Woe from illusions
Although the Chinese would take us a little.
Wise from them - Ignorance of foreigners.
A.S. Griboedov
When people talk about the causes of the collapse of the country that happened before our eyes, the most frequently used of all explanations is the socio-political one. "The natural disintegration of the last of the colonial empires of the past occurs. Russia, if it wants to enter the community of civilized nations, must necessarily be divided into a number of independent states." The popularity of such an explanation is equal to its internal inconsistency.
Firstly, this has already been written many times. Russia has never been an empire in the Western European sense. If the peripheral republics of the Baltic states, Central Asia, Kazakhstan, the Caucasus, etc. are considered as colonies, then the place of the metropolis is only Russia itself. But since this is the case, then Russia should have reminded England of the XVIII-XIX centuries. in comparison with India: to have a higher welfare of the population, formed by the third estate, to actively develop social infrastructure through colonial investment. But, pardon me, nothing like there is in Russia. According to the welfare of the inhabitants, the Caucasus is much more like a metropolis than Moscow or St. Petersburg. In the formation of the third estate, Central Asia has gone much further. As for the colonial investments, gas and oil from Siberia continue to flow into the Baltic region separated from the Union at lower prices, while in the historical center of Russia, for some reason called the Non-Black Earth Region, you can get far to all villages and towns from - for lack of roads.
Secondly, why the condition of entry into the family of civilized nations is considered the collapse of a great power? If "his malice prevails" and the modern European practice of management in the form of the European Economic Community stands before the eyes of enchanted Russians, this is all the more erroneous. The EEC and the European Parliament with their slogan "Europe is our common home" really represent a natural result of the development of individual civilized countries with established traditions of a market economy in the 20th century. But if you take the European experience, you should consider it as a whole, and not as individual fragments. For European countries, disintegration has always been a way of being, but Western Europe has not become civilized today. According to M. Weber, the process of turning the Christian world into a civilized world took place already in the XVI - XVIII centuries. Thus, the formation of a “family of civilized nations” does not coincide with the collapse of empires, but, on the contrary, with their creation as a result of European colonial expansion into Africa, India, and the New World.
But you can not stop at the level of the whole of Western Europe and consistently consider from this point of view, individual European countries. Modern France within its political boundaries, in the opinion of the outstanding French historian O. Thierry, is the result of the military conquest of very different lands and peoples by the Parisian kings. Celtic Brittany was finally annexed only under Napoleon, Burgundy - in the XV century, the conquest of the South - Provence and Languedoc - demanded from the central government a continuous war, stretching from the first Albigoy in the XIII century. before the suppression of the Kamizars uprising at the turn of the XVIII century. The same in England. Wales resisted the British until the 13th century, Scotland almost until the 18th century, and to this day Northern Ireland was not completely reconciled with the power of London. Italy likewise united Piedmont and Naples in completely ethnologically different ways. Is it worth mentioning Corsica, Navarre or Lusatian Serbs still living in Germany? But it is unlikely that Western Europeans themselves will support a policy that will require a political separation of Brittany, Burgundy, Provence, Corsica, Piedmont or Navarre in order for France, England, Spain and Italy to become even more civilized.
The contradictory social point of view encourages us to look for explanations that lie on a different plane, and we will try to find an answer in the ethnic stories and the ethnogenesis of the peoples of our country. True, here we immediately meet with a very significant complexity. Today we do not have a generally accepted one, i.e. shared by the majority of society, view of the history of the Fatherland. What is, for example, 70 with over the years of Soviet power for steadfast Bolsheviks? "A new era in the development of mankind". And the democrat quite rightly characterizes these same 70 over the years as "the time of the domination of the totalitarian regime, which suppressed freedom, democracy and human rights proclaimed by the February revolution." However, a patriot-soil scientist reasonably objected: "It was the February revolution, directed by the hands of foreigners, destroyed the traditional Russian statehood and marked the beginning of the Great Terror." The number of statements is easy to multiply, but, being within the framework of the socio-political system of coordinates, it is almost impossible to eliminate the influence of "party bias". And the situation is quite natural - in the struggle for power, each political group seeks to win the sympathies of society, and therefore the transformation of the truth is easy and imperceptible.
Let's try to put the question differently. Is an alternative not possible separately for Marxists, democrats, primatemen, anarchists (they have no number), but a social interpretation of history as such? After all, in fact, politicians, with all the mosaic of political views, have a deep inner conviction: history is made by people and this process can be consciously regulated. No wonder the key moment in the activities of any politician is the moment of the so-called decision-making. However, not only a politician, but also any man in the street can cite a lot of examples of how, at first glance, correct and balanced political decisions led to completely different consequences than those for which they were designed. For example, wanting to correct shattered welfare through military success, a medieval duke, sensibly assessing his strength, "made a decision" to start recruiting mercenaries for himself. Soon the major-dame of the duke already gave some crook a gold coin and spoke; "My dear, take this, go and explain to all your friends that our duke is a good duke." And now the seekers of paid adventures began to arrive in the possession of the duke by discordant crowds. As a result, even before the start of the war, the seigneur's well-being fell, because after the landsknechts there remained povravlennye fields, empty barrels and ragged women's skirts. Of course, our contemporary retroactively will easily explain what happened with the Duke’s short-sightedness and a low level of education in the Middle Ages. "The ruler should have foreseen the consequences of inviting greedy condottieres to the service, and in general it would be much better to free the peasants from serfdom, enlighten them by teaching the basics of political economy and military affairs, and relying on the peasant masses in union with the artisans to accomplish the bourgeois revolution ". The example is deliberately exaggerated, but we note that such a program would hardly have been approved by the vassals of the duke, and a quarrel with the environment even then reduced the leader’s chances of a happy old age.
But the most paradoxical conclusion from the above example is that the methodology of social policy today remains the same as it was several hundred years ago. Call the duke - the president, the mercenaries - the partycrats, the peasants - the civilized businessmen, and the bourgeois revolution - the democratic one, and you will get an exact copy of the statements of yesterday’s newspaper about the discussions in parliament.
As we see, the choice of conscious decisions for the politician is always limited by the influence of the behavior of the environment and the adequacy of the views of the politician about this environment. Therefore, for a correct assessment of what is happening, it is extremely important to imagine the mechanisms of behavior of human groups. But even more important is the correctness of the policy views on the nature of the objects with which he has to deal with volens nolens. Here, in our opinion, lies the roots of interethnic problems.
European education and the European mentality, among many other illusions, gave rise to the illusion of the social nature of ethnic groups (nations). We should be more critical of this well-established and widespread misconception.
You can, of course, continue to believe that history is determined by socio-economic interests and conscious decisions. But let's think about the obvious things. In human life there is nothing more unstable than the social situation and social relations. One of the authors himself had the opportunity to experience the transformation from a powerless state slave into a scholar who enjoys some public attention. The reverse transition is even easier: the head of the political police and the speaker of a newborn parliament can turn into a convict - sad examples are V.A. Kryuchkov and A.I. Lukyanova before our eyes.
But no efforts and desires can change a person’s ethnic affiliation - each belongs to some ethnic group, and only to one. Does this not suggest that global and objective laws of historical processes are hidden precisely in the depths of the diverse ethnic element of humanity? Not long ago there were no grounds for this kind of assumptions. Within the framework of social doctrine (whether it is Stalin’s Marxism or Levi-Strauss structuralism), differences of one ethnic group from another were associated with any combination of social characteristics, and that was the end of the story. In the works of the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences, this view was carefully cultivated until very recently.
The emergence of an alternative approach turned out to be connected with the application of the methods of natural science to the historical material. The alternative was embodied in the form of the passionary theory of ethnogenesis, proposed by one of the authors of these lines in the seventies. Within the framework of this theory, differences of one ethnos from another are determined not by the “mode of production”, “culture” or “level of education”. Ethnic groups objectively differ from each other in the way their members behave (stereotypes of behavior). A person learns these stereotypes in the first years of life from parents and peers, and then uses them all his life, most often without realizing the stereotyped behavior. In ethnos, unlike society, not conscious decisions work, but sensations and conditioned reflexes.
Roughly speaking, the behavior of each person and each ethnic group is simply a way to adapt to their geographic and ethnic environment. But in order to adapt in a new way to their surroundings, i.e. create ethnos, need strength, need some kind of potential energy. This is the core of the novelty of the passionary theory of ethnogenesis. For the first time, she linked the existence of ethnic groups as groups of people with the ability of people as organisms to “absorb” the biochemical energy of the living matter of the biosphere, discovered by V.I. Vernadsky. Behavioral practice shows that the abilities of different people to absorb the biochemical energy of living matter are different. The easiest way to classify all people on this basis into three types.
The greatest number of persons has this energy in an amount sufficient to satisfy the needs dictated by the self-preservation instinct. These people (they are called harmonious) work to live - they have no other needs. But it is noticeable in the history and a certain number of people with "extreme energy". The excess energy of living matter was named L.N. Gumilyov passionarity. If passionarity is more than is required for a quiet life, the passionate man lives to work for his ideal goal. However, another option is possible. When the passionarity of a person is noticeably less than necessary even for a philistine life, an individual, called a subpassionarium, lives in order not to work, and focuses on consumption at the expense of other people.
The ratio of people of different types in each ethnic group changes with time, and this process determines passionarity not on an individual, but on a population level.
Suppose a population reproduces biochemical energy at the norm level (and the biological norm of the organism is considered to be an adaptation for the sake of reproduction of offspring). Then we see the non-aggressive ethnic groups, quite happy with life. Such are, for example, modern Icelanders, Bedouins of Saudi Arabia or Mansi. But if a certain number of passionaries appear in such a population, the pattern of ethnos behavior changes. Since there is an excess of energy, people necessarily have to spend this excess on something. This is where a new ethnogenesis begins, various social ideals, that is, illusions, - comfort, knowledge, justice, victory, etc. - come into the light of God.
Striving for their ideal, passionate people often sacrifice their lives for other people, but most importantly, they incidentally, in order to achieve their practical goals, rebuild the ethnic system itself, change its behavioral stereotypes and development goals. And when all the initiative figures and their energetic descendants are killed in wars and clashes, everything returns to normal, and again we see the people hardworking, calm, quite happy with life. But let us remember: the same Icelanders are the descendants of the formidable "sea-loving," the Vikings; The ancestors of the Bedouins of Saudi Arabia once created the mighty Arab caliphate. And even the innocuous modern Mansi descended from the fierce Attila warriors who destroyed the Roman Empire.
With other things being equal, from the moment of the passionate push (the appearance of the first passionaries in a quiet population) to return to a new state of equilibrium - homeostasis - takes place about 1200-1500 years. For such a long time, the drive of the ethnic group does not remain stable. At first, passionarity steadily grows - this is the phase of passionate ascension, when the structure of the ethnic system is constantly becoming more complex, and a single new ethnos emerges from disparate subethnoses (estates). Then passionarity reaches its maximum values, and the Akmatic phase of ethnogenesis begins. It is in this phase that a single ethnic world is created - a superethnos, consisting of separate, close to each other friends in the behavior and culture of ethnic groups. The whole subsequent ethnic history is connected with the reverse process - the destruction of the created super-ethnos due to the decline of passionarity. A sharp decline in passionarity (the phase of fracture) comes after the “overheating” of the acmatic phase and does not bring anything good.
With every generation, energetic passionate people are becoming less and less, but alas, the social system created by people does not keep pace with these changes. It is always much more inert and less plastic than the natural environment. And if the ancestors once created the state and the economy, based on the many passionaries of the akmatic phase, now everything has to be rebuilt constantly in the fracture, adapting to deteriorating conditions. As soon as this process ends successfully, the ethnos has a chance to live to the next phase of ethnogenesis - inertial. In her passionarity decreases slowly and smoothly, and people live "without problems", but they enjoy the benefits of material and cultural. However, when passionarity falls even lower - the destructive phase of obscuration comes, deceptive well-being dies at the hands of its own sub-interests, the ethnic group disappears, and some people either incorporate into new ethnic groups or remain in the form of ethnic relics - fragments of once raging passions.
But the most difficult moments in the life of an ethnos (and, therefore, in the life of the people who make it up) are changes in the phases of ethnogenesis, the so-called phase transitions. A phase transition is always a deep crisis, caused not only by abrupt changes in the level of drive, but also by the necessity of psychological breaking of behavioral stereotypes in order to adapt to the new phase.
The listed phases of ethnogenesis and phase transitions are experienced by any ethnos, although in different ways. In addition, any process of ethnogenesis can be forcibly cut off from the outside - as a result of mass death of people during aggression of foreigners or epidemics like plague or AIDS.
Changes in drive during ethnogenesis create historical events. Thus, the story is not general, but in particular ethnic groups and superethnos, each of which has its own reserve of drive, its own behavior pattern, its own system of values - the ethnic dominant. And so to talk about the history of all mankind does not make sense. The so-called universal history is only a mechanical body of knowledge about the history of various superethnos, since from the ethnic point of view, historical humanity does not represent any phenomenological community. Therefore, all talk about the "priority of universal values" is naive, but not harmless. In reality, for the celebration of universal values, it is necessary to merge all of humanity into a single hyperethnos. However, as long as the differences in the drive voltage of existing superethnos persist, as long as there are different landscapes of the Earth that require specific adaptation in each individual case, such a merger is unlikely and the triumph of human values, fortunately, will be just another utopia. But even if one imagines a hypothetical merging of humanity into one hyperethnos as a fait accompli, then not the “universal human values” will triumph, but the ethnic dominant of a particular superethnos.
The reason is simple. Superethnic systems of values, as a rule, are mutually exclusive and, in any case, poorly compatible with each other. Such incompatibility is fully justified and meets the functional role of superethnic dominants. After all, they serve as indicators of the belonging of an individual and an ethnos to "their" superethnos. Dominants are blocking the merging of superethnos among themselves. For example, you can find a lot in common in the theology of Christianity, Islam and even Buddhism. This common and before found enough. However, historical practice shows that all previous attempts to artificially create, on the basis of this general, not only a universal, but simply inter-peer-ethnic system of values, invariably ended in failure and only led to additional bloodshed. In other words, although the Muslims of Azerbaijan consider the Gospel along with the Koran as the holy book (Injil), and Jesus Christ as the prophet Isa, but this does not lead to reconciliation with the Armenian Christians and cannot lead in principle.
Thus, the connection of two super-ethnos as such is impossible, but it remains possible to separate individual ethnic groups and join them to another super-ethnos. The entry of Russia into the "family of civilized nations of Europe" is precisely one of the options that the country is losing today to the new super-ethnic system that is being lost. But it would be the greatest fallacy to think that the outcome of the construction of a "common European home" would be a mutual triumph of universal human values.
Entering into a foreign superethnos always implies abandoning its own ethnic dominant and replacing it with the dominant value system of a new superethnos. It is unlikely in our case will happen otherwise. The price of entry into civilization will be for us the domination of Western European norms of behavior and psychology. And will it be easier because this super-ethnic system of values is wrongfully called "universal"? With the same degree of justification, could have figured as a universal Orthodox Christian, Islamic or Confucian system of views and assessments.
But what, the dissatisfied reader will ask, it turns out that nothing depends on us? We hasten to reassure the reader. It is not at all about the fact of human influence on history. It would be ridiculous to deny that human designs and human hands influence history, and sometimes very strongly, creating unforeseen violations — zigzags — in the course of historical processes. But the measure of human influence on history is not at all as great as it is customary to think, because at the population level, history is not governed by social impulses of consciousness, but by biospheric impulses of drive.
Figuratively speaking, we can, like frolicking stupid children, translate hands on the clock of history, but we are deprived of the opportunity to wind up these watches. In our country, the role of arrogant children is played by politicians. They move the arrows from 3 hours of the day to 12 hours of the night on their own initiative, and then they are terribly surprised: "Why hasn't the night come and why don't the working people go to bed?" For the answer to the last question, they turn to the very academicians who scientifically substantiate the need for the transfer of arrows. Thus, those who make decisions do not take into account the natural nature of the processes taking place in the ethnic sphere. And, knowing the passionary theory of ethnogenesis, one wonders not at all that in the country “everything is bad”. Surprised that we still exist.
So that the author’s pessimism does not look like a mere assertion, it is enough to make a simple calculation. The passionary impulse of our superethnos, formerly called the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union, and now, apparently, will be called the Union of Sovereign States, occurred at the turn of the XIII century. Consequently, now our age is about 800 years. The general model of ethnogenesis shows that one of the most difficult moments in the life of a superethnos falls on this age - the phase transition from fracture to inertia. So the crisis we are experiencing is completely natural, and the events taking place in general do not contradict such an interpretation. Fracture in Russian superethnos was first identified after World War 1812. Since the total duration of the breakdown phase is about 200 years, it becomes clear that the so-called Soviet period of our history is the most difficult, final part of the breakdown phase in which the former unity of the superethnosity disappears and is replaced by bloody excesses civil war. Consequently, the Gorbachev restructuring in reality represents an attempt to move to a new phase of development — inertial. Perestroika is often called the last chance, but in an ethnic context it would be more correct to call it the only chance for further life, because historical experience shows that superethnos that did not survive this phase transition simply ceased to exist as systems whose elements decayed and were part of others. superethnic systems.
Given the retrospective of ethnic history, there is nothing unique in our situation. Of course, if we compare ourselves with modern Western Europeans or Americans, the comparison is not in our favor: we are upset, and in vain. Comparison makes sense only for equal ages of the ethnic group. Europeans are older than us on 500 years, and what we are experiencing today, Western Europe experienced in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
For some reason, we easily forget that welfare, civil peace, respect for the rights of our neighbor, characteristic of modern Europe, are the result of a very long and not less painful than ours, of historical development. Quiet and tranquil France under Mitterrand, for which a terrorist act is an event, in the 15th century, just like Russia in the 20th, blazed in the flames of civil war, only supporters of the Duke of Orleans and the Duke of Burgundy fought there. The people hanged on trees were then regarded by the French as a familiar element of the native landscape.
And therefore, no matter how hard we try today to copy Europe, we cannot achieve their well-being and their morals, because our level of passionarity, our imperatives imply a completely different behavior. But even taking into account the marked age difference of superethnos, it would be wrong to say that the disintegration of the country is only and exclusively a consequence of the phase of fracture. Yes, the fall of passionarity in the phase of fracture and even in the inertial phase, in principle, always increases the desire of the provinces for independence, and this is quite natural. After all, the sign of drive in the course of ethnogenesis drifts across the country from the center to the outskirts. As a result, to the final phases of ethnogenesis, the drive of the outskirts of the ethnic area is always higher than the drive of the historical center. The process is very simple: people are energetic, trying to get rid of the close attention of the authorities and to gain more space for activity, leave the capital and go to develop new lands. And then the reverse process begins - their children and grandchildren, having made a career "on the ground", go to Moscow or St. Petersburg to grab fortune by the hair. Thus, in the center of power is in the hands of the same provincials. Are there many of the political leaders of recent years of indigenous Muscovites or St. Petersburg? N.I. Ryzhkov and B.N. Yeltsin - Urals, A.A. Sobchak and E.K. Ligachev - Siberians, MS Gorbachev and E.K. Polozkov - people from the North Caucasus, etc. We deliberately mention politicians with diametrically opposed programs, because the essence is not in slogans.
Of course, if the provinces feel their power, they are not inclined to listen to the central authority. So, in ancient Rome at the turn of I century. AD provincials also became the only real pillar of the throne. The province filled the legions, giving the empire protection, the province paid taxes, ensuring the prosperity of Rome, which mainly consumed. But Emperor Augustus, in contrast to MS Gorbachev understood that if the provinces became the mainstay of his power, it is necessary to expand the rights of provincials, but this should not be done to the detriment of the integrity of the state. Augustus consistently defended the provinces from the arbitrariness of their own central bureaucracy, in fact, considered the opinion of local authorities, in every way sought to compensate for the large taxes collected by establishing the rule of law and maintaining a solid economic and legal order. That is how he secured prosperity for the empire, and for himself the 44-year rule. Of course, separatist excesses happened during Augustus, but they were local in nature and, as a rule, were they easy, hard, were they settled.
We have the same center since the time of Lenin and until very recently was guided not by the national interests of the country, but by a man-hating communist ideology. Red Moscow reshaped the way of life of all peoples, without exception, in accordance with the directives of the Central Committee, adjusting it to the social scheme that was fictionalized by the leaders. Realizing political utopias, the authorities forcibly moved the Ingush and the Baltic states to Siberia, and the Koreans and Kalmyks to Kazakhstan. Realizing economic utopias, the same Bolshevik government relocated the Russians and Ukrainians to the Baltic states on an orbital set.
Yes, taxes from the provinces were collected firmly - both the Ministry of Finance and the State Planning Commission followed this, but Kremlin elders most often provided local problems with "edges, regions, autonomous and union republics". Is it any wonder that the outskirts, as soon as the opportunity arose, wanted to get rid of such care of the center? But still in 1986-1989. even the most radical-minded Lithuanians limited their demands to the provision of greater economic and political independence. In other words, they were not averse to remaining in the rebuilt Gorbachev Union, if they were given to arrange their life as they liked. And if the opportunity to be themselves, to live in its own way was provided to all - Lithuanians and Chechens, Russians and Uzbeks, Azeris and Armenians, Gagauz and Moldovans - precisely then there probably would not be a dozen sovereign states today, there would be no direct civil war in the Caucasus, there would be no civil confrontation in the Baltic States and Moldova. But the central government continued the irresponsible international "socialist choice policy" and as a result, not only could not keep the outskirts, but Moscow was completely lost.
Thus, the "parade of sovereignties" was not programmed during ethnogenesis. It could well have been avoided had it not been for the "party line" pursued by the communist government. She quite consciously ignored the very fact of the existence in the country of different ethnic groups with their traditions and stereotypes of behavior and thereby provoked these peoples to secede.
Today, the process of decay, apparently, has become irreversible, and what has been done cannot be returned. Unfortunately, on the outskirts disintegration has become aggravated by another circumstance. The local national movements perceive communist politics as Russian national politics. Such an aberration gives rise to the greatest delusion, for the Russians, since October 1917, were also deprived of the opportunity to pursue their national policy, like all other nations. But even in a theoretical sense, the identification of Russians with the Communists is incompetent. The Communists were originally a specific marginal subethnos, staffed by people from various ethnic groups. It was not their origin that brought them birth, but a negative, life-denying attitude of people who consciously broke off all ties with their people. (Such structures are known in the ethnic history since antiquity, they are called anti-systems.) Recall the famous definition of LD Trotsky - "nomadic revolution" and quite sincere statement ideological scammer and murderer L.Z. Mehlis: "I am not a Jew, I am a Communist." It is unlikely that there will be emotional, and even more scientific grounds to consider V.I. Lenin, Pole - F. E, Dzerzhinsky, and tofalar - K. U. Chernenko. It seems to us equally unqualified to impose responsibility on Russians for Lenin's national policy, and on Latvians responsibility for the terror of the "red shooters" against the families of Russian officers.
Unfortunately, the substitution of "Communists - Russians" that has occurred is dangerous in the first place by the fact that it severely narrows the already small possibilities of the union of Russia with sovereign states. But one thing is to be sure "one hundred percent": if the national policy of Russia will again be party policy, if this policy again sets as its goal the construction of another utopia, the collapse of Russia will follow the collapse of the Union, and B.N. Yeltsin is quite able to become a president of the Moscow region. Let's hope that the Russian government will be able to see the obvious and be able to reckon with reality. But for all the rest - the will of God.
Published // "High School Bulletin (Alma Mater)", 1992, No 7-9
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