Without the future

In 2012, at one of the regional economic forums, I listened to a professor from the Higher School of Economics. He was dedicated to the future. The author claimed that Russia had a “future”, since sociology records an increase in the “planning horizon” of households. Polls showed that ten -year economic development, stability and the formation of institutions led to the fact that the active layers of the population began to relate differently to the mortgage. If five or seven years ago, the mortgage seemed a risky and unreasonably expensive personal decision due to the short horizon of the future, then by 2012 the future began to manifest in the minds ahead for the whole thirtieth anniversary. The mortgage ceased to seem exotic. And the future - as one of the forms of time - has changed its character. Twenty years had passed by this time with the disappearance of the USSR. Only in the second post -Soviet decade, the mass distribution received car insurance (it became mandatory in 2003), the payment of goods and services by banking cards, the regulation of ownership of households and many other financial instruments of the daily life of millions of people have settled, due to which personal investments of long -term nature acquired meaning and began to “design” a personal and collective future. Prior to this, three Soviet generations lived, relying on the experience of constant zeroing of savings, loss of property. “Savings burned”, “the inheritance disappeared” - these were routine events in the life of three generations. Ideologically the future in the USSR was constructed as “anti -bourgeois”. The emphasis was on the collective utopian future, and the personal future or future of the families was the subject of acute jokes. Although the official ideology in the USSR sought to construct the future as a non -conflict and comfortable, Soviet person, relying on his real life experience, he saw the future as a dangerous, “aborching”. The main modus of the perception of the future came down to the phrase: "We will not live, but our children will survive (until bright days)." At the same time, the Soviet man did not possess any set of tools to ensure the “future of children”, he could only rely on the fact that a good education would allow the next generation from the routine of hard work, not leading to accumulations and not allowing the household to take root in the past, present and future.

On the first post -Soviet decade, not only in Russia, but in all countries of the former USSR, households accumulated the experience of independent economic actions in conditions of high risk. The accumulations continued to burn out, the heads of families lost their jobs, since entire “Soviet industries” disappeared, a balanced idea of income has not yet been established. But the second post -Soviet decade was an explosive development of “tools for constructing the future”, that is, “long -term”. Since 2004, a decade of triumphal exit of Russian companies on IPO began. Global companies poured into the Russian market. In Russia, the frame “Modernization - Globalization - Stability” was rapidly forming. The active segments of the population felt that Russia finally connected to the global models of modernization, and their global standard creates non-alternative and thereby constructing a long-term acceptable future. Of course, in Russia there were those groups that opposed this “global standard for modernization” in favor of a particular type of Autarchy. But if in the elections to the State Duma in 1999, shortly after the default, the Communist Party received 24% of the vote , then in the 2007 elections - 11.5%. In the “brilliant decade” (2003–2013), all economic innovations - and we are talking about the construction of the future - were perceived as stabilizing, and therefore generating long stable expectations. This concerned everything that later began to be perceived as risk factors. For example, state corporations. During their active creation, the consolidation of assets was perceived as a necessary condition for entering global markets. Cooperation with the state for rapidly growing companies offering their products in the global market was perceived as a good guarantee for foreign partners. Kudrin modernized the country's financial system, Gref - Sberbank, Kuzminov created a giant unit of modernized education when Segalovich and Volozh brought Yandex to the exchange in 2011 under the motto “Second after Google ”. All this happened to the applause within the country and outside, the universal was the understanding that the ideas about modernization and its goals completely coincide with active economic groups and the Kremlin. Of course, there was Munich’s speech, a “bronze soldier”, a war with Georgia, the annual “gas war” with Ukraine, ideological searches in the field of “sovereign democracy” and “memory policy”, but it is undoubted that, from the point of view of the “image of the future” of the household, they relied on the conviction that the transparency and invariability of economic modernization finally opened the path to the path to the path to the path to the path Mass 30-year-old mortgage.

Where is all this? There was no one left from the future. Comparisons of Putin's regime with conservative dictatorships were far behind. Comparisons with Franco, Salazar and Pinochet are already inappropriate. These were, one might say, the quiet comfortable anti-liberal autarcies against the background of the radical and the spirit of the National-Bolshevik regime in Russia. Since 2014, Vladimir Putin has been doing everything to go into a difficult conflict with the outside world, the result of which can only be an exclamation of the National Bolsheviks “Yes, Death!”. Heroic suicide for the manifestation of an imaginary global alternative. Over seven years, Putin and his environment managed to go so far that the “planning horizon” has no further than three to six months and at the same time everything has been covered by anxiety and the only universal thesis regarding the future: “And now anything is possible!” Any of the next suicide step of the regime is understood by this “anything”. The future now turned out to be derived, deleted from everyday life, since the demonstrative “conflict with reality” can only be maintained due to sacred or mystified images. The war, as Patriarch Kirill said in the sermon, has "metaphysical foundations." The Kremlin and its people fight the “neo -Nazis”, with “anti -Russian”, with “Anglo -Saxons”, with the “West”, with “Georopa”, with “US Hegemony”. And this war does not take place in the field of media and the system of political education, as in 1975-1985 , for example, in the USSR. And right on the territory of a neighboring state. This war is frontal in nature, leads to the destruction of cities, the deprivation of the population of light and water, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the Kremlin intends to expand this massacre by mobilization and forming parts for new offenses.

The future of the once energetic and “long -term planning” groups of the population of Russia collapsed into four parts. Some are rapidly “leaving the boat”, with the words: “Somehow we will live the rest of the days in Dubai, Israel or in Cyprus.” The latter with dull doom remain inside and “adapt” the economy not to “geopolitical risks”, as it was customary to call in 2014-2022 , but to an impending catastrophe. Still others enthusiastically wait for some global crisis in the future, which will tear the West to pieces, and salvation will come “by itself”, and now let's shout loudly: “Death to the damned Anglo-Saxons”. The fourth in the future only see the hope that Sobyanin will come instead of Putin and all this gloom will end, and it will be possible to return to the “salazar”, that is, to a calm life with understandable motivations, “and there somehow”. Moreover, all these four expectations are completely groundless. After all, all of them are passengers of the same train, which rushes along the rails towards the bridge, which is not.

The future has disappeared. Instead of him now is darkness. It is necessary to move into this darkness, guided only by "fate". Putin began this rhetoric shortly after the Crimea: “In the world and death is red”, “Russia is not a project, but fate”, “why do we need the world, if there is no Russia in it”, etc. Behind all these sayings, many immediately felt the transfer of the future to another register. This is no longer a bourgeois future of modernization and well -being of households. This is not the future of “risks and benefits” in the logic of active entrepreneurship. This is a waste logic. Exists of all resources - money, people, infrastructures. Z-ideology and Z-Orthodoxy quickly begin to offer a political language that justifies this waste through “sacrifice”, through the mysticism of death and resurrection, through the need to accept any troubles and forms of violence as fate. Let's move your heads closer to the sledgehammer! - This is the motto of the day. The population feels perfectly that the consequence of the war will not be the entry into the social life of valiant officers with some kind of noble ethics of the military aristocracy, but crowds of demobilized contractors who "killed Ukrainians for money." Feeling. And he tries to adapt himself to this darkness of the future - who can.

The entire 30-year-old Russian post-Soviet transit ended with disaster. The consequences of which has not yet accommodate consciousness. Even the most optimistic thinking, which tends to grab for any of the twelve in detail described by the scenarios of how Putinism soon collapses, stops at the contractions of the consequences. “Conflict with Europe, reparations, restoration of the raw material sector, return to global markets? Oh, this will all be quickly settled, as soon as ... ”Excuse me, how will it“ settle ”? It will not settle, but will require very hard, difficult work for about 20 years. And this will be possible only in the case of a historically recorded defeat and the coming to the authorities of the appropriate administration, aimed at normalization. But this is good - and not the most likely script. After all, the failure of such a large-scale 30-year transition, a waste of a peaceful chance of democratization and well-being of households lead to the “second chance” to arise as a result of a cruel conflict of interest. After all, the representative office is not born from the fact that it was read about its benefits in books, but from the Hobbes struggle for exhaustion between groups, from the civil war and fatigue from it. Putin buried everything: the “European project” of Russia, and the “Russian world” in the concept of Solzhenitsyn, and the Constitution, and Moscow, as “shining on the hill of the Eurasia,” and “middle class” as the support of the State-Building , and the concepts of national security, and all the options of the “public focus”, and the status of Russia as a “regional power”, and the concept of “Russian policy” It follows Russian economic interests ”, and the mysterious image of the“ Second Army of the World ”-and in general, in different years of this 30th anniversary, attracted different social groups and created them“ the image of the future ”. The war of 2022 demolished everything under the root.

Everything was exposed. There is a wasteland in front of us. Plain. Darkness. Here and there, the lighting missiles take off, grabbing some fragments of a difficult social landscape out of the darkness. When the sun rises over this plain in five to ten years, the question related to the future will stand like this: how far has the population went in the direction of the letter Z ? Is it cheerful? Or it will be found on this plain in a state of deep orphans. Well, if the second. Then at least there will be a close chance to get out of the train, which left the mystical rails of “fate and soil” to the worlds of sacred victims and exalted nonsense. Get out of the train and just get into reality. And then somehow re-design for their collective existence the balance of freedom and security, state and private, faith and reason. And all the other balances that create a frame of the prosperous life of households and their long planning horizon.