Summer 2014

The editor -in -chief of The New Times, Evgeny Albats, is that there are advantages in the vile: it removes halftones and shows the greatness of some and the failure of others

Valeria Novodvorskaya (May 17, 1950 - July 12, 2014)	Marina Khodorkovskaya (September 13, 1934 - August 3, 2014)

One of the strongest impressions of this heavy, painful on the tragedy and the loss of summer is the reaction of social networks to the events of the last week. Without exaggeration, the whole tape is devoted to ... food: what products the authorities have forbidden, but how to do without Kamamber and Prokekko. In this unit, the news about the wedding on August 6 Anna Karpova and one of the prisoners of Bolotnaya Alexei Gaskarov - attention - attention - attention! - In the pre -trial detention center "Butyrki." Gaskarova, like three of his innocent accomplices, is waiting for a verdict on August 18, and few doubt that a prison will be a sentence.

God sees, it was necessary to come up with these idiotic sanctions of power, so that the failure of the Russian educated class, those whom it was customary to call the intelligentsia to be so exposed. Moreover, it is curious that the moan on food comes not so much from the elderly people who survived the shortage of everything and everything, “there is no meat in our store, and there are no fish and will not be in the store opposite”-for them this is a visible reminder of the “holy”, “funnels”, “funnels”, there, and the samizhzdat and the impossibility of self-realization, how many of thirty-second-year-olds, which have all over the past years, have all over the past years. Methodically selects things are much more significant than a clearing. Select freedom. They select the right to speak. The normal future of their children is selected - at least for the next couple of years.

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The moan on food comes not so much from the elderly people, but from today's thirty-sorrel-year-olds, from whom all over the past years are methodically selected things much more significant than right

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The fate of Gaskarov (by the way, a man very distant to me by views), as well as the fate of the equally distant Udaltsov, Debzzozhaev and others, who had already traveled to the zones of the “swamps” completely out of broad public attention. But what an universal cry on past! The failure, the narrowness of the horizons, the pettiness of the aspirations was obvious in the Soviet intelligentsia (the alternative to it was a few dissidents), but at least it was excusable: most of the grandfather-grandmas were either shot or served in the Stalinist camps. Fear and its derivatives - self -censorship, inability to resist, concrete (and, accordingly, the inevitable complicity in the crimes of the authorities) - this was the strongest tool of the totalitarian regime. But: the Soviet generation did not know the alternative, about life in the conditions of freedom, at best, read in Hemingway and Fitzgerald novels, crowded with the criticism of the world purely and corrupt politicians. The Soviet government has not been 23 years old, there were normal elections, and a competitive political struggle, and an independent press - there are plenty of experience of other, non -confidence. But no, in fact - the same Soviet intelligentsia, ready from fear as forty years ago, clog under a conditional mattress, to shut his mouth to himself and silently observe how they castrate their own life - the whole difference is that now these are ladies and gentlemen with French toilet water instead of the Sivukha “Red Moscow”, and they are not preoccupied, but a tin And Sibas.

Against this background, the departure of two steel women - Valeria Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya (she was gone on July 12) and Marina Filippovna Khodorkovskaya (she left on August 3) is felt as an impossible loss: Lord, how did you take them on time! Two completely different destinies - all her life, a fierce Lera and the extremely restrained Marina Filippovna - both, although for various reasons, tried to put the authorities on her knees, neither one nor the other, they did not go to bow. And how noticeably the world is empty without them ...

Photo: Archive of the Party "Democratic Union", Vasily Popov