The incident of the free mason

The courage to rebel against how “everything in Russia is arranged”, and the price of such a riot

The owner of the Domodedovo airport Dmitry Kamenchik did not want to flee from Russia, the Basmanny Court, Moscow, February 19, 2016

About four years ago, I was called to participate in the jury of some dramatic competition: young authors, acute topics, documentary, verbatim, everything, as it has been adopted in the theater in recent years. I had to read the texts, I remember that I was a fair part of their diagonal in the Aeroexpress, following the Paveletsky station, but one play was hooked serious. The play was called “Gentiles”, it was written by the young playwright from Odessa Anna Yablonskaya, and the amazing factors of this text were not a mat and an imitation of everyday speech - but an encroachment (if not, mockery) for the most domestic and household customs, “as everything is arranged in Russia”. In a brief and inevitably simplifying retelling-it was a married couple with a sick daughter, to whom a deep-religious mother-in-law comes to, begins to water all the holy water and demand to go in order to heal in Diveevo, and everything moves to the final’s predictably good in their tragedy-but here the heroes exhibit her church and acceptance of the door, The icons are removed in the closet, the name is some dense chickest sorcerer, and the daughter, who is already on the threshold of the kingdom of heaven, takes and recover. The word "scrapers" at that time was not yet in use, but the Pussy Riot was already beginning, and I thought: what a wild and in a good way the inappropriate text, what would be done with the author and how the courage was enough.

“Why run? - answered the investigator as a mason. “I know that it’s true for me”

From the reports on the detention of the owner of Domodedovo Airport Dmitry Kamenchik, one could also make a good play: judging by the material of Kommersant, the first interrogation of the businessman lasted 18 hours and was dedicated not even to the circumstances of the 2011 terrorist attack, in which, according to the accusation, the top managers and the airport owner are indirectly guilty, and not even clarifying the confused The property of Domodedovo, in which the mason is the final famous link - but in questioning why the mason did not leave. You have three main managers, one of them is a woman with two children. You were hinted this way and this way - and electricity at the airport was turned off, and they did not give the excavation of documents, and permits for a new runway were not given. You heard, go, that the state is going to unite all three metropolitan aero -Nations, and the state is also the Rotenbergs, who have already entered Sheremetyevo. In the end, you have your own airport, you don’t even have to run to the border - why are you building a fool, why didn’t you leave? “Why run? - According to Kommersant, answered the investigator as a mason. “I know that it’s true for me.”

We do not know what is behind this wild and in a good inappropriate statement-faith in justice, calculation of his own strengths or accurate knowledge that they will intercede upstairs-but the story with the mason, at least his external stress, also denies how everything is arranged in Russia. If you have an asset, you can always agree with you, so that you do not have this asset: offer a profitable price, change the composition of shareholders, send a tax, OEP, SK, and now you are already crossing the line of the state border, and the asset begins to work for the good of the Motherland (or those whom the homeland has appointed this asset). “Truth”, “Law”, “Justice”, “The Case of Life” is not a topic at all, it is “not in our agenda”; The fate of intractable entrepreneurs who appeal to these concepts is also well known-you can familiarize yourself with the interview that they give now from abroad. And here, in the seventeenth year of the existence of Putin’s power, with its long -prescribed rules of the game, a person appears who openly declares: do not worry, I will not give my asset to anyone, and do not hope, I will not leave.

It so happened that I first saw Dmitry Kamenchik in the autumn of 1990 somewhere in the fields of the Mozhaysky district of the Moscow Region-he walked along the potato beds, discussing the poems of Robert Frost from the same freshmen of the Moscow poetry with other freshmen of Moscow State University. I can’t say that we were closely familiar - but for many years I watched from the side of how his business gradually lined up: a travel agency hosting Korean tourists, charter cargo transportation, a airline sale agency, finally Domodedovo. I looked at the airport from a monstrous trash-without any state programs and national projects-turned into a huge, well-functioning, comfortable space: in the mid-2000s there was nothing cooler and modern among the Moscow airports. I was worried when the airport - obviously, not only for natural reasons - ceased to develop and muddy body movements began around it, indicating that its owners did not share with whom and did not want to share. I understood why they didn’t want to, because this farm did not get the owners by inheritance and did not fall into their hands, because they were engaged in the same sports section with the president, and there was no technologically pressed or raiderly captured: it was more or less built, and it took 25 years of life; In essence, all life. I was a little proud that I happened to know the person who did all this - and honestly, I am still proud.

For nothing that the previous time I recalled him when I got into Wikipedia to find out what the playwright Anna Yablonskaya was doing now-and found out that she died with a terrorist attack in Domodedovo, when she flew to Moscow to receive some kind of dramatic prize.

 Photo: Gennady Gulyaev/Kommersant