Translated material
Wall newspaper on the Titanic. Dmitry Bykov* - about all the entertainment of warring Moscow
Russian media have long been divided into censored and anti-war media, whose audiences rarely overlap. Among the first to survive is Afisha, a once cult publication that was a trendsetter in the 2000s. Over the course of 15 years, Afisha has gone through several changes of owners and editors-in-chief, gotten rid of its signature snobbery and switched to the language of zoomers. Writer and publicist Dmitry Bykov read an interview with Afisha columnist Shura Bogacheva that went viral in April - and experienced a lot of emotions ranging from rage to sympathy, which he generously shares with Republic readers.
These notes are generated by irritation, almost rage, but are ultimately dictated by sentimentality - it’s not for nothing that Zinaida Pronchenko once said that I seem kind to her. I don’t know if this is kindness, but it’s certainly conscientiousness: after reading the program interview of Afisha columnist Shura Bogacheva with Alexandra Glazkov in the SRSLY publication, I began to read Bogacheva herself. Before this interview, I had no idea about its existence. But the Afisha magazine, a chronicle of the life of advanced youth, could not evaporate, and the advanced youth themselves could not completely leave with the outbreak of the war. She had to take on some other forms and speak about herself in a different tone. And this, alas, really happened.
This revealed a curious, unreflected (at least by me) feature of fashionable youth: its existence has traditionally been somehow linked to the values of freedom, modernity, liberalism, whatever is meant by them. These most fashionable youth usually do things condemned by patriots and conservatives: they use prohibited words and substances, indulge in unbridled promiscuity, devote more time to leisure than work, and do not rush to join the armed forces.
I remember that back in the 2000s, very insightful people told me that the restoration of Soviet methods of leadership and censorship in Russia was impossible, since the market and private property existed. And this market, as I warned, does not guarantee or provide anything in itself. It gets along well with ideology, and with the archaic, and with censorship - in Nazi Germany, by the way, there was also a market, albeit a regulated one.
In the nineties, Veronica Dolina had a song that sounds downright mocking today: “If there are shrimp, then there is freedom.” But it turned out that fascism gets along well with imported products (even if not all of them), and with private property, and with organized crime. This, remember, is like Herman’s in “It’s Hard to Be a God”: “We fly, we look - castles. Well, we think it's a renaissance. We arrive and there are castles, but no Renaissance.” Or even like Ilf: “There is a radio, but there is no happiness.”
Everything that is inherent in freedom is preserved under fascism - but takes, how can I put it, a special form: a fascist imprint, intonation licentiousness, a kind of demonstrative permissiveness appears on everything. After all, fascism, in essence, is the absence of any criteria, a teenage disregard for them. Every phenomenon seems to say - yes, this is what I am, and you will eat it because it’s native. And the informal movements that Bogacheva (formally) writes about are quite possible under fascism - but these are special informals, apolitical or at least not revolutionary.
Fascism without ideology is entirely possible, because fascism is not a train of thought, but its absence; not a way of thinking, but a way of acting. It seems to me that in such fascism there is even more fascist, that is, actually, cynicism: communism is the adherence to some kind of dogma, and fascism is a joyful, with full consciousness of its fall, betrayal of any beliefs and mockery of all prohibitions. Fascism does not deny, so to speak, all of humanity, but only that section of it that is associated precisely with fidelity to its views: it consists in the ecstasy of fall, in the special joy with which divine and human laws are violated. Fascism is any form of dehumanization, ahead of the era and, moreover, cheerful: unlike communism, which emphasized asceticism and sorrow, it revels in strength and joy.
Another question is that the strength does not come out very strong, and the joy is emphatically joyless; this bleakness is a distinctive feature of all publications of the current Afisha without exception.
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