The Communist Party is building Stalin-Center near Nizhny Novgorod, so that Supporters of Navalny gather in it

On May 8, in the city of Bor, through the Volga from Nizhny Novgorod, the regional Committee of the Communist Party in a solemn setting-in the presence of a delegation from Japan and Nikita Dzhigurdy-will lay the first stone in the foundation of the Stalin Center. The sponsor and ideological inspirer of the project is the communist-businessman Alexei Zorov, who last year already erected a monument to Stalin in Bora. Ilya Azar, a special correspondent of Novaya Gazeta, visited the place of future construction and learned from Zorov that Putin’s repressions are considered more brutal than the Stalin, and Stalin-Center sees the unifying area for the opposition forces of all stripes.

You will not surprise anyone for a long time by installing a bust or even a growth monument to Joseph Stalin in Russia. For example, last year I was present at the opening of a bust to the Soviet leader on the outskirts of Khabarovsk. The businessman Georgy Abyev, who established him on his land, admitted to me that Stalin became a fan after he saw the leader of the leader on the surface of the moon, and in a dream he was asked about this “people with white beards”.

The head of the Communist Party of the Communist Party in the city of Bor of the Nizhny Novgorod Region Alexei Zorov gives the impression of a much more sane person, but he solemnly opened the monument to Stalin on his land in the center of Bora on June 24, 2020, and now he decided to go further. On April 22, the website of the Nizhny Novgorod regional branch of the Communist Party proudly announced that on May 8, its members would “lay the first stone in the construction of the only Stalin Center in Russia, a museum dedicated to Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin”.

Zorov himself, the harbulic, hollow and a little funny person, this name, however, does not like this name. According to him, the Stalin-Center brand is the creative of the Nizhny Novgorod regional committee of the party, and Zorov himself insists that he is building in Bor (local residents say “on the forest” and, as they say, are ready to kill Soviet achievements for “in Bore”.

“But about Stalin, of course, there will be an exposition, and I have many exhibits: for example, a sculpture [Stalin] of the work [Paul] Keniga, Zhukov’s books with a gift inscription,” Zorov explains.

- But the name is sonorous. You definitely won't call him that?

“There will be no Stalin Center here, this is not a counterweight to the Yeltsin Center, this is [the museum] about the achievements of [the Soviet Union],” Zorov assures me.

It has been in the Communist Party since March 1995, but openly criticizes its leadership, believes that Gennady Zyuganov, who in April was unanimously re -elected to the post of chairman of the party, was time for peace. But Stalin Zorov, on the contrary, would love to disturb and return it back.

- I am a Stalinist and do not hide it ... Well, what is your claim to Stalin? - Zorov asks me with a naive expression on his face.

“You know, ” I answer coldly.

- Repression? You can see the memorandum of Rudenko Khrushchev, and there are no millions of tortured and tormented! - says Zorov and starts the old song that, though there were no executions under Yeltsin, but no less people died from the bandits.

- But what is the connection? - I interrupt him irritably, because I have heard these arguments very many times.

- Such that if we consider the rule of any ruler, then it is essentially bloody. The same Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great, which St. Petersburg built on the bones, says Zorov.

Factories against repression

Like any Stalinist, he refuses to recognize Stalin’s responsibility for the executions of innocent people and has a push of the leader’s economic achievements (achieved largely due to the labor of prisoners and atmosphere of fear in the country). “We need to evaluate what was created!

All enterprises on our territory were created under Stalin, in the country - tens of thousands, and still today's Putin guys cannot pull them all down, cut and destroy them, ”continues the Stalinist from Bor.

Zorov factories are personal. At the age of 17, the future founder of the Stalin Center and his mother were fired from the Borsky glass factory. “I myself had to start my business with the purchase of a garage without a roof. Then I grew up, bought the room and now I supply mirrors. The factory used to work 8,500 people, and now there are 1200 left, ”says Zorov.

- And if we talk about deaths, now no bullets or a gulag are needed, if you can simply overtake a person like Slavin (the Nizhny Novgorod journalist who burned herself in Nizhny Novgorod last year. - “New” or the same Navalny. Stalin [repression], of course, was unprofitable, but Tukhachevsky was preparing a conspiracy, ”the businessman-old-player argues.

- And Meyerhold?

- This is another topic. But we are not allowed to work with talented people, and they get drunk. Maybe Yesenin hanged himself and Mayakovsky shot himself because of the Stalinist regime?

My two great -grandfathers left the NKVD dungeons and died the next day, but their children did not say that under Stalin it was bad, that he was a bloody satrap, ”continues Zorov, whose faith in Stalin nothing could shake.

He claims that in Bora, over the years of the Stalinist authorities, no one was taken away or shot, that before it was possible to appeal any court verdict

(to the question about the "triples" only grunts), and now people who have a special opinion are chasing. “Throughout the country, at least 11 million repressed, but Bor bypassed? This is obvious nonsense, ”comments the opinion of Zorov, the chairman of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the International Memorial ( forced to report that the decision of the Ministry of Justice was included in the register of organizations acting as a foreign agent - approx. Ed. ) Arkady Galker.

“There are people who claim that there was no Holocaust, but they act with them hard enough, and I think it would be right to do those who deny repression symmetrically,” the galker goes on. He regrets that in the 90s few people raised a public discussion about the need for lustration and reassessment of the past, but believes that “the tightening of the nuts will inevitably change by the stage of liberation,” and hopes that then society will demand not to silence this topic and in Russia will finally evaluate the Stalin time, as was done in Germany after Hitler's rejection.

By the way, Zorov as a true Stalinist also considers the lustration necessary. “Imagine: tomorrow there is no Putin and an honest and decent person comes to power. Well, for example, you or me. What will you do with those who wrapped our people and fabricated things? Or for Zakharchenko [was] an adequate sentence? You may be a great humanist, and for me everyone should answer his merits, ”Zorov hints at future repressions.

- What are you leading to? I clarify.

- To the fact that today's time is worse than Stalin. You see the field, ”he shows his hand to the expanses behind the monument to Stalin,“ there is a whole bunch of “bookmarks”. Indeed, for power we have not a population, but a biomass. Do not spend bullets if the main part is under the influence of the TV and from hopelessness just thumps.

"Postman Pechkin"

We are talking with the Borsky Communist right under the canopy of the monument to Stalin, which the local wits were nicknamed the "postman Pechkin."

Indeed, the local Joseph Vissarionovich does not look very heroic, and his low bent figure in baggy pants even wants to regret. “Postman Pechkin” stands on the extreme to the Volga Street Ordzhonikidze - one -story houses create a rural atmosphere here. One of these houses with a land plot below him and acquired. “People who lived 12 square meters in the 1912 house were very happy and thanked me for being able to move to the Stalinsky house in the center,” he says.

The house of the beginning of the last century, Zorov, drew the sidewalk with tiles, installed Stalin right on the border of the site, and placed pre -revolutionary shops nearby. Now they and the leader are surrounded by a high fence, the gate in which is almost always closed. Two reasons: firstly, the monument to Stalin had already been thrown three times with paint, and secondly, Zorov is worried that children can fall into a pit dug to the construction of a Stalin Center right behind the figure of the leader.

“Such surrealism and trash are going on, it is funny,” Ivan Vasilich tells me the correspondent of the local resource “Your Bor”. He used to live in Nizhny Novgorod, and moved to Bor several years ago (this is an unusual decision - the idea of ​​his wife). “For the first one and a half years, I didn’t know anyone here at all, I went and shot the video on Instagram on the topic“ Look at which ass of the world I arrived. ” I was noticed and called to work, ”says Ivan Vasilich . According to him, the publication "Your Bor" does not live at the expense of contracts from the administration, but by advertising.

Generally speaking, Ivan Vasilich does not like Stalin and believes that perpetuating his memory leads to the “split of society”, but Zorov seems to like it as a character and as a person, therefore, after the opening of the monument to Stalin, they became friends. Judging by the complaints of Ivan Vasilich about not the most peppy secular life in Bor, there is simply no more to communicate with.

“I live here from birth and in his place it would be better to drag my wife in Nizhny, which came to live in this swamp,” Zorov laughs. He called his liberal friend to our interview, and Ivan Vasilich did not let him down: he came in a sweatshirt with the logo of the 1996 Yeltsin election campaign “vote or lose”.

“I am also funing for Troll Zorov, who hates Yeltsin,” says Vasilich, who had flaunted on his Instagram on his jacket with young Stalin.

The correspondent says that his wife, for example, does not understand why he communicates with the Stalinist.

“I like that Zorov is alone against all rushing, that he is not afraid of anyone, because he has no support.

He bought some kind of military equipment and drives it around the city. I read all the time how everyone is clamped in our country, and here is an exception to the rules, ”explains Ivan Vasilich.

And of course, no one, except Zorov, suits Nikita Dzhigurdy's free concerts in Bor. He came to Bor in August and sang his songs right at the monument to Stalin. The artist will come here on May 8.

Magnet for tourists

According to Ivan Vasilich, a survey was conducted on the attitude towards Stalin and more than 70 percent of the participants admitted that they supported the former generalsimus. “The collective farm provincial population loves tyranny and a hard hand,” Ivan Vasilich comments as a real metropolitan snob.

In the Nizhny Novgorod Memorial, this attitude of Borschan to Stalin, of course, is not enthusiastic. “Let's conduct a mental experiment: how could you react to Hitler Center in modern Germany to someone else's private territory? I think the reaction will be sharp - and primarily from the side of society, ”says Arkady Galker.

- Our society respects Stalin more and more .

- This is a man -made result of the policy of power. If there were no active exaltation of Stalin, then the society would be completely different, which it was in the 90s, when the information space was incomparably freer,-Galker is sure.

In the meantime, tourists are increasingly coming to the monument to Stalin. From Nizhny Novgorod to Borod above the wolf wide in this place, the Volga was extended to the cableway popular among the city guests (local residents use it to quickly get to work in the regional capital), and now they have a reason to linger in the city for at least a while, and not go back immediately.

By the way, Zorov not only Stalin exalves, but also restores the local cultural heritage of earlier years. Restores the estate, and in the summer in the city of Lyskovo will open the Museum of the Persian box . “I will honestly say that I want to leave behind not only my ego, but also something else. I do not have, like Colonel Zakharchenko, 9 billion rubles, although they beat themselves in the chest and say what patriots they are. You can’t rob people, and then head the immortal regiment, ”says Zorov.

Corruption and Slavin

At the opening of the monument, Stalin Zorov said that this is a symbol of the fight against corruption in Bor. He loves to talk about her - he tells, for example, that he himself had to asphalt the road near his site; that the cost of the cable car during the construction processed almost doubled; That the former mayor has a house in Spain.

So with the tragically deceased journalist Irina Slavina Zorov, he said, was friends. Slavina wrote in her “goat”, including about corruption in the Borsky district.

“When I erected a monument to Stalin, I told her:“ You are a fan of Nemtsov, I know, and I am Stalin, but we are friends with you? ” She replied that friends, and three days before his death, told me one very smart thing: “We are doing a common thing with you, each with his own slope, but we both clear the rot,” Zorov recalls.

He says that Slavina was wise, albeit an impulsive woman, not a “magazine”, but a real journalist.

“Slavina hated the Communists,” says Ivan Vasilich.

“But she loved me,” Zorov laughs.

“It is a pity that she did not live to the largest rally in Nizhny, which was January 23,” the correspondent of “Your Bore” continues the conversation.

“I can say one thing,” the Stalinist summarizes. - Ira pressed this power without any Gulag. Yes, and I am pressed by administratives, constant surveillance and wiretapping.

Dagestan cognac

For some reason, Zorov is afraid of the "Dadin" article, although so far he was discharged only one protocol under article 20.2 of the Code of Administrative Offenses, and even then they could not force him to reach trial. “They give you one, one more, and then you become a bird behind bars today, because you can be planted at any time. That's all. This is the Putin regime today, ”he says.

But Zorov is an experienced person. In 2005, he was greatly beaten and selected at that time a fashionable Nokia phone with a sliding titanium building. “I am lying with my teeth knocked out, and the witnesses say that I myself fought my head against a tree. Then a girl arises, whom I allegedly hit with my foot, she finds two bruises on the pope, and the article “Beating” is sewn for me. They gave me half a year conditionally and the powers of the deputy were removed from me, for which all this was done, ”says Zorov, who was elected the deputy three times.

But he is not afraid of pressure from the city or regional administration because of Stalin-somehow even defiantly. Ivan Vasilich is sure that the point is not only that the authorities "use Stalin as a scrap." According to the correspondent, they simply can’t find anything on Zorov: “They did a lot of checks at his enterprise, but he works cleanly.” And not according to the law, it is allegedly not accepted.

“They can go by lawlessness, ” I make a completely appropriate assumption. - Start, for example.

- Do not set fire. In addition to throwing a paint or egg, they are not capable of anything, ”Zorov laughs in response and tells the story. - In 2000, before the elections to the Legislative Assembly of the region, Nikolai Snatkov came to me with a whole bunch of Caspian cognac, who had previously been the head of the apparatus of the Government of the Russian Federation under Kiriyenko. He pulled 300 thousand dollars out of the tour and offered to withdraw from the elections. I refused, and, leaving in the morning, he said: “Lesh, I understood only one thing: that you have a rod that I have not left.”

Zorov convinces me that it was an advance that he “lay down under this system” and then “dance to their pipe” all his life. The fact that now he is not touched, he explains exclusively with his then refusal. By the way, he lost those elections.

The chairman of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the International Memorial Galker is confident that if the authorities had a real desire to prevent Zorov to build a Stalin Center, they would have found a way. “I did not want to react violently [to the installation of the monument], because I did not want to make an advertisement for this initiative,” the human rights activist says. “I waited for the authorities to react, and deep down he hoped that they would not approve this, but they clearly approved this silently, pretending that everything was fine.” In his opinion, Zorov, with whom the human rights activist personally was not familiar, “considered the authorities”, so he began to build a three -story museum.

He compares this story with a poster in memory of Boris Nemtsov, which, after his murder, oppositionists were exposed daily in the square in Nizhny Novgorod. “I had to guard it, because he ended up in a garbage container for half an hour,” Galker says. However, later a memorial plaque appeared on the house where Nemtsov lived.

-There is not enough courage in the field-they are very afraid to do something, because it is too close to the lower. Although we were offered to publish compromising evidence for Zorov 300 thousand rubles before the elections, ”admits Ivan Vasilich.

- And if 300 thousand dollars were offered, would you take? - I am interested.

- No. But Zorov is not worth it, - laughs the Borsky correspondent.

“Of course, it’s easier to order me,” Zorov rushes out with laughter.

Maybe the secret of the survival of Zorov and his "Staliniana" is that he ceased to participate in the elections. “Today's electoral system will not allow anyone to win, even though you have a pure reputation, at least seven spans in the forehead,” he says.

— Я Зорову говорю идти на хайпе в заксобрание, ведь он со своим Сталин-центром сейчас на пике, но он не хочет. На недавние выборы в городскую думу Бора сам не пошел, да еще и набрал такую команду, что и из них никто не прошел, — рассказывает Иван Василич.

Казус садовой фигуры

Формально Зоров делает все, чтобы власти не могли ему помешать. Тот же памятник Сталину по документам — это садовая фигура .

«Растрезвонили по всей России, что памятник Сталину незаконен, поэтому я подстраховался, и в накладной мне написали, что это садовая скульптура ( по словам Ивана Василича, в администрации считают, что Зоров сам себя позорит тем, что так обозначил памятник . — «Новая» )», — объясняет Зоров.

По его словам, Сталин-центр тоже будет оформлен хитро. «Я живу по тем законам, которые они написали. Я не пройдоха какой-то, но я их ставлю раком. [Формально] это будет жилой дом, а не музей. Я не смогу брать деньги, но водить туда кого угодно смогу. А если понадобится, то через суд выведу в нежилое помещение», — рассказывает Зоров с гордостью.

Галкер называет действия Зорова «хитрым финтом» человека, который понимает, что не имеет права ставить памятник даже на своей территории. И если садовую фигуру правозащитник решил игнорировать, то Сталин-центр не замечать уже не может. «Это, конечно, позор, но как этому эффективно противодействовать — большой вопрос, учитывая, что мы отрезаны от массовых информационных каналов», — признает Галкер и обещает подумать.

Навальный-центр

«У нас [в Бору] не любят Навального, потому что все смотрят телевизор, где говорят, что он украл лес и берет деньги у Америки. Зомбированное общество, люди, приехавшие из деревень. Я на праздниках спорю с родственниками жены, которые тотально за Путина, и когда говоришь им про дороги, они отвечают: «Ну в городе-то они есть, а до нас просто Путин не дошел еще, но Путин и губернатор — хорошие, а местные все дебилы, но Путин еще с ними разберется», — рассказывает Иван Василич.

Зоров, хоть и местный, про Навального думает иначе. «Если бы я был Путин, то я бы ему борт президентский дал, а когда он прилетел, встречу бы устроил и отправил домой. Я знал еще советских руководителей области и района. Они бы сделали так, и не было бы никаких митингов», — говорит он.

— И при Сталине бы так было?

— Здесь нет никакой идеологической подоплеки, — пропускает он мой вопрос мимо ушей.

— За что Навального посадили? За то, что он говорит правду. Ведь если он говорит неправду, то опровергните, ребята.

Сделали статью за клевету, но никто ни дворец Путина, ни дачу Медведева не опровергнул.

Зоров не то чтобы поддерживает Навального, но считает, что с его электоратом надо работать: «На митинги большая часть выходит не за Навального, а против сегодняшнего строя, потому что они не видят перспективы дальнейшего своего существования в обществе». Он участвовал в последних митингах в поддержку Навального в Нижнем Новгороде, а свой Сталин-центр вообще задумывает чуть ли не как объединяющую все политические силы площадку.

— Сегодняшнее общество и сегодняшние партии играют в поддавки с властью. Я не играю и не буду никогда. Дедушка фронтовик меня учил, что надо на своем поле боя всегда выигрывать, — говорит мне Зоров.

— Это, что ли, поле боя? — показываю я на Сталина.

— Нет, но эта площадка [перед памятником Сталину] объединяет всех, как гайд-парк. Здесь встречаются люди разных мировоззрений, в том числе поклонники Навального. Ведь если они выйдут за периметр, то там их задержат. В последний раз меня таскали в ментовку за то, что якобы здесь собираются представители запрещенной организации. Но здесь такого нет, здесь свободное поле.

Я напоминаю ему, что на другом берегу Волги — в Нижнем Новгороде — за подобную деятельность недавно завели уголовное дело на предпринимателя Михаила Иосилевича (подробнее о нем в ближайшем времени в тексте в «Новой газете»). «Власти нужна была показательная акция, — соглашается Зоров. — Но самое главное — никогда не бояться. Это они нас должны бояться».

Иван Василич убеждает меня, что Зоров, хоть и сталинист, но «гораздо более адекватный, чем единороссы, и гораздо либеральнее многих из них». «Он такой либерал-коммунист, как мне кажется. Он за свободу мнений», — с уважением отзывается о приятеле корреспондент.

— Может, и в Сталин-центре будут сторонники Навального собираться? — спрашиваю я Зорова в шутку.

- No problem! Должна быть дискуссионная площадка. Если вы приедете и скажете, что проведете среди наших журналистов ликбез, то я вам дам ключи и ни копейки с вас не возьму. Кому-то нравится Сталин, кому-то Навальный, а кому-то Цицерон. Нужно общие мнения прорабатывать и объединяться, — эмоционально говорит Зоров. — Мы, либерал и сталинист, что, должны тут друг друга задушить? Я считаю, что нет!

Бор — Москва