So what, vile, did I do this?

We read this material from the computer of Anna Politkovskaya after her murder. 2006

There is an old Russian word - “carpet”, from the word “carpet”. This is almost the same as the clown, only more precisely. There was a carpet on a circus patch - and let's mix the audience. His task was to not upset the audience in any case. For the fact that the “carpet” could not make fun of those who came to the performance of the gentlemen, the audience booed him, and the owner of the circus immediately drove over.

Almost all the current generation of Russian journalists and existing media are “carpet”. All together - the booth of the "carpet". Their task is to entertain the audience, and if you write about serious, it is only about how good the “vertical of power” is good in all its manifestations. Let me remind you: President Putin for the past five years has been building everything and built this “vertical of power”, which consists in the fact that everyone, from the beginning, officials, are prescribed by the entire bureaucratic hierarchy either personally by him or personally those whom he appointed. The “power vertical” is such a state of state structure in which everyone who is able to think is different from the leading field than a higher chief. In our country, with the filing of the President of Putin, which is actually the main governor of the country, this state is called “ours”. “Ours” are those who are with us. “Not ours” - if not with us, then enemies. The vast majority of the media, in fact, describe this dualism: how “ours” are good - how disgusting enemies are. Enemies, how
The rule is represented in the form of “sold by the West” - liberal politicians, human rights activists, “bad” democrats (the image of a “good” democrat is the image of Putin). Newspapers and television in the first lanes and in the first lines place reports on how it turned out which of the “not ours” which in the West received grants for their activities.

At the same time, journalists and the media fell in love with their booth “carpet” with all their hearts: the struggle for the right to transmit impartial information and serve this information, and not the presidential administration - this struggle in the past, the time of mental and moral stagnation has come to which I belong to. I must say that this own stagnation, which turned the profession again from journalism into propaganda in favor of the existing authority, colleagues are not particularly shy, openly admitting that they receive information about “not ours” right from the presidential administration, also about what to write about, and about what is not about.

What happens to those who do not want to participate in this booth?

They are outcasts. This is not a joke or an exaggeration. This is a vacuum around. This is when officials shy away from you, when the meeting happens publicly and they love to talk secretly. Again, as in Soviet times (then, however, representatives of the establishment with a foreign press spoke like that), conversations in the open air, in squares, in closed houses, where a journalist and an official come in different paths. Like scouts-illegals. Journalists of such a newspaper as ours are trying not to invite any press conference or meeting, where the presence of representatives of the Kremlin administration is supposed-of course, that these representatives do not suspect the organizers in sympathies to such publications as the "new newspaper".

Perhaps from the outside it will seem ridiculous. But we are very sad. The last business trip to the North Caucasus - to Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan - I had in August. Do you know how I interviewed a high -ranking Chechen official about how the militants amnesty was announced by the director of the FSB?

I wrote to him on a piece of paper an address in Grozny - a destroyed private house with a dilapidated fence on the outskirts of the city - and quietly, as if by accident, handed over. Without any additional words-about everything (that I will come and I will ask for an interview) agreed in Moscow.

A day later, he sent to this address of a person who only said: “I was asked to convey:“ Everything is fine. ” This means that the official will come. More precisely, he will come - on foot, with a string bag in his hands, as if he had gone for bread.

So it happened. The information reported by this official was priceless and sensational. She completely defeated the official version of the amnesty. I received this information in a room 2 by 2 meters with a tiny, tightly tied window - it was a former barn: before the war I served a barn, and when the house of its owners was bombed, the barn was converted into the kitchen, the bedroom and the bathroom in the same person. The owners here are not without fear and let me in - they are my old friends, about the troubles of which - the abduction of my son - I wrote in past years.

Why are we - the official and I - so behaved? Maybe we are crazy?

And this game adds to us exotic? Nothing of the kind. Open communication of such an opposition collector of information, such as I or another journalist in Novaya Gazeta, and an official official, “ours”, death is like both.

The same high-ranking official, by the way, later brought me to this room-soured militants who want to lay down their weapons, but do not want to participate in the official booth. These militants told a lot of interesting details why no one wants to give up to official authorities: because the authorities are interested only in their own PR, and not the fate of people.

By the way, the wording is that “no one wants to give up”, knowledgeable people will cause obvious rejection. How! For weeks on Russian television, some people were shown who explained that they came “under the amnesty”, “believing Ramzan”.

Many “booth” journalists are brought to these gatherings (they never invite me) - they all neatly write down, remove, convey in their media, and so a completely distorted picture of reality is born. But - pleasant to the gaze of those who "declared an amnesty."

I do not get used to working underground. I have a habit of such a way of life. All the years of the second war, starting in 1999, this was how it had to work in the North Caucasus.

At first, hiding from the federals, but always communicating with them secretly and underground, through proxies, so that others do not see and not report to higher generals. Further, when in Chechnya the Putin plan of leaky (the destruction of some Chechens, "bad" in relation to the Kremlin, the forces of others, "good", loyal to the Kremlin), the same type of work spread to communication with "good" Chechen officials.

About the same thing happens in Moscow, in Kabardino-Balkaria, and in Ingushetia-the virus spread very much.

However, the booth does not continue for too long, and the power that enjoys the services of the "carpet" is a rotten mushroom.

The stripping of the information field carried out in Russia is a total lies organized by bureaucracy for the sake of the “correct image of Russia under Putin” - before our eyes they turn around the tragedies that the authorities cannot cope with and which any aircraft carriers are able to sink, no matter how strong it apparently seemed. I mean recent events in Kondopoga (a small town in Karelia, in the north of Russia, near the border with Finland) - an explosion of anti -Caucasian pogroms with fatal outcomes, pogroms heated by vodka. Nationalist processions, “patriotic” beating of foreigners-all these are the consequences of the lies of power, the absence of any real dialogue of the authorities and the people, the closure of the eye of the authorities for the fact that the people live in the majority terribly poor, that the real standard of living everywhere is not fundamentally different from the declared, that corruption under the “vertical of Putin’s authorities” reached incredible heights that even earlier heights that heights were incredible, that The generation has grown very angry from poverty and young people stupid from poor school education ...

I am a vile of the reigning ideology: “ours” - “not ours”, “our” - “strangers”. If the “our” journalist, then these are rewards, may be invited to the Duma. They will invite - they will not be elected. We have no elections to the parliament in the usual sense of the word - with the struggle for the voice, with the presentation of programs, with the debate. We are called to the Kremlin those who are in the “ours” board and “rende it”: they enroll in the party “United Russia” with all the ensuing consequences.

If the journalist is “not ours”, “alien” - in fact, this is still guaranteed shame. I never sought such an abuse - an release of a dolphin on land. I'm not a political fighter at all.

So what, vile, did I do this? I just wrote what I witnessed. And nothing more. I deliberately do not write about all the other "delights" of my chosen path. About poisoning. About the detentions. About threats in letters and on the Internet. About promises to kill ... I think these are still trifles. The main thing is to have a chance to do the main thing. Describe life, accept visitors daily, who have nowhere else to go with their troubles - they were vigilanted by the authorities, what happened to them does not fit into the ideological concept of the Kremlin, and therefore stories about their troubles cannot appear almost anywhere, and regularly - only in our newspaper, called the "new newspaper".

This material from the computer of Anna Politkovskaya was intended, apparently for a foreign performance