"We are all Cheburashkin children"

Interview with Vladimir Yakovlev specialist "Medusa" Ilya Zhegulev

The founder of the newspaper Kommersant, journalist Vladimir Yakovlev in early March 2015 announced the launch of the new Mulbabar media project. His task is to withstand the “wave of hatred” that overwhelmed Russia, and “turn the madmen back into people”. Yakovlev collects money for Mulbabar at the Kikstarter ( asked for 50 thousand dollars; 28 thousand are already there). According to Yakovlev, 920 people participate in the "working group" of the project - on a voluntary basis. The special correspondent of Medusa Ilya Zhegulev contacted the founder of the new project living in Tel Aviv to find out how Mulbabar is arranged and why it is needed.

- What are you going to do? Is it possible to compare the “mulbabar” with the Adme website, which is terribly popular and there is no enmity and hatred?

- You know, I think that according to the audience that you want to get, you can. By the fact that I really want to make content, which is very interested, it is also possible. By the degree of content load, the degree that content carries - no, of course, cannot be. I would like the content that will produce a “mulbar” to be no less popular, but at the same time more loaded. Here is my own recent post - an appeal to journalists - received only more than five thousand reposts in my tape. Even without reposts with the same Medusa. For a text post on Facebook, this is very, a lot. Content, which carries a strong positive charge and receives a wide audience, is quite real.

- A few years ago, you announced the appearance of Global Russians , which have some common interests. They had to make an audience of one of your previous projects - Snoba. There are no more? Readers of "Mulbabar" - aren't they?

- Of course not. In general, the concept of Global Russianans, which was not invented by me, by the way, turned out to be a strange way of prophetic. Just because the level of migration from Russia is now such a scale that, as I understand it, there have never been in this country at all, including five years ago, when Snob appeared.

People who have been leaving Russia in recent years are called emigrants. And it seems to me that this is wrong - they must be called refugees. They do not leave because where they go, they want to live. They leave because they do not feel socially safe in Russia, they cannot raise children normally in Russia, they cannot find normal work. The Russian creative class today is generally absolutely deprived of work and is faced with a choice - either prostrate for the state budget, or sit without a penny. Therefore, these people are refugees in the most literal sense of the word, and by the way, they need to help like refugees really.

-The previous waves of Russian emigration somehow looked more like a stream of refugees.

- This is true. Actually, all three of the most difficult Russian ruler - Stalin, Brezhnev and Putin - could afford the luxury of neglect of the cultural and intellectual part of society. All three parasitized on the sale of minerals, and the fact that Russia is such a rich country allowed them, unlike any other large state, not dependent on the cultural, intellectual or business elite of society. And get rid of her. The whole difference is that they got rid of differently. Stalin - shot, Brezhnev - marginalized and deprived of his work, and Putin - simply expelled from the country.

- And "mulbar" - is it for a cultural and intellectual elite?

- I would like to make a product from a cultural and intellectual elite.

- To the masses?

- To people. My father, a journalist, worked in the most difficult years in this country; A huge number of writers, artists and poets worked in this country in terrible completely Brezhnev years - severe censorship, there was no Internet, there was a committee and a complete misfortune. Nevertheless, these people managed to somehow maintain in society the absence of bestiality and kindness, and their attitude towards each other. “Baron Munhgauzen”, “Ordinary Miracle”, Strugatsky, Taganka, Okudzhava - you can transfer it endlessly. And look at what is happening now, this is a terrible comparison, because systematically people are pulled with each other as dogs.

The very idea is that today's cultural and intellectual elite is not able to work with a mass reader, with a mass audience-this is garbage, we are all Cheburashkin children. Therefore, the fact that [Dmitry] Kiselev can promote hatred with a mass audience, but we cannot promote good with a mass audience is nonsense.

- When you founded Snob, you said that the rest of the media is a dining room, and Snob is a restaurant. In this case, the “mulbar” is the grocery market or the old kind nomenclature Soviet dining room?

- I had a certain number of projects in my life. With each of them, of course, I made many mistakes. The number of errors that I have bent in Kommersant, cosmic. The number of errors that I have borne in the "Snob" is also completely huge.

But here is what I cannot be blamed-this is that I have ever been repeated. “Mulbabar” is a new project, it does not look like “Kommersant”, nor “Snob”, nor the “age of happiness”, which I have been doing for the past four years.

- How are you going to distribute Mulbar? Now notes appear on the Facebook project page. You know, probably, that after achieving a certain ceiling of the audience, Facebook begins to show the news not to everyone who has risen, but only parts, and then this part decreases; And if nothing is done, then subscribers simply will not see you.

- By the way, this is terrible meanness with Facebook, by the way, because Facebook does not apply to the audience collected on the page, as the commercial value and commercial property of the author of the page. What a lead, generally speaking. For us, of course, Facebook is just a starting platform, a preliminary site will arise in a month, and in three months a full resource will stand.

- So you will advertise it?

- Well, of course.

- It is also necessary for normal money, and not 50 thousand dollars that you collect the whole world.

- “Mulbabar” is a volunteer project. All who work in it do it for free, because they consider it necessary and correct, what they do. We collect 50 thousand dollars at the Kikstarter, this is the money for those types of work that we cannot do ourselves. People at the Kikstarter give both $ 20 and $ 20. And I have to say that I am very, very grateful to them for this. This incredibly helps and supports. On the Kikstarter, by the way, there are many reviews about the project.

- “Mulbabar” - such a strange word means “Jupiter”. Are there any slogans with Mulbar already?

- “Mulbabar” is a pilot working name, probably it will not remain like that. And of course there are slogans. There are two of them. The main slogan: "People are more important than ideas." And the second slogan, which, in fact, fully determines the style of the project and its approach to content: "make significant interesting." And this, in fact, is what we are now studying on the working group, on the work page, this is the main task of the working group.

- And who does this group include, how many people are there?

- There are 920 people in the working group.

-Is there any truncated group or all 920 people make decisions?

- The project is a platform, the project does not have a real tough editorial approach, it is not needed. And most of those people who have now come to the working group look, understand what is happening. However, all this is quickly organized. Now there are already coordinators who are conducting the project.

- And how many coordinators?

- Coordinators are now 15 people. These are people who offered their headings, themes - and lead. From today, there are already daily duty outputs who will take away those posts that 900 people offer us. That is, the project is quickly and well structured.

“But still, these rubrics that you proposed, you claimed?” As always, as in all projects, you follow you the last word?

- At first I claimed, simply because there was no one. Now we are doing this along with the coordinators of the project. Although the headings are a very obsolete category. Therefore, those sections that are now are more like guidels. You just need to understand what Mulbar is. There is a wild wave of hatred in the country, there are a huge number of people who would not want this to happen in the country, they would not want large social groups in the country to hate each other. “Mulbabar” is a platform where these people can come and say, write, what they would like to say and write.

- In ordinary media, where there is an editing and monitoring content, enmity and hatred are breaking through every now and then. And on Facebook, VKontakte, where there is no editorship - there is much more there.

- Of course, yes. For us, this is, frankly, a technical question, I do not know how much it falls into the framework of the interview, to be honest.

- It gets.

There are two circumstances. Firstly, the resources that set a different approach to reality by their task are much less susceptible to this hatred. There are 900 people in the working group, and, in general, it cannot be said that these people were somehow specially checked at the entrance. However, the inner world of the working group is completely different. Good. This is me to the fact that the atmosphere depends on the participants. And participants from the goals and ideology of the project.

Secondly, the work of Internet media is largely opposite to the old ideology of print media. In the old ideology, the main product was the publication. For the right to publish, they agreed to the editing, to a certain style of the language, to certain rules of work ... In today's correctly built Internet media, the circuit is the reverse: publication is absolutely publicly available, and what you are offered is an additional promotion of the material. Promoting in common thematically blogs, promotion on the main page and so on. This is not an editing, because no one prevents you from publishing the material on the audience of your blog, to the audience that reads directly to you. And such promotion schemes for us, of course, will be, without them, it is completely impossible.

-If someone writes an evil text that brings hatred, you simply will not promote it-or do not put it?

- In this scheme, neither I nor the editors put anything. This is done by the author. The basis of the resource in any case will be open blog ribbons.

- It turns out, like on Snob?

- Not quite like on Snob. In fact, completely different, but now I really do not want to get into details. Look: now there are 900 people who went to our “mulbar” in the working group in order to write, and try something, and do something, just as a result of my two posts. They came, knowing that this is a volunteer project, because they want to try because they want to do something. And it creates a different sensation from the Internet and from the environment on the Internet than, say, it existed before that.

- I still don’t understand how you are going to filter, defend yourself from the same graphomaniacs? How will the site differ from the same Livejournal and Besttode?

- I am not ready now in detail and in detail to the end to tell the concept. I can say that I hear your questions, we ourselves have these questions, we know (or it seems to us that we know) how to solve them.

- Will there be advertising in your project?

- The project is three weeks. I don't know. I know that now I have 900 people, a working group and a volunteer resource, and I need to help those people who have come to give them access to the site, give them the opportunity to work ... It seems to me that the country is taking place **** c. P **** c. With hatred, with the wild attitude of people to each other, with the fact that the country is on the verge of social disaster.

- Worse than in the Soviet years?

- Not comparable, not comparable. And if we talk about the Mulbabar project, then ask in this situation how he will earn money and whether he will - in my opinion, excuse me, is funny. I don't know. I want not to earn money, but to do something so that in politicians like Nemtsov they stop shooting on the street a hundred meters from the Kremlin.

Ilya Zhegulev

Moscow