​Stick over the Reichstag

There is an opinion according to which sport as a mass spectacle channels potential aggression. It is possible that someone has a sewer. And in some it clearly excites. It depends, so to speak. Sewage, as you know, also does not always behave flawlessly. It happens that it gets clogged. It happens at the national level as well.

Now, of course, this business is blooming, as they say, and smells with a special intensity, due, among other things, to the communication breadth and power of social networks and the media, which have gone irrevocably crazy due to acute infectious patriotism.

But it seems it has always been like this. At least as long as such a social phenomenon as “Soviet sport” existed. This very “sport”, even though by the will of historical circumstances it began to be called “Russian”, this did not cease to be Soviet, just as the army, police, secret police and many other state institutions did not cease to be Soviet, no matter how many times they changed their names and nicknames.

Over time, this former “Soviet sport” became, it seems, even more Soviet than it was.

So it's always been there. By “this” I mean a specific official and public attitude towards sports, towards its achievements, victories and defeats. This attitude, these joys from victories and sorrows from defeats were formulated exclusively in the categories of war, exclusively in military terms.

In the harsh, unsmiling thirties, with their anticipation of war, it looked something like this:

Hey goalkeeper, get ready for battle!
You are posted as a sentry at the gate.
Imagine what's behind you
The border strip is coming.

Nowadays, the general stylistic features of which are characterized, among other things, by the rapid expansion of the criminal-gopnik lexical repertoire, no special “borderline stripes” are heard.

Their role is played by much more domestic, more courtyard, such understandable and familiar “tear”, “bend” and “insert”.

However, the context of the use of these words and constructions clearly indicates that here we are not talking about the “yard to yard” battles of the times of my childhood and not about the “shooters” and “graters” of the 90s, but about high politics. About international, frankly speaking, politics, where in full accordance with the observed predominance of mythological public consciousness over the historical in all times and eras, all real or imaginary events of world and domestic history are mixed into one unformed heap and occur, as it were, simultaneously. Where Alexander Nevsky in chain mail hits Angela Merkel in a trouser suit with a sword, where Comrade Stalin on a white horse pokes a spear at the creeping bastard Obama, where the Russian passion-bearer tsar abandons a depraved Polish dancer for the sake of a beautiful and spiritual Crimean prosecutor, where TV presenter Solovyov in a Stalin-like jacket takes a selfie against the backdrop of the smoking Reichstag, and shirtless President Putin, holding a trophy pike in one hand and a brand new antique amphora in the other, poses for a photograph in Yalta along with Roosevelt in a wheelchair and Churchill with a cigar in his mouth.

So it's all politics, guys. This is our story, in short, bros. We will not allow it to be rewritten and we will not allow anyone to falsify it like this.

This is politics. What is politics? That's right, war. Because we need victories. And without war there is no victory. It's not clear, is it?

And all this painful paramilitary hallucination from time to time crystallizes and formalizes in the form of the Olympic Games or football and hockey championships.

The most seductive and transparent military-historical metaphor, of course, is a football or hockey match between national teams. There, all “historical memory” gushes out like a bucket.

I remember at one of the relatively recent world football championships a game between the Russian and Swedish teams. And I remember her gushing comments on the Internet. I am sure that never before this moment the citation index of individual fragments of the poem by A.S. Pushkin's "Poltava" did not reach such a height.

But just the other day, at the Olympics taking place in South Korea, at the very one where “we” are so strongly and unfairly offended, the Russian hockey team in the final, although with difficulty, still won (that is, of course, it tore and bent ) German national team.

Hockey fans who were rooting for the Russian team, of course, were delighted and began to write their own humanly understandable “hurray” on social networks. I’m not a fan at all, and I absolutely don’t care who wins, in what way and with what score. But I’m used to being loyal to fans, remembering, for example, that my older brother was a passionate Spartak fan and my entire childhood was spent listening to his excited exclamations in front of the TV. I admit that, although I did not particularly understand what was happening there, I was involuntarily infected by his excitement and enthusiasm. Well, he’s still an older brother, of course...

But what began immediately after this did not even eclipse all humanoid manifestations of joy, but simply buried them irrevocably.

What seemed interesting and surprising to me about this “victorious” orgy was that almost all of its participants interpreted this victory in different ways not as a victory of one hockey team over another, but as a victory of one country over another. This, so that no one doubts, was a victory for Russia over Germany. And for a reason. This was the very victory in that very war. Difficult, yes. Just like that one. Yes, yes, “after stubborn fighting, our victorious Red Army entered the city of Berlin.” Well, and about Stalingrad, of course. What would it be like without Stalingrad? That's the only way.

There were a lot of pictures in this mystery, a lot of very creative, frankly speaking, posters. Among them, I remember the one where Generalissimo Stalin knocks out Corporal Hitler with a confident direct blow to the head against the backdrop of, of course, the laconic, but so meaningful inscription “4:3”. I also remember the image of the Reichstag in May 1945, in the broken dome of which a hockey stick was stuck, and a flag was attached to it. Which one do you think? The same one, the victory flag? You guessed wrong. The current Russian flag was hanging on the stick, which for anyone somewhat familiar with the history of the Second World War cannot be perceived as anything other than the flag of the Vlasov army.

One lady, a former Muscovite who had been living in Germany for a long time, said that she tried to convey to her German husband some particularly striking manifestations of this military-sports exultation. He listened to her carefully, did not interrupt, and then admitted that he understood absolutely nothing. He did not understand exactly what a person living in the second decade of the 21st century cannot and should not understand. He did not understand how this was and why there were so many people thinking in terms of the second third of the last century. How is this even possible?

How is it possible to explain this if it is not clear to you? How can this be explained other than that “meldonium goes to the head.” But this doesn’t explain anything either. But everything that seems to be a cause turns out to be only a consequence of another cause, which itself turns out to be a consequence of some completely different cause.