The escape is like a riot

Philosopher Peter Ryabov - about why non -participation is not weakness and cowardice

Russians are not capable of resistance? Are they born to obey the “king-priest”? After the start of the war, the accusations of the inhabitants of Russia of almost a “genetic predisposition” to humility and spine became a common place. Western politicians do not hide that the purpose of sanctions against Russians, the closure of borders and visa restrictions is to stimulate protest within the country. Those who left Russia are often called cowards of both supporters of the regime and its opponents. But is it cowardice? The candidate of philosophical sciences, historian of anarchism, philosopher Peter Ryabov believes that “departure” is also a form of resistance, a tradition that has been formed in Russia for centuries. Here are his arguments.

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The current conversations about the “Russian cultural code”, which consists in eternal submission to the authorities and the long -suffering of the Russian people (yes, the same patience for which Generalissimo Stalin proposed his famous toast following the results of the Second Imperialist War), conducted on both sides of the barricades, are not devoid of arguments. Some angrily remembers the “orcs” and “Mordor”, racistically divided the population of Russia, others with tenderness refer to the house-building “spiritual scrapers” and a special unique “spiritual and moral tradition” of the Russian people, inevitably withdrawing a conversation to the Uvarovsky triad “Orthodoxy, autocracy, and the constant readiness of the Russian person” Kill and die for the authorities.

Our classics of the century before last were bitterly complained about this. Russian history inspired Saltykov-Shchedrin on the hopeless history of the city of Glupov with his doomed by the authorities that were doomed to total humility. Pushkin was biliary in the hearts: “Grinkle, peaceful peoples! / What are the herds of the gifts of freedom? " Lermontov cursed “unwashed Russia, the country of slaves, the country of gentlemen”, with its people, devoted to blue uniforms (that is, gendarmes), and with contempt renounced the sovereign militaristic “glory purchased by blood”. Nekrasov in despair stated: "People of the servile title - real dogs sometimes: / The harder to punish, the more miles the Lord."

But is it so hopeless? It is unlikely. The most severe oppression of state milk has repeatedly encouraged the Russian people to grandiose uprisings for land and will. The enormous, covering half the country and incinerates of the autocracy of the movement of Razin, Bulavin, Pugachev, salt and copper riots, the civil war of the beginning of the 17th century (contemptuously called by state historians “Troubles”), Decembrists, Dissants, the two great revolutions of the early twentieth century refute the established myth of eternal silence and humility The God-bearer and save the honor of Russian society, passing on a spark of resistance from generation to generation.

Nevertheless, these bright lights of uprisings are the most heroic and noticeable, but far from the most common form of resistance to people to the state oppression in Russia. A more constant, massive, relatively safe, effective, albeit less noticeable form of such resistance, are numerous types of evasion, care, flights of people from state control. The departure of individual and collective, demonstrative and secret. Departure to "internal emigration", to the outskirts of the endless of the Fatherland or beyond. I would like to briefly recall this today as the exposure of the “orcs” and the to the sungators of the “Holy Rus' and the Russian World”, for some reason always turning on to the war.

According to the correct remark of the historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, "the history of Russia is the history of the country that is colonized." Over a thousand years of existence, Russian people (rapidly going from the Dnieper to the Volga, and then from the Volga to the White and Okhotsk Sea) settled gigantic territories, huge lands conquered and joined, creating the largest state in the world (and, by the way, giving rise to what Peter Vyazemsky witty and actually called the "geographical fanfaronades": the self -love of Russians, the vastness of the imperiality, the vastness of the imperiality, as if justifying and compensating for all its vices).

The largest state is in the world, but at the same time sparsely populated. The vast territories and smallness of people very early pushed the state to the path of violent retention, consolidating the subjects scattering from it and turning them into “strong land” (with the restriction of freedom of movement). Actually, the censuses, certification, registration, mass deportations (like the deportation of the inhabitants of the conquered Novgorod undertaken by Ivan III, in the depths of Muscovy in order to break their resistance and break social ties), an attempt to enslave the noblemen, subjugating and tying them entirely to the needs of the public service, and enslave the peasants, raising them to the land and forcing them to contain and force them to contain and force them to support and force them to contain and force them to support and force them to support and force them to contain and force them to contain and force them to support and force them Noblemen, and bureaucracy - precisely in this, in essence, was the process of enslavement that stretched for centuries and changing forms.

It began in the XIII century, with the formation of the fatal trajectory along which the Tatar-Moskovskaya Rus' moved first (contemporaries called it the “Zalessian Horde”!), Then the St. Petersburg-imperial Russia, then the Bolshevik totalitarian USSR, in general, with that historical track that finally and so painfully ends in our eyes and with our (suffering and actual) participation.

But this action, in full accordance with Newton's third law, has always caused active and mass opposition. To enshrine, “dragged”, taxes, census, people answered in vials - sometimes peaceful, and sometimes not very. Even when, in 1257, St. Prince Alexander Yaroslavich (after a couple of centuries called “Nevsky”) helpfully brought to Novgorod the Horde agents for the census and the application of regular tribute, the free Novgorodians who did not want them to be “taken to the number”, rebelled and killed by the Plantan (for which the prince was executed by the troublemakers, and many of the rebels ordered their eyes and cut off and cut off noses). Later, Peter I, embodying his dream of a universal “regular” state, tried to conduct a total census and passportation of the population to resolve the recruiting and poll tax system.

But people fled from state paternal supervision and slavery. Hundreds of thousands of Old Believers fled - from religious violence, backed up by bayonets of the authorities. (There was even an extensive sect of “runners”, considering power as a manifestation of an antichrist, which created a significant network of secret shelters and developed a whole worldview and “subculture”, an alternative state order: with tax evasion, recruiting, state priests.) The boyars fled from the Moscow despots, like Andrei Kurbsky, to a more free Lithuanian Rus'. The peasants fled to the Don (from which “Issues is not!”), Fasting from enslavement and wanting to become free Cossacks. We fled to impassable Siberian wilds. And the state persistently moved after the flesh, setting the fortresses and imposing tribute to the conquered tribes.

After the lesion of the uprising led by Kondraty Bulavin and the Great Dushegub and Tirana Peter I Genocide Don and Zaporizhzhya Cossacks, a group of several thousand rebels-Bulavans, led by Ataman Ignat Nekrasov, fled to the Crimean Khanate, preferred by the “Basurman” to an “Orthodox” autocrat.

They fled from the Siberian hard labor, leaving abroad. Hundreds and thousands of free -thoughts and dissidents emigrated to Europe in order to freely breathe and speak away from the “blue uniforms” - from Herzen and Bakunin to Bukovsky (already with late Brezhnev).

The family of the Old Believers of the Lykovs, famous by journalist Vasily Peskov in his story “Taiga Deador” twice: at first, under the king, fleeing in Siberia from the official Nikonian Church, and then, already under the new autocracy of the Bolsheviks, disappeared in the 30s of the twentieth century in the taiga for half a century.

After the wave of the Black -Hundred pogroms in the late XIX - beginning of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled from the Russian Empire - to America and Palestine. Free Christians-Dukhobors, following the spirit of the Gospels, refused to deal with the state: serve in the army, pay taxes and pass censuses. The autocracy subjected them to the Caucasus, hoping that hot prouds would break through peaceful dunce. But they looked with surprise and respect at such “atypical” Christians: non -one, hardworking, friendly, honest pacifists. At the end of the 19th century, several thousand Christian anarchists-duchasts, with the assistance of Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin, moved to Canada, where their settlements exist now.

Another important form of resistance of people in Russia and the USSR to the State ISU was various methods of sabotage and evasion of forced labor. The well-known labor ethics of the Russian population (most clearly expressed in folk wisdom “work is not a wolf, will not run into the forest” and “let the iron saw work, my mother gave birth not for work”) is generated, of course, not some “initial damage” of the Russian worker, but for centuries for the forced corvee, which continued at the construction of the Gulag.

Everyone knows the formulas of vital wisdom that has developed in the late USSR, but having centuries -old roots in the “tricks” of entire generations: “We pretend that we are working, and you pretend that you pay us a salary” and “You are a master here, and not a guest from the factory every nail”. To constant attempts by the state to control every step of workers, they quite reasonably responded with simulation, evasion and obvious or implicit sabotage. And, just as the serfs, reluctantly and somehow practicing the corvee, earnestly and eagerly worked on their communal alloties on few days free from duties, just the same Soviet collective farmers, without any enthusiasm, working on state collective farm fields, put the whole soul into the processing of their own gardens, which became an important abyss for them and the whole country. starvation.

This logic of behavior is quite meaningful, understandable and justified, although, as one of the implicit forms of resistance to society to the state, she puzzled and enraged the rulers for all centuries, like Peter I trying to solve an unsolvable task: to create and educate initiative, energetic slaves (according to Vasily Klyuchevsky).

The most large -scale manifestation of mass evasion of public service in Russia was the events of the First World War. Sergei Yesenin wrote about this in the poem "Anna Snegina":

War of my whole soul is stolen.
For someone else's interest
I shot me a close body
And the breasts of his brother climbed.
<...>
But still I did not take a sword ...
Under the roar and roar of Mortir
I showed another courage -
There was the first deserter in the country.

Hundreds of thousands of people who did not want to die for the dynasty of Nikolai Bloody and for Dardanella showed such courage by 1917. Mass fraternities with the Austrians and the Germans, the flight from the front, the refusal to comply with the crazy orders of the generals, the self -organization of the soldiers to the councils were the most important factor in the beginning revolution and one of the most glorious pages in the history of Russia, which shows that the long -suffering of a Russian person still has the limit.

Emigration and flight is better and more meaningful than the Kholuic humility, and often, as in the case of dungeon, it is open and bold, but non -violent resistance. Often the escape completely flowed into the uprising: the peasants fled to the Don, and then went from there to the Cossacks-purests to the capital, the deserters of the First World War created "the third power of the green." Evasion, sabotage, the departure of people from the power of the older brother and from the paternal supervision of the state is a long and powerful Russian tradition, which is useful to remind today.

The author’s opinion may not coincide with the opinion of the editorial office.