Berezovsky as a diagnosis

What does the book of Peter Aven demonstrate

This book must be read. Well, at least for a purely practical purpose. She offers topics for conversation, even with those with whom there seems to be no common topics. Stretched dinners with dialogues about the weather are guaranteed to turn into noisy feasts with inevitable arguments. Because we don't have people who are indifferent to the nineties - to what happened then, to how it all can be interpreted.

For exciting conversations and lively discussions, there is a wealth of material here. Lovely insider tales if you like: for example, during the confrontation between the “Chubais team” and Luzhkov, Boris Nemtsov, who had just arrived in Moscow as a member of this very team, complained to Yeltsin that Luzhkov did not register him in the capital. “Yeltsin asked to be connected to Yuri Mikhailovich. "Yuri Mikhailovich! Petty and unworthy!” Yeltsin says and hangs up. Poor Nemtsov says: “Boris Nikolaevich, how will he know what you were talking about?” “He will now spend two hours trying to find out who I have. Everyone will understand." If you want, new macabre versions of the already terrible events: Berezovsky's wife, Elena Gorbunova, suggests that, as she puts it, "Roma and two other people" are behind the murder of Alexander Litvinenko (and Berezovsky himself, in her opinion, also died not from my own hand).

However, "Berezovsky's Time" gives ground for reasoning and more thoughtful, theoretical. This book, compiled from interviews of participants and witnesses of the "triumph and collapse of BAB" (mostly politicians and businessmen with a slight interspersing of old friends and beloved women), is in fact nothing more than a remake of Kurosawa's famous film "Rashomon" (well, or Akutagawa's story "In the Thicket", based on which it was filmed, but for some reason it looks more like a movie). Different people, testifying to the same events, do not dramatically coincide with each other - and it doesn’t even matter whether they are deliberately lying, or the fault is simply a distortion built into human memory.

There is only one conclusion - objective history is impossible, memory is deceptive, the past, how we remember it, depends on how we want to remember it.

And although there are at least two separate short stories in Pyotr Aven's book - a conversation with Anatoly Chubais, showing how the impenetrable narcissism of an intelligent person leads him into the most obvious contradictions with himself, almost into stupidity, and a conversation with Sergei Dorenko, clearly demonstrating how to be a psycho for one's own benefit, and where Kiselyovism comes from - nevertheless, the voices of all its heroes merge into a certain rumble, into a single narrative, from which it is quite possible to single out common, "one for all" meanings.

So, if we talk about the main meanings of this hum, then for me there are at least two of them.

First. Everything that was said then in the nineties by skeptics, believing in a conspiracy, in general, the most unpleasant people - that's all true. And that General Lebed as a presidential candidate was from the very beginning a fake, a turnkey electoral notion (Berezovsky flew to the general, who did not think about the presidency, and agreed on everything with him overnight). And that the methods of “ours”, intelligent, so to speak, reformers did not differ in any way from the methods of “not ours” and not reformers (the book mentions the most perfect lights of liberal thought as sending “masks-shows” to competitors). And that Sobchak's assistant Vladimir Putin was promoted to the place where he found himself, because those who promoted him hoped for his gratitude and manageability - and this is true in all its incredible literature. Somehow I can't believe that people are equipping the country in accordance with the ironic historical digressions from Mikhail Zoshchenko's Blue Book, but no, that's exactly how it is.

The bad people were right.

Second. From the confessions and memoirs of all these important people - Anatoly Chubais, Alexander Voloshin, Valentin Yumashev, Mikhail Fridman, and all the rest - you can learn a lot, but what is much more significant is what you cannot extract from there. Namely: at least some recognition of responsibility for what they did and for what they did. Well, yes, says one of the rare “just people” in this book, Berezovsky’s assistant Irina Pozhidaeva, that it’s better not to remember the “beauty” of the nineties, because they will always say “and the whole country at this time ...”, and even Vladimir Pozner mentions that the journalists here ceased to be journalists, having taken part in the campaign for the elections of 1996, but the general message, the general tone of these interviews is completely different. This is the intonation of people who did everything right, maybe, of course, they miscalculated here and there, but in principle they are confident both in their own choice and in their actions. And, most importantly, having nothing to do with what everything came to as a result

Most of these interviews were made by Petr Aven in 2014 - which is already the year of our so-called "stability" - but our heroes, you know, have nothing to do with its grimaces. Only others are to blame - the communists in 1996, the new generation of the "Kremlin", who replaced them in the middle of the 2000s. Everyone, anyone, but not them.

The appearance in stores and the general discussion of "Berezovsky's Time" coincided with the publication of the last word of Alexei Ulyukaev. “Only when you yourself get into trouble,” he says, “do you begin to understand how hard people really live. What injustice they face. But when everything is in order with you, you shamefully turn away from human grief.

Of course, one should not wish trouble on anyone, but I would like to wish at least some reflection to the heroes of this book. Perhaps the inability to do so once contributed to the fact that they were thrown upstairs. But now all people are adults, not to say old. Eh.