What changed 2014?

Oleg Aronson

philosopher

It is difficult to talk about the changes in 2014, because what happened this year was expected by many. Changes, in my opinion, are associated not only with political and economic circumstances, but primarily with the moral sensations of those who live in Russia. This is not to say that these sensations are very different from what was before. Just 2014 was more intense from the point of view of an attack on the emotional sphere of man, because this is the year of the war.

The war in Ukraine is more than just war. It is in many ways a symbolic character. If we talk about a new attitude, then the war in Ukraine is one of the first wars of the global world. And freely or involuntarily, but this feeling of global events affects us. This is not a local conflict at all. This is not just a political rivalry of countries or aggression. The global world in which we live has already experienced an era of aggressive wars, he survived geopolitical fantasies. What wars are possible in the global world, we are still poorly represented. We know something about the US military actions in Iraq or Afghanistan, but this is not at all. There is still an idea of ​​the traditionally understood enemy. The war in Ukraine is different, it is more like a civil war, which does not go inside the ex-SSR, but in the territory of the whole global world. There is a feeling that this war exposes the absolute inadequacy of modern Russian politics, and, as a result, its moral aspect, its undisguised cynicism comes to the fore. It seems to me that in an economically globalized world, all wars strive to be precisely civilian, that is, such where there is no political friend and enemy, where they are purely nominal, and the political space is fictitious.

Perhaps this is the main news of 2014: we are all now in a situation of civil war and we will, apparently, for a long time. The more politics speak of the world, the more the feeling is created that the world is impossible. In general, the world or truce in this war is our illusions related to the past experience of the war, when states and regular armies fought. The war in Ukraine is not a war of states and armies, it is a war of ambitions of weak and cowardly politicians. Their aggressiveness is the effect that for them there is less space in the global world, that their policy itself does not correspond to this world, and war is one of the ways to keep their significance. As a result, people who have neither political nor national certainty die, civilians and those who are involved in this war with money and propaganda. They can be from any country and be in any direction. Therefore, this war is world civilian, not civilian in Ukraine. Such a war is waged in mass media. The fighting is only one of its effects - of course, the most dramatic. We all know that there are victims. But the main war is waged by the weapon of the media. And real killers are those who use this weapon. It is possible to stop such a war, only radically depolitizing the media. In Russia, I do not see the conditions for this yet.

In the global world, the war ceases to have a specific enemy. The war itself becomes more important than the enemy. So, Ukraine is an accidental enemy. By and large, the division into political friends or enemies does not matter here, in such a civil war the enemy can be any. For politics, it is only important that the war continues.

I have never heard of my long life for all my long life that now sounds everywhere.

Mikhail Gelfand

Professor of the Faculty of Bioenginery and Bioinformatics of Moscow State University

The war in Ukraine, unleashed by Russia, changed absolutely everything. Everything else is its consequences.

Lyudmila Petranovskaya

psychologist

If we talk about Russia, the main change is the authority of the contract with the society, the essence of which was: the good condition and stability in exchange for the refusal of citizens from claims to control the authorities. In the past year, the population was invited to change stability to the greatness of the state. It looked tempting for many. By the end of the year, however, it turned out that stability had swept, welfare in his eyes was drying out, and with greatness it came out so -so. Russia quarreled with the whole world, lost even long -standing friends, but did not achieve goals, except for the unfortunate Crimea, which is not very clear at all how to live now. One was taken away, they promised the other, but "not shmolo." That is, in fact, now there is no clear contract of the population with the authorities. And this is the main change, perhaps, because before that it was 15 years, and practically did not change. How this situation will develop - we will see next year.

Olga Sedakova

poet

The outgoing year was, in my impression, catastrophic. We (the country, I mean) crossed some trait, because of which it is simply impossible to go back. Is it not easy? Depends on a lot. Boris Dubin in his last interview - in connection with the Crimean adventure - well determined what kind of line it is. The space from which we came out recently described Lyudmila Ulitskaya well. In the language of the Gorbachev years, it was called “universal values”: humanism, legality, rationality, historical sanity. The dirty, empty and cruel boltka, which we are offered in return as our original national identity, is similar to the subpoennial nonsense. A mixture of protonacism with non -postalinism (however, the new in this Stalinism is only final shamelessness: the cruelty and meanness of that regime were usually either silent or camouflaged by the “struggle for universal happiness”, etc. Hatred and unheard of impudence is the general tone of this music.

I have never heard such a disgrace for my whole long life that now sounds everywhere (not only in the media: of course, they set this tone - but as compatriots willingly pick it up!). You can hear all these obscenities from a neighbor, a year ago, still quite good -natured.

The Cold War with the outside world began. The cold (so far) civil war begins. The configurations of "loved ones", "their" have resolutely changed. The split takes place in families, in professional circles, everywhere ... even in church communities and even abroad (which I recently convinced, seeing Orthodox parishes in Italy). The split is not a dispute. People were smashed into such distant areas, from where it is already impossible to talk. It remains to stigmatize others and choose offensive nicknames for them. Here the Russian language has not lost its resourcefulness. In order to say something directly, seriously, without mockery and shouting, I am afraid, already lost.

All this, of course, did not fall from the sky, it went to this. It went from different sides. A month ago, I happened to hear a brilliant analysis of all this preparation in the speech of Konstantin Eggert at a conference in Fribur.

We can say that all these schisms and self -determination are the moment of truth. Which finally became clear who is who. This is not easier. But, in any case, we cannot but understand what the responsible time comes for us in a new way.

In October, such a virus was found-called ATCV-1, lives in the throat: a reaction deteriorates from it, orientation in space worsens. And they generally get.

Alexey Tsvetkov

poet

New Year's custom is to send curses to the outgoing year and rely on the fact that the coming will be better. And it doesn’t even matter what was in the outgoing, because we love the best. Only this time, the reputation of the outgoing is justified with more than, and the advancing, it would seem, does not need much effort so as not to slide to the same level, but this is unlikely.

Who would have thought that in the centuries -old anniversary of the war, which brought down three empires and the entire world order, we will receive an attempt to galvanize the fourth with the tragic consequences for neighbors. And this, of course, is grief not only for Ukraine, which, I hope, still has a chance to run away. This is grief for Russia, which has nowhere to run away - from itself. And the hope for a generation, which supposedly grows after the collapse of the USSR and will be more freer and happier than ours, is lost, although part, perhaps, will be saved by the usual way of shipwreck.

The saddest thing is the loss of friends: at least those who were considered friends. There are misunderstandings, and almost always there are ways to resolve them, but there are times when the overall habitat is split forever and with painful evidence. About the dead, at least you keep good memory; It is much worse when you try to splash out of the living memory.

But, however, most of the good that will be remembered is the wrong side of all the same events. Friends preserved in such a situation is like re -acquired. And this is not counting really re -found - there were also many of them - together with Ukraine, where they live and with which I, its native, suddenly felt forgotten connections.

Everything else is purely personal, even to me the very little interest against this background.

Tatyana Chernigov

Professor of the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University

What has changed? Civilization has changed, I answer. Civilization has changed in 2014. Humanity has gone crazy, so you can write. Probably the virus drove. In October, such a virus was found-called ATCV-1 , lives in the throat: a reaction deteriorates from it, orientation in space worsens. And they generally get. I do not mean literally that humanity came this virus: there is evidence here, you understand. But everyone has gone crazy and rushed into the abyss, into the underworld. This is my opinion.

Mikhail Yampolsky

philosopher

2014 brought Russia out of the predictability zone and calculated causal relations. All norms were violated, and the country entered the crisis - political and economic. The social system fell out of stable configurations and entered the turbulence zone. The theory of systems indicates an extremely unstable metasystem, which can repeatedly strengthen the slightest effect on it and lead to absolutely unpredictable results. Any strategic planning gave way to an efforts on short -term survival. In Russia today there is no longer a person who is capable of long -term investing not only money, but even efforts. Institutions that always play a stabilizing role in society discovered either failure or complete absence. The feeling was intensified that the entire political system is holding on a single person-the president. This feeling gave rise to the cult of the leader and at the same time discovered the absolute ephemerality of the grounds on which Russian society was built - without courts, without political parties, without institutions of power and law enforcement system, without a normal economy, etc. All this radically changes mentality and creates a new scale of time. A ten -year sentence to Navalny in such a world turns out to be an almost equivalent life date, and maybe only a three -month. No one knows. The temporal prospect has disappeared. A premonition of the impending collapse of the entire system arises and spreads. And this transformation of the prospects of time and expectations itself becomes the most important destabilizing social factor. In a word, it seems that 2014 was the end of the whole era.

Alexander Etkind

Philologist and historian

In Europe and the world of 2014, he was a true year of Russia. In many people, this year has changed the usual ideas about the nature of the Russian state, about its legitimacy and vitality, about its right to exist in the current form and about its possibilities to continue this existence. I think that in Russia such a reassessment of values ​​moved a little later, maybe in 2015.

Anna Yampolskaya

philosopher

A significant part of my friends - of those who are called “left” in Europe, and in Russia “liberals” - fell into depression and despair. It became clear that our social group, who for many years considered itself an intellectual avant -garde of society, has lost a common language with the majority of the population; That we no longer have the dream that we could offer a person from the street. “Go ahead of the bright past,” the traditionalists exclaim, but this illusory “bright past” nevertheless forms some kind of semantic horizon in which you can live. As a result, European far -right and Putinists are on the rise, and former revolutionaries and innovators can only repeat the words soured from excessive use, which have lost their sacred power: “freedom”, “justice”. No one, including ourselves, does not believe that we can build a free and fair society: we are not able to offer any positive image of the future, no hope. I think that our despondency, our despair, our intellectual powerlessness is not a consequence of the imaginary exclusivity of Russia, but a sign of belonging to a pan -European fate, and therefore it is so important to adequately accept and survive it.