Review of Ilya Falkovsky's documentary collage "Unnoticed Murders"

In 2014, the Common Place publishing initiative released a book on hate crimes, compiled by Ilya Falkovsky. He publishes court materials on the case of the neo-Nazi group NSO-North. These are the accounts of witnesses and defendants of several victims of deadly neo-Nazi attacks.

Such a book - a selection of direct or almost direct speech of participants and eyewitnesses of events - is, of course, not just a story about specific destinies, it is a portrait of our society. Such a book, only more significant in terms of volume of work, was once created by Haruki Murakami. His nonfiction novel The Underground, about the victims and perpetrators of the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack, is precisely the portrait of society. Murakami not only tells stories, but also talks about the causes and consequences of what happened. He finds out that many Japanese before the terrorist attack not only did not attach much importance to the Aum Shinrikyo sect, but moreover, they themselves recognized the ability to automatically fulfill the order of their superiors, even if it was an order to carry out a terrorist attack, when they would have logically justified its necessity. .

The very experience of such a book in Russia is very important, because until very recently, hate crimes were virtually unknown and, as it were, they did not exist, because it never occurred to anyone to describe them as such. Then they started talking about them, statistics appeared, the problem was recognized and named at the state level.

But it was only very recently that the idea appeared in our country that the victim should be the central figure in such crimes. Not a murderer, not a policeman, but a suddenly and senselessly dead or crippled person. So far, this idea of ​​protecting victims (and they include not only the victims themselves, but also their relatives) is not very widespread in our country. But the very nature of these crimes requires special treatment of those who do not belong to the so-called "vulnerable groups". Prosperous representatives of the majority, of course, are morally responsible for what is happening to minorities and, at a minimum, should show solidarity.

Hotlines are needed to report such crimes, as well as a well-established system of medical, psychological and material assistance to victims. Unfortunately, there is nothing of the kind in Russia yet, and the first attempts at such projects were made only by the non-governmental organizations ADC Memorial in St. Petersburg and the Civic Assistance Committee in Moscow.

In Falkovsky's book, unfortunately, there is not enough background information about the NSO-North organization itself and about their case. In the appendix, the author gives a detailed history of one of the convicts - Lev Molotkov, writes about the organization of the NSO, its founder Dmitry Rumyantsev, but in this text, filled with extensive quotations from the defendants in the case, it is impossible to find their complete list and deadlines. they were sentenced.

The commentary of the psychologist Sergei Enikolopov, a specialist in criminal aggression and ethnopsychology, could have been more detailed, especially given the specialization of this scientist. Sergei Nikolaevich makes an interesting remark about the craving for murder as an addiction, that the transformation of gang members into serial killers is a moral pathology, but otherwise his, of course, valuable arguments remain within the framework of intellectual amateurism. It would be very interesting to get a psychological portrait of a nationalist-murderer from a specialist, to hear his commentary on how such killings affect "vulnerable groups", how to help people who survived the attack themselves or lost loved ones. In addition, there are smaller questions to Enikolopov’s commentary: in particular, discussing the reasons for the emergence of aggressive xenophobia, he writes that Rosenberg was a doctor of philosophy and could not find a place, since all the departments of German philosophy were occupied by Jews. Perhaps he was trying to find a place in the department of philosophy, I am not an expert on the biographies of members of the NSDAP. But it is known for certain that he had an engineering degree at the same time. Also, the statement that all the chairs were occupied by Jews looks very biased. All the more strange is the logical continuation that Enikolopov makes: “Here [in Russia], too, people are faced with a kind of insurmountable wall,” from which it follows, apparently, that the Jews were still an insurmountable wall in Germany.

I would like to make one more remark in connection with the commentary of the sociologist Dmitry Poletaev. Like the psychologist's commentary, the sociologist's commentary fits perfectly in this book. Dmitry Vyacheslavovich, an expert on the topic of migration, gives information about the migration history of Russia and Moscow, gives his explanation for the growth of aggression towards "come in large numbers". But it is from a specialist that I would like to receive in this book the debunking of one of the most persistent myths of recent times, spread by both nationalists and journalists, politicians, and officials. We are talking, of course, about the so-called "ethnic crime". The statistics of the Ministry of Internal Affairs clearly show that the real share of crimes committed by visitors is small and is quite consistent with their percentage of the total population of the country. Moreover, often those who like to speculate on this topic (and some officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs also belong to them) play with statistics, silently saying that we are not talking about serious crimes, but about the total number of offenses, the lion's share of which among visitors from other countries is harmless violations. immigration legislation. For example, Viktor Shnirelman's article "Media, the fight against "ethnic crime" and cultural racism" is devoted to this topic in a recently published book "Russia is not Ukraine: modern accents of nationalism".

Despite the foregoing, I still want to recommend Falkovsky's book. It is especially pleasing that this somewhat lonely voice of solidarity comes from the left. There is nothing more natural for the left than to speak out loudly in support of discriminated groups. But until recently, the Moscow anti-fascist environment showed solidarity, visible to an outside observer, mainly within its own group (it must be admitted that, unfortunately, there were many reasons - from Alexei Krylov to Stanislav Markelov ). In addition, it seems that the book fulfills the mission formulated by Ilya himself as follows: "Probably, this is naive, but I still hope that our society can still wake up - of course, this will not happen suddenly, there is a long way ahead. I want to believe that this documentary collage will make a small contribution, and after reading it by one, two - at least a few callous people will become less.

Falkovsky, Ilya. Invisible Murders [documentary collage]. - M.: Common Place, 2014. - 202 p.