go to the fight. But where is the public support? Cannibal Feast! There would not be the slightest dissonance if the correspondent immediately cut off the head from the corpse and, having filled the skull with wine, solemnly proclaimed a toast to the health of the sovereign emperor, the many-merciful Alexander the Hangman. Get used to it. We got used to it. Lord! There are things that you can't get used to. If a person is accustomed to pulling from other people's pockets, he is a thief. If a person has got used to the groan and squeal of those dying under a knife, he is a beast and a bashi-bazook. Nerves can get tired, conscience cannot and must not.

Written in 1880. A year later, the Narodnaya Volya killed Alexander the Liberator, aka the Hangman, because the reform to abolish serfdom failed. Freedom fighters also failed, turning into the construction of the same empire, only even more bloody and disenfranchised. Russia is not being reformed either from above or from below, the possibilities of reforms have been exhausted, having reached a dead end, it snarls and bares its teeth at its tanks.

Why should we?

Russia annexed and lost lands so often, attaching sacred significance to its great size - and it always wanted to increase it even more - that its borders in the minds of people seem to be blurred. Either our Poland, or not ours. What is not ours is against us. After the collapse of the USSR, Russia looked at the runaway republics with undisguised sarcasm: well, well, live without us, psychologically it was completely understandable, but geopolitically (which no one thought about for a long time, without taking the "younger brothers" seriously) - recklessly. Russia would like to keep Georgia as a zone of its influence - it was necessary to feed and stroke its head, given the poverty in which it vegetated and disorientation in space. "Why should we?" They should not, but then those in need find other patrons for themselves. Switzerland or Luxembourg are small and independent, they do not need anyone, but here they are wild, that is, peoples who have not learned how to equip their lives. Dying villages, open spaces overgrown with weeds, thieves and bloodsuckers - savagery. As well as the conviction that no one needs a “talking shop” (that is, diplomacy), the main thing is to be able to embed.

Russian constant

The concept of friend or foe in Russia was conditional in all respects. For serfs, the land was never theirs, any merchant or nobleman could fall out of favor and go into exile or hard labor. Kickbacks, raiders, racketeers, revolutionaries, prisons, dependence on officials, a sense of humiliation replaced by a sense of superiority - this is a Russian constant, like Planck's constant, a physical law. Living with this is hard for everyone, but you can change how you can correct your own character, only for this you need to rebel against your habits and attitudes, and not against your neighbors. Until now, only Russian literature has dealt with anti-Russian therapy, but Gogol, alas, has not become less relevant today. It's time. Otherwise - Nekrasov's “there were worse times ...”, borrowed from a little-known writer of the middle of the 19th century: “The devil knows what is being done of us. We are grieved with envy, we console ourselves with hatred, we become smaller - at least look at us through a microscope! We feel that we are falling, and we laugh at ourselves ... Huh? Truth? there were worse times - there were no meaner times! - this will be repeated, and the slogan "Glory to Russia!" never bring glory.