KOhe väga hea rohujuuretasandi hinnang meelsusest Venemaa tavarahva hulgas (just need keda mobiliseeritakse) Vene ajalooteaduse kandidaadilt, Sergei Tšernõšovilt:
The “Russian people” have not lost anything. Because they had nothing.
"My parents have been living in the “private sector” of a big city for the last twenty years. Before writing this column, I spent several days thinking about how to translate this term into other languages (including Moscow). I realized that there was no way. This is not “individual housing construction,” as Wikipedia writes, but a kind of injection of rural life into the fabric of big cities. There are no asphalt roads, no sewage system (although almost everyone has bathrooms), telephones appeared about 15 years ago, and gas was introduced at the same time. Gas means that in winter two (or even three) times a day, you don’t need to carry coal in buckets from the barn and light the stove. Gas is still good; it is not available everywhere. About ten years ago, foreign cars began to appear near the fences. Nothing has changed in the last five years.
This summer I picked up my son from my parents after the weekend. “Come no later than ten in the morning,” my mother told me. I actually arrived exactly at ten. And at eleven, a funeral was scheduled on a nearby street in this private sector. At eleven in the morning, the nephew of the “elder” was brought there, to the next street, on this parent street. “Senior” is a respected person, like a class leader, only on the street. Consequently, the nephew of the eldest person on the street, a deceased “member of the North Military District”, needs to be seen off with dignity and go and honor the memory. He was mobilized in the spring, fought for six months, returned home on leave, and went again - and on the very first day, he came under fire. I came back for the second time already in a zinc coffin, even the window was painted over. That’s why it was necessary to pick up the child at ten; my mother knows that I would not approve of his participation in this memorial event.
Even on this parental street, a “war hero” now lives in his parents’ house, part-time—a former Wagnerite, part-time – a former inveterate thief. As long as I can remember, he was always in prison, either because of petty thefts or because of hooliganism. He went out for a couple of months, drank, robbed, and went back to prison. If during these months something disappeared from someone’s garden or house, they thought first of all about him. Now he has a medal and a brand-new car. I took my parents to the sea, by the way. They say they cried with pride for their son.
And right across the road, in the next house, my parents’ neighbor lives. She worked as a tram conductor, and perhaps because of this, she traditionally swears loudly. And over the past year and a half, she says that her son-in-law has increasingly begun to say that he will volunteer to go to war. After all, loans will not pay themselves back. And the truth is they won’t give it back - another neighbor just across the house drank himself to death because of loans; his heart couldn’t stand it. The day before, in the spring, they also buried him along the street.
I lived on this street for ten years. My parents still live on this street, because here they have a bathhouse, a garage, and a vegetable garden - not like “in these apartments of yours, where they are one one-on-one.” As for the Wagner veterans in the neighborhood, they are literally in every neighborhood now.
Every time I listen to “experts” who tell me from their warm studios in the Netherlands or Israel how people are suffering under the yoke of the Putin regime and how these people have lost everything due to war and sanctions, I think about this street. I think about her even when I watch another debate on YouTube between one “liberal” emigrant and another “liberal” emigrant. Well, this is where they say that because of the unbearable oppression of sanctions, the people will soon understand that the “Putin regime” has taken everything away from them. He will understand, and, as they hope, he will rebel. Well, he won’t rebel, but at least he will sabotage the regime. Or something else like that.
Recently, the famous psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya, in one post, tried to bring together all the losses of the Russian people in order to prove to us that “not all Russians are the beneficiaries of this war.” Her list included several items: the collapse of the national currency and the value of all property in “hard equivalent”, “closing the world” for tourists, closing prospects for children to study abroad, curtailment of civil rights and freedoms, degradation of education, degradation of culture, “separation families due to departures,” something else. After reading this list, I once again thanked fate that I was not born in Moscow and still have not lost touch with reality.
Because if we take two-thirds of the Russian population as the “Russian people,” then the “Russian people” have not lost any of this. Because he had none of this. The last time the people of russia held dollars in his hands was in 1997 - as a funny little thing, nothing more. They never went to theaters and did not notice at all how the best directors left Russia and left them, the people, with nothing. His children go to the same school that he once went to—perhaps even to the same teacher, who is already seventy years old. They, the people, don’t even know that children can be taught without shouting and that they can walk on school lawns. Finally, if families were “separated” from them, it was only because of prison, mobilization, and contract service. They, the people, never left for Georgia and Kazakhstan; all their relatives never went further than their city.
And that prices in stores have increased - these people never hoped for stores. People have both potatoes and jars of pickles underground for the whole winter. They'll survive somehow.
So the people, in general, did not lose anything. He has nothing special to lose.
But what did they gain? They acquired a lot, an unspeakable amount. First of all, money. So much money. Yes, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers did not return, but hundreds of thousands did! And they returned with millions of rubles that they could not even think about before. In my wife’s hometown (not as big as ours, but much more industrial), one man returned home with three million rubles, which he and his friends spent in ten days. Three hundred thousand a day per company, including unlimited alcohol and prostitutes. What a life! Those who have families go to the seaside, buy apartments, and upgrade their cars.
Secondly, belonging to the great. Just as our grandfathers defeated fascism, so we are defeating Nazism (or what is it now?) in Ukraine. And at the same time we defeat gays, Jews, the entire collective West, Freemasons, and generally everyone. Those who are older rejoice at the revival of the pioneers, basic military training, school uniforms and, in general, all the attributes of their youth. Finally, otherwise, today’s youth have completely lost their belts! And all this without straining at all, most often - without even getting up from the couch.
And what do you offer to the people who, because of this war, got rich and felt great, like an eastern king? Movies about palaces of stolen officials? So these people have known for a long time, since the 90s, that they were robbed, there is no news here. Talk about the fact that it is the people who are to blame (as “remainers”) for the crimes of the regime? Interview about democracy and human rights? Tragic stories of imprisoned Berkovich or Melkonyants? Who is this anyway? Nothing was said about this on TV or on the Internet (for example, on the Komsomolskaya Pravda website).
Cash handouts that people will never earn from their work in decades, coupled with belonging to the great, is an explosive mixture. If you do not take it into account, you can endlessly wonder why in the last elections it was mainly the villages (and not large cities) that voted for the appointed governors and the “ruling party” - although it was precisely this village that suffered the main losses from the mobilization. It is this explosive mixture that encourages grannies to vote for power, who come to the polling stations in a dress they bought twenty years ago. They sincerely vote for the government, which is about to build a great country – in spite of its enemies, of course. And it is this mixture that gives rise to a total misunderstanding between the thin layer of those who really lost everything from this war and the overwhelming majority of the population, who did not lose anything, but received everything.
In our intellectual conversations, hoping that the nightmare will soon end, we try not to remember this. The many hundreds of thousands of men and women who have already gone through the current war and the processes of "recovering new territories" have millions of children. These millions of children believe that their fathers and mothers are now doing heroic things. They sincerely believe, by right, that these are their parents, and they cannot be ghouls. These millions of children put on a tricolor tie on September 1, watch the same TV, listen to their fathers’ stories about “khokols,” and travel through the destroyed Mariupol on vacation to Crimea (with or without their fathers).
If we want to start talking about public repentance after the end of the war, we will have to wait until these children grow up, give birth to new children, and now these (not yet born) children can be told that their grandfathers committed unworthy acts. It’s somehow easier to hear about grandfathers than about fathers. Internal, rather than external, repentance in Germany began in the 1970s - just when the children of the children of the National Socialists grew up.
Then—by the end of the 2040s—it will be possible to talk to the people about the losses that Russian society has actually suffered from the current war. At least some of the people will actually listen to this. By that time, by the way, teachers whose careers began under Brezhnev will finally stop working in schools.
In the meantime, people are experiencing perhaps the best period of their lives. Yes, some of its representatives periodically return from the war in zinc coffins. But they bury the whole street - why don’t you like the revival of traditional values?
Sergey Chernyshov
Candidate of Historical Sciences
Ehk jah, elades selle kõige keskel väida ta et suur osa venelasi ei ole selle sõjaga kaotanud mitte midagi. Hoopis rohkem on võidetud.
Kümned tuhanded küll surevad aga sajad tuhanded jäävad ellu ja saabuvad rindelt selliste rahapatakatega, mida ei oleks olnud võimalik kümne aastaga teenida. Suur legend fašistide geide, juutide kollektiivse lääne ja vabamüürlastega) võitlemisest päriselt elab. Mis veelgi hullem neil inimestel on miljoneid lapsi, kes siiralt usuvad et nende isad tegelevad kangelaslike tegevustega. Panevad kooli minnes ette trikolooriga lipsu ja kuulavad 1. septembril isade jutte hohollidest ning sõidavad krimmi puhkusele läbi purustatud Mariupoli.
Ta väidab et see tulevane põlvkond on juba ette kadunud, ning esimene kelle hulgas on natukenegi lootust ausalt selles sõja mõjudest rääkida on sõjakskäinute lapselapsed. Inimesed suudavad psüholoogiliselt üldiselt taluda seda, et nende vanavanemad olid kaabakad, aga vanemate osas tuleb blokk ette. Toob paralleele ka saksamaaga, kus sisemine (mitte väljast peale surutud) arusaam tekkiski alles 70ndatel, mil kasvasid natsionaalsotsialistide lapselapsed.
Ehk sõltumata sellest mis sõjas juhtub saab perses see asi meil olema veel aastakümneid. Ja läheb ainult hullemaks
milles meie süüdi oleme, et kasvatame lapsi ja ootame oma mehi (pommitamas käimast) tagasi teadmata, kas nad elusalt naasevad ... 