Putin's guards

The strongest feelings I experienced at the rally on June 12 were feelings of pity and shame. They were called, of course, not by the people who selflessly sacrificed their holiday weekend, and not by the organizers, who were broadcasting something from a distant podium, not by the festive policemen (their white shirts were in perfect harmony with the ribbons of the protesters), and not even by the riot police, relaxed due to the lack of a command to kill - "astronauts".

Conscript soldiers brought in to guard the city from protesters—that’s who was to blame for my unexpected feelings.

They stood in two lines at the entrance to the metro, surprisingly ridiculous in their green field uniforms against the backdrop of the townspeople, scantily clad from the heat. This uniform, obviously of recent production, inexplicably looked incredibly old-fashioned - as if extras from the set of a weak film from the times of the Great Patriotic War had been brought to Turgenev Square. Their faces... I won’t talk about their faces, after all, some of them were quite normal, boyish, and some even wore glasses... But their height! Almost all of them, wearing huge green helmets that seemed about to slide down over their eyes, were very small, shorter than me, and by today’s standards I was not tall - only 165 cm. Some of them were as stunned as and I said to passers-by with a nervous laugh: “Medvedev’s guards.”

I think he was wrong. Medvedev's pseudo-presidency accounted for only four years of these boys' lives: from 14-15 to 18-19 years. And for all the blessed Putin’s stability - 12 years. They were six when it happened. So, it seems to me that it is more logical to consider them “Putin’s guards.”

Why didn’t they eat up during the notorious getting up from their knees?!

Just don’t say that these are all children of the “terrible nineties”. My mother, a siege survivor, was ten in 1944; no one gave her more than seven. But by the age of 14, she straightened out and caught up with her non-Leningrad peers. The aunts who took her from the orphanage, although they scolded her niece for her excessive love of reading, fed her the same as their own children: Saratov region, chickens, vegetable garden...

But these guys haven’t caught up with their city peers. This means that they did not have any well-fed stability; they lived there in their villages and villages from hand to mouth.

I recently ordered an article from a good author about Peter’s reforms. I was looking for how to formalize it, and came across a study about the growth of recruits during the reign of Peter. Over 25 years it has decreased by 2.1 centimeters. From which the author of the study makes an obviously fair conclusion that Peter’s reforms somehow had a bad impact on the life of the people.

I have not found publicly available data on the dynamics of the growth of conscripts in recent years. But it would be interesting to compare - and understand whose “guardsmen” these are after all - these unfortunate boys whom it was so shameful and pathetic to look at on June 12th.