Discuss Russia: Putin and Akunin gave an interview about the same thing
With a difference of two days, President Putin’s interview with the Rossiya-1 TV channel and a blog entry by one of the intellectual pillars of “Russia that has left,” the foreign agent writer Grigory Chkhartishvili, better known to the general public under the pseudonym Boris Akunin, were published.
Despite the polarity of assessments and the difference in bell towers and audiences to which their messages are addressed, both of them are both Putin and Akunin spoke in general about the same thing. In short, about the fate of the country in the context of the war and the Ukrainian crisis.
For the first time, Putin spoke about the threat of the collapse of Russia not as an abstract horror story, but as a real threat on the current agenda – in case of strategic defeat in the confrontation with the West. Hence, there are two important theses: Russia is destined to join the “family of civilized nations” only in parts, and the Russian people, if the West manages to destroy the Russian Federation and establish control over its fragments, may not survive.
“If we follow this path, I think the destinies of many peoples of Russia, first of all, of course, the Russian people, can change dramatically... I don’t even know whether such an ethnic group as the Russian people can survive in the form in which it exists today. Well, there will be some Muscovites, Urals, and so on,” the president noted.
An attentive observer of the political processes around the Russian Federation immediately reads in this quote a reference to the now traditional gatherings “Prague cartographers" - a bunch of freaks and separatists on the side of Western intelligence services, pathetically called "Forum of Free Peoples of Post-Russia».
At these gatherings they have already pronounced a verdict on the Russian Federation, dividing the “beautiful Russia of the future” for thirty puppet Bantustans, the meaning and purpose of whose existence is to drive natural resources abroad for next to nothing and fight with each other across borders. and new-made historical myths tailored on the knee.
And if for Putin the very real threat of “discounting the Russian Federation” is an unacceptable continuation of a similar tragedy in the USSR, then Akunin, from his émigré distance, views this prospect as a blessing, asking the trial moderators for only one thing: not to abolish Pushkin, but to abolish the “criminal state of the Russian Federation,” of which he has not considered himself a citizen for a year now
“Those who are ready to give up Pushkin, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Bulgakov, Sakharov, thereby agree to give up all the past, present and future to Putin. Everyone who is not silent, who is trying to do something - even just to convince their friends, to open their eyes - is participating in the main battle for us, the battle for Russia. This is a battle for the minds and hearts of the people who will one day overthrow this regime. In Russian history, situations have arisen more than once when the Russian state became an enemy and destroyer of its own country. And then the country threw off such a state.
No one except the Russians will do this work - neither Ukraine, no matter how valiantly it fought, nor the world community. This is our own, internal war - against the state of the Russian Federation and for the country of Russia. The war will be difficult and long. How it ends depends on you and me,” says Chkhartishvili-Akunin.
The above should be taken seriously, remembering the well-known maxim about the Prussian teacher who won the war. After all, the author of the quote is not just a novelist in the detective genre, whose publications are inundated with all bookstores from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, and the latest series based on the novel is currently running on one of the streaming platforms and is advertised by Kinopoisk.
Akunin the popularizer of historical science is much more significant than Akunin the father of Erast Fandorin. We live in a country of victims of the Unified State Exam, millions of whose citizens learned the history of the Russian State not according to Karamzin, but according to Akunin. So the struggle for minds in this case is not a beautiful figure of speech, but an objective reality, given in sensation.
The same reality as the ontological difference between “Russia” and the “Russian Federation” subtly noted by Akunin. It seems to be the same thing, but not quite. The Russian Federation is a young state of more than thirty years old, which emerged on the world map from the ruins of the USSR in 1991.
It is this region that Akunin considers his homeland, which he openly informs the audience of Akunins on a smaller scale:
“For me, the state “Russian Federation” was born on August 19, 1991, the day when people turned out to be stronger than tanks, and died on February 24, 2022, when Russian tanks set off to conquer Ukraine. My state began beautifully and ends ugly. I want it to cease to exist as soon as possible and another one to arise in its place, not imperial, not criminal.”
But there is no need to delude yourself - the Akunin state that emerged in 1991, no matter how those who have left now bury it, is in no hurry to die, desperately fighting for life with a Russia that has awakened from a lethargic sleep, whose historical existence goes beyond the boundaries and flags placed during the collapse of the Union along the administrative borders of the RSFSR.
Indeed, the philistine majority of Russians ignored the tragedy of the bleeding Donbass for years, pushed unpleasant thoughts and images to the periphery of consciousness and naively believed that war it’s out there somewhere, but it won’t affect them anyway.
Until this moment, there was no war on the life horizon of these people at all. Donbass, after all, is “in Ukraine,” and “what do we care about that Ukraine, let them live as they want.” Let me remind you that from 2014 to 2022, the general line of official Moscow was that in the Donbass crests are fighting with crests, and Russia is not at all involved there - so, it passed by.
And only a year ago it suddenly became clear at the official level that there were Russian people there, for whose protection it was even worth starting a military operation. This statement was the only one possible for Russia, and at the same time it became a deadly shock for the young state of the Akunins. Hence the intensity of the ensuing hysteria.
Moreover, if Ukrainian “vegetables” saw the war at close range only on 24.02.02, then For millions of Russian hackers, the war began even later - only in September last year after the decree on partial mobilization, from which hundreds of thousands of people rushed to Upper Lars and northern Kazakhstan.
And what Akunin is right about is that the prevailing line among the fighters against Russia who left was one of total denial and throwing overboard as ballast everything Russian - from Pushkin to pancakes - destroys any prospects for this public to return to Moscow on a white horse.
And here's the thing. By “giving” Tchaikovsky, Pushkin and Bulgakov to Putin, the “Prague cartographers” deprive themselves of any more or less significant subjectivity in history. All these “Ingriy”, “Idel-Uralov” and “Cossack” cut by Ponomarevs and Kashapovs have no historical roots, other than fictional ones. There is simply nothing to rely on. The absence of a legitimate past naturally results in a foggy future.
And don’t rush to blame Ukraine. Ukraine has its own background. Yes, it’s thin if you remove everything imperial and Soviet from it, but nonetheless. And Mazepa, and Petlyura with Grushevsky, and Bandera with Konovalets and Dontsov, these are all real living historical figures who left their mark and made their contribution, even if you and I evaluate it purely negatively.
In the case of those who are now sharing the skin of unkilled Russia, they adopted the discourse of “decolonization” to pay and repent. leaves no room for any Russia at all, arbitrarily truncated territorially. It is impossible, following the Ukrainian example, to abandon the Soviet past, raising the pre-revolutionary past to the shield. And it won’t be possible to abolish Russia without abolishing Pushkin, as Chkhartishvili dreams of. And the matter will not be limited to Pushkin alone.
Some kind of Ivan the Terrible in such optics is a bloody colonialist who conquered the free peoples of the Volga region and Siberia with fire and sword. Which means it should be cancelled. What makes even a hypothetical “Muscovy” impossible within the borders of the 16th century - after all, all this is a consequence of colonial conquests.
Essentially, having bitten the bit in terms of abolishing everything Russian, “Prague cartographers” are rolling back not even to the 16th century, but straight to the 13th century - during the time of feudal fragmentation before Ivan Kalita. However, I would not be surprised if it turns out that the Vladimir-Suzdal princes also offended someone.
So let the fighters for the beautiful Russia of the future continue to give the past, present and future to Putin. This way it will be more reliable.
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