Our Restoration is Voldemar Putin. (Vladimir doesn’t go with his image. He is more complicated than the name Vladimir.) It sufficed to look at his inauguration ceremony. Actually Putin is even two Restorations together. One slipped as an allusion in the grotesque coronation ritual, that is, inauguration – a bleak restoration of the pre-revolution tsarist epoch. And at the same time Putin is an indubitable restoration of our Sovok. With him repressions against the differently minded resumed (selective for now), the General Prosecution plays the unprecedented role of the Inquisition (operates selectively for now) – in a whole the soviet repressive machine is restored. The blending of people of the past and the new regimes is always characteristic for a restoration, therefore the FSB officers and the Prosecutor’s office quietly blended together during Putin’s rule, next to his throne, with the oligarchs Deripaska and Abramovich and the SPS member the tadpole Kirienko, a scientologist. A crossbreed of sovietizm and democracy? That’s right. And precisely in the proportion of 15 sovietizm and 9 democracy. The numbers here are the years spent by Valdimir Vladimirovich: 15 years in the KGB and 9 years in the apparatuses of Sobchak, Borodin and Yeltsin.
And how with the inner urges of society, with the emotions’ lava propping up at the throat of the volcano, emotions of the intelligentsia and the people, with this fast-boiling steam, which prompted still in the 60s the first protest movements? And the people, and the intelligentsia and the misfits are still left out of the State government. Over thirty years of discontent and what did the mountain generate? Two autumnal months of freedom – from August to October 1991? Two, three, well say a dozen of monuments thrown down? What guided the democrats when they called a leader – a Varyag from the Politburo? They maybe thought: “Well, this way it’s safer. Our people are such, that the moment you let them loose, you won’t be able to drive them in factories afterwards! And later we’ll grab the most supreme power from the Varyag. We’ll end up by getting it. He’s here temporarily, he’ll serve a bit and then we’ll push him down…”
They didn’t grab, didn’t push down. The Varyag preferred to transfer the power to a heir he had elected himself, composed in 15 parts of a KGB officer and in 9 parts of an administrative Russian bottling, a liberal democrat. And 15 to 9 that is the formula of Restoration.
Magma, blind forces, our society’s emotions, the collective unconscious and conscious, unspent, still long for freedom. They didn’t get anyway. The principal problem remained the same as in 1985: the worn out state of the human material of Russia’s ruling class. In 1985-1993 the fresh people didn’t have the time to break into the political scene in Moscovia. There, where it had – in Karabakh, in Abkasia, in Pridnestrovie, in Chechnya – there each time a new, local world was being born, a new regime. Not always, actually, pleasant to the countries-opponents – Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldavia, Russia, but what can you do?
The Restoration is a poorly built temporary respite. Nothing is solved, present was poorly built from the past and the recent present – already past. But the problem remained: society doesn’t need a limited change of only some thousands of leaders and their replacement with only their deputies or functionaries, previously standing lower in the hierarchy, which in a 150-million country isn’t a reform even, but a simultaneous forced banishing. Of some million bureaucratic bosses (many of them hereditary!) and their replacement with new, young, strong people. This kind of total replacement of the personnel of a ruling class is called: Revolution. Rough, young, idealistically oriented, prompt to experiences, fresh, some millions of yesterday’s adolescents will bring to the country each his energy. It is this very energy that has to create the New Russia. Without these new barbarians there will be nothing. There will be Gogol’s and Saltikov-Shedrin’s characters at the scale of the entire country. A continuous “The Dead Souls” play, that’s what is and will be. “Adat” in a word.
An important clarification: The resignation of some millions of bureaucratic bosses should not be voluntary. They should be ousted, banished with kicks, only then will the desired effect be attained. I am certain, Russia will not escape the revolution. The survival instinct has to push her on the Revolution. The Revolution has to be offensive for some, an act of revenge for others. It has to be unfair, when people grab, kick, insult, banish. Then the necessary emotional temperature will be attained in society. This atmosphere of implanting a forcible justice will awake talents, genial ideas of society’s reconstruction will come. This is precisely what it takes. It takes a state of conflict. As for peace, it is preached to us as stability, security on the streets, quiet happiness within four walls is needed only to the sick, the old and the handicapped, in real fact. For the healthy and the young the conflict of Revolution is a blessing. For the 2.8 homeless kids it is a blessing.
During a Revolution a miracle is always possible. Therefore it is so attractive. During the Restoration, the pause – there is no miracles. Therefore the Restoration is always unattractive, to nobody, except to the restoration’s leaders. And a peaceful Revolution does not work, as I tell it. It is designed by nature as the destruction of the old, as an all-cleansing violence. Only then on the cleared space the new could live.
Lecture 21
An heir to the throne doesn’t need parties. He doesn’t even need his own party. He came to power thanks to a non-political action: he was appointed premier minister and then recommended to the presidential post not as the representative of a powerful political party that had won the majority of seats in the Parliament, as it is supposed to be in democracy. Putin was appointed as the president’s favorite. After a year or so his appointment as an heir was “ratified” by the TV-processed electors. Even without this there were hardly any politics in Russia, and during the Restoration the last of the political Mohicans were simply slammed. But to be precise politics were thoroughly exterminated even under Yeltsin. The Justice Ministry and the mad hangman Veshnyakov (this guy is certainly a maniac!) tortured Russian politics to death. And here, very recently the triumph and the apotheosis of the Victory over it. The State Duma adopted the “Law about political parties”, whose text is the twin of the text “Rules of maintenance in the SIZO [investigative isolation ward] of Russia’s FSB of suspects, accused and convicted” here it is at my left, a cardboard sheet with rules, next to the cell’s door. “Socks, no more than two pairs…” – croaks the text. We can’t even eat bouillon cubes, and the bones from the fish have to be taken out outside, then they’ll accept it. Likewise is the “Law about political parties”… Only a thickset governor can do politics in Russia, or a bellied general, but not the twenty years old NBP member. Practically clause 6 of the USSR constitution was reestablished – the monopoly of bureaucracy on political activity was reestablished. What we’ve got is viscous pieces of boneless fish…
So what can the naive weirdoes do, who founded their political parties from simple mortal citizens, who had believed in the fact that by assembling themselves into a party of like-minded people, they could influence the fate of the Country – Russia? The answer: all the party members have to go and hang themselves. Just kidding.
The dead soviet types seat again in all the cabinets of the power. People with empty eyes. Employees of the Public Prosecutor office, investigative departments, judiciary, carceral functionaries. The Inquisition – a blind robot – turning around grabs the citizens by their clothes and drags them in prison. The Lefortovo castle is packed with “enemies of the State”. For the record, they are all talented, charismatic individuals. Dead people overtook the country and they put the living in prisons – that’s the fictional image that comes to mind. It is clear that the Restoration is not forever, but what to do now?