Marsh Rarest

Putin returns the Stalinist state. What can be opposed to this?

A year ago, at the beginning of 2022, we had just begun to take a breath after two terrible “covid” years and believed that a return to normal life would gradually begin. They fiercely argued about vaccinations and vaccines, about the "mask regime" and other prohibitions. And especially-about whether it is necessary to introduce QR codes as the possibility of access to a cafe, theater or to the exhibition ...

Where now-at the beginning of 2023, in the world that came after 02.24.2022-these hot disputes? And where are the problems that seemed to us the most important? They left not that on the second - on the tenth plan. And in the foreground, the second, third, and so on until the ninth - the Putin's “special operation” and its consequences.

The main of them - except, of course, the deaths of people, disasters and destruction - the state of a considerable part of Russian society, amazed at what can be called political color blindness: loss - under the influence of deafening propaganda, the ability to distinguish good from evil, the truth from lies and white from black.

Yes, this is not the first time: under the influence of similar propaganda in our country, tens of millions of people believed in the existence of “enemies of the people”, “foreign spies” and “Trotskyist-Zinoviev killers”. The fact that the evil NATO wanted to capture Czechoslovakia in 1968, and only the entry of the Warsaw Treaty troops tore off this insidious plan. The fact that it was necessary to introduce a “limited contingent” of Soviet troops in 1979 to Afghanistan so that it would not be captured by the United States. The fact that Academician Sakharov was a “traitor”, writer Solzhenitsyn was “a slanderer for the Soviet system”, and the poet Brodsky was “a parasite”.

Of course, this was also found in the post -Soviet years. So, many believed that in the fall of 1993, the democratic president Boris Yeltsin suppressed the rebellion of the reactionary and “red-brown” parliament (although the rebel was then the president, and not at all parliament). Or that in the spring of 2014, the rebellion in the Donbass was raised by the interventionists such as Strelkov-Girkin, but “miners and tractor drivers brought to despair,” who bought weapons and equipment in the nearest military commander.

But such as after February 24, 2022, nevertheless did not reach.

Apparently, we underestimated the ability (and desire) of citizens to independently look for information, and the power of propaganda radiation. Every day inspiring that Russia is the best, and therefore everyone around hate and try to weaken.

If an ordinary person begins to repeat this - that he is the best, and therefore everyone hate him, he will be considered seriously ill and take him to the doctor. And when officials, deputies and propagandists every day tell this in the style of the immortal fairy tale Evgeny Schwartz about the “naked king” (“You don’t know that our nation is the highest in the world? All the others are not good, and we are well done”), this is considered to be granted. Like the reasoning that Ukraine is not a state at all, and that there is no Ukrainian language, but there is only a distorted Russian. That power in Ukraine is from the Nazis and Bandera. That NATO planned an attack on Russia, and Putin was ahead of them for only a few hours. That the United States and other European countries “supply the Nazis weapons, as during the Great Patriotic War - their fathers and grandfathers” (I note: from history textbooks, a mention of the anti -Hitler coalition has not yet been removed). That Russia in its history “never attacked anyone” (again, mention of many wars that the Russian Empire began from textbooks and books has not yet been removed).

And that today's Russia, who, who declared its independence within the borders of the RSFSR, has some “historical rights” to the “historical territories” of the former Russian Empire, which were never included in the RSFSR.

Recall that a policy based on supposedly “historical rights”, and carried out in the name of the return of “historical territories”, is called briefly and clearly - revengeism. But it is precisely such a policy that Putin’s power pursues, and it comes personally from the president, obsessed with the idea of ​​reviving the former Soviet empire (or at least most of it). As in the “Inhabited Island” the Strugatsky brothers called to do with the former provinces of the old empire, Honti and Pandei, who received independence in difficult times - “to return the reptiles to the bosom, having previously strictly punishing”.

This idea is obviously hopeless - not a single collapsed empire subsequently managed to recover even partially. Moreover, it is hopelessly archaic in the twenty -first century, when the key resource of development and the basis of competitiveness are not territories, but the minds are intellectual and scientific potential.

Therefore, for example, in the UK, they would have looked at a madman, at a politician who would seriously talk about “historical rights” in the territory of the former empire, proposing “return them to their native harbor”. Or engage in the “protection of English -speaking citizens” in a foreign country, carrying the “British world” there. Or he would say that "the borders of Great Britain do not end anywhere."

The same applies to other former empires - such as France, Germany or Türkiye. And in Lithuania, no one, being in his right mind and clear memory, does not require expansion to the borders of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which at the beginning of the 15th century extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

However, for the Putin regime, revanchist dreams are not crazy fantasies of marginal politicians, not a serious political disease, but quite a mainstream.

And now President Putin in the New Year's appeal speaks of protecting “his people” in “historical territories” (as already mentioned, never to the predecessors of present -day Russia). And a considerable part of society willingly argues in the spirit of this mainstream. Nothing that there is no gas and sewage in the houses, that beggarly pensions and unemployment, broken roads and current roofs - but they are overwhelmed by a sense of pride from the “return” that you never belonged to you. And a sense of indignation by the actions of the Israeli military, known to the whole world (crossed out) of the NATO aggressive block, which I want to call for an answer. And evil-deep joy (daily strengthened on TV) from the fact that in the cities of Ukraine there is no light and heat.

And another serious illness is what Jan Rachinsky spoke about, receiving the Nobel Prize of the world for the Memorial in 2022: “Brokes of state power as the highest value, the proclamation of the absolute priority of what this power pleases to consider“ state interests ”, over the person, its freedom, dignity and rights, the overwhelmed system of values, in which people are only consumable for the decision of state tasks ".

That is why public statements are made that the purpose of life is to give it for the sake of the state, although the purpose of life can only be a continuation of life, and not death for the state and its interests. All this is an absolute tracing paper from the foundation of the Stalin, police state, where a person has always been a “cog” and “dust underfoot”. And where there was no higher meaning of life than to sacrifice it for the sake of the state (remember the famous Friedrich Dürrenmatt: “When the state begins to kill people, it always calls itself the homeland”?).

This state is now trying to revive Putin. Because the president, brought up in a secret police, cannot and cannot build anything else.

But, fortunately, not all are struck in Russian society. A lot of people, in the words of Leo Schlosberg, "retains human in his inhuman time." Retains the ability to empathy and solidarity. Builds horizontal structures to help those who need it. Helps refugees and persecuted for political reasons. Protects its civil rights. Requires peace and freedom. It does not lend itself to state lies and militaristic propaganda, not allowing this poison to get into his souls. And it helps others to resist this.

It is only this that gives the hope that the Moroz will retreat and the dawn will come.