Why am I not a Siberian?

My father's parents came to Siberia voluntarily. Just because they were promised an apartment. My grandfather got a job as an engineer at the Sibmotor factory, so that after fifteen years of hard work to get the coveted living space, on which he and her grandmother happily lived forty years. Nevertheless, grandmother always considered her move beyond the Urals a victim. She constantly compared Russia and Siberia - not in favor of the latter. “Nobody is trading in the bazaar here,” she was indignant. “Not like us, in Russia!”

It was strange for me to hear it. I did not understand: what's the difference? What does it mean "in Russia"? Where are we?

In the USSR, Siberian, as something special, was mentioned only in congratulatory cards, when the addressee wished "Siberian health"

Then the USSR collapsed and the question "Where are we?" Suddenly ended up on the agenda. Deputies of local parliaments recalled the regional ideas of Potanin and the famous article by Yadrintsev "Siberia as a colony." “We had in mind to show that this land could, under the best conditions, be a country of contentment, wealth and happiness,” wrote Yadrintsev.

- Exactly! Rob us! - The Siberian deputies of the democratic wave were worried, demanding to raise the question of autonomy. In Kemerovo, they wanted to declare the "Kuznetsk Republic", in Chita they dreamed of restoring the DVR.

Discussions took place against the background of empty stores and a coal deficiency before starting the heating season. This is probably why the Siberians remained indifferent to the question of self -determination. People wanted to eat. Somehow it was not believed that another change of flags would allow the food crisis. The most practical of local politicians went to Moscow to ask for oils and bread to feed fellow countrymen. These walkers later made a career under Yeltsin and Putin, using the confidence of the center and the administrative resource. And those who rally for "free Siberia" left the political scene. At the end of the 2000s, as a journalist of TV-2 television company in Tomsk, I decided to find out how the fate of the Evast Parliamentarians developed. The picture was depressing. One worked as a taxi driver, the other was sitting without work in a wooden hut on the outskirts of the city. It was impossible even to joke about how terribly far from the people they were from the people, because it was the unrealistic choice of the political course that abandoned them into the thick of folk life, where you can feel the deep wisdom of Erofeev’s broom: “I like that the people of my country have so empty and convex. Whatever happened to my country, in the days of doubtful folly, in the year of any trial disaster - these eyes are not wrinkled.

And now I will reveal the secret: the Siberians do not care about the authorities and under what flag it is sitting. The indigenous, in the tenth knee, Siberians, in which in the subcortean, is the memory of Soviet concentration camps and royal hard labor, they consider any power inevitable evil. Therefore, they live unnoticed. If not from a blizzard, then at least from Caesar away. I must say, they succeed well.

If you call a Siberian, then you should not care what is happening at home

Once the fate of the journalist brought me to the wilds of the Tomsk region, to a dead village. The rural settlement, according to all the documents, was in non -residential and those who were registered there received lifting money from the budget to move. But they did not leave. They stayed in place, acquired autonomy, thanks to the Japanese electric generator, and they lived well, selling cedar nuts and swamp berries to the Chinese. This pirate offshore in the heart of the taiga, right along Yadintsev, looked like a country of contentment, wealth and happiness. Out of journalistic habit, I wanted to tell Urbi et orbi about courageous people, real Siberians ... But they asked to refrain from reporting. They said that no one needs advertising here. And in general, I would ride my own way and would not interfere with working.

I had to do so, to leave a dead village that looked more alive than any collective farm, with the realization that I am not a Siberian and I will never become them. The gut is thin-to live according to the law of the jungle, like four hundred years ago, when the Russians, having come from the Urals, drove off the tribes of river, forest and Kuznetsk people. Which of them is to consider Siberians? Conquistadors or Aborigines?

Militant Chukchi resisted government forces until the end of the 19th century. "The clothes of the Russians are all iron, the mustache is like walruses, the eyes are round iron, spears long in the elbow and behave druelly," the local tradition reported. In the history of this brutal local war, material for several novels and blockbusters, but we limited ourselves to jokes. Chukchi is smart - Chukchi knows who the boss of the party. This is instead of an apology for genocide.

The pioneers, convicts, fugitive Old Believers, peer peasants, prisoners of the Gulag, builders of BAM and Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station-all these waves of migration at ninety-nine percent consisted of people who did not like Siberia and did not know anything about it. Some rode for freedom, others in the prison car, someone behind a long ruble, and who for the fog and the smell of the taiga. But almost everyone considered this country as a wild desert, as a pure leaf for a new chapter of his biography. The immigrants had to fight for survival. It was not up to the sentiments. “You die today, and I am tomorrow” - this principle dominated in Siberia long before Solzhenitsyn quoted him in his “archipelago”. The pioneers studied local languages in order to interrogate the prisoners. The old people were only interested in the form of jewelry from funeral mounds. At the same time, the winners and defeated were equally powerless in the face of the central government.

The Siberian intelligentsia, the only thinking percentage of the population, was under the close supervision of the police. The government was afraid of separatism, even when it was not at all. But it was worth in Tomsk in the 60s of the XIX century to arise a Potaninsky mug, the participants of which discussed the “United States of Siberia”, as vigilant agents reported, and hardworking investigators concocted the case “about the separation of Siberia from Russia”. The name is loud, but they don’t give orders for a trifle. Potanin was sent to hard labor so that others would not have dreamed about the unrealizable.

My friends, in Moscow and Paris, will fog a look at the word "Siberia". “Oh, romance!” They say. “Oh, open spaces, free spirit, Trans -Siberian highway! Lucky for you to be born a Siberian!” Thank you, I answer, only I'm not a Siberian. Who are you? I don't know myself. A delicate question. You will begin to discuss it and encroach on the territorial integrity of Russia. After all, if you call a Siberian, then you should not care what is happening in your homeland. Why is there, near the offices of Gazprom, the asphalt lies and the flowers grow, and how do you take a step to the left, a step to the right, then neither flowers nor asphalt? Impenetrable spaces. Pedestrians are leaning like pioneers, under them, without feeling the country. Everyone thinks to himself: I am alone, everything is drowning in Pharisee. And these are not all questions.

In general, I wish you Siberian health to survive to the time when the conversation about what Siberia is, it will become a normal agenda of the day, and not the 280th article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

Andrey Filimonov - Tomsk writer and journalist

The "Opinion" expressed in the heading of the point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial office