Translated material
Arseny Roginsky
An open letter to the researcher and thinker Arseny Roginsky from his friend Alexander Auzan.
Dear Senya!
I, as for sure, to me, the idea to widely celebrate the 70th anniversary of a person seems quite strange. The fact is that such dates were correctly widely celebrated in past times, when there was little reason to expect that a person would continue his active activity outside of this age. Today everything is wrong. We live in the era of the great demographic shift, when at least the educated classes began to live for so long that the scientists remembered that 120 years are biologically laid down the duration of human life. But I, in fact, not about that. I'm about what begins in seventy.
I want to remind you, dear Arseny Borisovich, that in some sciences, for example, in philosophy, the age of scientific maturity has always been quite high. Immanuel Kant wrote a dissertation where a hypothesis about the origin of the world was put forward, later called the Kantovo-Laplasov hypothesis, at 68 ... It's time, Senya, it's time!
I would like to state how I see your life, which you, of course, know much deeper and in detail, but perhaps it seems to me more integral and logical exactly because I do not know the details.
How can you imagine a portrait of Arseny Roginsky in the interior of time?
Soviet time. How does Roginsky become a dissident (and then political prisoner)? In my opinion, an unenlightened person, the situation is very understandable, where your work on the history of the Leningrad blockade became the point of turn, on the restoration (establishment) of the true picture. You did not conduct political or civilian ideas, but the spirit of the researcher who should finish the work, despite the fact that it became dangerous. You acted like that, it seems, Pliny the Elder, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, ran not from the volcano, but to the volcano to study its action. In the same way, you, having removed the young people from this study, continued to work and eventually passed the entire circle of the necessary misfortunes of the Soviet dissident. And they were met (including) the criminal community and the system of execution of punishments, as a respected political prisoner.
When the era changed, and you, together with Sergey Adamovich Kovalev and other colleagues, carried out the necessary work on the liberation and rehabilitation of political prisoners, there were different ways and roads in front of you. One could go to politics, where, for example, Sergey Adamovich went. It was almost impossible to go to science, because at that time people from science either went abroad, or simply looked for another lesson that provides at least some survival. You went to the sphere of the non -profit sector, which later received the proud name of civil society. Why so? Well, it was not to go to politics, really!
The main problem of the Russian policy of the 90s, which, I think, you understood before everyone else, was that no political activity is possible if it is not based on more complex types of public life. If this is not, then the minister commands the deputies, the deputies command the party, the party is trying to command non -profit organizations - i.e. Everything works accurately up to "vice versa." Therefore, in my opinion, you took up the construction of more complex things, the search for the correct mechanisms that would create social activities, form civil society.
The Memorial turned out to be the rare public organization that consisted not only of the initiators, but also of the huge number of people who were included in the history of their life and thereby their most important interests. You participated in the inventing and creating of a public organization unique for this period, in which society really participated, and not just city crazy and people who graduated from Western universities about non -profit activities. At the same time, you were truly carried away by things related to finding a solution to complex issues. You yourself admitted how significant the work with Gauk, the future Bundespräsident, the President of Germany on the archives legislation, was significant for you. Maybe this is your largest research project of the 90s, which is known to the whole of Europe (let you remind you of this).
I think that even then it was clear to you that your favorite classes, namely, “count corpses”, are only the background of wider and serious thoughts, which you have always been located as a historian, and how (again I dare to remind) Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman's beloved.
At the friendly table, you shook me with conversations that it is actually not clear how world wars are ending. That the First World War was completed by the outbreak of World War II, and a long peace between the Second World War still makes the drums in the souls and hearts knock, and the war is waiting for the threshold all the time, because the Second World War, generally speaking, has not yet finished. Your thoughts about this turned out to be unusually important for the current period, when the drums are hit much louder, and the incompleteness of the Second World War turns into the ghosts of the repetition of the previous ways to complete the wars, and the end by the beginning of new ones. It seems that we are already observing some steps in this style. Therefore, dear Arseny, it seems to me that now it is much more important to trust these of your thoughts than undoubtedly important experiences about a difficult historical era and efforts to save the results of many years of work. Because, in fact, the essence of the difficulty of this era? The fact that she cannot find her correct historical identification, cannot distinguish where the war begins and how to make it ending, that is, it requires you, dear Arseniy Borisovich, so that you come off many organizational affairs and indulge in conversations and thoughts that, believe me, you have a lot of time.
You know, Senya, if I could not convince you in private conversations that you should not just (for you this is a weak argument), but you want to do what you can do, today, I hope I will be able to convince you with this open letter.
In this letter, I said too often “it seems”, “in my opinion”, “seems” ... At the end of 2015, when we met with Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, he said when I began to say the word “seems”: “So far it seems to you, you better shut up. You say - "I'm sure." And I finish this letter as Mikhail Sergeyevich suggested.
Arseny, I am sure that your purpose of the thinker and researcher requires your efforts. Your talent should be realized for us and can bear worthy fruits to you, and not only to you. Please, Senya, hear me.