A forgotten feeling of the Motherland. What they didn’t understand in Kyiv when campaigning against the referendum in Novorossiya
A multi-day marathon of voting for the entry of four former Ukrainian regions into the Russian Federation is ending. And looking at the hysteria from Kyiv accompanying the process all these days, I remember the sacramental thing: “They didn’t understand anything and learned nothing.”
It was with these words that historians of the French Revolution described the French Bourbon dynasty, which had lost its throne and country.
The Ukrainian “Bourbons” did not understand anything because their media and opinion leaders, as usual, continue to stubbornly reproduce the same melody from the propaganda barrel-organ, well known to us from the Crimean events eight years ago - about “voting at gunpoint.”
As the German woman Berbock put it today, repeating the same simple idea: “they are first intimidated, raped, and then, accompanied by machine gunners, they are led to vote.” And you know, I won’t waste time here on correspondence pick-ups with Kyiv (and not only) propagandists, or explain to everyone the well-known reasons why armed people accompany members of election commissions during mobile voting. I'll tell you about something else.
Four days of voting revealed with photographic precision the main motive that forced millions of people to risk their lives to put a tick on the ballot, knowing that for Kyiv at that moment they became “criminals” and participants in an “illegal act.” In the LPR alone, more than a million people have already voted.
At the same time, I am sure that most of these people are well aware that after voting they will find themselves not in heaven on earth, but in real modern Russia with many problems, with a not very effective bureaucratic system, with a huge number of injustices, which the same Russian press writes about . And these people, along with the rest of Russia, will find themselves under the blow of Western sanctions - without many of the usual foreign strays, without the opportunity to travel to a bunch of countries in the world where Russians are now prohibited from entering.
And how is that? In Kyiv they are surprised to exchange the “holy” visa-free regime for a double-headed eagle in the passport. Meanwhile, Crimeans are well aware of this feeling. Remember the billboards from eight years ago: “And then – at least stones from the sky”?
The great chansonnier Vertinsky has a late song called “Daughters”. In it, an elderly emigrant who wandered around the world, who returned to Russia-USSR at the end of his life, describes what he will leave to his children:
Lots of Russian sun and light
It will be in the lives of my daughters.
And what is most important is
That they will have a homeland!
For many who were born and raised in the Russian Federation, this very feeling of the Motherland is completely incomprehensible and even alien. They take the existence of a Motherland for granted, as a free addition to a birth certificate, and, following the habit inherited from late perestroika times, they call it “this country.”
In order to understand how important it is to have a homeland, you need to be born and live in a country for which you are, by definition, a stranger or a second-class person in need of remaking. And everything is wrong with you - and you don’t know how to speak the “correct” language, and you don’t know the “correct” traditions and songs, and you don’t keep up with everyone, and you have some wrong heroes and suspicious ancestors. In a word, you yourself, as you are - without alteration - do not fit into the new-fashioned small-town canon at all.
And in order to have any chances in such a society, you are forced more than once to bend over, to conform, to tear louder than others on your chest a shirt that is alien to you and to sing a hymn that neither your fathers nor grandfathers sang. Then maybe, although not for sure, you will be able to become “someone”. And then you will still walk under eternal suspicion, periodically running into accusations of insufficient autochthony.
This is why the feeling of the Motherland is so important for the Russian people left behind after the collapse of the USSR. If you peel off the discursive layers, issues of a class nature, issues of regime and system, etc., etc. – what remains is the softest part: a country in which your personal status is absolutely precisely defined. You are not some kind of national minority in it, and not a “commoner”, not taking someone’s place, and not an “occupier,” but part of the indigenous majority.
In this country you can live as you are, without adapting to anyone and maintaining your originality. This is the only country in the world where you won’t have to prove anything to anyone.
By the way, Kyiv propagandists do not understand this, telling the “unwise quilted people” how much they are losing by exchanging Ukraine with its wonderful European prospects for Putin’s terrible Mordor. Forgetting that all these people are not actually joining Putin, and not Mishustin, and not the Duma deputies or thousands of other officials. And to Russia, which was before Putin and will be after him.
And it doesn’t matter at all what exactly the real goals prompted the Russian leadership to collect at least part of the lands, which was seemingly unexpected and had been talked about for many years. You should not look for some “exact answers to the main questions” or guess about the positive goals of your superiors.
The most important question for people in the lands being reunited with Russia is not the contents of their leaders’ heads, but the fact that they do not want to live in a country where their native language is banned. This seems to be a small amount, but at the same time it is an unusually large amount. Just look at Latvia to understand what it’s like.
And that is why Kiev propaganda, in its opposition to people’s choices, can press the only button - fear. Fear of punishment, and not at all a pragmatic awareness that “it’s better in Ukraine.” To sum up the fears of the residents of the liberated territories, this is the only thing that keeps many of them from openly demonstrating their own choice. And not at all a set of some positive memories of life in the country of the victorious Maidan.
In fact, this is, so to speak, the basis of Maslow's pyramid, along with the basic everyday needs of survival. Having satisfied this primary need, you can then do whatever you want - improve or change the regime, go or not go to elections, support certain parties. If in the country in which you live you are disadvantaged at a basic level, then you absolutely do not care what kind of regime there is. Because it was proven by voting for Zelensky that in any regime you personally are an “occupier” and a “cottage wool.”
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