"Your inequate shi"

Leonid Shinkarev died

Lenya.

Leonid Iosifovich.

By the last New Year, I called him to Switzerland, where he lived in recent years. An unfamiliar woman picked up the phone, after a long questioning she called her wife, Nelyu. She, too, alas, did not recognize (“We were familiar? ..”), but then she said that Lenya was sick, hard, in the hospital, in Germany ...

They didn’t talk.

The best journalist in Russia, now it is more obvious than ever. Impeccable, whatever he wrote for decades of work (35 years in Izvestia).

I remember he asked about his book about Mongolia, just published. I sincerely praised, but added that about Tsedenbala ( Secretary General of the Mongolian People's Avolutionary Party - Ed. ) I would like more certainty and rigidity. Lenya answered-as usual, in a quiet, as if an apologetic voice: “You understand, Pasha, if I came to Ulan-Bator on a business trip for a week, I would have written more definitely, there would be enough ignorance. And I spent years in Mongolia ... "

And the “certainty” Shinkarev was enough for a book on the invasion (Soviet troops) in Czechoslovakia ( in August 1968. - Ed. ). A book equal to which no one will ever write: at least for “technical” reasons - no one can meet people who met with a journalist and told what they saw and know; With those with whom Shinkarev managed to talk.

Member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU Mazurov, in August days personally (under the pseudonym "General Trofimov") flew to Prague and directly led the process; General of the Ground Forces, General Pavlovsky, who commanded the invasion forces; officers who became commandants of cities taken without a shot; The soldiers who until the last minute did not imagine where they entered and why; Soviet ambassador in Prague Chervonenko; Speechraiter Brezhnev Bovin; Czech reformers - oak, mlynarzh, nuts; The playwright Gavel became president of Czechoslovakia in 1989; their opponents who put their signatures under the “invitation” of foreign troops; Soviet dissidents who were one by one saved the honor of the country; Journalists, diplomats, scientists, scouts; Those who lied then, and those who do not tell the whole truth today ...

Shinkarev managed not to distort, not to interrupt even the most unsympathetic interlocutors, he did not sink to a completely appropriate evil irony in relation to them. And even more so - to such an easy (retroactive) distribution of assessments right and guilty.

But how did he manage to “talk” them all? Why did they all believe that he would act respectfully and honestly in relation to them?

I will give an excerpt from my old review of this book.

“... They met God know when on the edge of the Earth, in Eastern Siberia, then they corresponded, sometimes met, although they lived in different countries, but the countries were, as it was called fraternal, it was quite possible to knock out a business trip, especially since the foreign friend Brezhnev himself once asked to write an honest note about everything that he in the USSR saw what he paid attention to. And he even invited in advance when the note is ready, discuss it somewhere in the country, without prying eyes ... Is this something right?

Actually, there were three friends. The Siberian Sobrik "Izvestia" Leonid Shinkarev and the great Czech travelers Irji Ganselka and Miroslav Sigmund, who traveled to their "Tatra" the whole world and wrote books about this, which we read in the early sixties.

But an honest (secret) note in our Central Committee will not like, even offends, the meeting in the country will not take place, but the Prague Spring will begin, in which both Czechs will take more than a noticeable participation. “Spring” will be distributed by the caterpillars of Soviet tanks, which is why all these travels around the world on the “Tatra” will stop, already printed by a hundred thousandth circulation, the last book will be launched under the knife, they will drive from the party, they will have to be released to survive, the libraries and collections will have to be sold out ... In the Soviet newspapers they will be watered with the last shameful words, and letters from Shinkarev and Schinkarev Shinkarev will come only from case to case.

By the way, when the Hanselka in the USSR will still be allowed to introduce us during the perestroika, and Shinkarev will introduce us to us, and we will drink some swill in his cabinet on Pushkinskaya Square, Hanselka will say that after 1968 Lenya will remain the only Soviet who did not stop corresponding with them ... ”

“... in the heated minds, Prague remained a training ground for the development of future, larger military operations. Afghanistan will follow Czechoslovakia, and the Kremlin motivation will be the same: "We will ahead of the enemy or die!" - The book begins with this.

And so it ends.

“... my friend once worked in Prague:

- I have always condemned troops in Czechoslovakia, I still consider this a mistake. But now, after the Czechs, albeit symbolically, participated in the US campaign against Yugoslavia, when they sent their soldiers to Iraq, and now they want to build an American tracking station, they should review the events of 1968. Didn't we have the right to protect our strategic interests then? Or the Americans can, but we can’t? You know, I'm even glad that the Czechs behaved like that. They took off the stone from my soul. I no longer have guilt before them for 1968. Enough! We owe nothing more to anyone. You can’t go forward with the head turned backward. Do you understand me?

How not to understand. "

The experience of psychological essays of events in Czechoslovakia in 1968 I consider his best book.

It is good that Shinkarev’s latest publications took place in Novaya Gazeta - essays about old friends: poison Yevtushenko, a goldfinker of Tumanov ... I happened to prepare them for printing.

“Dear Pasha, my dear gu! Thank you for the trouble. I already get out of bed and move, so I hope to give you 12,000 signs on these days. True, I don’t find a determinant of size in any way-and there is a hole on the old woman-but somehow we will agree. Could you send a fragment of any text in the size of 12 thousand signs for orientation. Sorry for additional troubles. I hug. Always yours, the old inevement of Shi. "