Translated material
The secret of Russia
One of the three nominees for the award of Yegor Gaidar Prize (it will be awarded on November 19) - historian Alexander Yanov. The main idea of his three -volume "Russia and Europe" is a danger to Russia the idea of "Special Way"
It was a long time
The end of the 60s-the beginning of the 70s. Suddenly (exactly suddenly!) They spoke of Chaadaev and Slavophiles. Prior to this, Chaadaev went in the official Soviet context only as the addressee of the Youth Pushkin Epistle “To Chaadaev” - “... and our names will write on the wreckage of autocracy!” “Philosophical letters”, which brought the author the status of the mentally ill, were never remembered. And how to remember them? “Foreigners put us in the dignity of a kind of reckless courage ... They do not see that this indifference to everyday dangers corresponds to us the same complete indifference to good and evil, to truth and to lies ...” (I letter).
And a sensational (on the topic!) Book of Alexander Lebedev “Chaadaev” appears in the series “Life of wonderful people”. There is a stormy controversy around it in the “issues of literature” (Vadim Kozhinov and Alexander Dementyev - a member of the editorial board of the achieved, but still not finished “new world” of Tvardovsky). The article by the “Young Guard” famous in those years of the Molodogvardeisky (from the odious magazine) Chalmayev’s criticism on “Neoslavinophile” topics-and the artistic interview of Dementiev in the spring of 1969 in the “New World”. And both are worse! Chalmayev has a clear lack of a cultural horizons and a diligently hidden burden ... Well, let's say, to some phobias. Dementyev has a rejection of the same phobias, but also an overabundance of Marxism-Leninism, anti-religious ecstasy: the Church (and Slavophiles near her) is much more afraid of the Bolshevik power than any non-immoligy anti-Soviet.
It will take another step in the depths of times.
In February 1967, I came to Leningrad - to work in the manuscript department of the Pushkin house over the materials of the Bulgakov Foundation. My friend gives the address of his friend Sergei Belyaev: he can stop. I come to the address - I see two men with inverted persons. This is Belyaev and A.M. Panchenko, future academician. We are unfamiliar, but I have a good recommendation. Therefore, they tell me that searches and arrests have just passed. This is the case of Vlobson (to me a completely unknown underground anti-communist organization-the All-Russian Social-Christian Union of the Liberation of the people). And they are waiting for unwanted guests at any moment ...
We spend all three in the only tiny room. The owner is on the couch, Panchenko - on the floor, I am on the only bed. We sleep dressed - in accordance with the situation ... I remember how they called early in the morning at the door, and the men did not want to open it. I had to. On the threshold, instead of gesniks, a black -haired young man, a stray luminous smile. It was a 22-year-old Lazar Fleishman, who came from Riga to work in the archives of Leningrad, later-professor of Stanford University, author of books about Pasternak, etc., etc.
And the head of the VShhson Igor Ogurtsov received an unheard of time - 15 years of prison and camps plus 5 years of exile "without confiscation of property for lack of one." (Neither he nor three “accomplices” were subsequently rehabilitated: in November 1996 (!), The Supreme Court of Russia confirmed - “All of them were convicted”).
In the same years, there is an acute interest in Konstantin Leontiev - a much more inconvenient figure for Soviet power than Chaadaev. In general, the "churchman" (gebashny term). But for us with A.P. Chudakov, first of all, the author of amazingly bright and fruitful work about the prose of Leo Tolstoy - about her, imagine poetics! In 1971, Chudakov would quote her in his first book “Chekhov’s Poetics” - and friends will be amazed at how censorship missed the name of Leontyev ...
Degeneration of nationalism
This is the background on which I move in 1970 at a large Pirogovka to the pedagogical institute (then not yet decorated under the university) to protect A. Yanov’s unfamiliar to me with “passing” (the dissertation undoubtedly rackled his head for a long time), but still the explosive name of the dissertation: “Slavophiles and Konstantin Leontyev. Degeneration of Russian nationalism. 1839–1891 ". Of course, the scientific one in the exact sense of the word was not expected there. Everything is indirectly, covered, with abysses, encrypted. So why did you go? Hear with your ears - and what can now be publicly said about Leontiev. That's all. We were sophisticated with such things - instead of normal scientific life.
Protection went in the usual order. The opponents were disconnected, the beginning of a public discussion announced. The first question to the dissertant from the public: “Why did you take a pseudonym for yourself?” ... I remember how blood hit my head, I was eager to answer the questioner: “Because of you, anti-Semites!” The satellites kept: this would not be procedurally, and the scandal in any case was not needed by the dissertant ... In 1974, under pressure from the KGB, Yanov left. All the years he was engaged in the United States with clarification, I would say the secrets of Russia. After all, we have everything - the whole world can envy. But go - we will not cut it off ... where? Yes, to the hated by many European standard! For example, to warmths - so as not on the street, but in every house. Yes, at least in every Russian school for starters!
I read Yanova from time to time - and more than once I thought that he was overdoing about the danger of nationalism. As she did not believe in the 90s, that the pogroms were about to begin in Russia (it turned out to be right), she did not believe that the main threat to the west is to us ...
And today, alas, Yanov is right. Generated, nationalism degenerated, and never degenerated. Every day today is an orator from a television screen (those who look, testify). It seemed to me sometimes that Yanov writes about too obvious, long -understanding, bursting into the open gate. Today, these pages of his books look, alas, otherwise ... Well, who could imagine, reading the three -volume of Yanov “Russia and Europe” (1462–1921) that the great reform* will be called premature in 2009?
“... Power in Russia was always late,” the author of the three -volume one wrote. - And she always preferred the captivity of adaptation to the requirements of freedom. <...> Russia was late for half a century with the abolition of serfdom. ” The reason is the belief in the particularity of its non -European path.
Who did not know that she was late? That largely because of this we lagged behind Europe ... And now-we get acquainted with the latest point of view. The end of September of this year, the chairman of the Constitutional Court, Valery Zorkin: “The most failure, according to the general opinion of experts, was peasant reform. <...> Something such a reform was very painful in Russian society. <...> With all the costs of serfdom, it was it that was the main cross, holding the internal unity of the nation. ” Both words are good here - both “costs” and “screening”. Recall: “For 180 rubles, a girl is sold for twenty years, who cleans linen and partially prepares a food. About it, as well as the sale of a used carriage and a new saddle, ask in the postal yard ”,“ The laundress is sold for the elderly ”, as well as“ a shoe with a wife, she sews in the vestibule and gold, with her son of five, with a chest daughter ... ”But is this the costs? For us, who know what Kolyma and Magadan are, and orphanages for children “enemies of the people”. One continuous screening. In vain, of course, they liberated - and then let it fasten.
Not ready for freedom
The reform of Stolypin, according to the mindset of our Constitution, was even more failed, because "took away from the peasants <...> communal justice and offered to instead individual freedom, in which almost none of them knew how to live and which deprived their communal guarantees of survival." That is, the newly talked and negotiated a century earlier is chewed! Yes, they really did not know how! But what follows from this?! Do not learn, but stay forever on your special path? How relevant is Yanov today - with the fact that it always seemed to me a strong exaggeration! .. Well, further, of course, is a direct thought path by August 1991 and subsequent reforms. “The“ Switching to Capitalism for five years ”proposed by President Yeltsin and his government turned out to be for wide Russian masses (Marxism - Leninism, which was stuck at the university, with its wide masses of the working people! - M.Ch.), quite commensurate shock of peasants <...> 150 years ago,”. And brought in 1991, "the type of social, economic, political, cultural life <...> the very broad masses of our citizens only suffer as given." Yes ... Thank you, at least they didn’t tear it off with a bomb - they let them die with their death.
And as for the “prematurely”, the writer Vyacheslav Pietsukh said the best and best of all - about one village where an ordinary bright life is based on respect for the personality of a person.
“You know what guys,” the rooms said, “it may be good, but prematurely.”
- Of course, premature! - the hemp agreed with him. - It’s just painful to live hunting! .. ”
Historian Alexander Yanov, 2010
Photo: RFE/RL