Anatoly Shot: Dreams, Dreams

About the reasons that caused the February revolution of 1917, the main victim of it-Tsar Nicholas, does not allow anyone to lie. "Around the betrayal and cowardice and deception!" - He wrote in his diary after, how he made a manifesto about his renunciation. And he added: "At one in the morning he left Pskov with a severe feeling of experienced." So he could write a simple subject of the empire after the next scandal with his wife, who was not to blame. These words are also striking: “After the experienced”-after that means that it has already passed, followed, leaving only a difficult feeling.

He has been all his life: he did not distinguish, like many ordinary people, which is important, which is not very. And he perceived everything the same: like something purely personal, homemade. In his own way, a happy little man, he knew neither spiritual upheavals, nor explosions of the mind, nor the game of imagination. "How they love me!" - He noticed sluggishly, once looking at the crowd of the common people, driven to meet him.

What did the words mean: "Around the betrayal and cowardice and deception!"? They meant that tsarism was tired of everyone, I could not be disgusting. All: peasants, workers, soldiers, officers, officials, priests, students and gymnasium students with their teachers and rulers of their thoughts. To everyone, although not everyone was called by name. But the king’s inconsistency with his duties only reflected a much more serious discrepancy.

"Istambul, Constantinople,"-now the Zastalovka is so in Uglich or Morshansk, not suspecting that this is an echo of other people's worries

It’s not even about what Solzhenitsyn is said: from above - red hundred, from below is black, and between them a handful of people, entrepreneurs are silent. The late Russian capitalism was simply not so wealthy as to ensure a tolerable life to the vast majority of an almost illiterate population, who did not want to change anything in his life. But all the same: capitalism suffered most from popular dissatisfaction. His main opponent was the tsarist bureaucracy, bureaucracy. Everywhere slingshots, bribes, requisitions, all and all sorts of absurdity. “They don’t help - at least they didn’t interfere,” novice manufacturers and breeders sighed in the same way as the current ones. Tsarism was tired both in itself, and in the end - with its war. To the one who has not yet read, and now he will read his secret agreements with the Western allies, there will be not quite an ordinary experience.

What were you going to get after the victory? Among other things - Black Sea Straits and Constantinople. Just what the Russian person lacked for complete happiness, isn't it? Like Crimea in 2014 ... "Istambul, Constantinople," now he is eager for Zagalovka somewhere in Uglich or Morshansk, not suspecting that this is an echo of other people's concerns.

ISTANBUL WAS Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople ...
So Take Me Back to Constantinople ...

Was Istanbul Constantinople,
Now this is Istanbul, not Constantinople ...
Eh, I would return to Constantinople!

Already under Khrushchev, year -third year, the General Staff once had a lecture for the highest officers. The lecturer, a military historian, a civilian man with glasses, talked about a “throw into the Balkans” as a dream that crossed from one generation of the rulers of Russia to another. The hall remained indifferent. The thoughts of this audience for the first time in Russian history were in the area of the Caribbean. In the silence there was only one thick voice: "See ... Ali Dardanella!" The voice belonged to Marshal Rotmistrov.

Thus, we can say that tsarism was dropped by the not quite successful course of the war. That is, he was removed for that because he could not present the Russian Constantinople. It turns out that way. There will be many opponents of this explanation, but today - a little less than three years ago. In February 1917, the generals and the Duma figures seemed that it was in the Sumbur of democratic transformations that they would finally manage this ancient charitable affair. Now, they are in opposition, people, and serious people who expect that, having ennobled Putinism with a democratic maneuver, they will be able to keep his acquisitions, and if they are lucky, then make new ones.

Anatoly Shot - writer and publicist, leading
Radio Liberty programs "Your letters"

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