Efim Fishtein: power of powerless

If he had not died five years ago, he would now be eighty. It is unlikely that he would look different than in his lifetime. Well, maybe he would have looked even more comical in his short, boy pants and a jacket jacket, burry, always coughing and half -bent, hardly choosing the right words. From a beautiful far, his figure looked much more monumental than in his native Czech Republic. The characteristic that the prison psychologist gave the then political prisoner Vaclav Gavel in 1980: “An extrovert personality with high intelligence, socially flexible, well-oriented in the world of modern ideas. Free-thinking liberal of a radical rain, inclined to independent and extraordinary solutions, with rich fantasy and saturated internal lives, Able to formulate thoughts perfectly ... At the same time, a person pursued by anxious imagination and not confident. " Medical conclusion is cited in his monograph by a close friend and associate of Gavel Michael Zhanovsky. A psychologist, for nothing that was prison, was extremely perspicacious.

The theme of Gavel’s life was moral values, in everyday life and in politics. In the early 90s, when the communist past was not yet so past and when the experience of totalitarianism still affected human existence, just liberated, its speeches and texts sounded fresh and meaningfully. As they strengthened the democratic structure, they gradually lost their severity and shock, slowly but surely turning into an empty moralization. Gavel still scourged consumer mentality, installation on the bourgeois coziness, the condensed essence of the emerging capitalism, a petty bite of political parties, not offering in return anything good and working. The motto of his whole life “Truth and Love will defeat lies and hatred” was good while he was addressed to human nature and had in mind the ennolation of the moral appearance of the personality, but, seriously proposed as a political program, perhaps perhaps an perplexed grin. The fact is that all four concepts are enduring and non -emergency, like everything metaphysical, and it is impossible to speak in a completely seriousness about the final victory of one over the other, without imposing a suspicion of a few book and undead warehouses of the mind. Vaclav Gavel was generally easy to criticize, and during his presidency in the Czech Republic, only the lazy did not engage in this.

Amazingly, in the midst of the Russian right -capacity intelligentsia, the first Czech president (before him were only Czechoslovak) is perceived today as a departed like -minded person. This is a memory of memory that occurs as it is removed in time and space. The views of the president, of course, evolved. For example, he began as a convinced pacifist and opponent of military blocs, who advocated the self -seducer not only of the Warsaw, but also the North Atlantic military organizations, to become at the end of his life a “hawk”, an ardent propagandist of interventionism and the author of the phrase “humanitarian bombing”. But in his evolution before the ideas of right -wing liberalism, he never ripened.

In the book of memoirs “The Art of Management of the State”, Margaret Thatcher, a subtle expert on ideological movements and an insightful physiognomist, gives the Czech president the following characteristic: “There can be the slightest doubt that Gavel is an anti -communist. But he is a person of left -wing beliefs, and this determines his view of the world.” This is the key to his many errors and the source of contradictions that tormented him as a thinker. It is no coincidence that in his epoch -making polemic with the wonderful writer Milan Kunder around his essay “The abduction of Europe”, Vaclav Gavel rejects the interpretation of Russia as aziopes, a stupid aggressor who pulled the Czech Republic from its natural civilizational context. He expressed his credo against an uncomfortable eastern neighbor in the first performance after a velvet revolution in the American Congress: "If you want to help us, help Russia first." This may be deep, but not realistic enough: Russia is not the miniature universe that can be helped from the outside.

Being left intellectual, Havel often fell into logical trap. On the one hand, he professed the cult of the Masarik President, who was the first to formulate the Czech idea, which was laid down in the foundation of the national state, appreciated the traditions of anti-Austrian and anti-fascist resistance and the specific ideology of the "falconity"-the All-Russian Sports Movement. On the other hand, he rejected all nationality, promoted the principle of world citizenship, the state considered a hopelessly obsolete institution and attribute of the past, was a supporter of the unconditional and unlimited transfer of all and all signs of state sovereignty supranational governance bodies, a certain "world government".

On the one hand, Gavel was a selfless fighter for freedom and democracy, on the other hand, his ideas about democracy were very peculiar and included the extreme distrust of political parties and representative parliamentarism, and the sermon of “civil society” gave out sympathy for the corporate model.

Havel was strongly not a black and white figure, and to see it in black and white colors means simplifying a complex phenomenon

On the one hand, he loved to talk about high morality and spirituality, on the other hand, he unconditionally supported the progressive left -handed movements in all areas of public life. Where ideological disputes arose in society, Havel intuitively took the side of those who promoted the principles of postmodern moral relativism. Christian moral foundations, the self -worth of the family, patriotism - these concepts were infinitely alien to him. His worldview was based on floating sands of abstract humanism, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism. He contemptuously called the traditional family "a calf, where they certainly expect slabs on meat from a bitch with a cow." In the last years of his life, Gavel was carried away by climatic alarmism and helped the Green Party in every way, but, as in all other cases, his support turned out to be, in his own apt word, "a kiss of death."

On the one hand, in life he was a convinced pacifist, humanist and defender of human rights. On the other hand, this never prevented him from playing for all the forms of the West’s military intervention in the most confusing sectarian-tribe conflicts.

Sometimes you have to deal with the insidious interpretation of the latest history of the Czech Republic, where Vaclav Gavel is served as a cunning intrigue obsessed with one, but fiery passion - a craving for power. With his whole life, he allegedly only disappeared the ground in order to get to power and master it. The secret meaning of such a question is the desire to remove from history the memory that there were people who were ready to sacrifice their own freedom in the name of freedom and justice for everyone. Havel, after all, served a total of almost five years for his work in the Committee for the Protection of the Unjustly Purse (one of the specialized bodies of the Charter-77 movement). Of course, by Russian standards, this is not a period, as they say, “to sit on a parach”, but the time was not Stalin's yard. The very willingness to sacrifice her own well -being in the name of higher universal values distinguishes Western civilization from all others. So, in any case, Vaclav Gavel understood her, and, perhaps, with all his errors, it was thanks to him that the West recognized the right of the post -communist countries of Central Europe to become his integral part.

Vaclav Gavel was never a static, unchanged value. He was one in the 60s, the other during the Kharty, the third during the “velvet revolution”, the fourth during the years of the presidency and completely unlike all the retirement after retirement, when he brought the lived, wrote the last and last film. Some today see in him a demon responsible for all the flaws of real capitalism, for others he remained an idol, a monument poured in bronze, which freed us from the charms of real socialism. One and others are mistaken. Havel was strongly not a black and white figure, and to see it in black and white colors means simplifying a complex phenomenon. Gavel went down in history: what he ruined, he can no longer correct him, he can no longer prove his correctness. One thing is clear: he was a full -blooded politician of meat and bones, he lived with his ideas and was always ready to pay for beliefs on the largest account. There was the truthfulness in it, which is so murderously lacking the replacements of Gavel at the presidential post. And on the other hand, it did not have that endless cynicism, without which, supposedly, politics is impossible today. He lived not by lies, did not clown, did not pretend.

I often did not agree with him - in personal disputes and in newspaper controversy. But tonight, I am happy to get lost in the crowd on Vaclavskaya Square - I hope that one of those who will come to celebrate his anniversary. And show that there is still a demand for living people in politics.

Efim Fishtein - International Radio Observer Freedom

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