Mikhail Khodorkovsky about the 2018 World Cup

I have never been a fan (he finished all his affairs with football at the age of 14 :), but the championship is not only a football event (and maybe not so much a football one :), at least in Russia. Therefore, I regularly follow the comments on the topic.

In general, football turned out to be an interesting manifestation of the real self-identification of people in the national sense (national in the sense of a civil nation, not ethnicity).
After all, a civic nation is not only language and history, but also common in the perception of the present and future, and when the common is more important than differences.

Today, the Russian (Russian) nation, which has not been fully formed, is being tested for rupture by its attitude to corrupt authoritarianism, to the insane centralization of resources and power, to conflicts with relatives-neighbors, when the sense of perspective has disappeared, any person who feels himself a part of the Russian civil nation, instinctively looking for an opportunity to cling to at least something that will save such an important community until better times.
In this regard, we have little other than the school curriculum and Victory Day, but the Kremlin is trying to monopolize them too.

Now football. A holiday organized for public money, by people hired with this money.
Not without flaws, but a worthy quality of organization, a worthy game of our team, a relatively decent behavior of the police ...
At the same time, of course, part of the money was stolen, part of the work was done carelessly, the authorities are trying to take advantage of the holiday to strengthen their positions and present themselves in the best light in the eyes of the world community...
How do people evaluate what is happening?

“Thanks to the great Putin for the gift of the holiday!” - the position of lackeys and mercenary sycophants. The first obviously consider themselves second-class people - “the master gave us a small fraction! Let's rejoice!" The second do not care about "high matters" - only proximity to the feeder is important. Both those and others do not identify themselves as part of a civil nation. Some are “subjects” at best, others are simply parasites in the biological sense. The Russian civil nation will be created without them.

“The worse, the better. The better, the worse. Everything that unites everyone is for the benefit of the regime. Down with the common holidays…” - whatever the adherents of such a position think to themselves, objectively they lead to the destruction of the Russian civil nation, the possibility of creating a Russian national state.
It is difficult to condemn those whose own lives are in danger, who have lost their loved ones "thanks" to the Kremlin, who simply felt like a part of another nation, but suffers from the pain of the past ... But be that as it may, if a Russian civil nation is created, then regardless of their wishes.

“This is our common holiday! Let's go to hell ... all those who want to steal it ... "Maybe this is not very intelligent in form, and also not quite correct in relation to those who empathize with people suffering in the dungeons, but who said that the construction of a civil nation in a country with a history like ours, would look pleasing to the eye?

The unification of people around the participation of their country in the organization of an international holiday is a wonderful element of national construction, and it depended (and still depends) on all of us that it be exactly that, and not what the Kremlin would like to make it - a new watershed within society.