2023-04-18 15:46:00
Our civilized society (these are those who were pleasantly called “advanced people” before the revolution), dispersed to different countries, living in internal emigration at home, is monstrously indignant at the dirty stream of political denunciations – it seems that the common sewage system has broken through, all the contents have flowed out and spread throughout the country. But couldn’t this have been imagined in advance?
It turns out that the indignant citizens did not initially understand the reality in which we all live. Year after year, the authorities, tightening the screws, hit the protest movement with their actions, and each time the authorities turned out to be faster, more dexterous and in some ways smarter than the opposition. The opposition from the insolence of the authorities more than once froze with its mouth open. The actions of the opposition were basically a belated response to the violence of the authorities, and this delay ultimately led to the defeat of the opposition in Russia. In addition, the opposition constantly split into clans and even abroad did not come to any kind of framework agreement. Nonsense! This cannot but please the authorities.
But it is not enough for the current government to defeat the opposition. She began to bring the consciousness of the country to a single ideological denominator. Those who are not with us are against us. The well-known Stalinist thesis again became a reality, and numerous informers who came to life under his banner reacted to it, who were never translated, but who at some point seemed to be hidden moles. The eradication of any kind of dissent, the hunt for the fifth column, the funny struggle of spiders in the bank of power (the incident of Strelkov and Norkin) is now being waged under the slogan of fighting Russophobia, for the mythical Russian world. The war has blessed a new era of whistleblowing.
Of course, Christ himself with his untimely commandments could now fall under the distribution here. Write denunciations of Christ? Why not? And, perhaps, he will be convicted, administratively or criminally, despite the imaginary state Orthodoxy. But is this the first such historical case? Something similar happened in Europe with Germany about ninety years ago. But now I’m talking about us.
The current era of Russian denunciation differs from previous similar phenomena in Russian history. We are witnessing the undeniable degradation of the moral qualities of the masses of the people, who have fallen in love with the current propaganda and its delights.
The well-known informer of the Nikolaev era, a contemporary of Pushkin, the writer Faddey Bulgarin became a symbol of pre-revolutionary informing. The then Russian society did not find any excuse for him that he was fighting for the security of the state, in solidarity with the secret police, fighting with slander against the state regime, exposing fakes and discrediting the tsarist army. Chaadaev, of course, by no means became the recognized leader of liberal society, but Bulgarin was the personification of moral evil.
Further, Russia entered the 20th century not only with the Silver Age of Russian art, but also with the Black Hundred, a mass popular movement of hatred for free thought, supported by the last Russian tsar.
The denunciations under Soviet rule were the forerunners of the current denunciations, but with a caveat. It was not without reason that Soviet scammers began to be called informers – they somehow had a moral curse, they were multimillion-dollar (recall four million denunciations, according to Dovlatov), but a marginal phenomenon. The historical truth remained with those who were denounced, and not with scammers who were voluntary or became informers under the pressure of the NKVD.
In our times, the moral permission to denunciation was given to itself by the people who were ripe for this. The one who, according to the liberal idealists, should become the liberated people of the beautiful Russia of the future. To pounce on one or another scoundrel-informer who has become famous today means to underestimate the scale of the catastrophe. If the idols of the whole people are allowed to be lowered by the people themselves, then the informer is more likely only an executioner, an executor of an imperious sentence with the silent approval of the crowd, which has always loved public executions, especially cutting off the heads of celebrities. There is no mention of the role of the courts here at all.
Does this mean that all scammers are cogs in the state machine? Not at all necessary. Their bloodthirstiness is born not only because of the dissent of the fifth column, but also because the current generation of scammers get massive pleasure from denunciations, and these are scammers of different ages, from young to old. Judging by the brightest and most inconspicuous examples of denunciations, from those that struck all the denunciations against Alla Pugacheva and other stars, to calling the police because of an overheard conversation in a pub, informers rather serve not their homeland, but their personality, they are betrayed not by the authorities, but by their own their own cruelty, they have already turned into secret or overt sadists.
The history of the Russian state is not in vain. She presented us on a silver platter both modern power and modern people. The Russian protest movement essentially overlooked the evolution of the people or simply abandoned its analysis because of its utopias. We got what we deserved. Is it possible to fix the sewer and eliminate the stench of denunciations? Probably you can. But abandoning utopias and illusions for both the future government and the protest movement is a difficult task, perhaps even more difficult than getting out of the current military apocalypse.
Viktor Erofeev, writer, literary critic, TV presenter, author of the books “Russian Beauty”, “Good Stalin”, “Akimuds” and many others, holder of the French Order of the Legion of Honor.
This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author. It may not coincide with the opinion of the Russian editors and Deutsche Welle in general.
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