Survive to demand

It is always strange for me to hear and read when a civil protest in modern Russia is called politics, that is, a party struggle, and the rivalry of various social forces in the desire for common good. But in Russia there is neither society, nor people, nor gravity to freedom, and therefore there is no and cannot be politics.

Instead of society-the public, and in the place of the people-the population, and everything is swarmed only "in relation to meanness", as the semblance of the life of Saltykov-Shchedrin determined. Here it is, all politics: apply to meanness or not to be applied. And to what extent to be used. It would seem a complex and painful question! But I seem to know a tuning fork, according to which it is possible to verify the purity of the vital tone, to determine my own case or falsehood.

I have a favorite grandson who will get everything. Including-my changeable image, some words and actions stored in his memory, in letters, in a random echo. I can’t, I do not want to leave my inheritance and our common wrong, fear, cowardice. For his sake, I must and will stand - to myself the last, saving, as soon as I can, self -esteem and spiritual harmony. How generally it is in my power.

My grandson is my homeland. My fate and career. I have nothing more to do in the world, otherwise - at least for it - to be and remain myself. Such care. Do not integrate into someone else's line, do not care about success and glory. But - to live so that it is not dirty and abominable. Forgive the guilty. And remember where and why they are dirt and abomination. Confront. You live with an unrighteous native power - hold on, do not give up, against it.

I have been living in a feeling of impurity for a long time, among the darkness and stench. Under an enthusiastic roar of triumphant ink. I myself - part of it. But I'm still ashamed. When they, speaking and screaming in the same language with me, merge in a wild consonant delight before criminal power ... Is this a vile scarecrow - my homeland? Only it is always it? It is unbearable to be a purulent tavro complicity.

I, earning pennies, still give the state tax. And on this slave loan, for our common money - camps are being built, a gendarme army is contained, planes and tanks are being built. This is me to finance the mocking of Ukraine. With my connivance, a “beech” was made, which gave a volley through the passenger Boeing. This is all innocent blood on me. The rapists of my people and the stale of native land, neighboring countries and people - this is my constant philanthropist!

I am with all my verses, songs, passions - disguise, cover for bandits. The props that everything looks like it should: as if the country has art, education and ways to maintain a competent life. We are all a crowd in this vile performance.

I dream of at least two Russia. Of them, one of them would be wide and terrible for enemies and relatives, but the other - at least with Holland - lived not with removal and scope, but with conscience and labor. Guilt, repentance and forgiveness. Homeland for sane

By unborn, in infancy, that is, by chance, I am not responsible for Butovo and Katyn, for the White Sea and the Holodomor, for Mikhoels and the Volga Germans ... for Budapest in 1956, for Novocherkassk in 1962, Prague in the 68th. But since 1969-I have been in the working system. And all that is next is not by someone, but I was paid. Not praised, not approved, but paid.

And the wine is still mine. Hell of Chechnya is paved with my penny. From my silent permission, nonhumans are fatigue and multiply.

Okay, I won’t survive, I will not be able to tear them away from myself, from my country, from my time. After all, they have irremovability. A genus of insanity. There is no demand from them. This is their (us) natural. But the mind is incomprehensible: the generation of generation burns in this all -devouring firebox. And at the same time, "all the people are having fun and jubilant." Special to become.

And nothing can be done, and there is nowhere to retreat - neither native Moscow, nor Russia ("Motherland, in other words") is left behind. There are - an unimaginable space that can be accumulated by temporary workers and fertilizers that can place more than one hundred caring homelands. And - there is not one. Everything is desiccant, looted and lost.

I dream of at least two Russia. Of them, one of them would be wide and terrible for enemies and relatives, but the other - at least with Holland - lived not with removal and scope, but with conscience and labor. Guilt, repentance and forgiveness. Homeland for sane. So that the one whom the heavens was appointed to us in the neighborhood, lived and worked without clamping his nose, ears and eyes.

After all, there is China in Taiwan!

And this is not the second China - the first.

On what extrontation land will we be allowed (fate, not the Kremlin creatures) to build an ordinary human country? What is the island? Is Madagascar really? Or the usual northern land? Nothing: exiled multilingual Baltic, Germans, Ukrainians were thrown into permafrost with babies and old people. And they survived entire nations and languages. And we will survive.

Let not even find the land from God for this second attempt: let our heavenly not possess a heavenly of the Holy Earth - but in our hope, in thoughts and actions, it can and should take place. Already took place.

Because we are. The roar and the meaningless rumbling of the rabble cannot cancel us. The true majority - let it be silent. It pretends to be dead, for how else to deceive the honey connecting rod in the pitch forest. I still want to live, and somehow we need to wait out all this misfortune, endure ... Only seven centuries crawled.

So: I am for the Russian section. If it’s already quite sure: for the voluntary non -violent self -generation of a geopolitical monster, confused in many crimes against all mankind. I think the Russians have no, we have other salvation.

I'm not afraid anymore. Late, boring, disgusting.

But I can’t move anything yet. As I can, I impose my sanctions against Russian products, I declare personal boycott Crimea, Abkhazia, South Ossetia. And not only there there will be no longer my leg: neither in Prussia (the so -called Kaliningrad region), nor in Sestroretsk and further throughout the Karelian Isthmus ... The whole world, except for the Turks, said "no" to the Northern Cyprus. How else? How else to answer the triumphant impudence?

And I dream of all our packs with their nuclear missiles, billions of stolen money, isolated nods to lock in the Kremlin and put a guard at the gate. Let them live in the usual mode. Even their cemetery is there at the side. In the nearest wall.

What it came to - even on the movie screen, on New Year's cards I can not see the Moscow Kremlin. I have no vital forces to contemplate a masterpiece that embodied the image of domestic statehood. And without that is sick.

In my life was the only full -time meeting with Boris Nemtsov. Two years ago, he came to Vilnius for some international symposium and said at the very end of the last performance (I quote, as I remember): “To win over barbarism and ignorance, you should not so much: not to be afraid of inconvenience, to abandon some excesses, to act according to conscience. But so far we think that you can stand up for the truth, and there will be nothing to be poorly compatible.” I now recall the play by Slavin "Intervention": "You can take a cigarette, but it will be necessary to refuse life."

When in August 1989, and then in January 1991, we stood hand in hand against the empire, we were unarmed. But not powerless. The meaning of that confrontation was simple: we will have to kill us. And if one or two-hundred-ethno-thousands of you will not kill you, and you will not blink, then certain difficulties will arise with a dozen thousand. Even just with staring in the ground. And then they retreated.

Not long and not everywhere.

Now they pull us out one by one, and we are disappearing under this butt. And for a long time this is not about Courchel. The choice is different, like the same Nemtsov. So you have to remind them and myself: I will not give up. You will have to kill me. You do not know anything else.

When I recall the song by Pete Siger We Shall Overcome , I involuntarily ask: who should we defeat? Probably only yourself. Since we live exactly as we live, it means that we don’t really want differently. But okay-and grandchildren? Do they also go through this school of enthusiastic reptile? Get along with meanness, with primitive lead?

The Neanderthal has no future. Either he will die, or straighten into a reasonable person. And if it does not die, then: drunken abuse and hangover vomiting. Our entire protest.

And we must unite. Search the hand of the neighbor, the look of the oncoming, sigh of the merciful. I see neither meaning nor joy in the creation of new parties. I am closer to the flexible, mobile initiative of those who are not yet fully and not in all unsuccessful. Contrary to those who "always sympathized with central beliefs" (Zoshchenko). There are no beliefs. And there is no religion. And there is nothing but savagery and self -interest.

If there is some living Russia in the world, it is in the melting of the language, in a fit of sacrifice, in an adamant culture. The Moscow government has nothing like that, there is nothing Russian. She is alien and hostile to Russia and Russians.

Occasionally, I am bewildered by those with whom I broke because of the current topical disagreement, because of the views on the modern Russian state (I think this is the question of whether it is permissible to lie, kill and rape): are our friendly relations will no longer recover? And I, looking at the newspaper or screen digging of the Moscow government, I say: someday, but only after them. And without them.

I hope that soon.

According to legend, Janusz Korczak went with orphans to the murderer, pulling off the guard (he seemed to tell him "you don’t need to go there"): "You are mistaken, not all the villains." No, not all. If something we succeed, let our initiative, this hope of our hope is so called: not all .

Georgy Efremov is a poet, publicist, translator into Russian of Lithuanian poetry, poems by Redyard Kipling, Cheslav Milos, Bob Dylan. In the late 1980s-a member of the Council of the Sejm of the Sayudis movement, the publisher and editor of the Vilnius Russian-speaking newspapers. Lecturer of the Moscow Literary Institute