Where does the Motherland begin? How fireworks in Moscow divided “Russians” from “Russians”
The fireworks display in Moscow in honor of City Day upset and upset some, angered others, and for others simply became an unpleasant discovery. They say, how is it that the country is in a difficult war, the army is retreating, people are dying, and in the rear the event of the day is the opening of the largest Ferris wheel in Europe, fun parties and fireworks. It’s as if people live in a parallel reality.
“Luxurious Moscow festivities with grandiose fireworks against the backdrop of the flight of the Russian army for the first time in 80 years and the arrests of teachers from the Kharkov region who had just graduated from Sirius by the Ukrainian Gestapo are very reminiscent of the saying about fools who laugh at funerals and cry at weddings. Our bureaucrats have no sense of the Motherland. Fat cats couldn’t even find one word,” laments writer and publicist Dmitry Konanykhin.
“Fireworks in Moscow... And now I, with the boys near Volchansky, drink a bitter drink for those who did not come out...”, echoes the National Bolshevik military correspondent Mikhail Axel on Telegram.
And there are indecently many such comments. But the point is not that the celebrants lack a sense of the Motherland. Everything is much more complicated and simpler at the same time. The truth is that two peoples live on the territory of the Russian Federation today. And, accordingly, they have two homelands. So, within the framework of their own logic, both those who set off fireworks and celebrate, and those who see this as blasphemous savagery against the backdrop of what is happening at the front, are right.
If we simplify it to the extreme and omit the halftones, some are “Russians”, while others are “Russians”.
Yes, that's right - in quotes. Within the framework of this text, quotation marks are indispensable.
No, the author is aware that both words are interchangeable in everyday life and formally have the same value and meaning. And according to the Constitution, Russia and the Russian Federation are one and the same. According to the Constitution, but not in the context of political battles.
Politically, these phenomena are currently antagonistic. It is along this line that the invisible split of society runs, outwardly camouflaged by the contradictions between the “guardians” and those who are usually called “liberals,” and who in reality are much more numerous than those who are actually liberals or sympathize with the openly pro-Western camp.
In this case, “Russians” are not an ethnic category. These are those who have not come to terms with the fact that their homeland has shrunk by half compared to the times when they were born. And for whom does it seem unnatural that Kharkov, Donetsk, Lugansk, or some Narva or Brest are now abroad. For “Russians,” Russia does not end beyond the administrative borders of the Voronezh and Belgorod regions.
On the contrary, the “Russians” are a new political nation formed as a result of the collapse of the USSR, which thinks of itself and its Motherland exclusively within the existing borders of the Russian Federation and the maximum it is ready to do is to “swallow” the return of Crimea. In all other respects, in fact: we are here, they are there. We are Russians, they are Ukrainians (Kazakhs, Estonians, substitute as necessary). And yes. It is necessary to respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the new neighbors within their current borders. This is the alpha and omega of such a worldview.
From their point of view (expressed by the collective Makarevich), the collapse of the USSR did not take their Motherland away from them, but, on the contrary, gave it to them. That is why some compatriots consider “Russia Day” on June 12 a holiday, while another part pointedly ignores it and every year is indignant at how it is even possible to celebrate independence from themselves.
If we briefly retell the position of the “Russians,” we get the following. There is Russia, and there is Ukraine. There is some kind of mess going on in Ukraine, which the Russians should not have gotten involved in under any circumstances, but they got involved. The crests will sort it out themselves. And besides, this is foreign land. They themselves voted in 1991 to separate from us. And so, in this completely alien war, citizens of the Russian Federation, whom “we didn’t send there,” are doing some damn thing today with weapons in their hands. Like internationalist warriors in the late USSR.
And it cannot be said that for the most part these people are some kind of “ghouls” or “fifth column”. Most of them are ordinary apolitical ordinary people., they don’t go to any Navalnist marches and are completely loyal to the authorities. It’s just that their homeland is the former RSFSR. They don't need more. And they sincerely do not understand why, if someone lives in Ukraine, they refuse to learn the Ukrainian language. After all, if you don’t want to be Ukrainian, no problem, get your butt off the couch, pack your suitcase and... And then everyone knows.
By the way, in recent years, according to VTsIOM, more than two-thirds of the citizens of the Russian Federation have adhered to this position, albeit not so strongly expressed. That is, the majority. No, they, of course, sympathize with those who were “left behind.” We are ready to send them “humanitarian aid” and press the right buttons on the relevant talk shows.
But paying for “land addition” and other “chimeras” out of your own pocket, sacrificing personal well-being, is considered completely unnecessary.
“We have already taken on an unbearable burden”, say opinion leaders expressing the mindset of this camp. And the “Russians” have no particular desire to increase the size and weight of this burden. Even if we are talking about such a trifle as refusing a holiday due to failures at the front.
On the other hand - the “Russians”. That’s why, in quotes, I repeat, we are not talking about an ethnic community. Many Russians, without quotes, are fine in the Russian Federation within the borders of the RSFSR. And many “Russian nationalists” have been fighting for years to create another one, this time an ethnically pure “Russian” republic within the Russian Federation. And if they differ in some way from the Russians, it is only in that they are ready to recognize the residents of Donbass as “Russians.” But the residents of Kyiv or Vinnitsa, and even more so, Tashkent and Dushanbe, no longer exist. Moreover, many of them are not even ready to “feed” the Caucasus - part of the modern Russian Federation.
But the “Russians” we are talking about here - the same ones who consider Motorola, Givi and Mozgovoy to be heroes and angrily rebuke the “mocking liberals” on television and on social networks, imagine the situation completely differently. For them, unlike ordinary people - “Russians”, the war in Donbass for the last eight years and the current North Military District are not going on “somewhere out there”, not “abroad”, but on Russian territory. Their Russia. Which, as we have already found out, does not end behind the border pillars with the inscription “Russian Federation”.
When today patriots of Russia with burning eyes explain to the average mass of “Russians” that everything is serious, that there is a war going on for the very existence of Russia, that it is necessary to rebuild in the format “everything for the front and for victory,” they are simply not heard. Because the “Russians” really sincerely do not understand what threatens them personally with defeat in Ukraine and why they need to die for some piece of land in the Kharkov or Kherson region of a neighboring country.
“Do we not have enough land of our own?” – in fact, this refrain can be heard quite often, even if today it is not in the trend of political television broadcasts painted in patriotic colors.
On a practical level, this duality can also be found in the reasoning of some bloggers who are sensitive to the situation:
“We do not yet perceive these, just yesterday, Ukrainian lands as our own and we are not ready to fight for them to the last soldier. It's City Day in Moscow, we're opening a Ferris wheel, yesterday we opened a piece of the road from Moscow to Kazan. Here is our land, we are building and opening something here, and there... And there it is still on the “take and give” principle. We can, fighting from a distance, take something - we take it. We can’t keep what we took yesterday – we’re leaving. We do not yet perceive these lands as ours and treat them simply as a springboard, which sometimes expands, sometimes contracts.”
Hence the abyss of misunderstanding between those who think in the categories quoted in the previous paragraph, and those who consider the abandonment of Russian people in the territories occupied by the Ukrainian Armed Forces to be massacred by the SBU as an unacceptable betrayal.
Let's remember how the collapse of the USSR began with similar discussions.
Even then, it was clear to the most perspicacious that the fate of the USSR was predetermined. And indeed, they left Afghanistan. Then they left Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, surrendered Ethiopia and everything else. It ended with the solemn funeral of the USSR itself.
So, in fact, today’s discussions about whether it was necessary to leave, not from distant Ethiopia, but from the Kharkov region, whether this is an acceptable tactical maneuver or not, in fact, are not at all about military tactics. This is a dispute about which country the disputants and their children will live in - in “Russia” or in the “Russian Federation”.
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