“Oh, the most powerless and shameful time in the life of my people is the time from dawn to the opening of shops!” - this is, of course, Venichka Erofeev, and we remember which stores we are talking about. But this, on the other hand, is a powerful metaphor, like the entire story “Moscow-Petushki”, unless you read it as an exercise in the genre of Zhvanetsky or Zadornov.

Among journalistic cliches, the phrase “on such and such a date we woke up in another country” is not the least important. Many Russians have already woken up in another country once, in the most literal sense - on December 26, 1991. One generation is enough for a century; I hope that Russians in the new country will not wake up on September 9 of this year. But in a different political situation they will definitely wake up. It is now impossible to predict what kind of situation this will be.