Royal alcohol

It is amazing that the discussion about the nineties, started by friends from the Colta.ru portal on the site and in the physical space of the Moscow Fashion Park , is still going on. She went beyond the intelligent community, capturing (though with another sign, that is, with a high degree of angry criticism), both patriotic and popular resources, and even, about horror, central channels. The flash mob with the posting of photographs on Facebook acquired an extensive geographical character, spreading not only on Russian networks, but also to Ukraine, and part of Poland and Germany (it seems that he temporarily stopped the politicized battles around the Ukrainian issue, that is, he turned out to be more significant in the semantic sense). And this is a sociophenomenon, requiring analytics more complicated than the idea of the emotional nostalgia of lovers of the nineties or the resentment of their critics, cursing everyone who "ruined the Great Country."

The nostalgic part is understandable: “when we were young”, “is it easy to be young”, etc. It is clear, but not justifying the victorious intonation of the authors who have achieved success, talent and luck and now describe the folk dislike of the nineties as a cry of losers: nevertheless, this position clearly smells of social-darvinism. More than clear, but the deconstruction of folk curses addressed to this time, to the conditional liberals from the authorities that began economic reforms, the short -term results of which were not spared by either a professor, a worker, and a pensioner. Responsible analytics about the nineties is now simply obliged to take into account the experience of Gaidar's "shock therapy" and its psychological imprinting in folk mythology.

I think that the positions of the debate can be seen as follows.

The nineties are marked with someone as “funny”, and they were “dashing” to someone, like a folklore robber

The nineties gave the post -Soviet man an unthinkable social play, which slammed into the zero. The dizzying careers that my peers made in the 90s thanks to the forcibly ejection into the wild market and personal entrepreneurship, after the onset of the so-called "Putin's stability" became impossible: the warm places are occupied, the state corporations disposed of their employees, the academic community was relatively self-determined; And only the crazy world of the media still continues to entertain the outside observer with ups and falls of reputations. Therefore, it is interesting to look at the fate of a person who now seems to be responsible about the nineties: he almost always argues from the point of view of his personal success or defeat, but these success and defeat are crystallized into zero. Therefore, the nineties are marked with someone as “funny”, and to someone they were “dashing”, as a folklore robber. Not remote (the first synonym for dashing), namely years of deprivation.

There is one detail that deeply amazed me in observations of the development of discussion. The voices of intellectuals did not immediately begin to be heard that the nineties were the years of the post -searry outskirts, primarily in Chechnya; My friend bitterly reminded me in a personal correspondence of the lonely anti -war picket of the philosopher Bibikhin. The society was deaf to the Chechen wars in both nineties and zero; In the center of Russia, in both capitals and in the province, they were perceived as something alien, "not about us, not our problem." The consensus myth of the accuracy of the collapse of the Soviet Union has long been presented to me by some blind spot of Russian society, especially taking into account power actions in Vilnius and Tbilisi (and this is under the peacekeeper Gorbachev) or Karabakh. This deafness continued and continues; It seems to me quite indicative of people's disbelief that Russian aviation bombed Tbilisi in 2008 (this action did not affect residential quarters, but demoralized their inhabitants). This zone of "blind spot" includes Transnistria and Abkhazia, which essentially became models for the development of the plot of "Novorossiya". Actually, the social approval of power actions in the east of Ukraine dates back to the historical insensibility of compatriots to the problems of the former vassal countries, which is usually justified by the shock of the nineties: they say, there were so many problems that strangers did not concern us.

An important theme of the nineties, which continues to this day, is wealth. We were so poor that we wanted with all our eyes, if not to get rich, then "live decently." The methods that my comrades used on this path led the intellectual elite to further social and political compromises, and in fact made the appearance of the figure of Vladimir Putin in the role of the president. His appearance is the nineties and ended.

Well, as a postscript. My friend, a successful book trader and clever, recently remembered that at one time he advised one young fashionable writer, now the apologet of Novorossia, to call his novel about the nineties " Royal alcohol". The young man did not heed the advice and gave the work the name "1993". Both memes are understandable: for us who survived the 90s in all their cheerful and dashing beauty, the mentioned drink was a symbol of new life and enterprise (my brother’s close comrade was the first butleger of the provincial city, where we lived then Royal from Poland ; fake liqueurs and champagne followed). For a boy who remembers this time on the oral text of the elders, the question of events in the White House remained the main question of the nineties. With all my disagreement with his current activity, I believe, this is a key story about the decade that should once be told, without fear and political preferences.

Elena Fanailova - Journalist of Radio Liberty, author and host of the program "Freedom in clubs"

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