Putin’s government insolently denied its own youth the just share of the common pie of power and prosperity. Still it did its work: the State should at first balance the classes, ages and shares of pies. But because the government’s administration is also realized by the middle age, so what can be expected from them?! The youth is the victim in this State. All the burdens are piled up on it. The middle age directs and commands, children and seniors eat on account of the parents and previous merits and they all are being pulled by those who are being called in announcements for work: “healthy young people up to 35 years old are needed”. From them is also expected to give up their lives and limbs without complaint, in wars started by the middle age. In the direct and figurative sense youth is the most oppressed class of the modern world. As for Marx it was the proletariat, as in the modern world the place of the proletariat was taken by the youth.
Lecture 5
In December 1989 after 15 years of life in the West for the first time I was able to go in the Soviet Union. Among other amazing discoveries that I did in my country, I was struck, I recall, by the fact that on the streets of Russian cities were still roaming the same old men and women, in the typical Russian patriarchal style, as I left them here in 1974. A gray down shawl, a worn fur collar of a tired out cotton-wool coat, women boots crackled like hoofs, a molted hat, a cotton-wool coat and the same cloven-hoofed footwear for the old men, and maybe a stick and a bag as well. According to my calculations they should have died a long time ago. It was as if they were all living abnormally long and they should have been at least ninety years old. I did not immediately get the simple truth that these were not the same old women, but Russia’s citizens who got old during the years of my absence, that were 50 at the moment of my departure, only after I came to Kharkov and saw my parents. From vigorous, slightly over fifty parents they too looked like old people of the 1974 pattern, cleaner, though. It is then that I realized that the torch of Russian old age is transmitted from generation to generation.
One gets the impression that generations of old people, like in the theater, take off their clothes from each other and change themselves. Their clothes are identical, up to the buttons. And the faces are the same as of those of my generation. Today’s American or French pensioner does not resemble at all the pensioner of the 50s and even less the American prewar old man. The clothes are brighter, more various, more fresh. The bodies are fuller, more muscular, the faces’ expressions are different. Completely! The faces are different! This is noticeable if compared to old pictures. The same is observed through all Western Europe and even in the likes of Latin America, in Malaysia, in Singapore. There old people of different times are: different! Here in Russia young people are different: young people of the 30s, 50s, 70s, 90s are recognizable by their clothes and hair style on pictures, but as for the old people, then it is hardly some XIX century and not higher.
This means something, doesn’t it? Right! This yells, screams of one and only thing, that we have here a monstrous stagnation of society. That in its essence it is old, its structure never deeply changed, regardless of the shocks, supposedly profound of the 1917 revolution. That it’s been two hundred years now that we have a social stagnation! Our little old people, like an emigrant who has fallen into a coma in foreign land begins to scream in the forgotten native language, thus the old people closest to death put on their own clothes of serfdom times, revealing their true archaic essence – slip, splash on the streets.
The fact that Russia is an old, peasant, serf-like country can be seen in Moscow’s center and its suburbs and even more clearly seen in all sorts of Mitishi, Electrostali, etc. Well, naturally, it watches top fashion on TV, but it is a big question what does it see there, on the place of the top fashion? Probably not what the other countries do. Don’t we have millions of citizens who listen to musical texts in English, without totally understanding their sense? Getting high on the foreign “mova” [language in Ukrainian].
All this talk, this chatter about grannies was started by me with the goal of showing by a multitude of examples that Russia, the RF, if it does not want to drop dead in its snow, let everything rot with the constantly thinning film of the Russian people, needs a huge social crash, an explosion.
Morning. Snow. The gray bricks of five story buildings. Birches. Asia. Krasnoyarsk region. City of Nazarovo. The citizens are going to work, the young people in leather coats, the middle age is muffled a little warmer, in felt boots and shawls. Pensioners, like suspicious old woodchucks by their holes, stand near their porches, looking around at the hostile world. Everybody is frowning. Discontented. I am looking at them, I arrived to Nazarovo, in the Krasnoyark region, to collect the material for a book about their fellow countryman Anatoly Bikov, I watch and reflect. They are all from the past. From my childhood. From the 50s. It is a copy of the Saltovski village, Stalin has just died, all the types are in places: frowning workers, women fat from potatoes and sweet dough. Have they spent all this time in refrigerators or what? Fifty years! But it’s true though they had lived in the social refrigerator – in the USSR, in a frozen social climate.
Once, in 1996 I attended the session of the Consultative Chamber with the president of the RF, the consultations of its Committee (I think it was called a committee) on defense. The Committee’s chairman was the bureaucratic Yuri Petrov, former secretary of the Sverdlov defense committee of the KPCC and former head of Yeltsin’s first administration. The meeting was taking place in the President’s Administration building on Ilyinka! Notwithstanding all the loudly sounding titles of the Chamber, it was a useless structure, created by the efforts of Ribkin, the glib Ivan Ribkin, who was already losing the favors of Yeltsin. Out of staff, friable activity that has for its goal to assemble together officials looking for a post, a lavatory for them. I got there, disoriented by its name and the fact that it was loudly announced: all political parties of Russia, without exception are invented to participate. NBP was then persistently working on its legalization and rehabilitation in society, the image of “red fascists” stuck to us by the mass media harmed us. We met the representatives of the “Chamber” and proposed them our participation. From a dozen of candidacies the sly-assed administration of “the chamber” managed to bargain to leave only myself, citing the fact that without us there was already a lot of people assembled and that we – NBP are still young, a “starting” party, so to speak. “But You, Edward Veniaminovich, You are very famous, we can’t refuse You.” They tried to put me in the committee on culture, but I insisted on defense.
I only attended the first session. In the house of the President’s Administration on Ilyinka a multitude of weighty, potbellied people went up the stairs, a part of them – bold, functionaries. Our committee assembled in the round hall. When I entered it, there, already in two columns of chairs (with a passage between them) rested functionary’s bodies. I took a place somewhere in the back. There was a scene, on the scene there were chairman’s tables. Some functionaries recognized me and started to look at each other with fright.
Entered Yuri Petrov – a tall, gray-haired bureaucrat of the soviet type. They selected the presidium. And it began… They had to select a secretary – the only paid employee except the chairman Petrov. They competed, furiously reddening. One general with stripes even got sick and he was escorted out of the hall supported by the arms. A certain functionary N defended the candidacy of the functionary M, who had good contacts at the State Duma and insistently proposed to choose just him as a secretary. Uri Petrov did propaganda for his candidate Y. A certain Z came out to the microphone and started to persuade the audience that he executed at a time the contact between the Supreme Council and the Government and he, just he has all the cards on hands, he has an uncounted number of contacts and only he should be elected. They accused each other, sneered, even screamed, without forgetting to look at me from time to time, the stranger, but the desire to possess the secretarial post overcame in them the prudence. I observed them, listened and gradually started to understand that they are peculiarly familiar to me, with hairs glued to the skull, with ears overgrown by gray hair, with boundless waists, with bellies, sticking out of the pants. Aren’t they Gogol’s characters, the great Nikolai Vasilievich, people from “The Inspector-General” and “The Dead Souls”, and “the Nose” and also “The Coat”. And also from Griboedov, from “Distress from Cleverness”. Here is the general Skalozub, here is Nozdrev, here is Molchanin, Famousov, – all the types, all had survived, all were preserved, after a hundred and a half years – like brand new! Among these mastodons in pants (because here is like in pre-Revolutionary China – the higher is the official in rank, the fatter he is, the heavier, weights more), among these mastodons, in a small leather coat bought on a flea market in Paris, I felt myself as Chatsky.