Sergey Loiko: One Victory

Near the shopping center near the Airport metro station, local authorities built a platform, placed tables and chairs. Elderly people of both sexes with gray and bald heads and orders, medals and all sorts of icons on the chest are sitting at the tables. Children in military caps bypass the tables and pin the old people on sweaters and jackets ornaments from the Guards symbol and the St. George tape. Veterans drop tears into plates with barley. At a distance is the field kitchen; A terrible young man in military uniform with the same ribbon on his chest generously piles a smoking porridge to everyone with a lady.

On the stage, an official person broadcasts something about "low bow" and "the main, blood-watered celebration of the great homeland." It is replaced by children in militarized costume and skirts, sing and dance. Then a massive woman with bright lipstick and a whole iconostasis regalius rises to the stage. "I remember how now, how to dig trenches, and then worked as a nurse, took out the wounded from the battlefield under the vigilant fire!" She screams into the microphone. Her face becomes Puntsov. The speakers begin to fony. “She took out the wounded!” One of the veterans at the table frowns, wiping her mouth from pearl barrels with the back of a wrinkled palm. “She was not more than a year old, and she, they say, snouts.” Indeed, you won’t give a military nurse more than seventy, and her criticism with medals in a jacket too.

Passers -by stop, listen to the performance, go further or queue for porridge. I got up too. Five minutes later, the same guy in a field cap with diets of sex from Moscow and Muscovites puts Gilyarovsky in a zinc bowl (there was such in the army in the dining room) porridge with a top and presenting like a reward, a zinc spoon with the words: “Thank you for the victory!” He says so emotionally, as if every letter in the words is title.

So I became a veteran. Porridge, indeed, smells of war and a little - machine oil. From the metro "Airport" to the Belorussky station, I am going by taxi. Tajik is lucky for the navigator in a straight line, who almost does not speak Russian. Under the driver's mirror, a bunch of St. George ribbons dangles.

In the cafe "Chocolate", the waitress Ksenia with a St. George ribbon on her chest brings me an account for cheesecakes and tea. In a leather daddy along with a score - a St. George ribbon. He says they were given visitors to take with them. I am a tips for her, she is a ribbon for me.

In one of the large network supermarkets, everyone has a cashier on the heads of the cap, and ribbons on the chest. Together with a check and a coupon for a discount on the sunflower oil, they give customers the same ribbon. In Sberkass, together with the pension, older people are again handed a St. George ribbon invested in a savings bank. “They could have threw even a stove for the holiday,” the pensioner grumbled, leaving the cash register, and removes the ribbon with the money in the wallet.

Airplanes fly low on Moscow - preparation for the parade. Five -story houses, Khrushchevs, almost shaking from a terrible rumble. “Nothing!” The old man laughs in a ragged, which has seen species with a suit with multi -colored blocks and a St. George ribbon on his chest. The veteran almost out of the edge of the jacket was erased by a pigeon litter from his “Lada” rusted to the holes with bald tires and sticker “on Berlin!” On the back glass.

Do you need anything else? Only victory. One for all. What is the victory?

On TV, the picture is a little more cheerful. Two seals in the blue berets of the landing and wooden guns in the paws spin vigorously in the pool under the team of the trainer. Then one of them swims over to the side and pulls his teeth behind the ring, lifting the Andreevsky banner on an improvised flagpole. And the other at this time sets a mine - a black ball with spikes - in the middle of the pool. Then both seals swim to water machine guns mounted on the poles above the surface of the water, and open the fire, pressing their noses on the trigger hooks.

Another plot is even more sinister. The four-year-old pupils of the kindergarten, dressed in military uniforms in the morning "Immortal Regiment" under a military song with a round dance, lifting the portraits of some military over their heads, supposedly their great-great-grandfathers. The faces of the children show that they do not understand what they are doing, and simply walk around the stage, like small zombies. On the back of the scene, the eternal fire "burns". "Remember, never forget!" - rushing from the speakers. At the end of the action, the participants in rows build on stage facing the audience, their parents, grandparents. Behind the rows of children with portraits, two educators hold a red banner of victory with a sickle and a hammer. On NTV, the children's choir of the pupils of orphanages selflessly sings: "So, we need one victory ..." They do not need anything else? Only victory. One for all. What is the victory? To achieve which millions of children have become the same orphans like them? For a price for such a victory, they will not stand?

The center of Moscow is blocked by trucks - daily preparation for the Great Victory Parade. "The requirements at the parade are very serious, and must stand accordingly, confidence, equalization, energy, the power of passage. It is necessary to ensure that all the lines go simultaneously with a wide, powerful step with this power-says Major General Anatoly Kontseva, the head of the Ryazan Higher Airborne Command School.-of course, this is difficult to achieve. Many hours of training ... It is necessary that the entire ceremonial calculation is one single one: one height of the head, one turn of the head, one of the weapons, I will not be achieved by one explanation. including self -education. "

The parades of such a scope and such a degree of frantic could be observed in the past only in fascist Germany, and today they are held in North Korea. Why Russia, the Kremlin, Putin, and especially the Russian people, this parade, in which everyone is involved, from kindergartens to cadets and pensioners, is not very clear. To note once again the victory in the war, in which the USSR lost two times more people than all other member countries combined? Even the "effective manager" Joseph Stalin seemed to understand what this victory cost, and did not celebrate these days with a parade. Apparently, I wanted this war to be forgotten more likely. Even for him, victory was inseparable from catastrophic defeats, millions of victims, colossal destruction of the European part of the country.

In Putin's Russia about the past war - either good or nothing. For Putin, the whole war consists of victory. Putin man of war. The war for him, as proven many times, is a political instrument. All people, even all pensioners cannot be made richer. There is not enough money for everyone. After all, it is necessary to pay excessive salaries to Miller and Sechin from something. And the cello for the Roldugins must be purchased for something. Therefore, it is easier for the people to feed myths about the Great Victory, preparing it in essence not for a peaceful and comfortable life, but for new wars and new victories. I wonder how long the long -suffering and patient Russian people are ready to eat pearl barley with the smell of machine oil?

Sergey Loiko - journalist and writer

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