Oleg Kashin: A holiday of what is not

“What is not” is for some reason an important factor in many countries. Somewhere in the third world, where from some epic times there is a foreign military base, and the natives work on rubber plantations of a large transnational company, always celebrate Independence Day. Dictators traditionally love to talk about freedom, put her monuments, call her the name of the square; A quote about the cruel century and freedom at the Moscow monument Pushkin was placed, as you know, not during its opening, but in 1937, and it is hardly just a coincidence. “What is not” - there is a joke about the Soviet Ministry of Culture can be remembered. But you never know what else.

It is easy to imagine how in the Kremlin this holiday was invented eleven years ago. What do we not have? Yes, that's exactly. They took and named. The farther, the more wild it sounds in Russia - folk unity. Everything is really very serious in the sense that for the authorities in Russia, popular unity is the last thing it wants.

First of all, the peculiarity of recent years comes to mind, when the construction of a public schism has become a conscious state policy: educating the conservative majority, the authorities primarily contrasts it with a disloyal minority, training and raising both sides with the help of a continuously imposed discussion on any topics, whether gays, history, religion, raising children and further according to the list, but this split is already final, already final, final. cosmetic. Propaganda prefers not to touch more important systemic things that exclude popular unity, the topic exists only in the form of fun for extravagant sociologists, but it should just be associated with any conversations about folk unity.

The estate of Russian society, cultivated and aggravated every year, leads to the fact that nothing between all owners of Russian passports can be in principle. It is difficult to talk about the very coexistence of all Russians in one society-the Putin aristocracy, the power oprichnina and others understand what social groups have long settled in some kind of their own country, speak their own language, exist in their, different from ours, culture. "In its country" is a calming exaggeration. In ours, of course. It just happened that it belongs to them - year after year and step by step, they assigned Russia and now, finally, they were assigned.

How to live in this reality, equally poorly imagine both of them and us. The game of the Russian nation, declared the other day, was caused, of course, also with this uncertainty, and the simple -minded Kadyrovskoye, "it is strange to apply to Chechnya the uniform standards for all regions" reveals the same problem on the very indecent side - interregional or even interethnic inequality serves the authorities with another source An extreme example) prefers just in internal ethnocracies, obviously contrasted by the All -Russian national majority.

That the nameless viewer, that Raikin, that I - we all stand from the outside of the perimeter inside which power lives

What should be motivated by a "simple" Russian to think that he has something in common with "difficult" fellow citizens? Probably, the authorities and which itself has been fighting over this issue for a year, and all propaganda experiments that are accepted to treat as a group of society and minority, in fact, can be called, on the contrary, to unite the majority and minority, but other majority and minority. For the authorities, this is a matter of survival - so that the “simple” majority does not hatch of the state “difficult” minority. The famous phrase of Margarita Simonyan about the fact that if we “release political reins”, then “we will be hanged on a tree or first” - she is exactly about that. And it is significant that the “difficult” Simonyan treats this warning to the “simple” to me - the very idea that freedom is dangerous only to them is unbearable for the Putin nomenclature. And for this, they will always need allies of us, that is, "simple" Russians of varying degrees of simplicity.

In this sense, the nameless viewer from the distant district center, with whom the authorities talks through the TV, and a very nomenclature by Soviet standards, the creative intelligentsia (see the case of Konstantin Raikin ), and not very deep, sincerely considering itself anti -people, and anyone else, are also equal. The authorities are important that these people feel at the same time with her, but that the nameless viewer, that Raikin, that I - we all stand on the outside of the perimeter inside which the power lives. And just the fact that too many are not ready to understand the outside of the perimeter that they are the people, and serves as an obstacle to the real, and not to the one to which this holiday is dedicated to popular unity.

The actual isolation of power from the people is masked by the fact that we, the people, ourselves do not feel isolated from it. At different levels, this illusion of non -insulation, of course, is different; The viewer from the periphery believes that, together with the authorities, he is opposed to the West, Raikin will be satisfied with the new Mumbulti trenches, and my other colleague will tell you what good people fall into power - not like this spring. That is, instead of a public agreement in modern Russia, there are several bilateral public agreements between the authorities and different parts of the people, and real popular unity is possible only if each of these agreements is terminated, and a new one, against the authorities, will be concluded. The fact that it has not yet been concluded can consider the authorities with its success, but this is the success of the same kind as in a person who has come out for a walk without an umbrella under thunderstorms and not wet, because there was no rain that day. The subject of a public contract against the authorities was not found only because no one is looking for it. All activity, which, according to tradition, is considered opposition, is associated only with current reactions to what the power does or speaks, and in fact only exacerbates the split that benefits it.

Inventing this holiday eleven years ago, the authorities themselves laid out its Koshcheev needle in a prominent place - it was precisely the popular unity of it and destroy it, it remains only to achieve it.

Oleg Kashin - journalist

Opinions expressed under the heading "Law" may not reflect the point of view of the Radio Liberty editorial