As an anti-adviser to anti-advisers...

It is a pity that the owners of the “anti-Soviet” kebab shop yielded to pressure from the head of the administration Shtukaturov and the prefect Mitvol - they dismantled the sign. Therefore, it is a pity that the officials’ demand is illegal. Because all this is an attack on freedom of enterprise, especially blackmail by firefighters and the SES. Because the complaints of veterans are meanness, baseness and stupidity. And also because the name “Anti-Soviet” requires you to take the blow and not bend.

There is no need to blame the cafe owners; you can understand them - they want to preserve the business. There is nothing at all to talk about with the Moscow bosses, stupefied by praising Stalin. But I would like to address the veterans who wrote the complaint.

It just seems to you that you have privatized patriotism, love for Russia and concern for its future. It only seems to you that your rest is well-deserved and honorable. It only seems to you that you enjoy universal respect. This was instilled in you a long time ago, but your time is up. Your homeland is not Russia. Your homeland is the Soviet Union. You are Soviet veterans, and your country, thank God, has been gone for 18 years.

But the Soviet Union is not at all the country that you portrayed in school textbooks and your lying press. The Soviet Union is not only political instructors, Stakhanovites, communist labor shock workers and cosmonauts. The Soviet Union is also peasant uprisings, victims of collectivization and the Holodomor, hundreds of thousands of innocent people shot in Chekist basements and millions tortured in the Gulag to the sounds of Mikhalkov’s vile anthem. The Soviet Union is an indefinite psychiatric hospital for dissidents, murders from around the corner, and in countless camp cemeteries there are unmarked graves of my friends, political prisoners, who did not live to see our freedom.

You were so indignant at the “anti-Soviet” name because, it’s true, you were guards in those camps and prisons, commissars in detachments, executioners at execution grounds. It is you, Soviet veterans, who defended Soviet power and then were treated kindly by it, and now you are afraid of the truth and cling to your Soviet past.

Vladimir Dolgikh, chairman of the Moscow Council of Veterans, who, in fact, submitted this petition, was a political instructor during the war, and then made a party career, eventually becoming secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. Older people should remember this surname. Veteran of totalitarianism! It was during his time in power that people were imprisoned for anti-Soviet activities; no wonder he reacted so strongly to the cafe sign. You, Vladimir Ivanovich, are from that gang of communist criminals who tried to destroy our country, and then managed to happily avoid trial and punishment. Now you are resurfacing again to justify your past. The Soviet past is bloody, deceitful and shameful.

And I come from the anti-Soviet past of our country, and I will tell you this. In the Soviet Union, besides you, there were other veterans about whom you would not want to know or hear anything - veterans of the fight against Soviet power. With your power. They, like some of you, fought against Nazism, and then fought against communists in the forests of Lithuania and Western Ukraine, in the mountains of Chechnya and the sands of Central Asia. They raised camp uprisings in Kengir in 1954 and went to a shooting demonstration in Novocherkassk in 1962. Almost all of them died, their memory is hardly protected by anyone, squares and streets are not named in their honor. The few survivors do not receive benefits or personal pensions from the state and live in poverty and obscurity. But not you, the guards and admirers of Soviet power, but they are the true heroes of our country.

Our sleepy society has not yet realized all this. It is still unable to appreciate the significance of the anti-communist resistance, nor to honor the memory of those who died in the fight against Soviet power. Our society is still under the hypnosis of Soviet propaganda or, at best, looks indifferently at its past, not understanding its significance for its future.

Why are there Soviet veterans - Stalin's falcons and Brezhnev's sycophants, freedom stranglers from the party of Vladimir Dolgikh. Seemingly normal people live obediently and not squeamishly in the world of Soviet symbols and names. They read Komsomolskaya Pravda, work in Moskovsky Komsomolets, play in the Leninsky Komsomol theater, live on Leninsky Prospekt and don’t even ask to rename it. What difference does it make, they say, what you are called. Indeed, living in cleanliness or in dirt - what's the difference?! And they perked up only when the veterans were offended by Soviet power. Oh, how can this be combined: so that it is democratic and so that veterans are not offended, they must be respected.

Yes, those who fought against Nazism should be respected. But not the defenders of Soviet power. We must respect the memory of those who opposed communism in the USSR. They defended freedom in an unfree country. Is their memory worth anything in Russia, which calls itself democratic?

It's time to stop hypocritical lamentations about the feelings of veterans who are offended by attacks on the Soviet regime. Evil must be punished. His servants too. The contempt of descendants is the least of what the builders and defenders of the Soviet regime deserved.

Photos by the author