Iron law of revolution
Although by occupation I am a historian and a writer, but most often I, like most people, have to think not about the past, but about the future. The past only helps to predict what will happen to us. Figuratively speaking, one who knows history, holds the keys to the door through which will enter the future. About what is happening to us today, I first thought in ... 2002 year.
I was then a novice writer who published only two books. But they enjoyed some success, and journalists began to take my first interviews. One of them came out in the then very popular Kiev magazine "Academy", trying to accomplish the almost impossible thing - to combine gloss with intellectualism.
A LONG TIME AGO. In this interview (I repeat: the case was TWELVE YEARS AGO!) I said the following: “I want to make a little prediction. If the situation of squeezing continues, terror will begin. At first, informational, when they use the Internet, dirty PR technologies to destroy the reputation of other people. Then it can turn into physical terror. A very long time ago there were no purges and repressions, during which violent and active were destroyed. And now a new generation is growing up. We do not notice him, it was born, by and large, somewhere in the 1991 year. And it is about to manifest. Young people will come and see a world that does not belong to them. They will see banks in which they have no accounts, cars that drive through the streets and in which they do not sit, divided land plots that do not belong to them. They will ask: "Why do we not have all this?" And the hottest will strike terror. Because if you have a university degree in your hands, but you don’t have a job, the choice is very limited. ”
In other words, even then I was thinking about the change of generations and the possibility of a revolution in Ukraine. As the tension in the Ukrainian steam boiler increased, I increasingly recalled this interview. Reality convinced me that I was right. And in the days of the first Maidan 2004 of the year. And when “Femen” appeared in Kiev with their, at first glance, absurd rebellion against morality, for which he was lurking hard economic calculation. And during the second Maidan.
The Soviet generations, born in 1930 and 1940, on which Ukraine had kept up, naturally left along with their value system. Gangster 1990-e built a political system, tough and impenetrable for outsiders: a closed club of "lucky", who survived in civil strife for the section of "people's" (in fact - state) property. Social elevators were absent. Instead, familyhood flourished. Children, sisters, and mistresses of the “masters of life” became deputies. The rest went as a consolation prize "stability" and "GREAT PODYAKA", as in the joke about a collective farm meeting. And the Kiev subway was filled with dissatisfied people from the regional centers and villages, who were trying to escape from their native places where there was no work left. The export-oriented economic model still left an annual hole in 7 billion dollars in the country's budget. Could IT in such conditions not to jerk? Yes, even under the president, whom Anna Herman the other day called the personification of rapid enrichment and glamor? (Literally: “The era of fast money and glamor has gone along with Yanukovych ...”)
Who would have thought that the fruits of the French Revolution will gather Napoleon? Anarchy is always replaced by dictatorship.
WHEN THE ELEVATOR IS NOT GOING. We have learned a lot and have changed a lot in the last three months. Although they did not find happiness yet. After all, can not be the consolation of the golden loaf of the "glamorous" president, found instead of the golden toilet? Is this the “bread” with which Christ fed the thousands who were suffering?
To be honest, it was not so bad. The country has evolved. Houses were built. Cars were bought. No one died of hunger. Many even went on holiday
- who to Turkey, who to Europe. But the first iron rule of the revolution grew stronger, like the baseball bat, which armed "peaceful" activists. LACK OF SOCIAL ELEVATORS.
This was nothing typically Ukrainian. Was it bad life in pre-revolutionary Russia? Much calmer and more satisfying than in the early USSR in the 1930. But the revolution has taken place. Only because the son of a peasant is tired of being a peasant, his son of a priest is a priest, and a small-town Jew who lived below the Pale of Settlement is a small-town Jew. The hereditary rights of the royal family, which monopolized political power, irritated the overwhelming majority of empire residents of all shades of red and white, up to a handful of aristocrats who killed Rasputin (the white guard is also a child of the revolution, not the October, but the February revolution). And the king was overthrown, although personally he was a very good man, with aesthetic tastes much more refined than that of our last president: instead of gold loaves he collected Faberge eggs.
From the point of view of psychology, any revolution is a kind of insanity, a mass psychosis. People literally "lose their temper." They strive to jump out of tight old clothes and change them with new ones. If someone thinks that I am separating myself from the other fellow citizens, he is mistaken. Separating yourself from the psychosis of the revolution is IMPOSSIBLE. It is experienced by ALL. And the one who wanted her. And those who did not want. And a revolutionary. And the counterrevolutionary. I also survived it. And sometimes I still worry. This pain tends to roll at the most inopportune moment. At times, it is simply intolerable. But it is this pain that turns the soul (a revolution in the literal sense of the word - “coup”) brings us back to life, forcing us to single out the most valuable thing in it.
FAILURE DREAM. One of the laws of any revolution says that it is always an attempt to translate into reality the DREAM OF THE FUTURE. The French Revolution put forward the slogans of Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood. The October Revolution in Russia tried to make reality a PARADISE OF EARTH - a communist society. Both are naturally unattainable. The current post-revolutionary France (apart from the first, the most famous, in its history there were four more revolutions - 1830, 1848, 1870 and student 1968) is still one of the most bureaucratic states on Earth. And the “Jacobins” are the least similar to the “brothers”, who destroyed their revolutionary Girondist competitors and, in the end, they destroyed them in the same guillotine, which the Jacobin Robespierre was the first to unleash.
The Ukrainian revolution began with a dream of Europe. The reason for her was the refusal of Yanukovych to sign an agreement on euro-association. Europe was thought of as paradise. We will sign it and everything will be fine. Yanukovych is not. The political part of the association is signed. Economic - promise to sign in a few months. Soon everyone will see in practice what it is, and whether paradise is attainable in Euro-association - at least that part of it, which is called a visa-free regime. There are many dissatisfied. Payment for communal promise to raise one and a half times. Salaries are frozen. Social benefits are curtailed. The country faces unemployment. But is it possible to forbid living a dream?
After all, revolutionaries always want to change literally everything. The French even came up with a new calendar, starting the countdown from the day of overthrow of royal power (22.09.1792 of the year), and renaming the usual August and September to “Frutidori” (“giving fruit”) and “Vandemier” (months of vintage). The calendar lasted until 1805, when Napoleon canceled it. It was he, figuratively speaking, who collected the fruits of the French Revolution, although at the dawn of it no one expected this.
All revolutions always end in authoritarianism, dictatorship or ... restoration (that is, the return of the previous regime). They are looking for unlimited freedom. Even anarchy. And come to order even tougher. The Russian 1917 revolution ended with the "red king" Stalin. The English Revolution of the XVII century - the restoration of the dynasty of Stuarts. When, in 1649, the British cut off Charles I’s head, who could say that in 1660, his son Charles II would return to the throne, and the same England (or rather, almost the same!) Would meet him with joyful shouts?
MOSCOW MAIDAN. Who could predict the arrival of Putin, whom Yulia Tymoshenko recently called the “dictator”, on that August day in 1991, when Yeltsin stood at tank near the White House in Moscow? But it was also!
In today's Russia, the Ukrainian revolution was perceived with caution. Today there is a main stream - conservative protective mood. And not only at the top, but at the bottom. Meanwhile, the Kiev revolution is surprisingly reminiscent of Yeltsin’s Russian times. Kievans want to Europe? Muscovites also yearned for this in 1991. They wanted to taste the "universal" values that Gorbachev spoke about for so long. "Universal" - an analogue of our European.
A major role in the Moscow 1991 revolution was played by Russian nationalists. I remember the mood in Russia at the time: “There are Communist Parties in all the republics of the USSR, but we don’t! All the republics have their capitals, and Moscow is the capital of the Soviet Union, not Russia! ”The collapse of the Union did not begin with Belovezhskaya Pushcha, but with the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the RSFSR adopted on June 12 of 1990. It is this document that launched the mechanism of "dismantling" the USSR. A similar decision on the sovereignty of Ukraine was made more than a month later - 16 July 1990. And clearly influenced by the events in Moscow.
Then, for coming to power, Yeltsin was able to gather in one fist the Russian liberal dream and the Russian soil dream. Similarly, in Kiev, on the Maidan, a link of Ukrainian Eurocentrists with ultranationalists occurred. Their situationally united hatred of the former regime. In both cases, there was a crisis of governance - Yanukovych also forgot how to lead the country and adequately assess the situation, like Gorbachev. Even such coincidences as the attempt of two falling leaders to build their little country paradise at a time when everything around them collapsed are amazing! Gorbachev met the fall of his power at a dacha in Foros (a new Crimean residence, under the murmur of indignant masses, was built specifically for him), and Yanukovych in the notorious Mezhyhiria. Who will say after this that history does not repeat?
The crisis of elites in the capitals of empires always leads to the extinction of suburbs. While in Moscow, Paris or Kiev they are fighting for power, the “colonies” set off on an independent voyage. Each revolution has its own Crimea. This is the same iron rule of any revolutionary upheaval, as well as an attempt to realize the Dream. When at the end of the 18th century, the Jacobins in Paris established their “cult of reason”, abundantly watering its tree with the blood of executed political opponents, black slaves revolted in the distant French colony of San Domingo (Haiti). They declared independence and created their own free "black" republic. Even Napoleon Bonaparte could not attach it again to France. The first thing Lenin did when he came to power was the independence of Finland. More precisely, he did not even provide, but simply AGREED with it, knowing full well that otherwise he would receive a center of white resistance right at the head of the “cradle of the revolution”. On the last day of the outgoing 1917, the Council of People's Commissars recognized the independence of Finland "in full agreement with the principles of the right of nations to self-determination." By that time, the Finnish nation, as they say, fully matured - before the revolution, the country was in union with the Russian Empire, united by a common monarch. The abdication of Nicholas II automatically terminated the union.
For the coup in Moscow in 1991, the new Russian political elite, which consisted of the younger generation’s new members of the new generation of members of the new generation who had quickly repainted themselves as “democrats”, had to accept the “republics-sisters” from the union state. On this fee for the revolution is not over. Civil strife is already among the winners in the fall of 1993, when the President of the Russian Federation and the Supreme Council (Yeltsin against Khasbulatov and Rutsky) began to fight for power, turned into street fighting in Moscow, storming the Ostankino with supporters of parliament and returning the White House with troops of “Tsar Boris”. The exact number of deaths has not been determined so far - most often the number in 2000 people is called. After this, the country that had arisen in the ruins of the Union had to go through two more Chechen wars, suppressing separatist tendencies within itself.
Kiev, 2014. All revolutions are somewhat similar to each other. This element, to be offended by which is impossible.
On your own. The revolution is the element. Moreover, unlike an earthquake or tsunami, these are elements in ourselves, which makes it especially dangerous, although it is so excitingly interesting. This is a change in the mass consciousness, affecting everyone, however. The White Guard publicist Count Alexei Tolstoy did not know in the days of the revolution that he would become a "red count." Monarchist Dr. Bulgakov did not suspect that he would become a Soviet writer and even a Stalinist in his last play Batum. A Russian officer, Petrov, hardly thought that he would become a Minister of War of the UNR and go into emigration as a Petliurist. Petliura's soldiers Sosyur and Dovzhenko did not even realize that they would face the fate of prominent Soviet cultural figures.
On a revolution, it makes no sense to take offense. The same Bulgakov, with all his satirical stinginess, insisted that "it is impossible to write libel for a revolution." “Blessed is he who has visited this world in his fateful moments,” these Tyutchev lines have become a textbook, although many will disagree with them.
Everyone on such days has its own destiny. Someone kills, and someone saves. One does not cancel the other. Do not judge. Do not despair. Remember the biblical phrase that Sholokhov noted in the “Silent Don” the grave of “unjustly killed” Valet: “In the time of unrest and debauchery do not judge me, brothers, brother” ... For some reason, it is stronger than the others that sat down from this novel in my memory.
Remembering the revolution and the Civil War, my grandfather, who was seventeen years old in 1919, said: “This way people were killed in Spite”. But he himself did not kill anyone.
The most important law of revolutions is that all of them end sooner or later.
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