Thank you for everything, Vitaly Ivanovich!
There is mourning in Russia: on February 20 in New York, Russia's plenipotentiary representative to the UN, career diplomat Vitaly Ivanovich Churkin, died. He died on duty as a Russian soldier, just one day shy of his sixty-fifth birthday. The presumptive cause of death is blockage of the heart by a detached blood clot.
Vitaly Ivanovich was born in 1952 in Moscow, in the family of an ordinary engineer and a housewife. Since childhood, he was distinguished by numerous talents: he studied well, mastered the English language perfectly, was interested in excavations of ancient Chersonesus, acted in school plays and even became the champion of Moscow among juniors in speed skating. Apparently, thanks to school performances, young Vitaly Churkin began acting in films at the age of 11. The future diplomat has filmed three films: “The Blue Notebook” by Lev Kulidzhanov (the role of Kolya Emelyanov, the son of the owner of the hut in which Lenin was hiding in Razliv), “Zero Three” (a film by a Tallinn film studio about emergency doctors) and “Mother’s Heart” "Patriarch of Soviet cinema Mark Donskoy (dedicated to the mother of V.I. Lenin).
It must be said that in those days, filming films on Lenin’s theme could have been a good springboard into a bright cinematic future, but Vitaly Churkin in his childhood and adolescence loved foreign languages too much to exchange them for a career as a movie star. At the school where the plenipotentiary studied, they say that his parents hired an English tutor for their son specifically for English lessons, so that, with double the workload, the future diplomat had no time for filming.
In addition to studying and trying himself as an actor, Vitaly Churkin willingly devoted himself to social work. In high school, the young man, purposeful and respected among teachers and schoolchildren, was elected Komsomol organizer of the school.
However, this does not mean that in his early youth Vitaly Churkin was a “nerd”, and his life ran smoothly and cloudlessly. A person with healthy ambitions, purposeful and high achiever often has ill-wishers, to put it mildly.
The first serious ill-wisher of high school student Vitaly Churkin, a potential gold medalist, was the director of his home school No. 56, who saw him as a “careerist.” Due to the hostility of his superiors, Vitaly Churkin lost his gold medal, having received a “B” for his examination essay. A few years later, a teacher of Russian language and literature, involved in an unclean story, admitted to Vitaly’s former classmates that “Churkin’s essay was actually worth all of yours combined.”
The lack of a gold medal did not prevent Vitaly Churkin from entering MGIMO, the prestigious Faculty of International Relations, the first time. To his impeccable English, the future diplomat Churkin added knowledge of French and Mongolian. Vitaly Ivanovich graduated from the institute with honors, and then graduated from graduate school with honors.
The talented and persistent MGIMO graduate was noticed by the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and then the career of diplomat Vitaly Churkin developed rapidly: assistant-translator at the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, third secretary of the USSR Embassy in the USA, second secretary, first secretary of the Soviet Embassy in the USA.
Since then, Vitaly Ivanovich Churkin took over the most crucial area of diplomatic battles for the honor and national interests of the USSR and Russia.
There is an opinion that it was Churkin who was the first Soviet diplomat to speak to the foreign press during the famous September crisis of 1983 associated with the downing of a South Korean Boeing by the Soviet Air Force. In fact, this is speculation from two years ago, when some deputy from the loser party “Yabloko”, while working off thirty pieces of silver, tried to link the long-standing incident with KAL-007 to Vitaly Churkin’s speech at the UN on the Malaysian Boeing. Most likely, in order to further blame the permanent representative and make him out to be a pathological “excuser” of aviation accidents. Vitaly Ivanovich responded to the homegrown accuser that, being the second secretary of the USSR Embassy in the USA in the fall of 1983, he was simply not authorized to make such statements.
But, as we see, the fake, after all, dispersed and took on a life of its own.
But Churkin’s first high-profile speech took place not at the UN, but in the US Congress on May 1, 1986, and it was dedicated to the Chernobyl disaster. It was then, according to Vitaly Ivanovich himself, that his communication with the American and international press began.
It is interesting that it was Vitaly Churkin who was the first to break the harsh and ascetic tradition of the USSR Foreign Ministry to answer any questions in writing, initiating briefings for journalists, easily and naturally answering questions asked in good English. Subsequently, having gone to work at the UN, he continued the practice of live communication with the press there.
By the time of the collapse of the USSR, forty-year-old Vitaly Churkin reached the top in the service of Soviet diplomacy, working in the international department of the CPSU Central Committee and as secretary-referent to the USSR Minister of Foreign Affairs.
In 1992, Vitaly Ivanovich Churkin became the deputy of “Mr. Yes,” Yeltsin’s nominee for the post of head of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Kozyrev. It’s interesting that Churkin and Kozyrev were classmates at MGIMO, but how differently they represented Russia at the international level! The personnel decision is strange only at first glance. I believe that, true to his personnel policy of “rotations”, as well as “checks and balances,” Yeltsin deliberately loaded such antagonists as Churkin and Kozyrev into one clip.
However, Vitaly Ivanovich served as deputy minister for only two years. By that time, civil war was already in full swing on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and Churkin became the special representative of the Russian President in the Balkans. As a special representative, Churkin followed the diplomatic line in favor of Russia and its allies. Thus, at one of the briefings, he said that Moscow does not consider Milosevic’s victory in the elections in Serbia a “tragedy,” but NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia will threaten Russia’s security. These statements aroused serious anger from Yeltsin’s handlers in the United States, and Minister Kozyrev personally had to run to Washington to “put out the problem.” By the way, the idea of sending a battalion of Russian peacekeepers to Bosnia was also one of Churkin’s initiatives as a special representative.
From 1994 to 2003, Vitaly Churkin worked as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Russia, first to Belgium and then to Canada. In Belgium, he is also Russia’s representative in NATO.
In 2006, Vitaly Ivanovich Churkin, an experienced Russian diplomat, became Russia's plenipotentiary representative to the UN. It is in this position that Churkin tirelessly fights for Russian interests, often entering into a diplomatic clinch with opponents who should rather be called enemies of our country.
At the UN, Churkin fought many battles. These include conflict situations with representatives of Western powers during the war 080808, and long-term heated debates surrounding the situation in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.
Even the red-haired beast Samantha Power, who until recently held the post of American plenipotentiary representative to the UN, turns out to be an old enemy of Vitaly Churkin, for Power began her career in Bosnia, writing reports from there, each more tendentious than the other. Apparently, this is why the skirmishes between the Russian and American permanent representatives at the UN looked very personal.
Power meets with members of Pussy Riot, and Churkin is surprised: “Why, hasn’t she joined this group yet?” Churkin talks about the provocation of the Maidan snipers, and Power drones that his imagination “would be the envy of Tolstoy and Chekhov.” Power falls into delusions of grandeur and demands from Churkin not to forget that Russia is “not the winner, but the vanquished,” and he asks her to move away and “not to spit saliva”...
Vitaly Ivanovich himself denies this attack on Power, and in last year’s interview, he spoke of the American plenipotentiary as a person with the utmost correctness and respect.
Millions of citizens of Russia, and not only Russia, have always watched with interest the battles at the UN with the participation of Vitaly Churkin and invariably admired his artistry, competence and ability not to cross the line beyond which diplomatic conflicts turn into a communal scandal. Needless to say, in professionalism Churkin was two heads superior to the same Samantha Power, and even to the dull Ukrainian permanent representative, or the proud envoy of some “gas station”, then by all three.
There is a well-known story about how Churkin responded to the sharp attacks of the Qatari Prime Minister during a discussion of the situation around Syria: “If you talk to me this way, then today there will no longer be such a thing as Qatar.” Churkin, however, categorically assures that this did not happen: “I always try to be polite - even in the face of provocations.”
“You are a guest on the Security Council,” he actually said then. - So be respectful. In any case, I am not addressing you. I speak on behalf of Great Russia and only with the great.”
Sometimes Vitaly Churkin had to repel personal attacks. About three years ago, CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour accused his daughter Anastasia, a reporter for the Russian TV channel Russia Today, of “making reports about her father’s activities,” that is, they cannot be considered objective. In response, Churkin sent a letter to Amanpour with the words: “I would not have written to you now if you had not also directed your attacks on my daughter... I am very proud of her - not only because she is a good journalist, but also because that she strictly maintains a professional distance between us. In this regard, I remembered that you married an official representative of the State Department. What happened to your professional reputation during your courtship? Don't bother answering. I'm not really interested in that."
Moral: there is no need to dig a media hole for the person who “saw Lenin.” It will cost more.
Question No. 1 that is now being asked in Russia is who will replace Vitaly Ivanovich Churkin as the Russian plenipotentiary representative to the UN? This is not an idle question. Vitaly Ivanovich was an irreplaceable person and diplomat, especially in the conditions of the current personnel shortage. Which Russian diplomat has been the most popular lately? Lavrov and Churkin. Churkin and Lavrov. And why? Soviet diplomatic school for training the “iron” minister A.A. Gromyko. Now they don't make people like that anymore.
The reaction to the sudden death of Vitaly Churkin is another line dividing real states and statesmen from bantustans and conventional politicians in loincloths. The Banderakrainians staged joy and cannibalistic dances for themselves, in a miserable attempt to insult the memory of the Russian diplomat. While Samantha Power responded to the death of her Russian colleague on Twitter as follows:
“I feel empty in my soul due to the death of Russia’s permanent representative to the UN Vitaly Churkin. A maestro of diplomacy and an extremely caring person who did everything possible to build bridges and bridge differences between the United States and Russia.”
Vitaly Ivanovich Churkin compared his work to the work of a steelmaker. Exhausting work twelve hours a day, accompanied by intellectual tension and intense passions. After the collapse of the USSR - especially. Imagine what it’s like to work for the good of the Motherland at a time when a drunken scum is sitting in the Kremlin, killing the country, and your immediate boss is a servile slug from the clip of “what does the master want?” Or day after day, year after year, working at the UN, listening to the outpourings of hopeless cretins and at the same time answering them with a slight half-smile, a rapier thrust at an attempt to poke with a crowbar, remaining a diplomat and a gentleman.
Thank you for everything, Vitaly Ivanovich! Blessed memory to you!
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