Upper layer

How the nomenklatura became the elite in Russia, or rather, took its place

Before any talk about national elites, a dispute flares up about the very meaning of this concept and its variability. They remember the line of the famous song: "Who was nothing, he will become everything!", Predicting radical changes in life and power....

Before any talk about national elites, a dispute flares up about the very meaning of this concept and its variability. They remember the line of the famous song: “Who was nothing, he will become everything!”, Predicting radical changes in life and power. This cry is ancient; Cromwells and Robespierres proclaimed it even before the composition of the Internationale, but I’m not even talking about our Razins and Pugachevs. The promise that authorities will change, that justice will rise is the driving force behind revolutions, but talking about how authorities are established and power is established is a separate issue. This theme is clearly reflected in the fate of the people of Russia, especially that part of it that becomes the upper, guiding layer, on which it largely depends how the grains of former societies are ground into flour for new, not always edible, breads.

Power is the domination of some people over others. The sorting of members of one society has always taken place, since ancient times, when there was a struggle for a warm place by the fire. Today, the concept of a warm place has expanded and majestically elevated, hiding behind lofty concepts of national tasks and state goals. Purposeful states are not squeamish, splicing vocal propaganda, the army, the police (including the secret police), the courts and much more for self-justification.

States, for all their diversity, have always singled out rulers and sorted out subjects. What exactly - with a hippopotamus scourge or a police baton is beaten with this sorting of the slow-witted, is not of decisive importance. Several centuries before our era, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle declared that at all times there were, are and will be only three types of state power: Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy, that is, the power of one, the power of the few and the power of the majority. But Aristotle warned that all authorities easily slide into perversions: monarchy into tyranny (uncontrolled, cruel rule), aristocracy into oligarchy (the power of a narrow group of moneybag politicians), and democracy into ochlocracy (the power of the mob). Aristotle's teacher Plato believed that whatever the state, it always consists of three communities - Elites, Guards and Slaves ...

We learned the correctness of ancient Greek predictions from our own experience. Large volumes have been written about Slaves and Guardians, and the Elite turned out to be very diverse. It included the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, and senior officials. It turned out that in our country it can be appointed as part of the apparatus of power, but in theory it can be determined by public opinion and consist of the most respected people. It's good if both of these principles are combined, and the vertical of power intersects with the horizontal - an elite made up of people respected in society, recognized, constituting a layer capable of yelling at the bully and appeasing conflicts.

I will immediately note that it is not easy to separate the smart from the fools, and it is restless to determine who is who, according to this principle. But, since it is necessary to sort citizens, everywhere they do it in their own way.

In traditional India, everything is determined at birth; it is impossible to move from caste to caste, from one social stratum to another, if you are a Hindu, that is, you profess the main religion of the country. One of the most tearful plots of Indian cinema is the love of representatives of different castes, who should never be together, let alone get married. However, this problem is to some extent worldwide. Remember the sad romance of Dargomyzhsky about how “He was a titular adviser, she is a general’s daughter” and for this reason they could not get along (nothing can be done, the general belonged to one of the first four layers of the Russian noble classification, and the titular adviser was only only the ninth class out of fourteen, not even having the right to pass on his noble title to posterity). The upper ones could descend to the lower ones, but the lower ones themselves had to know their place. The farther to the East, the more this principle was unshakable; at one time in Japan they did not understand Leo Tolstoy's novel "Resurrection", where the master did good, in their opinion, to the yard girl, having slept with her and thus honoring her, and in the novel this is presented as a tragedy ...

The English tragedy of Princess Diana began with her appointment as a bride to the Crown Prince by nobility, and not by attraction. In Britain, human thoroughbredness is firmly embedded in traditions, knighthoods are rarely awarded by the monarch, the House of Lords concentrates the most noble and titled, "sirs" and "peers" are sincerely respected. As the English classic D.B. Priestley, 20 out of 30 English people know which class they belong to and are very proud of it.

In the United States, a lot is determined by money. Americans believe that if income control is clear and fair, the dignity of a citizen will eventually be reflected in his bank account. There are clubs for rich people, there are areas where these people live: the American national elite is, first of all, a showcase for success in life.

The aforementioned alignments are possible in well-established societies, which are fairly frank and understandable, but not in our country, where for a long time, especially since Soviet times, too much has been hidden and is never put on display. The insincere state does not promote human frankness. The line that we have has not grown old for a long time: “Bottom is the power of darkness, above is the darkness of power.” Moreover, the authorities are diverse: monetary, sovereign, secret and all kinds. Property indicators in the Soviet years were secretive, today's tax department also does not fumble with irreverent curiosity through the bins not assigned to it: this category can hardly be a topic for discussion. Pedigrees? The people were weaned from them throughout the Soviet period. It is difficult to condemn some for ignorance of the roots, although their ancestors were illiterate and poor, which means they were trustworthy in the Soviet way. Others can be forgiven for self-protective forgetfulness if their ancestors were educated and noble, and therefore subject to destruction. The Bolsheviks sought and in many cases achieved ruptures in memory, a failure in human ties, especially those that go back into the depths of history - otherwise they could not have survived.

I will not forget how my mother burned photographs of her ancestors, among whom were nobles, and one grandfather even in a beard and with a sash over his shoulder. Until the beginning of the thirties, she was listed as “deprived”, because of her class inferiority, she did not have the right to study and was able to get out of this state only thanks to her marriage to my father, who was of a completely proletarian origin. On the paternal side, I know only about one great-grandfather, his name was Ivan Petrovich; that's all…

Meanwhile, in the former Russian Empire, genealogies were honored, there was an official "Armorial", there was a "Genealogy Book", there were "Columns", lists of the oldest genealogies, and those recorded there were "pillar nobles". The nobility absorbed people of different national origins, and in the so-called "Velvet Book", the register of the oldest clans - from Rurik - there are many glorious surnames, including, according to old reference books, Lithuanians, Jews, Swedes, Greeks - I will not tire you listing the Scottish ancestors of Lermontov or information that the family of the historian and writer Karamzin descended from the Tatar Kara-Murza ...

Merchants and peasants remained, as it were, on their own; playing important roles in life, but not taking a direct part in the management of this life. The clergy had their own system of ranks - from patriarch to deacon - which was respected in their circle. The main pillars on which the empire relied were officials, military and courtiers; the mutual correspondence of their ranks and ranks was determined by the Peter's Table of Ranks, approved by the emperor on January 22, 1722. Military, civil and court ranks were divided into 14 classes with detailed rights. “The fourteenth class,” wrote the Marquis de Custine, “is the lowest ... The people listed in it are called free. Their freedom lies in the fact that they cannot be beaten, for whoever strikes such a person is prosecuted by law. Nikolai Gogol, for example, was released from the Nizhyn Lyceum with the title of "real student" and with the rights of this very 14th grade.

So, in our state before last, each cricket was obliged to know its hearth. The rank could not be obtained without service, all ranks had names - from chancellor for the first class to collegiate registrar for the 14th. A nobleman could move to the next class only after serving in the lower class for 3-4 years. For special merits, this period could be reduced; this was done publicly and by special decree with the rationale for the benefits (this is how an officer receives an extraordinary rank).

Officers received hereditary nobility along with epaulettes; army service was not very profitable, but honorable. Still, a military man, especially in the guard, had to himself, for his own money, order uniforms for himself, buy a horse, dress and support a batman. Everything, even the number of horses in a team, was normalized. Generals had the right to harness six horses in a train, colonels and majors - four, junior officers - a pair. Civilians also had hierarchical signs. An official of the 14th class, Gogol, walked, court and collegiate councilors traveled around the city in droshky, state councilors - in carriages. There was a legal sorting; von Bradke, in his notes published in the Russian Archive, notes that if the visitor came on foot, “the servants in the hall did not rise from their seats, and you yourself had to take off your outer dress.”

The emperor by a special decree could assign a rank out of turn; so Pushkin, for the new year, 1834, received as a gift the court rank of chamber junker, this was the fifth class, just a step below the generalship. In vain we were told in Soviet times that the great poet was offended - the rank was very high. Pushkin could be offended by the only duty of the chamber junker: to be on duty at imperial balls and during solemn ceremonies. But they didn't ask him to...

The system was far from ideal, but public with undisguised privileges and strict observance of order. Non-nobles, having entered the civil service, could receive the lowest, 14th, class no earlier than 10 years later. But in the future, moving up the career ladder, they could establish themselves and even claim hereditary nobility (from the beginning of the 19th century, this also required a university education). The ranks were supposed to be respected, they were obliged to be mentioned, uniforms were required to be worn, there were also awards of various degrees and different prestige ...

Before the establishment of orders by Peter I (there were eight in total), there were monetary differences. From the introduction of orders until 1845, any degree of each order brought hereditary nobility (from the middle of the 19th century - only the highest degrees). In all such cases, there was also a vowel, quite strictly observed, order. Even with the introduction of the Table, Peter I issued a decree stating: "If someone above his rank demands honors for himself or takes a place above the rank given to him, then for each case he will pay a fine - two months' salary" ...

The problem of bureaucratic vanity is eternal (remember - Khlestakov pretended to be almost a member of the State Council). One can recall the special arched bells, the right to ringing which in the city was granted by a special order, according to official ranks - well, just like flashing lights with yells now. Officials sometimes cared more about their privileges than about business. A century and a half ago, the educator of the future Emperor Alexander III, K. Pobedonostsev, inspired his ward: “Everyone healed slipshodly, as if every business should go by itself, and the bosses dismissed their subordinates to the same extent as they disbanded themselves.” What has changed since then, except for the style of presentation?

Without delving into the processes of directive improvement of the environment, I only want to note that societies built according to clear rules and fairly open are capable of self-purification - never complete, but always noticeable. Issues of everyday decency, reputations, which in our time are ignored by many, were recently still vital. A person claiming respect in society did not have the right to "lose face"; until the very beginning of the twentieth century there were duels, there were courts of honor. A person who was not given a hand had to shoot himself with the offender, shoot himself or be cast out of society - all doors were closed to him. A prerequisite for the pre-Soviet elites was decency, which under no circumstances could be called into question. The officer's formula: "To God - the soul, life - to the Fatherland, heart - to the woman, honor - to no one!" went far beyond the army, respected under any circumstances. The nobles who lost at cards put a bullet in the temple, not wanting to live in poverty, but not paying the loss and living in dishonor was even worse. Such a concept of honor was not a lordly invention, an abstraction, as many were inspired in the post-October country. Pushkin and Lermontov died in duels defending their good name; they could not do otherwise. On parole, they borrowed and entered into thousands of deals. Herzen, in his memoirs Past and Thoughts, recalls how, in Moscow captured by Napoleon and already burning, his father was brought to the French emperor, and he asked if he could deliver him, Napoleon, a letter to the Russian Tsar. “I don’t know,” the nobleman replied. - The path is long ... ". “But can you give me your word of honor that you will do everything in order to deliver the letter?” repeated Napoleon. "I give you my word," Herzen's father replied. "That's enough for me," Napoleon said and handed him the package.

I will not entertain you with other examples of honesty, archaic in many modern terms. Moreover, at the turn of historical eras, when society learned to live “according to the rules”, there were many contrasting and eloquent examples. What, for example, is the call addressed to white officers in the Crimea captured by the Reds, when, on the word of honor of the victorious Bolsheviks, the officers were offered to voluntarily surrender, guaranteeing them life and freedom after surrender. But the surrendered officers were immediately tied with wire in pairs so that they could not swim out, and thrown into the sea. It's time for class criteria...

In 1917, many decisive turns in life took place, among them a moral one. The hereditary Russian nobleman Ulyanov-Lenin, the son of a drunken Georgian shoemaker Dzhugashvili-Stalin, and the descendant of a wealthy Jewish merchant Bronstein-Trotsky joined forces in his organization. In the turmoil of the revolution, the most important classless formula in the system of former values ​​was destroyed: "Honor - to no one!". Another non-class concept, nobility, was also rejected outright; he was included among the clown signs of the former elite, since class apartheid did not tolerate sentimentality ...

Looking for a word to define those who then rushed to power, I do not want to use either their invention of “workers and peasants” or “working people”, since this is not true, or the “louts” that existed during the revolutionary years or the recently resurrected “cattle”. It seems to me that we have a word for designating such an audience: impudent, not very cultured, but insisting on its right to be just such a “goon”. The zhlobocracy that seized power in the country was murderous, throwing away the old living standards and not replacing them with anything life-giving. I do not want to say that among the activists of the coup there were no idealists who really believed in universal freedom, equality and fraternity. But they didn't set the tone. Spiritual mob rushed into the streets, blowing up safes in banks, robbing estates and tearing precious salaries from icons. It is not strange that spiritual robberies were going on simultaneously with material robberies with slogans like "Let's throw Pushkin off the ship of modernity!" or "Shoot Rastrelli!". People who called themselves revolutionaries, but quenched their insurrectionary ardor in robbing wine cellars and raking out goods from broken windows, were not afraid of anything, forming the notorious “dictatorship of the environment”, lawless mass violence, which seemed to “exonerate” from personal responsibility: “Everyone does this ! The punks, who came to power, at the same time habitually called on the people to sacrifice their lives in the name of the Great Utopia, but immediately built for themselves systems of protection from their own people in the form of various Chekas.

In the society overthrown during the coup, public opinion, reputation, "good name" existed, powerfully influencing events. The Bolsheviks attributed all this to "bourgeois prejudices", turning off several more "lines of the old life" - among them democracy, freedom of speech, a market economy with competition. The authorities eradicated the ability of citizens to independently assess the situation, which was considered an important quality of the former elites. The servile belief in the wise omnipotence, the unjudicious power of the System, backed up by the power of its repressive apparatus, was planted. State mythology was guarded by all the forces of the army, government, security agencies and propaganda subordinate to them. The so-called popular, proletarian power did not condescend to the opinions of the people, instilling in them that those to whom the party would instruct would think, and the rest would be forced to obey. In Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" there is a mention of people who ended up in Solovki even because they inappropriately giggled at the party call. Moral norms were clearly defined by Lenin: “Our morality is derived from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat… We do not believe in eternal morality and expose the deceit of all fairy tales about morality.”

It is very interesting to observe how the mass consciousness was reorganized when the old moral and social norms were abolished. The Bolsheviks lied that from now on ordinary workers - workers and peasants - will become the elite in society, and cooks will learn how to manage the state. But for starters, they recommended enriching themselves by wandering through other people's bins, because, they say, righteously acquired wealth does not exist. The aristocracy, the officers, the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia were mercilessly purged from life. The slogan "Let's renounce the old world!" became a line of a mass song, but, as one of the poets “mobilized and called up” by the new government formulated: “He who sings not with us is against us!”.

Redneck became lawlessness, not tyranny, as many believed. Tyranny is at least some laws; the Bolsheviks did not even formally have them for a long time. The writer Korolenko sighed: "No one knows who can arrest him and for what." Vasily Shulgin, an authoritative politician in the old days, recalled from Kyiv: “I stopped for a moment at Bolshaya Vasilkovskaya, which is now called Krasnoarmeyskaya, where our club of“ Russian nationalists ”was located. In 1919, the members of this club, who did not have time to escape from Kyiv, were shot by the Bolsheviks according to the list. They found an old list from another eleventh year and shot everyone they managed to capture.” Ivan Bunin tried to understand the reasons for directed hatred, looking at the new owners of life in Odessa: “I met a boy soldier, ragged, skinny, foul and drunk to smithereens. He poked me in the chest with his muzzle and, staggering back, spat on me and said: "Despot, you son of a bitch!" A little further: “Day and night we live in an orgy of death. And all in the name of a “bright future”, which supposedly should be born from this diabolical darkness.” The murder of the present in the name of an uncertain future is a common thing with us, but this time society was writhing like never before.

Groups of the population, which constituted the most influential, most authoritative part of it and had never existed separately, became unnecessary, because from now on society had to be homogeneous, like semolina. I forgot to mention the merchants, who were now also being eradicated, forgetting about the merchant Morozov, without whose help the merchant Stanislavsky-Alekseev would not have founded the famous public theater. The merchants Soldatenkov and Sabashnikov spent millions on publishing books for the people. The fabricator Tretyakov created a Russian art gallery, Bakhrushin founded a theater museum at his own expense. S. Schukin assembled a gallery of works by French artists of a new direction, where everyone who wanted to get acquainted with painting was admitted free of charge, and his brother P. Schukin created a museum of Russian antiquities ... I don’t remember the naive merchants who fed the revolutionaries. It was them who were in plain sight, the rednecks-winners called for robbing in the first place.

It is clear that normal workers and peasants did not go to rob, but the “dictatorship of the environment”, regulated by the handy lumpen, who rushed to the fore, did not allow them to work either. Lenin shrugged his shoulders in relation to the public, who were in no hurry to cash in on someone else's expense: “The slogan “Rob the loot!” - a slogan in which, no matter how I look at it, I cannot find anything wrong.

For a long time, the new owners did not have confidence that the captured country would be able to keep it to themselves for a long time, so a lot was done by them quickly, “on a gop-stop”. A personal letter from one of the creators of October, Nikolai Bukharin, to a friend was published: “Denikin near Tula, we are packing our suitcases, there were already fake passports and “petit-meti” in our pockets, and I, a big lover of birds, seriously planned to catch parrots in Argentina. But who, if not Lenin, was completely calm, and said and predicted: “The situation has never been worse, But we have always been lucky and will be lucky!”.

Everything was done feverishly quickly: the coup took place on November 7, but already on November 10, 1917, Peter's Table of Ranks was canceled, press censorship was introduced, on November 22 all fur coats were confiscated, on December 11 schools were separated from the church, on December 14 the state monopoly of banks was introduced, On December 16, all ranks in the army were abolished, from December 21, all previous codes of laws were abolished, and "people's courts" were founded on the basis of "revolutionary legal consciousness." Lenin clarifies: “The scientific concept of dictatorship means nothing more than power unrestricted by anything, by no laws, by absolutely no rules, not constrained, and based directly on violence.”

In the documents of those years, I read a self-justifying pogrom appeal: “We must rob from the bourgeoisie those billions of people that the cunning bourgeoisie turned into silk underwear, furs, carpets, gold, furniture, paintings and dishes.” The new elite lived "according to the concepts" ...

... It is very important that not everyone supported the calls for robbery. Vladimir Nabokov recalls how in the Crimea, just before the flight of his family from Russia, “a robber-like figure crept up to us, all in leather and fur, which, however, turned out to be our former driver Tsyganov: he did not think about driving from St. Petersburg itself on buffers , in boxcars, all over the expanse of icy and bestial Russia, only to deliver us money unexpectedly sent by friends.

Robbery was a selective occupation, far from popular, but the redneck, which replaced the former elite, walked around without fear of anything. The lumpen dream came true, later formulated by Ostap Bender: “We will wear cambric footcloths, eat Margo cream!”. One can endlessly give examples of the revelry of such class morality, which has come to replace the traditional one. Prince Obolensky writes about a friend, a blind Crimean winemaker: “In January 1918, the Crimea was occupied by the Bolsheviks, the Golubev estate was turned into a state farm, and sailors-commissars settled in his house. When they got to his cellars, they got drunk and rowdy, and sometimes they came to show off over him. Golubev, from whom the Bolsheviks took away his most precious object, a typewriter, lived in the care of a coachman who fed him. He sat all day alone, with his cloudy blind eyes fixed on space. I leaf through other memories from the same timelessness: “Trotsky, stopping his train for five minutes in Kharkov, ordered the Ukrainian Central Executive Committee to introduce red terror throughout Ukraine ... From ten in the morning until five in the afternoon, the entire Bolshaya Novodvoryanskaya street was cleared of residents who were allowed to take only one change of linen with you from the apartment and nothing else. The apartments were left by the tenants in perfect order with furniture, libraries, grand pianos, linens, and utensils. The expelled people themselves were asked not to jostle in the street and not to whimper, but rather to go somewhere with their acquaintances, since already in the evening in their apartments the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Profiteering and Counter-Revolution, briefly called the Cheka, should begin normal work ... the streets of the city scattered "fives", which had in itself one communist for four non-party people. Fives, taking the chairman of the house committee with them, entered the apartments and carried out "withdrawal of surpluses." They took away cash, gold watches, rings, cigarette cases, spoons.”

It was scary to live in such hopelessness, especially since Dzerzhinsky formulated questions of class justice categorically: “For execution, we do not need any evidence, or interrogations, or suspicions. We find it necessary and shoot, that's all." That's all...

Longing for someone else's property constantly gnawed at the Bolsheviks, all attempts to protect property or dignity were punishable by death; the masters of life issued decrees without counting on their right to other people's pockets (such as: “All owners of steel boxes are obliged to immediately appear with the keys to be present during the audit of steel boxes” or “All gold and silver bullion is immediately confiscated and transferred to the public gold fund").

Comparing the way of life of the old and new elites is meaningless; it is described a hundred times how, after the death of Sverdlov, his safe was opened with diamonds hidden “just in case”. The main holder of the "emergency common fund" was Sverdlov's widow Claudia Novgorodtseva, who stuffed drawers and a chest with diamonds. The wife of Kalinin appropriated the sable fur coat of the murdered Empress, and the wife of Molotov took the wedding crown of Catherine II for a gift to the wife of the American ambassador. The new masters of life behaved like punks who had leaders, but not the elite. "Class instinct" in the absence of elementary decency only directed robberies and terror ...

Until now, there are disputes about the fate of the loot. The overthrown empire was one of the richest states in the world; the Bolsheviks cleaned out all the banks, all the apartments, pawnshops and shops in it. In February 1922, a decree was also issued on the seizure of church valuables, the biblical commandment “Do not steal!” canceled along with the temples where she preached. They robbed churches, churches, mosques and synagogues (there were more than 80 thousand Orthodox churches in the country alone, and some of them were consecrated hundreds of years ago). Gold coins, flattened icon frames, and crumpled chandeliers with monstrances were poured into sacks. Can you imagine how much was stolen in this way? If you believe the chatter that these riches belonged to the people, then for each inhabitant of the Land of Soviets in those years there would have been more silver and gold than for today's rich oil Arab. But instead of abundance, famine began in the country, fratricide raged, the notorious devastation came ...

The point is that goons fundamentally do not respect other people's, especially noticeable, lives; they are interested in the power vertical and are annoyed by even the minimal approach of people to independence of thought. Having exhausted the former social elite, the masters of the country were consistent: they would also kill the elite of the peasantry, thus provoking a severe famine, a famine. As for the workers, they will also be tried for a short delay in the workshop, and even an attempt to independently change their place of work will be declared a criminal offense. A little later, the great sculptor Vera Mukhina will build a work about the brotherhood of workers - the sculpture "Worker and Collective Farm Woman". Alas, another project by Mukhina, a 200-gram faceted vodka glass made according to her sketch, will become a symbol of twinning between workers and collective farmers driven into powerlessness.

It is impossible to remake the world on legal lawlessness. The riffraff who seized power fiercely uprooted the former elite, but the resulting vacuum could not be filled with executors, robbers of churches and banks.

In the most fierce tyrannies there are laws, albeit cruel ones. Rednecks live “according to concepts”, “by instinct”, also according to “class instinct”, which cannot be entered into codes. They do not need anything "very smart." In a well-known biographical study, Volkogonov tells how, in the years of the formation of Soviet power, a completely illiterate person was offered to Stalin for approval by the head of a large Russian region. The future leader spoke in the sense that he was a good Bolshevik who created a revolution, and for this reason he had no time to recruit abroad. The leader was approved.

Remember the classic Soviet film about Maxim, who was instructed by the party to steer the bank, where intellectuals in pince-nez and fur coats sat down? Barefoot, but inspired by the revolutionary spirit, Maxim disperses them and, clicking on the accounts, quickly organizes the work of the bank ...

The destruction of the national elite was only part of a revolution in beings and consciousnesses. Since it was necessary once and for all to inspire people why some of them live this way and others that way, another terrible bacillus was launched into society - envy, as part of class ethics.

The unfortunate Gogol Bashmachkin did not envy the "significant person" sensing the difference in their social positions. Today's American does not envy billionaire Bill Gates, understanding where he gets the money from and realizing the full measure of close control over the earnings of the "king of computer scientists." But when the criteria are skewed, bottom sediment can suddenly rise into the upper layers of the river of time; goons, like ice on the surface, can cut off the access of oxygen to the depths of clean water and destroy everything that lives there.

Envy is alive and contagious. Embodied in the calls “Take and divide!”, “Rob the loot!”, It wanders from the Bolshevik banners to the flags of the Somali pirates, the Philippine “forest armies” or the Marxist partisans of Bolivia. How instructive to see how quickly Robin Hood candidates turn into ordinary raiders! Observing warped minds, dirty in murders and robberies, the great thinker Nikolai Berdyaev called communism the "Philosophy of Envy", something like a contagious disease. She, this disease, turned out to be sticky, being indicated not only in pogroms and robberies directed by the authorities, but also massively growing in consciousness for years to come.

Prince Obolensky recalls how, in the company of the same ragged and robbed inhabitants of the country, he rode somewhere on a train without tickets, where sixteen people were crammed into a four-seater compartment, and without counting into the corridor. The corridor passengers were fiercely jealous of the fact that they were in the compartment. “We,” writes Obolensky, “we inspired envy, which at times turned into fierce hatred. The corridor waiters began pounding on our door in desperation and demanding to be let in ... For we were all hated “lousy bourgeois” for them, whom the people rushing to us threatened to throw out the window.

It was envy, and not a thirst for justice, that was introduced into consciousness. Justice became not a legal concept, but a class one, and nothing good was expected in connection with this. The omnipotent fear came. The playwright Afinogenov will write a play called "Fear", claiming that 80% of the country's population directs their actions precisely by fear (later Afinogenov would be shot). So that no one twitches, on February 21, 1918, the death penalty was restored in the country. On July 16, 1918, the royal family was killed, concentration camps were introduced on September 5, 1918, and from December 1918, the Cheka received the status of complete independence. As the Soviet leaders used to say, "the process has begun", the destruction of the non-elite people continued without stopping.

You know a lot about how canals were dug by the hands of convict slaves, dams and industrial giants were built, how the disobedient were uprooted for generations to come. On April 8, 1935, the death penalty was extended to children from the age of 12, and a post-war pet student was entitled to a year and a half in prison for escaping from school. What elite? What does the worker-peasant power and the people have to do with it? One of the creators of October and the creator of Soviet concentration camps, Lev Trotsky, will write, assessing the actions of those in power, whom he knew better than anyone: "Stalin's policy reflects the fear of a caste of privileged upstarts for their tomorrow."

When like this - in one fell swoop, directively - the old morality collapses, the rest of the landmarks fly to hell, and the compass needles begin to spin, confusing directions. In several religions, including ancient Christianity, chaos was considered the worst punishment, when the criteria for good and evil are lost. In the pre-Bolshevik past, far from everything was fair, but there was a society with clear laws, with an understanding of who is who. Domestic elites were closely connected, even related to European and world ones, understandable for them, never aspired to exist separately. Politicians, industrialists, merchants, writers and artists had their own places in Berlin and Paris, in Cannes and Baden-Baden (for many, these connections helped to survive in post-October times). People did not unite over the cordons, as Karl Marx called for the nationless proletarians, but were worthily included in the world elites, proud of their country and their origin.

Our social elite was called differently, sometimes called the aristocracy, understanding this term as something spiritual. The aristocrats were the wandering sage Grigory Skovoroda, the descendant of a black servant Alexander Pushkin, the recent serf Taras Shevchenko, the illegitimate landowner's son Alexander Herzen, and the descendant of an ancient family, Count Leo Tolstoy. Belonging to such an aristocracy had to be endured and confirmed by an impeccable reputation, a keen sense of justice, and a constant readiness to fearlessly defend justice. Since there was no smell of any class criteria here, the elite of the nation, aristocrats of any kind, poor, rich, spiritual and hereditary, the Bolsheviks shot and festered with a frenzy of people engaged in self-defense. Eradicated…

After October, the first formulas of the new elite, as expected, were proposed by Lenin, who said that, of course, the workers and peasants own everything in our country, but they are not yet ready to govern the state, so it is necessary to create an elite group of revolutionary party members (“A Dozen of Talented Leaders” , - as he said) and let this group get down to business. Later, on March 5, 1937, having done away with the nobility, the old intelligentsia, prosperous peasants and other remnants of the past, Stalin, already declared “Lenin today”, specified that the new elite would be 3-4 thousand of the best communists - this is the “highest command staff”, 30 -40 thousand - "officers", 100-150 thousand - "non-commissioned officers".

Sorting was thus streamlined, class and police principles in the selection of newly created self-proclaimed elites were strictly observed. Step by step, what would become the nomenklatura was formed, a predatory ruling group that had nothing to do with either the people or popular recognition. In those years, a joke was born that if the bourgeois non-party specialist Albert Einstein and the party brother from the Baltic Fleet Vanya Khryushkin had applied for the post of director of the Soviet Institute of Physics, Vanya would have been preferred ...

The former elite were thrown out with kicks, with hoots in pursuit, and some did not wait for the kicks. The great realist artist Ilya Repin painted pictures of the life of working people with great respect, but he never intended to entrust the heroes of his "Barge haulers on the Volga" with the management of Russia. After life changed and drunken marauders burst into his studio several times in a row with cheers-revolutionary cries, the artist left the country. The composer Sergei Rachmaninov, whose house was located in the center of Moscow, had his doors broken several times by thieves, and his favorite piano was pushed out the window to listen to it rattle on the pavement. After that, the composer chose to leave. People's Artist Fyodor Chaliapin looked and looked at all this and also left. I won’t remind you in what graveyards far from the Motherland the ashes of the writer Ivan Bunin, the ballerina Anna Pavlova, the entrepreneur Sergei Diaghilev, the artist Konstantin Korovin, the sculptor Alexander Archipenko, the creator of the TV Vladimir Zvorykin, the aircraft designer Igor Sikorsky, the composer Igor Stravinsky and many other children of the stunned countries…

The elite were trampled furiously - alive and dead. In order to streamline the thoughts of citizens and stop harmful philosophizing, the wife of the leader, Nadezhda Krupskaya, categorically ordered all Political Education to remove from libraries and continue to ban the works of dozens of philosophers, including Plato, Descartes, Kant, Spencer, Schopenhauer, who did not know about the Bolsheviks, but, according to Nadezhda Konstantinovna, could harm them. Even the philosophical writings of Leo Tolstoy were subject to seizure. In the autumn of 1922, 161 people, the elite of the then intelligentsia, were deported from the country without any trials or investigations: the rectors of Moscow and St. Petersburg universities, prominent scientists, journalists, writers, philosophers - N. Berdyaev, S. Frank, N. Lossky, F. Stepun, N. Bulgakov, P. Sorokin ... They took a subscription from everyone that he would never return - upon returning, the daredevils were threatened with execution on the spot. Reprisal against the intellectual elite was conceived long before the expulsion - in a famous letter to Maxin Gorky, sent back in September 1919, Lenin writes that the intelligentsia is "not the brain, but the shit of the nation." Based on what he said, he apparently did not consider himself an intellectual.

The people were hacked to the ground. Millions of people were killed, millions were expelled from the country: the whole structure of society has changed beyond recognition. The Bolsheviks dispersed the parliament and immediately declared that they would not tolerate any democratic struggle for power in the future. Lenin pointed out: "Everything that is done in the interests of the proletarian cause is decent."

The defeat of the elites, who did not know how to live by the new rules, was ruthless.

Korney Chukovsky wrote in his Diary how in the kitchen of the Petrograd “House of Arts” the former Prince Volkonsky and the former Princess Urusova bow gallantly, begging for something to eat: “There are French, English phrases in their conversation, but her fingers are swollen from last winter and on the face of the meek longing of dying.

The former elites were replaced by new masters of life. The German General Hoffmann recalled the details of the first meeting after October before the negotiations of the highest-level Soviet and German delegations on a truce: “Against me was a worker who was clearly embarrassed by the large amount of silverware. He tried one or the other cutlery, but used the fork exclusively for brushing his teeth. Directly opposite, next to the Prince of Hohenlohe, sat Madame Bitsenko, and next to her - a peasant, a purely Russian phenomenon with long gray curls and a huge dense beard. Once the messenger could not help smiling when, asked what kind of wine he wanted, red or white, he inquired which was stronger and asked for the strongest. Who was nothing became everything, earning the future right for the Soviet leader to knock his shoes on the UN podium, and for the first Russian president to conduct an orchestra drunkenly in Berlin.

... At the very end of the 20th century, the English writer David Cornwell, who published many popular novels, including ours, under the pseudonym Le Carré, asked me: “Why are your people so unsmiling, sometimes rude for no reason, are unceremonious?”. There was no bias in the question - David loves our country, wrote a lot about it, trying to figure everything out. “Imagine,” I began, “that all liberal philosophers would be expelled from you, many scientists, writers and musicians would leave, all estates and banks would be robbed, in addition, the entire House of Lords, all landowners and, in general, all titled Britons, all the inhabitants of Buckingham Palace, starting with the royal family…”. “Don’t,” the pale writer interrupted me, “I understand…”.

Three and a half centuries ago, in the British Isles, Cromwell shed royal blood, but this happened after a trial and did not entail the destruction of the entire structure of society. The felling of heads during the French Revolution is also incomparable in scale with what was happening in our country. The totalitarian regimes that seized power in European countries still tried to seize and use the already established society with its mechanisms. Only the Bolsheviks decided on the complete destruction of the surrounding world.

The new owners of the country, tirelessly chatting about the interests of the workers and peasants, from the first steps resolutely ignored these interests, immediately raising from the social bottom a vociferous and idle dregs that they needed as not like-minded people (what kind of thinking is there), but accomplices. The tipsy rednecks, boasting of what was now called “proletarian origin”, not concerned with either traditions or universal values, jumped over public morality, “moved class consciousness”, mocking the “shard of the smashed to smithereens” - a filthy intellectual in a hat. Later, Alexander Dovzhenko will sadly write that we have become the first society in history to coin the term "rotten intelligentsia." Nikolai Bukharin summed up the theoretical basis for this: “We need the cadres of the intelligentsia to be trained in a certain manner. Yes, we will churn out intellectuals, we will work them out like in a factory.” Apparently, such intellectuals no longer fit the definition from the leader's letter to Gorky.

The future Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin in the first post-October years rides in a cab, watching how the city is “flooded with a gray crowd, soldiers in overcoats offhand, idle workers, walking servants and all sorts of yarygs who traded from stalls and cigarettes, and red bows, and obscene cards, and everyone, everyone, everyone. And on the sidewalks litter, the husks of sunflowers, and on the pavement there is manure ice, mountains and potholes. Halfway through, the driver unexpectedly told me what many men with beards said then: “Now the people, like cattle without a shepherd, will ruin everything and destroy themselves.” I asked: "So what to do?". "Do? - he said. - There is nothing to do now. Now the coven."

Life broke down surprisingly quickly and in many places at once.

I leaf through a book on the rules of behavior in society, published more than a hundred years ago, and in the first chapter I stumble upon the phrase: “A decent society has its own grammar, its own language, its own code ... The etiquette of European peoples is based on good manners, which has a wide and serious meaning.” The book, which looked strange in Soviet conditions, tells how to properly communicate with table neighbors on the left and right, reminds you of which glasses and glasses you should drink from when changing wines. The authors of the book could not even imagine that we would soon have leaders of the state, sipping vodka from glasses, for fun (gee-gee!) Putting cakes on chairs (visitors to Stalin's dinners remember that Anastas Mikoyan was very fond of putting cakes, and he laughed together with everyone, cleaning off the cream from his trousers), and holding government balls to the accordion (at the Kremlin reception for the best women of the country in 1935, Marshal Budyonny played the harmonica, sang ditties, and when the phonograph with foxtrots was started, Stalin ordered "stop this vulgarity" ). I won’t retell your memories, according to which, during lunch at the same Joseph Stalin, the meals were changed in this way: the servants took the tablecloth around the corners with all the plates, forks, spoons, as well as half-finished and half-eaten and carried it away. Then a new tablecloth was laid, new dishes were arranged, and the feast continued. The details of how Nikita Khrushchev, at a dinner with the American president, tried to drink water from a bowl with a lemon slice, served to him for washing his hands after a fish dish, do not add anything. The process has started...

The new elite was in a hurry to finish off the old life, trampling on the old rules with rituals, swept the “legacy of the damned past” out of the way, at the same time destroying all possible shelters where a person could hide from the System - a separate apartment, a family circle, an established morality. More and more insistently, they demanded public confessions of loyalty to all this bacchanalia from people, leading the crowd to parades and rallies.

Korney Chukovsky, trying to understand what is happening, leafs through the classics: “Reading Anna Karenina, I suddenly felt that this was an old novel. When I read it before, it was a modern novel, and now it is a work of ancient culture... Now, in the era of Soviet girls, the Baltic Fleet, commissars, policemen, conductors - those forms of love, jealousy, betrayal, marriage, which are portrayed by Tolstoy, seem antediluvian " . What about being wise? In September 1918, divorce was simplified, church marriages were prohibited, Alexandra Kollontai, who ran the Bolsheviks in this area, pointed out: “The family has ceased to be necessary. The state does not need it, because it distracts women from labor useful to society, family members do not need it, because the state takes over the upbringing of children. Nikolai Bukharin clarified: “The child belongs to the society in which he was born, and not to his parents” (we must pay tribute to the “bukharchik” - that was what Lenin called his comrade-in-arms - on a personal level, his prediction came true; after the execution of Bukharin, his son was given the name of his mother and sent to a concentration camp, where he stayed until the "rehabilitation" of the fifties). The new elite cut to the quick, sparing neither themselves nor the people. Shortly before the destruction, the same Bukharin reported how the Leninists intended to drive humanity to happiness: “Proletarian coercion in all its forms, from executions to labor service, is, paradoxically as it sounds, a method of producing communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist era” .

New terms took root: "human material", "labor service", "manpower". The new elite pointed out to a man from the people a place where he, as if still a man, was perceived as a reproducible natural raw material, like a forest (during the war, this attitude continued - the answer of the Soviet marshal, who was horrified by General Eisenhower, is known, whom the American asked about unjustified combat losses Red Army: "Our women are still giving birth").

Ivan Bunin, shortly before leaving for emigration, wrote: “Didn’t many people know that a revolution is only a bloody game of changing places, always ending only in the fact that the people, even if they managed to sit, feast and rage for a while in the master’s place, always finally gets out of the fire and into the frying pan? The ringleaders, the most intelligent and cunning, quite deliberately prepared a mocking sign: "Freedom, equality, fraternity, socialism, communism!" And this signboard will hang for a long time - until they sit quite firmly on the neck of the people.

We sat down very soon, almost immediately. The redneck has become the nomenklatura, the elite, the new "panism", from the first days of its power, raking up fatter pieces. One of the most famous Russian monarchists, Vasily Shulgin, who at one time accepted the abdication of the throne of the last Russian emperor, talks about this in a funny way, looking back in time: “You cannot live without pans. What is "pans"? "Pan" is the class that leads the country. At all times and in all human societies it has been, is and will be so. They called him: the upper castes, the aristocracy, the nobility, the intelligentsia, the bourgeoisie, the elite, politicians, revolutionary democracy, and, finally, before our eyes, they are called "communists" and "fascists." Sometimes the ruling class is painted in national colors and then it is called either “Varangians”, then “Polyakhs”, then “Kids”. With all the difference, this formation of people has something in common ... ".

At first, the new “panism” with the old common ones turned out to have palaces, wine cellars, fur coats and diamonds - the new masters of life appropriated the property of the former elites. So what is next? Who will rule the plundered and intimidated country? In the "April Theses", composed in the revolutionary 1917, Lenin promised that after the seizure of power by his supporters, a completely new apparatus of power would arise, where "the payment to all officials in the election and replacement of all of them at any time is not higher than the average salary of a good worker" and in general, the country of the Soviets will be "a new type of state without a police force, without a standing army, without a privileged bureaucracy." The violation of these promises formed the basis of the society invented by Ilyich.

Shortly after coming to power, Lenin had another brilliant idea about the principles of organizing the elite. In a country that was destroyed “to the ground” and began to starve, he ordered all food supplies to be brought under control: “Not a single pood of bread should remain in the hands of the holders. To declare all those who have a surplus of grain and do not take it to the bulk points as enemies of the people, to bring them to revolutionary court. At the same time, of course, only the new government had the right to determine what “surplus bread” meant. “By distributing it,” Ilyich taught, “we will dominate all areas of labor.”

Ruthless to its own people, the Bolshevik government appointed its elite to positions that are called bread-cutters in prison, assigning grubs to the distribution. The new elite was formed from the very beginning not around principles, but around feeding troughs. The grasping reflex in the caste of bread-cutters developed and gained a foothold quickly.

Already in 1918, a canteen was organized for the "people's commissars", where food was served on looted Sèvres porcelain. Looking around the menu, Vladimir Ilyich complained that “Georgians can’t do without wine” and there were collectible wines for Stalin. Lenin personally supervised the delivery of food to the Kremlin canteens. The diet should have included several varieties of caviar, fish delicacies, cheeses, as well as mushrooms with cucumbers, to which the leader became addicted during his exiled family life in Shushenskoye.

Dzerzhinsky’s lunch menu for 1920 has been preserved, the same one when famine reigned in the country, and cases of cannibalism were recorded in the Volga region: “Monday - consommé from game, fresh salmon, cauliflower in Polish. Tuesday - mushroom hodgepodge, veal cutlets, spinach with eggs. Wednesday - mashed asparagus soup, bully beef, Brussels sprouts ... "And so on. In the meantime, the official press published tales of the leaders fainting from hunger. If the people knew the truth, they would make “spinach with eggs” out of someone. In the diaries of Korney Chukovsky there is a record of how enviously angry Maxim Gorky was, who heard rumors about the boss's rations: unable to feed. And there are provisions ... in Smolny there are a lot of caviar - whole barrels ... Yesterday I had one woman from Smolny, so they eat it all. Having seized power, the new elite legitimized their privileges without hesitation; in one of the most hungry for the people, 1922, the country's leadership allocated 200 thousand gold rubles for the purchase of selected food products abroad for the country's leadership. For other citizens of free Russia, back in 1918, the first Soviet culinary manual was issued by some K. Dedrina “How to cook on a stove and stove. A desktop cookbook for quick, simple, cheap meals."...

It's scary when normal food becomes a privilege. Returning to one of the themes of this essay, I want to remind you that in the former country, food was not among the exclusives saved for the elite. One of the most popular pre-revolutionary writers, Arkady Averchenko, already in exile, sadly remembered: “Go to Vienna or Maly Yaroslavets: a five-course dinner with chicken on the menu is a ruble ...”. In the book of the historian of domestic feasts, Professor P. Romanov, I stumbled upon the menu of a set lunch in the St. Petersburg restaurant "Tulon" (such restaurants were scattered throughout the country, and farther from the capitals they were even cheaper). So: an ordinary menu from January 15, 1897:

Soup marilouise. Consome Legum. The pies are different.
Sterlet in Russian.
Saddle of a wild goat with croquettes. Turn sauce.
Roast poulard and partridge. Salad.
Bavarian cheese.

The cost of lunch is 1 (one) ruble. A low-ranking official received about a hundred rubles a month, a worker - about 25, so such expenses did not look astronomical, even if you ordered a glass of wine or a glass of vodka in addition to the standard menu.

By the way, about vodka. The dry law, established by the tsarist government with the outbreak of the World War, did not last long after the October Revolution. Initially, the revolution was approved by moonshiners, true friends of the thirsty people. Remember how Isaac Babel described the life of the Odessa Moldavanka in those years: “The old man drank vodka from an enameled teapot and ate it right away, smelling like a happy childhood. Then he took the whip and went out of the gate ... ". No laws were in force in the ruined country, and on January 1, 1924, the production of alcohol finally became legal. Stalin formulated: "We settled on vodka, because we believed and continue to believe that if for the sake of the victory of the proletariat and the peasantry we have to get a little dirty in the mud, we will go for it." Got dirty. By 1936, the production of alcohol compared to 1919 had increased 250 times. Vodka has ceased to be just an alcoholic drink and has become one of the most important components of Soviet life. The phrase “You can’t figure it out without half a liter” has fully entered business management. Everything was clearly explained at the everyday, henceforth "class" level, especially since millions of posters said: "Life has become better, life has become more fun!" Anastas Mikoyan, one of the most daring demagogues and tenacious officials, reported from a high rostrum: “Some people think and say that we drink a lot of vodka, and they drink little abroad. This is a fundamental misconception. Under the tsar, the people were begging and then they drank not from fun, but from grief, from poverty. They drank precisely to get drunk and forget about their damned life. Sometimes a person will get money for a bottle of vodka and drink, but there was not enough money for food, there was nothing to eat, and the person got drunk drunk. Now it's more fun to live ... ".

Tales that all pre-Soviet life was a continuous poverty and hunger, planted in the gullible brains of the masses thoroughly. That is why I try to remind you that everything is not so simple and our ancestors once had a different life, not with sandwiches on a newspaper and not with barbecue or porridge by the fire, as the top forms of a feast. Somehow I came across a diary entry by Pyotr Vyazemsky that a long time ago his friend Alexander Pushkin “ate twenty peaches bought in Torzhok in almost one go.” A hundred years later, the October revolution happened, and I tried to calculate how many years and how many authorities had to change in order for peaches to reappear on free sale in Torzhok.

For many years we were prevented from understanding that in former times there was life in the country both this and that. And officials have always stolen, in all eras. I found a funny document that when Emperor Paul I was tormented by a runny nose, the doctor advised him to smear his nose with lard. Since then, at the request of the palace, there "for the treatment of the nose of the emperor" daily brought a pood of the best fat. There were significant one-time offerings. Catherine II, for example, used to receive a golden dish with pears, pineapples, peaches, plums, apricots for every New Year and was always impatiently waiting for this gift. Everyone knew about this, hurrying to publicly please the Empress ...

The Soviet elite lived in their own law - secretly and ashamedly. As Professor Y. Afanasiev recently formulated in his article “Russia's Special Path - Historical Running on the Spot”, “the attitude towards the population of one's own country as if it were alien, occupied”. So they spent the national budget, as it was convenient for them, the masters of life, continuing, in fact, a revolutionary robbery. At the same time, censorship made sure that not a single line about how the nomenklatura created a world separated from the rest of the people, with a separate health care system, housing and summer cottages, a system of their own security based on disobedience to laws binding on all others, starting with the rules of the road, got into the media.

At the same time, the System created by the rednecks did not trust anyone and, just in case, “held everyone by the muzzle”. The self-proclaimed elite of the Soviet world was not sure of anything, remembering how many were trampled under boots in torture chambers. Even later, when they were rarely trampled to death, they retained a cautious understanding, rooted in the genes, of the boss's lawless possibilities. This is how they live. Still.

Moreover, I believe, it is interesting for future researchers to trace the heroic destinies of people who defended their independence in the face of the System. The most talented, indestructible people, in spite of everything, gave birth to the brilliant Tupolevs, Korolevs and Sakharovs, through whose fates the zhlobsky steam rink also drove with impunity.

The authorities wanted the population subject to them to huddle in obedient flocks, walk in formation at two or three annual parades with slogans and choral singing. Those who insisted on the personal right to sing, draw or write were domesticated like artiodactyls. Creative unions were organized for them, which took control of writing products. The authorities, according to the observation of the Estonian writer Lilly Promet, talked about intellectuals casually, like a pig relieves a small need - on the go, without even stopping for such a trifle.

Shouting at the intelligentsia, the masters of life created a safe for themselves improvised version of cinema, radio, print, television (later), which smashed everything they were told to mind. Vladimir Nabokov shrugged his shoulders, trying to comprehend what was happening: “Oddly enough, Russia in the 19th century was a relatively free country, although books could be banned, writers sent into exile, and scoundrels and idiots went to the censors. His Majesty in sideburns could himself become a censor and a ban, but still this amazing invention of the Soviet era - a method of forcing an entire literary association to write under the dictation of the state - was not in old Russia.

Due to the old-fashioned way of thinking, poor Nabokov failed to understand the appeal of the Soviet poet Bagritsky:

“If they order“ Lie! ”- lie,
If they order: "Kill!" - kill.

...Soviet power ended according to the formula of the Nobel laureate, poet T.S. Eliot: “Not with an explosion, but with a squeal,” fell into post-Soviet life without a roar, like a rotten tree - it could not be otherwise. Almost a hundred years ago, the Bolsheviks gave birth to their own elite, the ruling class, this class arranged its own life and at the same time sorted society, changing the ratios in it. After which it collapsed, like the mentioned rotten tree or a wall without a foundation. Just a pile of dust. And yet, despite the fact that today the power in the country seems to have changed, I often recall the aphorism of the wise Stanislav Jerzy Lec: “A mouse dreamed of wings. So what, lady bat?" This is about us…

So far, there are three known ways to change the ruling elites. We have already gone through the first one - this is the Bolshevik break with unlimited violence. Another, almost reformist, method was used by Peter I, who established his own Table of Ranks. You can also buy the loyalty of officials with money and benefits, as they do in many countries in Asia and Africa. Thinking about the exit for us, I recall the famous film by Tengiz Abuladze "Repentance" with words about the need to find a way to the temple. But I also remember how, at the beginning of the film, scenes of repeated digging up and burial of the same corpse alternate: a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness to get away from the past, to learn from it.

Many of us are habitually afraid of authority, not respecting it, since this authority comes from no one knows where. At the same time, the intelligentsia looks peculiar, entering that half of society that is squeezed between 10 percent of the rich and 40 percent of the poor, while at the same time teaching both. According to the old domestic tradition, many intellectuals consider themselves smarter and more responsible than the people and the authorities, thus not recognizing their belonging to either side. Do they themselves want to be an elite, or are they going to overthrow the elites according to revolutionary custom? The question is constantly discussed and is hardly so simple ...

Elites are formed slowly, dying together with the society in which they matured (if this society really dies). Part of the elite of the former empire made attempts to adapt to Soviet life, but was thrown out of it. Those who rule in our society today are more fortunate. Many of them were formed in the former power structures, worked in them, crawled into the ranks of the then elite, and today they are trying to stake out places in the new one. The old nomenklatura is partly dying out, and partly trying to run the show again in the current semi-Soviet life. They have already achieved that governors and deputies are appointed, and bureaucratic privileges are going through the roof again. The nomenklatura, in a scholarly way, is converging, the Soviet nobility is growing into the current one, exchanging experience with it, retouching the pogromist Bolshevik images, stopping blowing their nose into the tablecloth and eating scrambled eggs with their hands.

The sovereign eagle looks thoughtfully in all directions at once. To the melody of the national, and formerly Soviet, anthem, the same author composed three mutually exclusive texts - for every taste. Meanwhile, the society remains without an elite. We have lost the ability to find logic in who has become more important than anyone - especially since such reflections do not affect anything. Tired people are like scattered atoms of a split molecule. Sociologists call this state "atomization of the environment." Wednesday, Thursday, Friday… Sunday is far away.

I don't know what will happen next. One well-known foreign journalist, when asked how he sees the process of returning our society to more or less understandable criteria for an internal structure, answered me with a question: “As far as I understand, you want to know how long an ear can turn into an aquarium?”.

And yet?