Pavlensky believes differently

" Where they wandered around the Kaera zone, \ where they were looking for rotten roots under the snow, \ before this earth - no premieres, \ tightened their pants, kneel down! \ ... only like an eternal flame, like imperishable glory - \ stacks! Stack! Stack!

Galich’s words from the “ Ballad of Eternal Flame ” are fair now.

Enthusiasts, members of the Memorial society, local historians tried all these years to maintain the memory of the places of suffering and the death of millions of victims of Stalinist repression, but did this almost always at their own expense, overcoming resistance, indifference, hypocrisy of the authorities. Even the great writers and poets, destroyed in Soviet times, did not put monuments and tombstones, and those monuments that were created by caring people did not protect against destruction. Such is the fate of the monument to Mandelstam (the cult of everything related to the death of Pushkin, the great Russian poet of the 19th century, is strangely contrary to the attitude of the best poet of the XX century), which the sculptor Nenzhivin tried to give the city three times and establish on the site of the former Vladivostok camp, where the poet died. Each time, the sculpture was broken, filled with paint, defiled and destroyed, I had to transfer it to the university, because there was no one to protect the monument to the place where he should stand, there was no one ...

And the memory of a wonderful Ukrainian poet and a fighter for freedom Vasil Stusa , who was already killed in Gorbachev’s time in the Soviet camp for political prisoners?! He died in 1985 in Kartsere, during a hunger strike, just when Henry Belle advised him to applicants to the Nobel Prize. Stus’s camp works disappeared, and the only camp in Russia, the “Perm-36” camp (where Stus died), took away the memorials who stored him, destroying the memory of the memory created by great labor. Exactly a year ago (in April 2015) a commemorative board installed in Donetsk was dismantled on the wall of the university where the poet studied - 30 years after Vasil Stus’s death, the memory of him continues to destroy.

The theme of "vandalism" is understood very differently in the country, in the Criminal Code of which there are different articles for persecution for attempts on "cultural values". In vandalism, the artist Pyotr Pavlensky is accused for the fact that during the Freedom action he burned several auto -wings in the center of St. Petersburg. At the same time, there was no destruction of architecture and culture monuments, and it could not be, a small bonfire flared up on the roadway. Is this, isn’t it much more serious than to destroy a monument to the poet, and before that to kill the poet, to hide it for decades, destroying his works and all the information about the place and circumstances of his death?

For the symbolic arson of the FSB door (aka KGB, MGB, NKVD), Pavlensky was arrested in Lubyanka. They also accused of vandalism in vandalism: they say, a very valuable former cultural and historical door, whose paintwork was affected by the "threat" artistic action. Pavlensky on ships repeatedly objected to the prosecution against him - he declared that he categorically did not recognize his vandal, even proposed to retraining the article on “terrorism” in order to force the authorities to dump the “mask of humanism”. Recently, it became known that the article was changed to 243 of the Article 24 of the Russian Federation "The destruction or damage of cultural heritage (monuments of history and culture) of the peoples of the Russian Federation, included in the Unified State Register of Cultural Heritage (History and Culture Monuments)." Pavlensky said in court that he considers this “change of numbers” insignificant, and the motivation for the new qualification of the “crime” is ridiculous: according to the case file, the Lubyanka door earned such a high assessment of its cultural and historical value due to the fact that "there were repressed and executed prominent cultural figures."

In this regard, Pavlensky said: "I tell them that the FSB is the organization of executioners, and they are to me, that this is an acting burial ground. What is the difference?" The difference is indeed small-both in the assessment of the activities of the FSB-KGB, and in replaced articles: vandalism and "destruction of objects of cultural heritage"-in fact, the same thing. The question of what is so significant in terms of history and culture is more interesting? If the whole historical value of the door lies in the fact that, having entered it, they forever lost freedom, and then the life of Mandelstam, Babel and other really great cultural figures, then why did not indicate any indications of such sad facts?

Peter set fire to a completely different door - the door of the current repressive organ, the door of the continuers of the traditions of terror, the destruction of history and culture

The destruction of the memory of the tragedies of victims of political repression can be considered a crime, but was this door a symbol of memory and sorrows? Is this door - and all the facades and walls of the Lubyanka would not be enough! - Decorated with tablets with the dates of life of those whom she swallowed forever?! The excellent initiative "Last address" is precisely such signs that at their own expense are placed on the walls of those houses from where people who were then killed by Soviet terror were forever. It would be more than logical that the killer organization itself participates in such a project, and after all, all the data is still at the disposal of the FSB, it is not difficult for them to find information about who they tortured there, and place it on the door-yes anywhere! Now, if the Memorial door, the door with the names of the victims, with the dates of their life, portraits, poems, flowers, candles, with whatever memory signs, pain, repentance set fire to Pavlensky, maybe he would be “vandal” or “pest of historical and cultural monuments”. But Peter set fire to a completely different door - the door of the current repressive organ, the door of the continuers of the traditions of terror, the destruction of history and culture. Pavlensky himself is one of the objects of "destruction or damage" - a cultural figure persecuted for his art. He did not harm the “threat” with historical memory, but defended it, reminding everyone of the terrible story of the Lubyansky hell and telling the truth about the present time, when this hell again takes more and more power.

All this, of course, is not quite legal, and the system of Russian investigative and judicial actions does not accept the lyrics. To assess the legal component of the case in Russia, it is customary to attract experts. Which allows the courts, prosecutors, and sometimes defenders to rely on an expert opinion and move away from responsibility for their own evaluation of events. Who are these experts who can distinguish, where "special artistic value", but where - not? The Ministry of Culture, as it turned out, does not have the methodology and criteria in the approach to the "especially" values, and its experts in the courts are based on them for the composed manual. As a result, in the process regarding the library books on Heraldry, you can find such formulations of the expert on value: "The special historical value of books is that you can study history, and special artistic value is that books with pictures and pictures of color."

These experts will apparently talk about the actionism of Pavlensky, one of the most talented, bold and honest artists of our time. With such criteria, they will judge history, culture, memory, "objects of cultural heritage." You do not need to be a "expert" to understand who destroys the memory, history, and culture. They do not believe that "manuscripts do not burn,"-they still burn, they already know! They believe that their storing secrets do not burn.

But Pavlensky believes differently.

Stefania Kulaeva - expert of the anti -discrimination center "Memorial"