"Now we are veterans"

The current culture of offended feelings came to us not from Soviet times. In the Soviet years, the shrines existed either at a state -owned, completely non -living level (for a long time, it is better to just listen, for example, the song “Little Earth” or, if lazy to listen, remember, if age, “Lessons of courage” or “Lessons of the world” in schools allows), or at the level of a purely human level, which the official could not come in, but I could not physically come in, but I couldn’t physically know (I would call the film “The Belarusian Station” or if you take a visual image, veterans with signs with regiments in the square near the Bolshoi Theater), and these two spaces did not intersect in any way and did not interfere with each other, “some words for kitchens, others for the streets”.

No, the current, a culture of insulted feelings familiar to us - it is from later times, from LJ of the zero years. In general, the role of one, Domamutovsky and Rannemutovsky, LJ as the main or possibly the only social laboratory of Putin's Russia, as, however, we have much underestimated for the offensive-this is actually a good book we need to write or at least defend the dissertations. LJ was a parliament, and a church, and a rally platform, and a lot more. And while the Yarovaya deputy quietly met in his “apple”, the boys and girls forgotten now in their cozy hills came up with, without knowing it, the image of Russia of the tenth years.

In the summer of 2005, journalist Alexander Minkin printed his 1989 article in Moscow Komsomolets, which was not taken to Moscow News at one time-for some reason, only sixteen years later, Minkin decided to print it. The article was about the fact that, according to Minkin, the victory of Germany on the Eastern Front would become the opportunity to free itself from Stalinism at the beginning of the forties, and the global disaster would not have happened, because the Western allies would still defeat the Germans and Russia would become free. For the nineties and now impossible, the article in 2005 was now dependent between these two conditions - a criminal case or at least a state persecution campaign (as, for example, in 2009 against a sub -Rabbines ), of course, the article did not go unnoticed by Minkin. There was a collective letter against Minkin, a signature under which was collected in LiveJournal, and there was a case in Luzhniki when a certain blogger threw ice cream in Minkin at the MK readers.

A year or two, a scandal occurred with the temple of all saints on Sokol - in that temple inside the fence there were several commemorative plates in honor of all heroes of the White movement, and one such plate was dedicated to the leaders of the anti -Soviet Cossacks of the Second World War - the white generals Krasnov and the German Groupenführer von Pannwitz, who commanded the Cossacks of Krasnov and Shkuro in the rank The Supreme Field Ataman and the hanged one with them in Moscow after the issuance of captured Cossacks by Stalin by the Allies. They also fiercely argued about this board in LiveJournal, and the debate ended that one of the debaters one night (I know who, but I am not sure that this is public information, and it doesn’t matter already) came to the falcon and broke that board for pieces-they say, fascists, you will receive. Now, probably, everything would happen at a qualitatively different level-the Kiselev program, the request of Mizulina, the case of the Investigative Committee, but then the times in this sense were still quiet, so simply-a LJ with a sledgehammer came and solved the problem.

“Lesson of courage”, accompanied by people from the district committee and, it seems, was launched from the KGB to the theater square, drove a veteran with a sign with it, on which the regiment’s number, and they say, now, now we are veterans.

I remember so well those two long-standing disputes in LiveJournal, because I myself have been from LiveJournal, and those two episodes were episodes and my personal evolution-in 2005 I also signed a letter against Minkin, because how did it be, my grandfathers fought, and in 2007 I yelled at the user with a sledgehammer that I did not have to break the stove-and because it was vandalism and because The defenders of the plate also had their own truth. For documentary reliability, I will not formulate again, but simply quote my text for about the same years, here:

“A look at the Great Patriotic War as the Second Civil War, with all its non -obviousness, at least deserves to take it seriously. A million collaborators, hundreds of thousands of which after May 9, 1945 ended up in the camps of the Gulag - this is too much a figure to treat all Hitler’s free or involuntary Russian allies only as villains and traitors. I will not say that this applies to each of the Vlasovites, but the people who then made a conscious choice in favor of the Germans are probably worth understanding. This is now, when we look into the past from 2009, we understand that Hitler and Nazism were an absolute evil. But someone would try to explain this sixty-five years ago to a simple Russian person who survived at least collectivization and, by the way, who knew about the atrocities of the Nazis only from the articles of Ilya Ehrenburg, who, as you know, loved and knew how to “simplify”. The story of the Vlasovites is not a story about Auschwitz and not about the Holocaust. This is a story about people for whom the Nazis were the only alternative to the Bolshevik order. An alternative to camps and collective farms, the NKVD and the Lenin Komsomol. An alternative to unions of militant atheists, in the end. "

Remembering how my attitude to the war of 1941-1945 changed, I am not sure that those changes can only be attributed to some personal belongings-growing up, reflection, etc. We live in society, and any evolution of views is always associated with what is happening in society. And there was the fact that just since 2005 ( the appearance of the St. George ribbon as a new symbol on May 9 - probably this is a turning point), the authorities began to actively use the topic of war and victory to solve its current political tasks, the main of which, obviously, became the authorities, the self -proclamation of the only legal heiress and guardian of the victory of 1945. Calling that war (the term is not mine, I just gleaned it from the discussions about Shkuro and Pannwitz) “second civilian” or “Kolyma War with Buchenwald”, I argued not with the forty -fifth, but with two thousand fifth, especially since it was not difficult to argue - almost the entire system of arguments in favor of the “second civilian”, and not “the Great Patriotic War”, invented Alexander for a long time. Solzhenitsyn, paradoxically revered, by the way, by the late Putin. The expression “second civilian” still appears in some articles and books, but, apparently, it will remain an extremely marginal, radical and yet inaccurate term that has not taken root in the language for many reasons.

But now, in 2014, the wording “second civilian” in relation to war and victory acquires a new and rather paradoxical meaning, and it doesn’t matter whether it will take root or not-it is exhaustively accurate, and not at all in the “literary-Vlasov” sense, which also now seems to be something old-fashioned and irrelevant. There is already no Solzhenitsyn, there is no pannwitz, the second civilian is what is now. The artificial, provoked, cultivated public split - the victory of 1945, and the parade on Red Square, and the St. George ribbon, and “thank you for the victory” have already become symbols. The whole set of these symbols and values ​​has been updated and appropriated by the authorities, and in the Cold Civil War, which has been going on at least since the beginning of 2012, and with the beginning of Ukrainian events that has moved to some completely fierce phase, in this war everything that is connected with 1945 now belongs to only one of the parties. The “lesson of courage”, accompanied by people from the district committee and, it seems, was in full force from the KGB in full force to the theater square, drove a veteran with a sign with it, on which the regiment number, go, they say, now we are veterans. I don’t want to put up with this at all, but what can be done in this situation - the devil knows.

Happy Victory Day, of course, but, as one poet of that war would say, "nevertheless, yet, yet."