"Poster" as a suitcase

Let's assume that Russia is a field of battle of good and evil.

Obviously, evil at the current stage unconditionally wins, but nothing remains of good at all. It would be strange if the Match of the Poster magazine remained; How do you imagine this at all - everything lies in ruins, people with evil faces go by, a raven is circling over them, and in kiosks a fresh room of “posters” is sold? This does not happen. Russia today is such that there should be no “posters” in it, of course,.

If we assume that for Alexander Mamut, all this is just a business - and there is no doubt about this since the defeat of Lenta.ru, just a businessman, obviously, would not have behaved like that, then we have bad news for him: he will never succeed with “posters”, no matter how optimize. The same bad news-for romantics, expecting something cool from the “posted” “posters” with a quarterly paper application. That is, something cool is even possible, but at best it will be just a separate work of art, which the “post” could write about if she had lived.

The state of Russian society today is not even a step, but a jump back compared to 1999.

Now it’s difficult to talk about this, because the social group “Former and existing journal employees” on social networks writes a lot about “Poster”, thereby translating a conversation about it into a series of private plots from the life of several generation journalists. Yes, there is a lot of important and interesting, ridiculous and non -effective, in general, but I would compare it with a huge suitcase, which put a suitcase on Red Square two or three years ago; Probably everyone remembers, the story was sensational. I can easily believe that there were also many incredible things inside the suitcase, and suitcases will ever remember them and tell us. But after all, the scandalous situation with a suitcase itself - it had nothing to do with what was inside. Everything happened outside - GUM, FSO, protests of public organizations, the reaction of the city authorities, ironic comments in the press and social networks, and finally dismantling the suitcase. The fate of the suitcase did not depend on what was inside.

The fate of the “posters” is, too, and it is not at all in the market situation (it never occurred to anyone to say seriously that the suitcase was removed from Red Square, because there was no demand for this suitcase), and in something more, literally in the victory of evil. We can say simply that evil is incompatible with a large influential magazine about “all entertainments”, but it can be explained.

A large media is a market product, it is an element of culture, but it is also a public institution. The gateway passing through which, part of the society is isolated in accordance with its interests, values, priorities. To be a reader of a particular publication is the simplest form of social orientation (the reader is much easier than, say, a parishioner). In Russia, this was best worked in the nineties-about the readers of Kommersant, everything is clear, but there were readers of AiF (housewife voting for Yeltsin), there were readers of the newspaper Tomorrow (military pensioner, or a provincial head of philosophy at a technical university, or a gumanitarian student from a poor family), there were readers of Sport-Expresses (The layman-ash, who is no longer enough Soviet “we don’t need such hockey” and want something more).

He will never succeed with “posters”, no matter how optimize.

Many people were, and at some point there was a need for the reader of the “posters”-a person who considers Russia a part of the world cultural process, and himself-part of this Russia. The second point, perhaps, is even more important, because by the end of the nineties it was no longer a problem to get a cassette with any festival film or a disk with any independent music, but it was closer to subcultures-disparate aesthetes in different cities read something, watch and listen, but exist somewhere deep outside the television mainstream.

It is important that the “poster” appeared in 1999: this date and formally allows the magazine to attribute the list of the great Russian media that appeared in that decade, but the ninety -ninth year is not just the nineties. For post-depleted Russia, it was the year of the mass search for itself, the year of Zemfira, Pelevin (it was Generation P, and not the “Chapaev and the Void”, was his first book, read by all), the year of the 200th anniversary of Pushkin, unexpectedly marked by everyone, suddenly turned out that Pushkin was important seriously, and not because Putin’s year, and the year of Putin, I am: Putin’s year, I I am sure that there is a connection, and a new magazine about a new attitude to culture can probably also be considered a link in this connection. If it is quite rude, in 1999, people living in Russia suddenly, each reason, felt like a nation or, at least, felt the need to be. In relation to art consumption, this was the need for a conversation about a new book, film, album - by 1999 this need became mass and made such a magazine possible.

The state of Russian society today is not even a step, but a jump back compared to 1999. The usual words - the “voter”, “taxpayer” - are mockingly in our conditions, because voters do not choose anyone, and individuals of individuals are more similar to a quitter in favor of the supreme landowner. All forms of public self -organization independent of the authorities have been suppressed and destroyed for many years - the state today proceeds from the fact that, besides its structures, no institutions should be in principle. The Poster was an institute. She had no chance.