Opposition. Reboot

“The age of disagreement. 2024 ” - the continuation of the film by Andrei Loshak about young supporters of Navalny. They ended up either in exile or in prison

Andrei Loshak’s new film breaks out primarily because it is a deeply personal statement. And not only for the author, but also for many thousands of spectators. For me, including. Cinema - about the bitter chocolate of the emigration of those whose life was full only with Russia. Those who were forced to leave, putting on the choice: emigration and freedom or prison and death in Russia.

“The age of disagreement. 2024 ” - the continuation of the first dock with the same name, shot in 2018. With the same heroes - the leaders of the regional headquarters of Navalny. Not talkers, but real passionaries brought up by their guru, really ready, as it seemed to them, for everything for the sake of a noble and crazy idea of ​​rebooting, reformatting our matrix.

Most of them gave in to the pressure of the forces of darkness and did not go, like Alexei himself, to the end. Turned out to be brave, decisive, convinced, but (fortunately) - not unbending ...

It is for the better: in Russia, unbending are the same Chernobyl liquidators. They know very well that the variable world will not bend under them, that the powerful herd will most likely trample them, but they will not leave the road.

The fate of two such young women is terrible - Lilia Chanysheva from Ufa and Ksenia Fadeeva from Tomsk.

Administrative arrests followed Lily one after another. During one such imprisonment, her boyfriend made her an offer. Lily got married, they and diamond, happy, were waiting for the child. The coordinator of the Bashkir headquarters was arrested when she only found out about pregnancy, which she immediately stated at the trial. Zero reaction. The meetings were held in a closed format. “HOLE! - shouted the diamond from the corridor. “Can you hear me?” I'm here, I'm with you. I love you!"

Lily Dali seven and a half years under the article on extremism in a colony in the Urals. She lost her child. Almaz rented a house nearby and sought a date.

Fadeev cannot be called xenia. Ksyusha is so miniature that it looks completely a teenager. Her aggravated passion for justice instantly worked when Navalny first came to Tomsk. Ksyushina Irony mother grins: " Of course , this did not pass by us!" In general, a small and stubborn Ksyusha went into politics. She became the coordinator of the headquarters, advanced to the deputies of the City Duma. And it began. The door to the apartment was poured with construction foam, car - paint, pierced the tires - in short, warned.

But Ksyusha, the only of all colleagues in other cities, was allowed to the elections - and chose. This is November 2022. And on the eve of the New Year, a detachment of armed defenders of the Fatherland broke into the denture, and Ksyusha went to the pre -trial detention center. During the hearing (closed) to the defendant, an ambulance was called twice.

The prosecutor asked for 10 years (according to their favorite article “Extremism”), they gave nine.

Where is this lion's fearlessness and the strength of the spirit in young women? It is easy and seductive to explain to their Avvakumov devotion to the cause of Alexei Navalny and the very influence of the heroism of the hero on an impressionable female soul, in other words, love. But the substance of the love of our heroines is directed in a completely different direction. Ksyusha has a mission in the channel. Lily has a beloved husband and family.

There is another girl in the film, Violetta Grudin, coordinator from Murmansk, LGBT activist. Navalny for her is the embodiment of hope. Exhausted, exhausted by power, endless persecution, surveillance, arrests, bullying of not only officials and security forces of the very different level, but also fellow countrymen - both as a civil trigger and as a representative of the Menshinism - eventually fled to Lithuania. But only after the doctors tried to kill her. “They entered into a criminal conspiracy. In general, I can understand everyone - both cops and power ... But I could not forgive the doctors. I lost faith in people. "

She, healthy, was stuffed into a covid hospital, to the ward to the dying old women. On the 10th day of the hunger strike (in the hospital!) They made a test. To the disappointment of doctors, it turned out to be negative. It was not possible to kill. The Divchina turned out to be strong.

And now, sitting in a tiny apartment on the outskirts of Vilnius with a son and a dog, Violetta grieves that her former associates and colleagues cut off a past life and think only how to survive abroad, where to earn, where to go to study. The very same - up to the death of Navalny - all thoughts were only about returning to opposition work. Actually, even tried to lead her, remotely.

“I, you know, despise these stupid, meaningless foreign rallies among Russian embassies. They bake me. The struggle for Russia is possible only in Russia. ”

And only mourning Alexei admitted that she did not want to return to her homeland anymore. There is nothing to do without Alexei there. And completely childish, through the sobs: "I so wanted him to be my president ..."

Looking at these Amazons, one cannot help but think about dozens of women cast from heavenly steel, who were able and can smile from behind the grate, climb into the very baked and go to death. Novodvorskaya, Starovoitov, Politkovskaya, Estemirov, Milashin, Kostyuchenko, Berkovich, Petriychuk, Skochilenko, Khalip, Kozyrev, Ivlev ...

I don’t know if anyone studied the gender aspect of resistance. Yes, for sure. People do not study what. After looking at the “age of disagreement”, I can’t stop thinking about his heroes. And resting at a dead end. I’m trying to go around the wall and so and the passage, but there is no passage. And one conclusion. Navalny is a hero, a born leader, and his role in the movement of "disagreement" is grandiose. Multi -kilometer and many hours of queues in the winter, so that you can’t even see, but only say goodbye and add your bouquet to a tall, above human growth to the flower hill and come there again and again - this is only a small part of its supporters. Because still thousands were already in exile at that time, which we began to call expulsion for some time. And the main trouble is directly connected with this. Navalny left dozens and hundreds of thousands of fans - but a few units of “understudy”. There is no one to replace it. Yes, there is a couple of fiery revolutionaries, brave girls, recklessly ready for the victim. But, firstly, they are effectively getting rid of them. And secondly, female sacrifice, the element of a forest fire in their souls-scare away.

In the end, the story knows the only colleague girl who is able to lead not only the army, but also the people. Yes, and the heavenly forces helped that. Yes, and the same as a result was betrayed.

“The age of disagreement. 2024 ”matured with the heroes. Six years later, many realized that the opposition is not a profession. Romantic boys who believed in themselves, in the meaning of the struggle, “agitators, throats, leaders”, the apostles with the Navalny icon at the head of the head found that they were millennials, and turned on common sense. Plus normal youthful hunting for a change of places. The USA, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, where these guys settled after Tula and Kaliningrad, attracted them on their own, and not as a path to salvation.

Philip Simpkins hit Switzerland by accident. The Russian family from Montreo saw him at the “age of disagreement” -2018 and wanted to meet, invited him to visit.

By this time, the cast -commander of the Tula headquarters of Navalny had already received several lessons of the “fight against the system”. The headquarters were smashed, Philip was bombarded with threats. The team, too, people, hung with a convincing arsenal, intelligibly explained who the master was here. Navalny returned from Germany, and he was immediately sent to jail. Philip’s mother lost peace and sleep. Yes, and the guy himself realized that his own arrest is a matter of time. And his campaigning was the result, mainly, the direction of three letters, and even young children built faces, galloped and yelled: “We are for Putin!” But Philip managed to unlearn at the railway technical school and work as a student of the driver. The mentor taught him not only the skills of existence in the “beautiful and fierce world”, but also of worldly wisdom. He warned that he would not end with good, and the connection with Putin’s main and only competitor, in which they all believe and with whom they associate hopes will not forgive him. “It’s pointless to fight the system. Do not shine. "

And then this is an invitation from Montreo.

And you know, Philip liked Switzerland!

And then the war. The headquarters was closed. The peers were looking for ways to hide from mobilization.

Philip Simpkins managed to somehow get out of Russia and asked for political asylum in Switzerland. And a year later I received a refugee status. "God, keep Switzerland!" -The exostole is having fun and rejoiced.

I myself emigrated in 2011. When longing became unbearable (it happens, this is a disease, who has not experienced - he will not understand), she returned. And then - war. And the family decided: it is better to die from nostalgia than to live with fascism. And we again found ourselves in exile. And many did not want to leave or could not. Many emigrants (people are nearby, and sometimes vile) dare to despise them from their sofas and accuse them of silent support for the regime. There are also Z-activists who proceed with poison about, on the contrary, who left-“rats from the ship” and “sold their homeland” (to whom and for how much?). Both that and the other are stupid classes that do not have other goals except self -love: here I am all in white, and you are all fools and traitors. Therefore, both of them (left - remained), I am unequivocally, as a given, like the color of the eyes and musical hearing.

Andrei Loshak, who is now living between his favorite cities - Tbilisi and Paris - also tries to maintain objectivity. And glad for those guys who escaped from Russia and did not repeat the fate of Lily and Ksyusha (like hundreds of political prisoners, as well as the very prophet of the opposition). And, of course, a person “with a soul and talent”, he correctly assesses all the material, physical and moral hardships of emigration. But the insidiousness of documentaries is that, when fixing the hero’s life in detail, the author loses control over him.

It is possible, like Maria singers in the video product “traitors”, dashingly dispose of historical truth, and her opinion is absolutely. In the series of all kinds, there are enough: schemes, graphs, tables, photographs, quotes, chronicle, and it lies all this economy in its understanding. There are only living people there. She is the mistress of this tendented dead man, and no one is a decree, neither the opponent, nor the hero, nor the navigator, nor the carpenter.

I see that Andrei justifies his heroes with all his heart, if only because they survived. “Thank you for living,” as they say for a different reason.

But, having abandoned the choice of new heroes (the concept of the film was to follow the guys from 2018 in development), he can no longer do anything with the old ones. These guys are Philip Simpkins (Tula - Montreo), Yegor Chernyuk (Kaliningrad - Philadelphia) and Oleg Alekseev (Kaliningrad - Prague) are good for everyone. And charming, and sensible, and independent, and marvelous. But they lost all interest in the matter, in the ideas that they seemed to be served. Time is when the profession, career, education come to the fore.

“Oppositionist is not a profession,” Alekseev, a comrade and former deputy Chernyuk, coordinator of the Kaliningrad headquarters, shrugs. The dispute will not work. The asset is the Faculty of Mathematics of Karlov University, work at the bank, a dozen white shirts on a hanger. "White collar", perfectly fitting into the format of modern Europe. "I do not put a point, it is quite possible, I’ll go somewhere else." Many people think, tells him the horses that the victim of Navalny was meaningless ... In response, Oleg leads him to the square, where Jan Pajah burned himself in 1968.

“They also said about him: a meaningless victim. But you know how the “velvet revolution” began? Twenty years later, people came here with flowers, they grabbed them, dragged - well, everything is like ours. And the people - he walked and walked, thousands. That's how the “meaningless” victim came around. ”

Once there was a mocking expression of "Demshiz". These are those who have made a profession out of protest. Dovlatov wrote about professional dissidents with a very angry mockery. Once in the conditions of normal civilization, in a developed society of the 21st century, where the culture of protest has long gone out of use (now, however, when the world is not very much losing his mind, it enters again), Demshiza does not know where to put himself.

Heroes of "age of disagreement. 2024 "were much smarter than, it seems to me, the author expected. They easily learn, including cosmopolitanism, they well understand why the political struggle is needed, they deeply respect Navalny and cannot even restrain tears, but at some point they said: let's continue without me. If you ask them, as the bear asked the bear: the soldiers out of love for the homeland risk life, scientists out of love for the truth go to the fire ... What did you do out of love for freedom for which your idol died? “They will answer almost like that bear: I chose another freedom for which it is not necessary to die.”

Egor Chernyuk, the young man quite brilliant, having arrived in the city of his dreams of New York, handed over the American exam with a huge margin from the American applicants: both language and mathematics. But in the life of an expensive, business and regulated Ny could not be built. In general, nowhere could I “integrate into the system”, as his new friend and neighbor in the apartment say, Trotskyist . I must say, all this strange political life of American rebels caused deep bewilderment.

Yegor went to cheap and criminal Philadelphia with its poverty and smoked firewalls and settled in a DJ to a golden place. And unexpectedly "fit." Overgrown with friends, girls, lives, albeit striking, but the freedom of bohemia “lies” him. Perhaps this alternative “system” underwear is most suitable for the “Russian soul”, which Yegor learned only here. Most likely, he went to “Politics” in search of his baroque, which, as you know, means “wrong”. Which of us knows our character and true motives of actions?

Let my tongue dry if I say: “And since then everyone stretches in front of them deaf, crooked, roundabout paths ...” Nothing is drawn. Their path is bright and full of impressions. But Andrei Loshak said in an interview with the worship for the film: “I asked all of them a question on a ten-point scale-how long are you happy? “And no one rose above five.”

Six young men and women. Real new Russians. Such different and so lost hope.

When Losk was planning to shoot his sequel, he wrote to Alexei in the colony. And he answered: maybe not? It will be a very sad movie ...

According to one English professor-political scientist, Navalny “did not appreciate the degree of risk” when he returned. Risk degree! I did not appreciate it! It does not occur to the professors that Alexei Anatolyevich then came to such an orbit of freedom that they did not dream of in their European universities. On that day and hour, when he flew, “without evaluating the risks,” we began to live in another era. In the era of Navalny, who has become at these days at a redeeming for our country.