At the Lukomorye

Valeria Novodvorskaya continues Russian history lessons* Lesson No. 2

In the beginning was a miracle. The Slavic tradition, the most ancient, the deepest - is an ardent faith in miracles. No one knows and never knew where to look for Lukomorye, and then the same thing will be with a hail of kitet. But the Slavs knew how to believe in it.

Ivan Bilibin. Illustration to the "Fairy Tale of Ivan the Tsarevich, the Firebird and the Gray Wolf." 1899

The Drevlyans talked with the goblin, the forest and dollars were full of visions, the gray wolves rolled the princesses, and good mermaids, which were called Beregini, sat on the branches. The Slavs were born poets, but faith in miracles will ultimately lead them to irrational, blind, unreasonable faith in socialism and communism, in Lenin and Stalin, as in some new prophets. And this belief will begin from faith in a good king ... Naive, a fairy tale instead of a road map, conceit and egocentrism-all this was stylized by Ershov in the “Humpbacked Horse”: “And on the tower of the stars is an Orthodox Russian cross.” To approve their faith in distant space - they did not agree to the smaller Slavs.

Many peoples are won by younger sons. But only we have these younger sons - also fools part -time, winning thanks to only a miracle. Either pike, then horse-humpbacked. And from Emelek and Ivanushki, it was not so long to the Russian “miracle gods” who went barefoot with Suvorov through absolutely unnecessary Alps, and then to those workers from Mayakovsky’s poem, who were in the icy mud, chewed the wet bread and chanted: “And the whisper of proud water and over: Four years later there will be a city-sard”. And after 20 years - communism, as we were promised.

And didn’t the miracle at the cost of their ruined “genialissims” of lives are hungry and cold soldiers with obsolete rifles, who with their dead bodies stopped a beautifully armed Nazi army? And the Solzhenitsyn Matrena and his own, who is daring for free on her and chairman of the collective farm, is Ivan Denisovich, who was thrown into the camp without any guilt and even there, hungry, honestly builds a thermal power station for a miserable ration. From such miracles it becomes scary.

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The fiery waves of invasions of the steppe excluded survival alone. And it had the most terrible consequences

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The Slavic tradition was humanitarian. Until the yoke, our ancestors did not know torture, did not know the death penalty and even prison. Instead of a prison, Kievan Rus had a “band”-something like an IVS (temporary detention center). But a little north, in Scandinavia, there were torture and executions.

Yes, the Slavs were warriors, his father laid a sword in the cradle of a newborn son, recognizing him, but in case of hunger, the Slavs did not take the girls into the forest and did not leave them there, as the Scandinavians did.

Back in the VI century, future Rus' was the land of political asylum, they fled from tyrants, and then fled from the authoritarian Byzantium. The Slavs fought off the steppe, they defended themselves. But this rare tradition was diluted with communitarianism. The Slavs could not live by individual families, "on bran", like Norwegian bonds over the fjords. The fiery waves of invasions of the steppe excluded survival alone. And it had the most terrible consequences.

The Russian community, which neither reforms of Alexander-Libertyr, nor Witte, nor Stolypin could destroy the predecessor: Verv, the rural community with circular guarantee, which Olga tried to dissolve. Verv together paid taxes, tribute and even held responsibility for the crimes of its members. All this will end with collective farms, in which they first drove by force, and then, in 1992, they could not dissolve and this was ruined by farming.

Our distant ancestors were strong, naive and nonsense. But it does not always go out on Bulat Okudzhava: “Oh, it would be pure thoughts! And the rest will be followed. ” Not applied.