Decide about yourself. Andrey Arkhangelsky - about Putin's man

December is the month of the collapse of the USSR, and this year, of course, the date speaks especially. "How much you can write about Soviet" - I hear the voices of the disappointed; Somewhere I have already heard these phrases. I remember how in the 2000s in newspapers and magazines the managers-managers told us, young journalists, that, they say, it is enough to write about repressions and Stalin. Everything is already; Leave Soviet stories, let's write about a new life.

And so she has come, a new life. More precisely, undead, as philologist Mikhail Epstein would say. This year - the most bloody in the entire post -Soviet history - recalls, in fact, that the conversation about the Soviet (and the invasion of Ukraine is a purely Soviet attempt to return the story to the starting point, to that "as it was") is just very relevant. At the same time, I note: the post -Soviet stage of life in Russia can be considered completed.

The observation that the USSR was not in 1994, which was made by a sociologist, was not, and the Soviet man continues to work out, turned out to be prophetic. And these are a kind of lesson to the Sovietists and Kremlenologists, who believed that Soviet experience is cured naturally: with the help of new economic practices in which everyone is somehow involved; due to the lack of totalitarian ideology; Thanks to the very opportunity to choose. But the Soviet (or, more precisely, Sovietness as behavioral patterns) did not go away, but sprouted through a new life. For the first ten years, it existed by inertia, and then Vladimir Putin, who came to power, reanimated this underground, dormant Soviet.

Ukraine is a country that decided about itself

The Putin regime did not create anything again: neither ideology, no speech, nor principles. He only gave a way out, let him open to the genuine, underground, if you like, to the Soviet man. Putin’s man is, as it were, local, chamber, unlike Brezhnevsky or Khrushchevsky, designed for large halls. The Putin man ceased to "live in the world", turned out to be torn off from the universalist roots that associated him with humanity and with the hope of the future. A naked Soviet man remained under Putin, along with the most root, key ability to produce and affirm violence, from any improvised material.

The proverb that Putin said before the invasion is “I like it, I don’t like it - tolerate, my beauty!” -Western journalists, I remember, tried to translate into a more or less rational language; Unfortunately, the meaning of this phrase is fully understood only for those who have grown in Soviet courtyards and schools, those who absorb the local rules. In the subtext there is sexual violence, but this is not just a statement; This is at the same time the anthem, praise to violence as such; Which justifies itself with historical laws, the natural order of things, nature itself, finally (the strong one eats the weak, it so happened, there is no getting away from it). This is the violence code, expressed in the shortest formula. Lying at the basis of Soviet ideology, but hidden behind the glasses of Marxism and other dogmas, and now "taken out and laid" without any embarrassment on the table, on general viewing - as national originality, zest, especially. Violence as a worldview, as an ideology, as a way of being. And this violence code was reflected in all practices, from everyday habits and speech to films and series, from the 2000s to the 2020s (all propaganda, in fact, is also an attempt to rape you with words). The violence code is the first key characteristic of Sovietness, the very one that was not spoke, like an injury, but continued to work out. Koshcheeva needle, placed on a pedestal in Putin.

The peculiarity of the post -Soviet experience is that all of us (each of those who were born in the USSR) in fact, after 1991, had to start life again (unlike, for example, from Western Europeans, Americans, whose life did not undergo tectonic measurements). That is, to rebuild, rethink, build yourself, and consciously, and not just by inertia. To ask ourselves: who am I in this world (where each of us, according to the apt expression of Jean-Paul Sartra, is thrown out; in our post-Soviet case, it turns out, at least twice) and how should I be now? That is, to make a decision about yourself in a new life, and not just use what is, or grieve about what has gone.

For some reason, the image is in the head: a person who is engaged in private cargo already in our time on the Volga (in Soviet times, a symbol of the highest welfare, and now rather a burden, due to technical backwardness); Inside plays the radio tuned to the Soviet nostalgic wave; Outside the window, Moscow swell, slush, slush. You find yourself, as it were, in the capsule of the continued past, Soviet capsules, from which you do not want to get out. Imagine the millions of capsules voluntarily locked from the inside, self -adjacent shells, which have postponed life for an indefinite time, who did not make a decision about themselves.

As a result, a whole country, a whole nation (in a political sense) froze in the interval, without a solution. Where will it take out. That is, frozen into nothing; Victor Pelevin, whose 60th anniversary had been in the bloody year, in fact, this "nothing" was described all the time; But with the same installation - nothing needs to be done (with you). The war is actually an attempt to hide this “unrealistic about oneself” from ourselves, the inability to position oneself, at least mentally, in the future. War is, oddly enough, a way to replace your own unresolved about yourself with the help of a radical negative dynamics aimed at others.

Both of these things (a violence code and anoride about oneself), although there are generic injuries of totalitarian, Soviet, but nevertheless are not something inextricable and insoluble. Ukraine got rid of this code of violence, in my opinion, with the help of politics - it was the original difference, the pluralism of the local political palette, its polarity (half a half, at first) was what made the same at first Soviet people become different. Politics has an amazing property of crushing violence, melting it into polemic (albeit not always correct), forcing people to negotiate. People do not always realize that they are engaged in politics, but ultimately it was the political practice (with the real adversaries of leaders and parties) that made the Ukrainian nation so modern, relevant, modern, which we see it now.

The Maidan, in fact, became the decision of the nation about itself - when the active part of Ukrainian society brought itself to some completion, to integrity. People themselves came up with a new meaning and a new life. And the need to constantly make practical decisions strengthened them in this determination about themselves. Since 2014, the active part of the Ukrainian society has been feeling the co -author of the general social project and voluntarily takes responsibility for its implementation. Hence this businessness and support on itself. That is why Ukrainians do not hope for a miracle or historical patterns. It was politics that made Ukrainians others. Their new experience is precisely political, and this is precisely this unacceptable from the point of view of Putin.

Ukraine is a country that decided about itself. Russian aggression further emphasized the Ukrainian “determination to be”, and even during the war, Soviet patterns do not wake up here, fundamentally different incentives, motivation work. Ukrainians are fighting today, not yesterday. Not for history (whatever it is in the past), but for itself today. This is precisely what explains to some extent why the Ukrainians decided to resist, go to the end, and not regret their own lives. And their new experience of life is ultimately stronger than the Soviet - in every sense.

Andrey Arkhangelsky - journalist and culturalist

Opinions expressed under the heading "Law" may not reflect the point of view of the editorial office