In society

On reputation in Russia

March 21, 2013 Mikhail Berg

The public reaction to the loudly unequisite denunciation of Mikhail Shishkin Putin’s regime, in which (reactions) I have already participated , raises one main question: about reputation. What in modern Russia should you have a reputation so that your words are heard adequately their meaning? So that the signifier and the signified coincide. So that no one suspects you of prudence and vanity, in an attempt to make a name on broad -Prophetic pathos? Are there any such people?

Of course, to someone like (about this “how” - we will talk again), but for me there is. Here Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich (coma) Ivanov, our famous philologist, called Putin Putin whispering a villain , from whom you can expect anything in this life, and I believed him completely, with some joy. It’s not that Putin the villain knew this without a coma, but that he said what he thought, and his motivation is, so to speak, a public, and not personal (conceited) character - that’s, they say, how brave I am, or what kind of prophet I am.

Olga Sedakova generally believes that motivation does not matter here. She is mistaken, with any statement we ask ourselves the question: who says, and only then what, how and why says. For both the coma Ivanov and Shishkin said that we knew without them, but in one case (in the case of Ivanov) his speech aroused gratitude to recognition and understanding, and in the other case (when Shishkin uttered words that are a liberal derived) - distrust. Why? Because coma Ivanov and Mikhail Shishkin have a different reputation.

Coma Ivanov is far from the first time sharply and mercilessly saying what he thinks, he did, and did publicly, decades, all his life; He publicly defended Sinyavsky and Daniel back in the mid-60s of the last century, choosing an inventive genre for this-a statement to the notary. Although the point is not that he said what he thought, he once again confirmed his reputation as a person who makes sense to trust. He put his life on one board with his statement - as if suggested, take my life of a witness, I am ready to pay it to believe me. And he proposed not somewhere, but in a scoop, whose cruelty cannot be compared with the cruelty of the Putin regime.

The same (in the reputational sense) is the figure of Vladimir Bukovsky - although this is a figure of a completely different plan. Not a thinker, but even more rarely in our Palestines-a makeman, in a modern way-an activist. But a person of such a sample, if we are corny to compare a person and his quality with metal (which, of course, is not only trite, but also doubtful), such, say, patient courage and nobility, that for me it was always reassuring that he is alive, that he lives with me, that his existence saves his reputation not only his own, but also an ethnos. Here, they say, the ill -wishers shout that Russian slaves and panties suffer for decades (centuries) cruel and dishonest, inhuman power, and Bukovsky’s biography itself testifies: not all panties and scoundrels, there are daredevils, which are actually few in any ethnic group.

Does this mean that everything that Bukovsky says and does always seems correct and undoubted? No, but the motivation, the quality of everything that he says is supported by his reputation, which is no coincidence from the Soviet era. That is, a person did not just take it and said the right words that Putin created a criminal regime, and his press was a prostitute, and made a completely different and much more valuable thing: he created respect for his fate, position, made any statement or rivers part of this fate, behind which we observe.

By the way, the mention of Soviet experience, that is, the duration of the period during which the instrument of reputation is created, is not accidentally mentioned by me. One of the main problems of our Russian culture is the gap between the intelligentsia (a layer of intellectuals) and the rest of society. Roughly speaking - the distrust of society in the intelligentsia. Total distrust, tragic. Because there is no such distrust of the layer of thinking people, people who generate meanings and models of authoritative behavior in any developed country. For it is precisely in this distrust that the reason for the inability of Russia lies to build a social structure - stable, consistent and adapted for embodiment in real life.

By the way, this was once again confirmed by the person whom I wanted to attract as the third example of the unconditional, in this case, scientific, intellectual reputation - sociologist Boris Dubin. It was he, in his explanation to the results of one of the latest studies regarding the attitude of society towards Stalin, that he said that terrible, irreparable things occurred with our Russian intellectual layer - there was no trust in intellectuals, they were not ready to take responsibility for the public past and the real ones, and society ceased to believe them.

At this statement it is worthwhile to hesitate. After all, in fact, Dubin confirmed what I am trying to say today: Russian intellectuals have no appropriate reputation that would give their weight to their seemingly fair words about the rotten Putin regime, about the state of lawlessness, about the total lies of the bureaucratic layer. That is, they tell the truth, but they are not believed. They analyze, conduct studies, which is no less valuable - they go out onto the streets, stand in single pickets or walk in the marches - and society in response: you are the snapping Moscow, you are a layer of the heroes that plundered the country. Like the heroes (indignant), we are intellectuals, we live at the expense of our intellectual abilities. No, the society says, repeating Pierre Bourdieu, you are part of the ruling class, in any case you are his servant, you in the dashing 90s helped the Soviet nomenclature to plunder the country, pretending that there was a struggle between democrats and communists, but actually created a screen for this theft.

And even earlier, with a scoop, they created a screen for the Soviet regime, pretending that the USSR is a normal country, with newspapers, magazines, literary prizes, you did it as a class, like a vaunted Soviet intelligentsia, but in fact a class of conformists. And you did it together and one by one, creating a certain reputation for yourself, which you would like to forget about today. You are trying to pretend that this past was not, that you did not participate in it, but in fact - participated, and therefore society does not believe you even when you tell the absolutely absolutely truth. But there is no respect for you. His (this respect) can only be earned for long decades of consistent and fearless activities, like the coma Ivanov, like Bukovsky, as Boris Dubin. But since such people are infinitely small, infinite, the influence of the layer of intellectuals in our modern rashka is infinite. And it is impossible to correct the situation at once, if at all. And if possible, then only by creating a reputation that they will believe in our incredulous, ill -owned, envious society. But how can he be different, if he was infinitely deceived and robbed for centuries. And Putin, it supports in many ways in the peak of us, in the peak of the intelligentsia, it does not believe us, and has the right to do so.

I don’t want to call names (just because of the unwillingness to talk about someone, carelessly), but look at those who are today in the world who make up today's intellectual elite or even those who are fighting for justice (really fighting), but at the same time has a very slurred part of the biography regarding the Soviet and post-Soviet era. You can’t jump out like a devil from a snuffbox, you can jump out, as Mikhail Shishkin did, but it turns out how he said today, the more questions arise about the period of his endless silence. The right to a loud word, the right to wake up by the hero, must be earned by the era of difficult words and deeds, but they were not there. Therefore, it seems that he told the truth, but it turns out that he lied, lied reputation, biographically.

We live in a society in which, like butter and water, two parts of it are not mixed. Water (society) is trying to squeeze out the oil, hoping that he can live without it. Oil (the intelligentsia) understands that it is impossible to live like this, but cannot do anything, since society does not believe him. Add to this a demographic catastrophe - the fact that, with all historical turns, the Russian authorities destroyed, first of all, who thought people who think and provoked (and still provokes) a distrust of the intelligentsia, and you will receive a vicious circle that someone has not talked about. The same Merab Mamardashvili, quoting Herzen with his doubt, whether the Russian national character will withstand such a hundred years of such despotism. He could not stand it, claimed Mamardashvili twenty years ago, broke. Because “culture is not a set of high concepts or high values. It is not this, if only because no values, no achievements and no mechanisms are a guarantee in this case. From any heights of culture, you can always break into the abyss. ” To help, if not too late, maybe only one thing - a reputation, if any. And for this, personal participation is necessary, continuous, long -term and graceful. In the understanding of history, in the articulation of complex, unknown and incomprehensible, in short - in participation, from which it is impossible to distract for a second.

Photo by ITAR-TASS/ Sergey Fadeichev