The empire did not break up

Member of our project “After”, historian and philologist Andrei Zorin in an interview with Perito speaks of the cult of strength and victory as the basis of national consent:

“Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the victory was the only zone of national consensus. For almost any other reason, there could be terrible disagreements, but there was complete consent here. And a successful ideology was supposed to stuck there. <...>

Russia also went through the Afghan and Chechen wars, which created a large layer of people with military experience and at the same time disoriented, who did not have a place in a peaceful life. For them, the propaganda of the war was an important semantic support. The events of the late 1980s-early 1990s even knocked out the country out of hinges, and many people lost the meaning of life.

In this situation, the cult of war has blossomed, actively planted from above. And not a specific war, but war in general: the cult of the military past, the cult of victory, the cult of power. In addition, he resonated with a loyal attitude to the criminal culture and the poetization of desperate courage and cruelty characteristic of it. The cult of the war was resonant with the ideas of a significant part of the population about himself, which in no way relieves responsibility from ideologists who created this cult, and its propagandists. <...>

Already from the end of the 1990s, work began on the creation of a consistent ideological narrative, which would unite the Kievan Rus, the Moscow Principality, the Moscow kingdom, the St. Petersburg Empire, the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet Russia in a single line. This narrative was worked out for a long time. The links were thrown out of it, found solutions that allowed Nicholas II to explain, and the Bolsheviks who shot him were also beautiful, why the Moscow kingdom was wonderful, and Peter who hated him was also deeply right.

It was required to remove from the Soviet myth its semantic center - a revolution. The revolution in the new ideological system is bad, because the power cannot be overthrown. And the system created by this revolution is excellent because a strong state arose.

Back in the 1990s, I wrote an article that in the imperial myth the Russian Crimea was the most important topos, but I thought it was gradually forgotten. And then suddenly in 2014 they began to call me from everywhere, ask to perform. Suddenly this myth coated with a patina came to life. But the feeling that this approach will be extended to other parts of the former empire, of course, I did not have. Many of us did not understand that 30 years were not a deadline, that in fact the empire had not yet broken up and that these screams of the type “we can repeat” are the reality of the resentment that arose after the collapse. ”