"The USSR is dead, but we are not yet"

Thirty years ago, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed an agreement in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, which put an end to the Soviet Union. You can curse the leaders who put their names under the document as much as you like, you can experience the collapse of the great country and the great era, we can talk about the "tragedy of all times and peoples", but in any case, the collapse of the USSR is already history, and history is long. We will defend from the Soviet era as far as in 1947, after the Great Patriotic War, Soviet people defended from pre -revolutionary Russia.

But at the same time, nostalgia for the Soviet Union is growing every year. And every year in the Russian Federation the feeling is strengthened that the then reformers offended us, deprived that, when the united country, we lost a lot and acquired almost nothing. Millions of our compatriots are yearning for revenge and are ready to welcome the slightest hint of him, no matter how half -hearted and dangerous in the current situation he was.

This internal context is also supported by the context of the external.

Almost immediately after 1991, President Bush announced an unconditional victory of the United States in the Cold War.

Suddenly, it turned out that the collapse of the Soviet Union was caused not by internal causes, and even more so not the struggle of thousands and dozen, if not hundreds of thousands of people who actively opposed the Soviet regime, but the enemy’s victory, albeit in the cold, but war. And in the new century, Russian propaganda skillfully played on the vulnerability of many from this defeat. We must pay tribute to the current Russian government-she already sees this trend and uses as much as possible in her interests.

And I am silent about the vast space, which could be seen as my country

Speaking with the language of Marxist sociology, revanchist rhetoric remains a powerful means of political mobilization of the masses. It works regardless of the real political and economic situation, works much better than all anti -corruption slogans and films about palaces with chic estates and gold toilets. It is the attitude to the Soviet past, and not the current agenda determines most of the lines of the split in modern Russian society. If you close your eyes and not see this powerful thirst for historical revenge, it is difficult to understand something in Russia in the early 1920s of the current century. Moreover, it is impossible to analyze modern policy and make at least some forecasts.

And the most paradoxical thing is that such a mood only increases as new generations that have never lived in the Soviet Union join an active social life.

We will not be cunning, for the author of these lines and other Russian people who, in Soviet times, somehow opposed party dictatorship and communist ideology, this trend outlined a crushing historical defeat, which will be extremely difficult to play. Of course, you can rely on "democratic values" and blame the "bloody regime" in everything, but these will only be naked self -justification. The essence of the problem is completely different.

Historical memory has a strange property. It retains ideological constructs and polar opinions, but very quickly and easily ishing the feeling of everyday life. Soviet everyday life for most citizens of present -day Russia is a real dusk. Any information and knowledge, memoirs and evidence coming from this dusk are easily obeyed by a particular pre -prepared position. The queues in stores and interruptions in the supply easily lunge under the gulag and victims of Bolshevism. And free education and healthcare are in the same piggy bank with the victory in the war and the flight of Gagarin.

As a result, we lose the sense of the era, and the new generations are increasingly seeing the image of the Soviet Union in the form in which the entire massif of Soviet propaganda presented it - by films, victorious party reports, memories of pioneering childhood and Komsomol youth.

It becomes more difficult to talk about how far from reality it was far from reality every year. And the most significant thing is that any such “truth” is easily read as the enemy’s decaying propaganda. As a result, logic, close to the logic of the old Soviet brochures such as the CIA against the USSR, which in the 80s did not laugh only tired of laughing, now quite legitimized itself and can be considered seriously. Close -close maxims sound from official stands, and from university departments, and on social networks, and, most unpleasant, in the same city cuisines, where political disputes have now returned.

Against this background, it is not surprising that in 2014, when the old vulgar stigma "Fifth Column" was thrown into the center of public discussion, the term itself, in principle, did not cause objections to the majority. In war as in war. And all funds in the fight against the enemy are good.

This actually designated the end of any political discussion. What can we talk about when any consistent criticism of power, and even more so confrontation, can be regarded as undermining the state? Here it is not to the principles of political freedom. Criminal law begins to work. The law is like a drawbar - as you turn it, it will come out. You can also change the constitution in two raglopes, in three tributaries - everything will be written off on the idea of fighting the enemy.

Now it is difficult to change the situation, and it is easy to imagine how the political stability of the Late USSR era will seem to us a real paradise. However, it is impossible to return to the past.

... Once upon a time, long, long before 1991, Alexander Galich wrote the song "The Experience of Nostalgia". It, of course, was talking about leaving the country. But if we talk about goodbye to the era, the text becomes even stronger:

I do not regret at all, about anything or about anything, I do not regret

Neither the boundaries above my heart are free or a year!

So why am I suddenly a thought with one thought,

That never ... my God, never! ..

Wait, calm down, think -

And what - never?! ..

And what, in fact, never?

... And I am silent about the vast space, which could be seen as my country inhabited by hundreds of peoples with amazing culture and customs, so dissimilar to life and customs of your house.

I am silent about friends and relatives in Bukhara and Tbilisi.

I am also silent about the descriptions of Alma-Ata and about Shostakovich’s concerts in the Baku Philharmonic.

I am silent about the quiet Ukrainian night and about the big -eyed Divchi, none of which I even thought of saying that we were not brothers and, moreover, not lovers.

I am silent about reading aloud the typewriting of Gumilyov and Orwell in the Lviv coffee shop and on the beaches of Nida in 1976.

I am silent about how we drank night with the guys from the front of Lithuania in Kaunas, and we were 16-17 years old.

I am silent about Niyola Sadunay and Paruyre Airikyan for evening tea in our Moscow apartment immediately after liberation.

I am silent about all hopes to build a free life together and how they collapsed ...

Andrey Polonsky - writer, poet, journalist

The "Opinion" expressed in the heading of the point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial office