Oleg Kashin: Veterans decomposition

In today's Russian political journalism there are a dozen older authors (those who are now plus or minus sixty years), whose fate is similar to the fate of the rest, as they say, to the degree of mixing. They all managed to work in the perestroika and early post -Soviet press, all were its stars, were pioneers, created a language in which we speak and write today and which there was simply no before them. Tretyakov, Sokolov, Leontiev and several more names - well, it is clear who they were then and who they became now. It is strange that none of the current thirty-year-olds looks at these veterans from this point of view that they may be a mirror in which you can see yourself in the future, that is, today you are well done, and tomorrow the Rosneft spokesman, which everyone laughs.

But the Rosneft spokeswoman is still one, and the typical path for a successful democratic journalist of the late eighties is still not to change the areas of activity and, having lived to this day, write articles and tweets about the wisdom of the leaders and the malice of the opposition; It seems that this is quite consistent with the popular formula about the heart of the young radical and the head of the adult conservative, but one of this formula can not describe their path. To be a conservative is an inconspicuous fate, but conservatism in the format “always for power, no matter what it does”, “still does not exist, and this format is before us, and the path from youth into maturity makes an impression completely different, as if late-piercing ironic skeptics at some point suddenly began to get younger, turning from the masters of new journalism, first in dull Komsomol members, and then in pioneers, and then, and then pioneer. Learning the speech and the hollow. Great seduction to call this degradation, that is, something like “drank a lot of vodka and deepened”, but offending people is always easier than understanding their drama, and even if someone really drank a lot of vodka, it is better to understand why he drank it-maybe there were reasons for that.

Too many wanted to lean on the only

And what are these reasons? If all Putin and his police officers had a history of the newspaper “God forbid”, worshiping Gaidar and Grachev’s tanks on the Novoarbat bridge, it would be clear: there were many people who dreamed of enlightened authoritarianism, and many of them are ready to perceive the current reality as their dreams that has been converged, why not. But even this very common feature is not peculiar to all the Prochrevsky authors of the older generation-we put it, Maxim Sokolov really wrote in “Do not give God”, and the same Vitaly Tretyakov and his “independent” in 1996 were as correct as possible to the opposition, and in 1993 the “Independent” was the only newspaper with white censorship spots in the place articles criticizing the power overclocking of parliament.

These people are really too different. Someone was firmly for the Gaidarochubais, and someone flirted with Berezovsky, someone was against the Chechen war, and someone was in, someone agitated, and someone did not campaign, but today they all have the same dull dungeon, and this scares primarily from the point of view that it is not clear what to avoid in their life from the exciting one to a gloomy period.

Twenty -five years ago they believed in what they were doing and what they write, and then stopped

Probably, at some point they were the hypertrophied significance of journalism in the post-Soviet society of the first years: then this profession was someone like the current security official or political strategist of the beginning of the zero, and it was difficult to resist that everything was subject to you, and that you are the most important-when it becomes clear that the main thing is not you, the ambitions are reduced to the desire to become next to the main thing, and then-somewhere under it, in it, areas of soles, but still close. In those years, everyone loved the expression “fourth power”, and when it became clear that it was worth nothing, too many wanted to lean against the only one, leaning, and some grew. It may have grown precisely the best, because it was they who had the most reason to believe in their immunity on dependencies, and in their ability to say what they believe in, so that it does not conflict with what the bosses believe in (something similar in our time, when some liberals managed to join the anti-Navalnic campaigns on the pages of the Kremlin press, almost did not True - in fact, if a Navalny Nationalist, but the liberal does not like nationalists, why not attach against Navalny?). But here they were unlucky in the fact that the space of loyal statement in the zero and tenths turned out to be too mobile, and what was unacceptable to the authorities yesterday became his position today, throwing the publicists from side to side, like when pitching, and the one who sang the indestructibility of the post -Soviet borders, turned out to be a supporter of the annexation of the Crime The arrests of the Limonovites were happy when the arrests took place, turned into a like -minded Limonov and his neighbor in the newspaper strip.

Any explanation of the evolution of these authors is exhaustively retold by one line: twenty -five years ago they believed in what they were doing and what they write, and then stopped. Everything else is secondary - it does not matter neither lemons, nor Crimea, nor Navalny. I do not want to speak from the position of the handler of the advice of the young generation, but I myself try, albeit in the eyes, to follow the decomposition of veterans so as not to repeat their path. Maybe this is their real purpose - to show us how it was not necessary to behave.

Oleg Kashin - journalist

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