Prilepin is not someone else's embarrassment to read. Not someone else's embarrassment

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Zakhar Prilepin
Not someone else's embarrassment. One day - one year

© Zakhar Prilepin

© AST Publishing House LLC

Instead of a preface

Let's start, it would seem, from afar (actually - no, we start with what is at hand).

Old Russian literature was in the cycle of sacred history.

Despite everything, ancient Russian literature gives a feeling of peace, humility, justification of the world. In the middle of any of these words is peace.

With peace in our hearts, we live in the midst of the earthly world. These feelings were inherited by Pushkin, Tolstoy, Blok, Yesenin.

Since ancient times, the Russian people lived from one gospel feast to another.

The events of the New Testament were perceived as occurring - here, now and every time - anew.

This is how we began to perceive our history. This is how our history began to perceive us.

Happened once in a century a great victory- another salvation of Rus', or a great shock, or another unprecedented thing, like a trip to India or into space. These days and the days of the Russian saints added to the gospel cycle, but did not change it.

Some say it's a vicious circle. Well, okay, let the circle - but it's not a dead end.

This is a carousel of Russian history that will never get bored.

In the fourteenth year of the third millennium, it once again seemed to us that we were flying into hell. And we just went to the next circle.

The weather was transparent, and everything around was especially sharply drawn.

Squinting a little, one could see all the same faces familiar to us from our so young, so ancient history: warriors, righteous, rebels, tax collectors, nobles, holy fools.

Thanksgiving that we were not surrounded by this cup again.

There is no need to dwell on certain events of the past year in detail. The more you look at them, the more clearly you realize that they have already happened more than once.

It’s just that we haven’t seen them yet in our earthly life – but now they have shown us a lot.

Much more often in this book, we will talk about how the same events looked before.

It makes no sense to be responsible for someone else's history, but now we once again know for sure about our own - it has no "progress". The very word is ridiculous and inflated, like balloon. Touch it with a sharp one - and it will burst, the children will laugh.

Can eternity have "progress"?

Spin, carousel.

Before everything

This year was brewing, and one day it fell like hail.

A short dystopia that Ukraine has split into two parts and is Civil War I wrote back in 2009.

I can't say that I was the only one who was tormented by such forebodings. Any sighted person could have foreseen this.

In May 2013, we were sitting in the middle of sunny Kiev, not far from Khreshchatyk, with Ukrainian "leftists" and other reasonable guys from among the local intelligentsia - who, however, due to their lack of "orange" illusions, patented Ukrainian elites were classified as marginals .

Then, six months before the Maidan, we talked a lot about everything that six months later came true in a strange and terrible way.

Our conversations were recorded and soon made public.

When the events that are now known to everyone began, we did not have to invent our speeches in order to turn out to be the most perspicacious after the fact, and shout: but we knew, but we knew!

We knew it.

Perhaps I will give a few quotes from our conversations - you can easily check that they were published when not a single tire was smoking in the center of Kyiv.

Sometimes you come, - I said, - to some not very distant country - from among the republics of the USSR or the countries of the Warsaw Bloc, and after a while you catch yourself on one painful feeling: in this country, fascism is being quietly rehabilitated. Doesn't anyone notice?

Do not think that this is expressed exclusively in Russophobic rhetoric, often characteristic of other foreign media - we have long been accustomed to such things. We are not obliged to love, and there is also reason not to love us: they have inherited, accumulated.

The problem is different. For some reason, these countries are looking for their own identity in those times when they wore fascist uniforms, caught local Jews and transported them where they were told, and then fiercely fought against the "Bolshevik invaders."

And at the same time, as soon as, for example, I find myself in Europe, local press immediately begins to rattle me on the subject of "Russian despotism", all sorts of National Bolsheviks and the latest Stalinism.

“Fear God,” I want to say every time, “here in half of the neighboring countries the police dress in such a way that you cannot distinguish them from the policemen of 1941, monuments are erected to pro-fascist thugs – and you are all in Russia looking for what you yourself under sideways".

But they don't really want to see what they have at hand - all these countries are gradually creeping into various European Unions, and in general, unlike Russia, they are perceived as quite civilized.

My other surprise is connected with the fact that if you meet a Russian liberal in the country described above - whether at a civil forum or in a cafe - then he often sits in the circle of the public, among which, in principle, he should not be.

In Russia, our patented liberals ate the dog in the fight against the "fascists": they look for (and find!) them either under a bench, or in an attic, or in a newspaper, or at a rally; but as soon as they get out of the cordon to the nearest neighbors, the scent disappears.

Or, on the contrary, is it getting worse?

In our country, they only do what they say about "authoritarianism" and "nationalist revenge", outside of its borders they do not distinguish anything like that at the very closest examination.

... While drinking Kiev draft, we discussed all this with one Ukrainian guy from the "left", Viktor Shapinov.

“Russians usually don’t understand Ukrainian politics in general, they think in clichés,” Shapinov said. – Fans of the UPA, the Nachtigall battalion and the SS division Galicia are often described in the Russian liberal media as “democrats”. We even sent an open letter to Ekho Moskvy, when the news service of this respected radio station wrote about Nazi militants in masks and with knives who came to the meeting room of the Kyiv City Council as “civil activists”. These "civil activists" also unfurled a banner with a "Celtic cross" - a well-known European neo-Nazi symbol - there. So, “Echo” did not answer us… At the rallies of the anti-Putin opposition, I myself saw the banner of the “Svoboda” organization a couple of times – and this is an ultra-right, neo-Nazi party. One of its leaders, now a member of parliament, published a collection of articles by Goebbels, Mussolini, Röhm, Strasser and other fascist criminals for "party study".

– What motivates some of the Ukrainian political elites to look for their predecessors in those times? I asked, referring to the Second World War and direct defectors to the side of our then common enemy.

The answer was known to me in advance, but I checked my feelings with what my Ukrainian acquaintances think.

“The key point here is anti-communism,” they answered me. - Heroes and "fathers of the nation" should be all those who fought against communism. And in the thirties and forties, the flagship of the fight against communism was Nazi Germany. That is why Bandera, Shukhevych and other collaborators are made heroes. history Ukrainian state have to lead from these "heroes". Otherwise, one will have to admit that today's Ukrainian statehood is a product of the late Soviet bureaucracy of the Ukrainian SSR, which was beneficial not to obey the all-union center in the conditions of the beginning division of public property. Simply put, the Ukrainian part of the Soviet bureaucracy wanted to determine for itself what and to whom would get on the territory under its control. It was this selfish and far from national spirituality motive that was the basis for the creation of an independent Ukraine. And nationalism was just a convenient screen to cover up the massive redistribution of property.

- What do they think about Russian liberal figures here - why do they need all this? I asked.

- I think that the same anti-communism is the cementing link here. Cooperation between Russian liberals and the far right in the former Soviet republics- these are not cases, this is a system. For us, the saddest thing is the support, primarily media support, of the Svoboda party, the former Social-National Party. The xenophobic and racist program of the Svoboda party, the aggressive rhetoric of its leaders, in different years who called on their supporters to “fight the Jews and Muscovites”, who advised Russian-speaking children in kindergartens in Lvov to “pack their bags and leave for Muscovy”, is known to everyone in Ukraine. Why you turn a blind eye to this is a big question.

Our so-called opposition is a bloc of liberals (Klitschko), national liberals (Yatsenyuk) and, frankly, fascists (Svoboda by Tyagnybok). By concluding such an alliance, the liberals dragged the fascists into big politics. The arrival of the fascists in parliament was also supported by the authorities, giving them a place on TV that was disproportionate to their then rating. Yes, and directly financing them - there is evidence that Tyagnybok received money directly from the Administration of President Yanukovych. There are facts when the events of the VO "Svoboda" were held in the premises belonging to the deputies of the Party of Regions of Yanukovych. The problem of power is that it thinks to outsmart everyone, to “deceive” with some kind of cunning political technique. The fascists have long acquired their own dynamics, it is no longer just a “project of power”, as many thought a year ago. The coming to power of the Nazis is more real than we think.

Soon Andrei Manchuk, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian “leftist” Borotba party, joined our conversation:

– Nationalist ideology has always been reverse side medals of Ukrainian capitalism,” Manchuk shared. – It is called upon to assert the right of the bourgeoisie to rule in our country, deriving the tradition of its power directly from the Trypillia pots and from the trousers of the Cossack hetmans, as well as legitimizing the results of the privatization of Ukraine’s production assets created by the labor of millions of people in “totalitarian” times.

It must be understood that in Ukraine propaganda has demonized the “leftists” to a much greater extent than in Russia, where the bourgeois elites use certain images or fragments from the ideological heritage Soviet era. The very idea of the left is presented here in Ukraine as something a priori alien to everything Ukrainian, brought here on the bayonets of the “Moscow horde”. A whole generation is growing up here who were taught that the communists are insidious, cruel, depraved strangers who brutally and deliberately destroyed the Ukrainian people, their language, culture, and so on by starvation and repression. This position is the basis of the right-liberal consensus, which is the alpha and omega of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie.

Of course, these statements are false - because most of the classics of Ukrainian culture, including Ivan Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, Kotsyubinsky, Tychyna, Vinnichenko and others, were people of socialist convictions, Ukraine gave a brilliant galaxy of communist revolutionaries, the Ukrainian lower classes actively supported the Bolsheviks, and the victory Soviet power became a prerequisite for an unprecedented flowering of Ukrainian culture, for the first time emancipating Ukrainian language and putting Ukrainian education on its feet. But now this is hushed up in the most cynical way - and shameful myths are being used that the communists allegedly shot a congress of kobza musicians specially assembled for this purpose, that in the fifties Kharkov students were executed for demanding that they take exams in Ukrainian, that Ukrainian soldiers were given before the attack on the Germans with bricks instead of weapons, and so on. But the level of education is low, the level of propaganda is high, and there are those who believe it.

A month later, in September, we discussed the same topics with the Kyiv literary critic whose name is Yefim Hoffman.

They spoke, still chuckling, still joking, about a very strange phenomenon: “Kiev Russian orangeism” - that is, about people who were brought up within the framework of Russian culture, but, going out to the Maidan (I remind you, there were still a few months before the Maidan), they lead themselves as inveterate Russophobes.

“I still remember the times when the concept of “liberalism” among the intelligentsia did not mean what it is now,” Yefim said. – It was about the observance of human rights, about freedom as the most important universal value, about pluralism, tolerance… It is no coincidence that the adjective “liberal” in everyday life is associated with manifestations of gentleness and tolerance. And the current liberal party mindset is completely different. Of the totality of human rights, one and only one is singled out, regarded as the main one: the right to private property and its inviolability. Its observance is guaranteed by a stable market economy regime.

As for the rest of the rights, the situation is quite interesting. The newly-minted liberals hate everything that gives away the "scoop", tuned in to the wave of total anti-communism. But the logical-conceptual apparatus of these people works in the mode of ... the so-called Marxist way of thinking, which they so vehemently reject. In fact, not Marxist, if we mean genuine Marxism. The whole question is that they think in the spirit of simplified schemes from the Soviet-university barracks course of social disciplines. They believe that there is a basis - a market economy, and there is a superstructure - everything else. If a stable market is established, the rest of the freedom-rights will automatically come into play.

It is quite clear that the United States of America is a strict reference point for today's Russian-speaking-Ukrainian liberals. It is significant that neither the failed results of the Russian Yeltsin-Gaidar experiment of the 1990s, nor the fate of many Third World countries that have been in a situation of "wild capitalism" for centuries, have sobered up the Russian Orangists in the least. This environment is not prone to doubt. Independent thinking among Russian Orangemen is not prestigious...

Well, it would seem: the same Internet now makes it possible to access a variety of information sources. So many new points of view have appeared, calling into question the system of ideas at the turn of the eighties and nineties. Orangists don't give a damn about all this! They prefer to hold on to the old dogmas, artificially inflating themselves and each other.

Returning to America, her foreign policy for the Orangists is also a non-negotiable issue. Equal - calmly! Hence their a priori dissatisfaction with Russia and their a priori loyalty to the “Ukrainian idea”.

* * *

“It’s all obvious,” I said, but I still tried, almost in jest, to explain what was happening with at least some rational things. - Some mercantile considerations - do they have a place to be? I asked. Grants, right?

- Partly - yes. But only in part, answered Hoffmann. – There are quite enough disinterested fanatics among Kyiv Russian Orangemen. Not pursuing any personal gain, not belonging to the category of successful. And, most importantly, completely resigned, accepting as the norm the process of discrimination against their native Russian language, their native Russian culture. In Ukraine, this process has been taking place for more than two decades, but under the rule of Viktor Yushchenko, the anti-Russian propaganda bacchanalia reached its climax.

In Kyiv today there are a few Russian schools. Obtainable blocked higher education in Russian. That is, the possibilities of spiritual, professional, creative realization of a significant part of the population. And the Kyiv Orangists, who in everyday life express themselves exclusively in Russian and are not going to switch to Ukrainian, look at such things with some amazing Olympian calmness.

Take, for example, last year's performance of the famous Kyiv film director Roman Balayan in one of the Kyiv newspapers...

“This is one of my favorite directors, I must say,” I clarified. - I watched all his films, starting with Biryuk, and half of them are masterpieces. He shoots them, as I understand it, still at Mosfilm.

- Yes, a person directs his films exclusively in Moscow, at Mosfilm, works with the most famous Russian actors, screens Russian classics. And in an interview, he states that in Ukraine only people over forty years of age feel the need for Russian, who “cannot read the instructions for medicines, tax payments, bills utilities»…

– But now it’s not the oranges who are in power, but Yanukovych. How are your notorious Kyiv Russian Orangemen doing?

- Influential hangouts we still have - orange, nationalist.

In their hands - not in power! - leading electronic Ukrainian media: both television and radio. And most Ukrainian newspapers.

The mood among the Kievan Orangists did not waver in the slightest. In the foreseeable future, most likely, only the surname in the Orange election chants will change: it was “Yu-shchen-ko!”, It will become “I-tse-nyuk!”. And another surname was built into the same rhythm: “Trag-ny-side!”.

“The absence of a serious layer of the aristocracy, and then of the intelligentsia, had a detrimental effect on the development of Ukrainian culture,” Yefim continued. - No matter how talented phenomena happen in it, they, unlike the Russian situation, do not yet have a chance to become self-sufficient and influential world-class events. This requires an appropriate powerful atmosphere within Ukrainian society, but it does not exist. Because there is no social environment that creates such an atmosphere. The formation of such an environment is a matter of the future. But only this formation cannot take place either by isolation, or, even more so, by clamping and ousting other developed countries from the territory of the country. cultural traditions. Nothing fruitful will come of it!

- Will the situation in terms of relations with Russia only get worse in the near future? Is there a chance that the Russian language and Russia as such - not the current one, but Russia in general - will no longer be perceived as a malicious hell in the neighborhood?

- In fact, the general political alignment in Ukraine has not changed at all, - answered Hoffmann. - Half of the country is for the nationalists, half of the country is strongly against it. This means that these second half of the country does not at all perceive Russia as, in your expression, hell next door. Let's take into account, moreover, that this half includes a significant part of the population of Kharkov, Donetsk, Lugansk, Simferopol. By the way, in Kharkov today there are much more real intelligentsia than in Kyiv. Both scientific and creative. Even in Donetsk, from which the Orangists create some kind of inadequate scarecrow, there is a wonderful intelligentsia.

But Kyiv, although it has the formal status of the capital, is actually a very philistine city.

As for the broad masses of the Ukrainian-speaking population, it seems to me that they would by no means perceive Russia as an enemy if such sentiments were not introduced by influential nationalist politicians and ideologists. And they implement. And they provoke.

I would very much like the Russian enlightened and creative environment showed more sensitivity to our problems. I did not show, as is often done in your liberal environment, an inaccurate picture: Ukraine is a ray of light in dark kingdom. It did not selectively listen to the voices of only those forces that stroke the liberal, party consciousness.

In fact, the forces in Ukraine, who do not want to understand what is really happening in Russia, and the same different Russian forces, who do not want to understand what is happening in our country - mirror reflections each other.

It is hardly possible to dispute that all the events of the coming year were, one way or another, touched upon in these conversations: and the persistent Ukrainization of the country, by no means entirely composed of Ukrainians, but in best case half, and the cunning behavior of the intelligentsia - both Russian and Kiev - who do not want to see the obvious nationalist tilt of the newest Ukrainian opposition, and even the key names of the impending Maidan were named, and a line was drawn along which one half of the country differs from the other, and a specific Donetsk and a specific Lugansk, which already then irritated the Kiev environment, and the trend towards total anti-communism, behind which elementary Russophobia and economic redistribution were hidden, was also indicated - there was just a little bit left before the monuments to Lenin began to be knocked down all over Ukraine, and at the same time and destroy memorials to Soviet soldiers-liberators.

I don’t know about others, but for me six months later, when there was a cry that Russia had been fooled by its own ebullient propaganda and was to blame for everything that was happening in Crimea and the Donbass, while Ukraine was united like never before and was not to blame for anything , and new people came to power here, and there is no trace of Bandera here, - ... I was both funny and sad.

No one heard us in time, and when everything happened, they didn’t bring us a glass of vodka with the words: oh, guys, we shouldn’t have paid attention to your words before.

Yes, now and not before.

Since the end of 2013, I have been recording someone else's turmoil, which became my own turmoil - not so much describing events as considering my feelings, the main of which was: “This has already happened to us! It's not the first time!" - and immediately published these notes wherever necessary, most often on his own blog.

It turned out that the most diverse events from Great Russian and Little Russian history are directly related to what is happening, even if they took place a hundred, two hundred or a thousand years ago.

That Russian literature, poetry and prose, the views and judgments of national classics wonderfully illustrate everything that we have seen, heard and experienced during the year.

I made myself a lot of haters and made even more friends.

At first, I looked at what was happening as a person in love with Kyiv, considering it the best and most beautiful city on earth and worried about my kindred people.

Then I looked at it point-blank, close - getting to my brothers, militias and separatists in the Donbass - either with risky fellow travelers put on the wanted list by the new Ukraine, or in my own car, at the head of the convoys with humanitarian, and not only humanitarian, cargo .

Recordings appeared literally every day - nothing was defended inside for a long time, there was no time for this: I wanted to draw the contours of the future as soon as possible.

The future came and, unfortunately, again confirmed all the fears expressed.

Preparing the book for publication, I did not correct anything - everything remained in the notes as it was.

I am not ashamed of what I said - and I am still convinced that my eyes were sober, and my judgments were reasonable.

For those who think completely differently, I will say one thing: I look at everything through the eyes of the people to which I have the good fortune to belong.

There is no truth that, like a blanket, can be pulled on everyone at once.

If another mother had carried me and another father had given birth to me, everything might have been different.

But everything is as it is, and so it will continue to be.

Zakhar Prilepin

Not someone else's embarrassment. One day - one year

Instead of a preface

Let's start, it would seem, from afar (actually - no, we start with what is at hand).

Old Russian literature was in the cycle of sacred history.

In spite of everything, ancient Russian literature gives a feeling of peace, humility, justification of the world. In the middle of any of these words is peace.

With peace in our hearts, we live in the midst of the earthly world. These feelings were inherited by Pushkin, Tolstoy, Blok, Yesenin.

Since ancient times, the Russian people lived from one Gospel holiday to another.

The events of the New Testament were perceived as occurring - here, now and every time - anew.

This is how we began to perceive our history. This is how our history began to perceive us.

Once in a century there was a great victory - another salvation of Rus', or a great shock, or another unprecedented thing, like a trip to India or into space. These days and the days of the Russian saints added to the gospel cycle, but did not change it.

Some say it's a vicious circle. Well, okay, let the circle - but it's not a dead end.

This is a carousel of Russian history that will never get bored.

In the fourteenth year of the third millennium, it once again seemed to us that we were flying into hell. And we just went to the next circle.

The weather was transparent, and everything around was especially sharply drawn.

Squinting a little, one could see all the same faces familiar to us from our so young, so ancient history: warriors, righteous people, rebels, publicans, nobles, holy fools.

Thanksgiving that we were not surrounded by this cup again.

There is no need to dwell on certain events of the past year in detail. The more you look at them, the more clearly you realize that they have already happened more than once.

It’s just that we haven’t seen them yet in our earthly life - but now they have shown us a lot.

Much more often in this book, we will talk about how the same events looked before.

It makes no sense to be responsible for someone else's history, but now we once again know for sure about our own - it has no "progress". The very word is funny and inflated like a balloon. Touch it with a sharp one - and it will burst, the children will laugh.

Can eternity have "progress"?

Spin, carousel.

This year was brewing, and one day it fell like hail.

I wrote a short dystopia about Ukraine splitting into two parts and a civil war going on there back in 2009.

I can't say that I was the only one who was tormented by such forebodings. Any sighted person could have foreseen this.

Then, six months before the Maidan, we talked a lot about everything that six months later came true in a strange and terrible way.

Our conversations were recorded and soon made public.

When the events that are now known to everyone began, we did not have to invent our speeches in order to turn out to be the most perspicacious after the fact, and shout: but we knew, but we knew!

We knew it.

Perhaps I will give a few quotes from our conversations - you can easily check that they were published when not a single tire was smoking in the center of Kyiv.

And at the same time, as soon as, for example, I find myself in Europe, the local press immediately begins to rattle me about “Russian despotism”, all sorts of National Bolsheviks and the latest Stalinism.

“Fear God,” I want to say every time, “here in half of the neighboring countries the police dress in such a way that you can’t distinguish them from the policemen of 1941, monuments are erected to pro-fascist thugs - and you are all in Russia looking for what you yourself under sideways".

My other surprise is connected with the fact that if you meet a Russian liberal in the country described above - whether at a civil forum, in a cafe - then he often sits in the circle of the public, among which, in principle, he should not be.

Or, on the contrary, is it getting worse?

In our country, they only do what they say about "authoritarianism" and "nationalist revenge", outside of its borders they do not distinguish anything like that at the very closest examination.

... While drinking Kiev draft, we discussed all this with one Ukrainian guy from the "left", Viktor Shapinov.

In general, Russians usually do not understand Ukrainian politics, they think in clichés,” Shapinov said. - Fans of the UPA, the Nachtigall battalion and the SS division Galicia are often described in the Russian liberal media as "democrats". We even sent an open letter to Ekho Moskvy, when the news service of this respected radio station wrote about Nazi militants in masks and with knives who came to the meeting room of the Kyiv City Council as “civil activists”. These "civil activists" also unfurled a banner with a "Celtic cross", a well-known European neo-Nazi symbol, there. So, "Echo" did not answer us ... At the rallies of the anti-Putin opposition, I myself saw the banner of the "Svoboda" organization a couple of times - and this is an ultra-right, neo-Nazi party. One of its leaders, now a member of parliament, published a collection of articles by Goebbels, Mussolini, Röhm, Strasser and other fascist criminals for "party study".

What motivates some of the Ukrainian political elites to look for their predecessors in those times? - I asked, referring to the Second World War and direct defectors to the side of our then common enemy.

The answer was known to me in advance, but I checked my feelings with what my Ukrainian acquaintances think.

The key point here is anti-communism, they answered me. - Heroes and "fathers of the nation" should be all those who fought against communism. And in the thirties and forties, Nazi Germany was the flagship of the fight against communism. That is why Bandera, Shukhevych and other collaborators are made heroes. The history of the Ukrainian state has to be traced back to these “heroes”. Otherwise, one will have to admit that today's Ukrainian statehood is a product of the late Soviet bureaucracy of the Ukrainian SSR, which was beneficial not to obey the all-union center in the conditions of the beginning of the division of public property. Simply put, the Ukrainian part of the Soviet bureaucracy wanted to determine for itself what and to whom would get on the territory under its control. It was this selfish and far from national spirituality motive that was the basis for the creation of an independent Ukraine. And nationalism was just a convenient screen to cover up the massive redistribution of property.

What do they think about Russian liberal figures here - why do they need all this? I asked.

I think that the same anti-communism is the cementing link here too. Cooperation between Russian liberals and the far right in the former Soviet republics is not an accident, it is a system. For us, the saddest thing is the support, primarily media support, of the Svoboda party, the former Social-National Party. The xenophobic and racist program of the Svoboda party, the aggressive rhetoric of its leaders, who in different years called on their supporters to “fight the Jews and Muscovites”, advised Russian-speaking children in Lviv kindergartens to “pack their bags and leave for Muscovy”, is known to everyone in Ukraine. Why you turn a blind eye to this is a big question.

© Zakhar Prilepin

© AST Publishing House LLC

Instead of a preface

Let's start, it would seem, from afar (actually - no, we start with what is at hand).

Old Russian literature was in the cycle of sacred history.

In spite of everything, ancient Russian literature gives a feeling of peace, humility, justification of the world. In the middle of any of these words is peace.

With peace in our hearts, we live in the midst of the earthly world. These feelings were inherited by Pushkin, Tolstoy, Blok, Yesenin.

Since ancient times, the Russian people lived from one Gospel holiday to another.

The events of the New Testament were perceived as occurring - here, now and every time - anew.

This is how we began to perceive our history. This is how our history began to perceive us.

Once in a century there was a great victory - another salvation of Rus', or a great shock, or another unprecedented, like a trip to India or into space. These days and the days of the Russian saints added to the gospel cycle, but did not change it.

Some say it's a vicious circle. Well, okay, let the circle - but it's not a dead end.

This is a carousel of Russian history that will never get bored.

In the fourteenth year of the third millennium, it once again seemed to us that we were flying into hell. And we just went to the next circle.

The weather was transparent, and everything around was especially sharply drawn.

Squinting a little, one could see all the same faces familiar to us from our so young, so ancient history: warriors, righteous people, rebels, publicans, nobles, holy fools.

Thanksgiving that we were not surrounded by this cup again.

There is no need to dwell on certain events of the past year in detail. The more you look at them, the more clearly you realize that they have already happened more than once.

It’s just that we haven’t seen them yet in our earthly life – but now they have shown us a lot.

Much more often in this book, we will talk about how the same events looked before.

Can eternity have "progress"?

Spin, carousel.

Before everything

This year was brewing, and one day it fell like hail.

I wrote a short dystopia about Ukraine splitting into two parts and a civil war going on there back in 2009.

I can't say that I was the only one who was tormented by such forebodings. Any sighted person could have foreseen this.

Then, six months before the Maidan, we talked a lot about everything that six months later came true in a strange and terrible way.

Our conversations were recorded and soon made public.

When the events that are now known to everyone began, we did not have to invent our speeches in order to turn out to be the most perspicacious after the fact, and shout: but we knew, but we knew!

We knew it.

Perhaps I will give a few quotes from our conversations - you can easily check that they were published when not a single tire was smoking in the center of Kyiv.

Or, on the contrary, is it getting worse?

In our country, they only do what they say about "authoritarianism" and "nationalist revenge", outside of its borders they do not distinguish anything like that at the very closest examination.

... While drinking Kiev draft, we discussed all this with one Ukrainian guy from the "left", Viktor Shapinov.

The answer was known to me in advance, but I checked my feelings with what my Ukrainian acquaintances think.

“The key point here is anti-communism,” they answered me. - Heroes and "fathers of the nation" should be all those who fought against communism. And in the thirties and forties, Nazi Germany was the flagship of the fight against communism. That is why Bandera, Shukhevych and other collaborators are made heroes. The history of the Ukrainian state has to be traced back to these “heroes”. Otherwise, one will have to admit that today's Ukrainian statehood is a product of the late Soviet bureaucracy of the Ukrainian SSR, which was beneficial not to obey the all-union center in the conditions of the beginning division of public property. Simply put, the Ukrainian part of the Soviet bureaucracy wanted to determine for itself what and to whom would get on the territory under its control. It was this selfish and far from national spirituality motive that was the basis for the creation of an independent Ukraine. And nationalism was just a convenient screen to cover up the massive redistribution of property.

- What do they think about Russian liberal figures here - why do they need all this? I asked.

- I think that the same anti-communism is the cementing link here. Cooperation between Russian liberals and the far right in the former Soviet republics is not an accident, it is a system. For us, the saddest thing is the support, primarily media support, of the Svoboda party, the former Social-National Party. The xenophobic and racist program of the Svoboda party, the aggressive rhetoric of its leaders, who in different years called on their supporters to “fight the Jews and Muscovites”, advised Russian-speaking children in Lviv kindergartens to “pack their bags and leave for Muscovy”, is known to everyone in Ukraine. Why you turn a blind eye to this is a big question.

Soon Andrei Manchuk, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian “leftist” Borotba party, joined our conversation:

“Nationalist ideology has always been the reverse side of the medal of Ukrainian capitalism,” Manchuk shared. – It is called upon to assert the right of the bourgeoisie to rule in our country, deriving the tradition of its power directly from the Trypillia pots and from the trousers of the Cossack hetmans, as well as legitimizing the results of the privatization of Ukraine’s production assets created by the labor of millions of people in “totalitarian” times.

It must be understood that in Ukraine propaganda has demonized the "leftists" to a much greater extent than in Russia, where the bourgeois elites use certain images or fragments from the ideological legacy of the Soviet era. The very idea of the left is presented here in Ukraine as something a priori alien to everything Ukrainian, brought here on the bayonets of the “Moscow horde”. A whole generation is growing up here who were taught that the communists are insidious, cruel, depraved strangers who brutally and deliberately destroyed the Ukrainian people, their language, culture, and so on by starvation and repression. This position is the basis of the right-liberal consensus, which is the alpha and omega of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie.

Of course, these statements are false - because most of the classics of Ukrainian culture, including Ivan Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, Kotsyubinsky, Tychyna, Vinnichenko and others, were people of socialist convictions, Ukraine gave a brilliant galaxy of communist revolutionaries, the Ukrainian lower classes actively supported the Bolsheviks, and the victory Soviet power became a prerequisite for an unprecedented flourishing of Ukrainian culture, for the first time emancipating the Ukrainian language and putting Ukrainian education on its feet. But now this is hushed up in the most cynical way - and shameful myths are being used that the communists allegedly shot a congress of kobza musicians specially assembled for this purpose, that in the fifties Kharkov students were executed for demanding that they take exams in Ukrainian, that Ukrainian soldiers were given before the attack on the Germans with bricks instead of weapons, and so on. But the level of education is low, the level of propaganda is high, and there are those who believe it.

A month later, in September, we discussed the same topics with a Kyiv literary critic, whose name is Yefim Hoffman.

“I still remember the times when the concept of “liberalism” among the intelligentsia did not mean what it is now,” Yefim said. - It was about respect for human rights, about freedom as the most important universal value, about pluralism, tolerance ... It is no coincidence that the adjective "liberal" in everyday life is associated with manifestations of gentleness, tolerance. And the current liberal party mindset is completely different. Of the totality of human rights, one and only one is singled out, regarded as the main one: the right to private property and its inviolability. Its observance is guaranteed by a stable market economy regime.

* * *

In Kyiv today there are a few Russian schools. Opportunities to receive higher education in Russian have been blocked. That is, the possibilities of spiritual, professional, creative realization of a significant part of the population. And the Kyiv Orangists, who in everyday life express themselves exclusively in Russian and are not going to switch to Ukrainian, look at such things with some amazing Olympian calmness.

Take, for example, last year's performance of the famous Kyiv film director Roman Balayan in one of the Kyiv newspapers...

- Yes, a person directs his films exclusively in Moscow, at Mosfilm, works with the most famous Russian actors, screens Russian classics. And in an interview, he states that in Ukraine only people over forty years of age feel the need for the Russian language, who “cannot read the instructions for medicines, tax payments, utility bills” ...

– But now it’s not the oranges who are in power, but Yanukovych. How are your notorious Kyiv Russian Orangemen doing?

- Influential hangouts we still have - orange, nationalist.

In their hands - not in power! - leading electronic Ukrainian media: both television and radio. And most Ukrainian newspapers.

“The absence of a serious layer of the aristocracy, and then of the intelligentsia, had a detrimental effect on the development of Ukrainian culture,” Yefim continued. - No matter how talented phenomena happen in it, they, unlike the Russian situation, do not yet have a chance to become self-sufficient and influential world-class events. This requires an appropriate powerful atmosphere within Ukrainian society, but it does not exist. Because there is no social environment that creates such an atmosphere. The formation of such an environment is a matter of the future. But only this formation cannot take place either through isolation, or, even more so, through clamping and ousting other, developed cultural traditions from the territory of the country. Nothing fruitful will come of it!

But Kyiv, although it has the formal status of the capital, is actually a very philistine city.

I would very much like the Russian enlightened and creative environment to show more sensitivity to our problems. She did not demonstrate, as is often done in your liberal environment, an inaccurate picture: Ukraine is a ray of light in a dark kingdom. It did not selectively listen to the voices of only those forces that stroke the liberal, party consciousness.

In fact, the forces in Ukraine that do not want to understand what is really happening in Russia, and the same different Russian forces that do not want to understand what is happening in our country, are mirror images of each other.

It is hardly possible to dispute that all the events of the upcoming year were, one way or another, touched upon in these conversations: both the persistent Ukrainization of the country, which is by no means entirely composed of Ukrainians, but at best half, and the crafty behavior of the intelligentsia - both Russian and Kiev - unwilling to see the obvious nationalist tilt of the newest Ukrainian opposition, and even the key names of the impending Maidan were named, and a line was drawn along which one half of the country differs from the other, and specific Donetsk and specific Luhansk were named, which already then irritated the Kiev environment, and the trend on total anti-communism, behind which elementary Russophobia and economic redistribution were hidden, was also indicated - it remained quite a bit before the moment when monuments to Lenin began to be knocked down all over Ukraine, and at the same time, memorials to Soviet soldiers-liberators were destroyed.