Brezhnev's eyebrows on Putin's face

The old dictator Brezhnev cautiously monitors the growth of the election ratings of the opposition Sakharov. Sakharov on the marginal television channel gives an interview to Pozner and boldly throws Brezhnev in the face of charges of cannibalism. Sluttsev Suslov, a Chechen, a Chechen by origin, persuades Brezhnev to start a small victorious war in Afghanistan for the rating, and the confessor-emenist Nicodemus is to allow a union with Catholics, but Brezhnev himself dreams of a quiet rich old age with a lover on a small island in Germany, and so that there are more oysters.

Here, probably, there is a conflict of interests, because I myself had a book in which Putin shoots the White House and storms Grozny on the night after the Olympics - the genre is approximately the same as Belkovsky’s, and that's how should I be with him? I’m scolding - I see, competition, I praise - it will probably be down, also nothing good. In general, it is probably normal that I like my plot more than the plot of Belkovsky: he, unlike me, had to come up with impossible things (alternative elections, alternative television, even with Pozner), but I did not have to. But that is not the point. Putting scenes from our realities in the scenery of other eras is an interesting occupation, and Belkovsky’s experience with Brezhnev-Putin is a good experience, a good game, all the more good that Putin who dreams of rich old age abroad, and not about the empire, came up with just Belkovsky, and who, if not for him, now joke about it. And yet - Belkovsky understands: even a successful joke on more than a hundred pages is risky, so the text about Brezhnev (Belkovsky calls him a story) is just limited by a hundred pages, and the rest in the book occupies a five -year -old play about Gaidar, about the same genre of political fanfix, a very cruel statement about Russian “system liberals”.

The play about Gaidar is an evil Belkovsky. The story of Brezhnev-Putin is kind and therefore more charming. The book itself is good not by the fact that Putin is easier to explain in Brezhnev’s logic, but on the contrary - we have Soviet knowledge lying with a dead load, and it would be great to figure out where to children.

I will recall once again for personal experience: when I wrote a “Gorby-Dream”, there were many real historical details-Kirilenko’s atrophy, galoshes of the same Suslov, Grishin, pulling the half-dead Chernenko from under the droppers to write a video with him, as if they vote together in the elections. In order to write about it, I did not need to check with some historical sources-we do not climb into the archive when we need to recall the quote from Brother-2 or from the Master and Margarita. There are things that you know by heart. Among these things, as a rule, there are a lot of garbage (some old advertising slogans, or pop-songs, or stupid cinema), but those who grew up in the eighties have such a full-fledged corps of knowledge about the Brezhnev era. Now you can’t explain this to anyone, but at the penultimate one (until they allowed Lenin’s scolding) Brezhnev and Stalin were the main ones, along with the living acting politicians and stars, the media heroes of that time, that is, every day in some newspaper or magazine the next investigation appeared with the dramatic details of historical events or just the life of dead leaders. His attending physician Chazov wrote about Brezhnev (Gorbachev will make him the Minister of Health, and the Architect group will have the song “Dr. Chazov and Marshal Yazov”; Chazov, of course, is one of the heroes of Belkovsky), the retired ministers, referents and members of the Politburo gave, all repented and at a time they told something sensational-at the hunt-at the hunting-in the hunting. Brezhnev stood with a gun on the tower, and the huntsmen were released under his sight of pre -caught boars; The Ministry of Air Products developed a ladder with an escalator for Brezhnev, but could not cope, but the escalator was put on the rostrum of the mausoleum, because Brezhnev could not climb the stairs on his own; Brezhnev’s speech had problems because of a stroke, but he himself thought that the matter was in his teeth, and constantly ordered himself new inserting jaws, and all to no avail; The doctors forbade Brezhnev to smoke, and he forced everyone who was nearby, smoke next to him and let smoke into his face. Just thousands of such details, we do not know about Putin as much as we remember about Brezhnev. People who were born in the year of his death are already over thirty, and some next stupid video like “Brezhnev reads Pasternak” gains millions of views-who is watching him? We look.

Knowledge of Brezhnev is the most important part of the cultural code of modern Russians, and what to do with this knowledge is generally incomprehensible. According to the now adopted rules, Brezhnev would be proud-a glorious past, as we love, and the biography of the serial-ideal one: he really fought at the front, answered the Central Committee for the space industry just at the time of the satellite and Gagarin, and then the golden stars presented Gagarin, led Kazakhstan and Moldova, that is, a real emperor, and by genus from the East of Ukraine, and and by the east of Ukraine. Which is also important in a sense. He was a world player, shared the world with the Obams of his time, he waged hybrid wars in different parts of the planet, the Olympiad again, but anything - strictly speaking, it was to him, and not Prince Vladimir, according to the mind, it would be necessary to put monuments, the ideal that Putin's Russia is striving for - he is Brezhnevsky, first of all, there is no other. And, probably, the only thing that protects today's Russia from the recognition of Brezhnev is the laughter of contemporaries who is still stronger than the rest.

It is believed that the stability of the authorities in Russia is ensured by its sacredness, and Brezhnev, of course, did not have everything in order with sacredness, this is his problem. Is it possible to desacrate Putin by drawing Brezhnev’s eyebrows to his face? Maybe. In this sense, Putin is generally convenient, a photobot man-both the Stalinist mustache and Khrushchev Lysin are going to him, why not approach the eyebrows. Another thing is that the current Putin is no longer even Brezhnev, it is Chernenko, and looking for eyebrows on his face is outdated fun, it's time to look for a large birthmark on the forehead of one of the courtiers.

Stanislav Belkovsky. Zult. - M.: AST, 2015. 352 p. (Anghedonia. Danishevsky project)