Russian in law

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to develop a law on the Russian nation. And the question here is not even in the anecdotality of the event itself, but that even the Soviet experience did not teach Putin that the nation is not created by laws and political orders. They either arise - or not.

When the Secretary General of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev proudly proclaimed that a “new historical community” appeared in the state - the Soviet people, he was unlikely to assume that horns and legs would remain from the community. What is Brezhnev there - most of his compatriots did not then suggest! But Putin, along with all of us, survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, along with its notorious historical community. I didn’t forget anything, I have not learned anything.

In order for the political nation to actually arise, it needs general trials - and solidarity. Moreover, not planted from above, but manifested in genuine actions of citizens. In the Soviet Union, the political nation could arise during the Second World War - if only after the liberation of the country's territory from the Nazis, the Stalinism did not again mercilessly compact all living things, punish those who remained in the occupied territories, resettle peoples, strengthen repressions, in a word, to do everything so that the sense of solidarity that arose again was replaced servility. And then people simply survived in their lively state.

About how political nations appear, we know not from history textbooks. I watched this on a Ukrainian example. I saw the completely fantastic solidarity of the participants of the Maidan of 2013-2014. I saw anger that gripped the whole country, from Uzhgorod to Donetsk, after the annexation of Crimea. I saw the miracles of popular self -sacrifice when the troops of the aggressor and their mercenaries attacked the Donbass. So political nations appear - in uprisings, wars and reforms. Without any decrees and laws.

What of all this has been experienced by Russians over the past decades? The fear of the Chechen war and terror, which rather split society, made the Caucasians for many years of second -grade people in their own state? Television joy due to an attack on Georgia? Because of the attack on Ukraine? The plague feast on expensive oil and the naive faith that everything in this life - from sports victories to friendship with neighbors - can be bought, falsified, won with the help of old tanks? From all this, you cannot glue the political nation, you can’t approve the law. No sorkov will help, as, indeed, no Volodin.

But the problem is actually much more serious than it seems. This is the problem of the future. Sociologists call Russians the most “atomized” people in Europe: the political nation here often ends on the threshold of their own apartment, and even inside, even among the closest, solidarity often cannot be raised. But the most dangerous is interethnic and regional tension that no one wants to notice and understand. The very concept of Russians turns the inhabitants of the country into a hive, as if consisting of different cells: we are all together, but do not poke to strangers. And this means that any representative of a small people who would like to become not a Russian, but simply Russian, does not even have theoretically such an opportunity: the Russian doors are tightly closed to him. The fact that the Russian itself, which - well, suppose at least - would like to become part of the Tatar or Yakut world, also has no such opportunity, I am not even saying.

Therefore, a simple question arises: is a unified political nation possible in the Russian Federation? And if she really - not according to the Putin’s order, but by the attraction of history - suddenly begins to arise, will it not turn out that this is not one nation, but two, three, ten? And will all these new political nations want to continue to live in one state? And if they don’t want to, then how will they share, is it peaceful?

This is the most important question of the nearest Russian future - the question that is unlikely to be asked by the self -propelled initiator of the next meaningless law.