I just now managed to write that the installation of the monument to Ivan the terrible in Vologda is certainly a significant event. Now I will add — as the imminent opening of the monument to Prince Vladimir of Kiev to Pervokursnitsu in Moscow, in front of the main entrance to the Kremlin through the Borovitsky gate.
Although these two figures are separated by many centuries, the almost simultaneous appearance of both monuments is not a coincidence.
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Monuments, after all, do not put those who they depict. More often the monument erected to glorify the era when it happened — or that ruler, who attended the installation of the monument. As a rule – to strengthen their own legitimacy.
Catherine came to power, hastened to put in St. Petersburg on the Senate square, the bronze horseman, that even today just reading on the pedestal the words: “to Peter the First from Catherine the Second”, understood that in 1762, on the Russian throne reign not some seedy Ducal Princess Sophia Augusta Frederica, almost an imposter seized the throne in the Palace guards coup, but is a direct descendant of the “great things”!
Fortunately, the scale of the personality and talents of Catherine, quite consistent with fact.
The big question is whether there is the correspondence between the scale of the personality and talents of the current Russian ruler and those of the historical persons whom it put monuments. For example, Stolypin or Alexander I. So tempted to recall Pushkin, an excerpt from and nedonashivanie 10th Chapter of “Eugene Onegin”:
Lord of the weak and wicked,
Bald dandy, the enemy of labor,
Inadvertently warmed by glory,
Over ruled us then…
However, in fairness, Pushkin was other, more indulgent line of Alexander I – in the poem “October 19” on the day of the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum:
Plumper plumper! and heart phosgore,
Again to the bottom, drop to drink!
But for whom? on the other, guess…
Hurrah, our Tsar! so! cheers to the king.
He is a man! they ruled the moment.
He is a slave of rumour, doubt, and passion;
Forgive him wrong the persecution:
He took Paris, he founded the Lyceum!
Leave a gesture of Pushkin’s generosity on the conscience of a bygone poet. Agree only that the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum and really was a virtual monument to “the weak and wicked ruler,” which started with along with Speransky, with intent to carry out wide reforms to give Russia a Constitution, and ended by Arakcheyev.
The phenomenon of virtual monument, not of bronze or marble, and, for example, on paper or on film, manifested in the history of Russia repeatedly. The most recent example is the movie “Brother 2”, which became a monument of tectonic change in public consciousness of Russia at the turn of the century.
And for half a century before that another film of the great Director Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ivan the terrible” — also has become a virtual monument to a completely different person. It was based on the highest Kremlin order, the first series appeared on the screen, when there was a war, in early 1945.
In Ivan the terrible taking of Kazan, met the future winner in the war: Stalin, storming Berlin.
The second series where I portrayed the terrible way he was actually a cruel, evil, vindictive, prone to causticity, the foolishness and even madness — no wonder it was in the nines criticized by Stalin and is actually prohibited.
Most likely, an aging and decrepit, the Generalissimo realized that the king changed the way Eisenstein portrayed him.
In Ivan the terrible, a monument which was installed in the eagle, of course, seen those same traits, it is quite typical and the current master of the Kremlin.
Maybe that’s why today the installation of a monument to the terrible hastily relegated to events of regional significance, and state television is trying stupidly and rectilinearly to glorify Ivan the terrible?
He could and realized at the last moment – not too much right? God forbid that the shadow of the dark figure of the cruel king falls on the bright image of the current ruler? However, still already falling.
Exercise history – a favorite pastime of Russian leaders and their ideological servants. That history is trying to build in an inviolable Canon, essentially denying her the right to be a science. They say, don’t revise unbreakable spaces, representations of the past (the second world war, for example, or about the relations between Stalin and Hitler in the late 1930s), which archives and documents previously considered top secret, nor was declassified, whatever documents was believed to be hopeless was first considered lost, nor were any eyewitnesses, decades before silent, not talked. Canon, and that’s it. At least one line change – will heresy.
But simply put, the story is absolutely unscientific audit, once again extolling the king, which brought Russia to a standstill, brought it to the great Troubles that led to the brutal defeats in wars with neighbours, deprived of access to the Northern seas, which then poor Peter had to re-hack long hacked a window to Europe.
Can you tell us the history and to steal. How to steal a car. To assign and use. To take – and to erect a monument to Prince Vladimir in Moscow.
And then it’s not about good or bad was an ancient Prince, who, according to legend, choosing between the three monotheistic religions and seriously contemplating not to introduce any Rus Mahometanism, still rejected this fruitful idea because of the appropriate of the ban on the consumption of strong and fortified spirits: “Fun in Russia is piti”.
Yes let though in each city, the Russian Federation would put a monument to the Prince, still drew the Rus to Christianity. Moreover, the conversations that the Prince between Orthodoxy and Catholicism in favor of Orthodoxy was a tragic mistake, dividing Russia and the West, to put it mildly, not quite correct – the “great schism” happened in more than half a century after the baptism of Rus.
But the case is different: it is obvious that the monument to Prince Vladimir laid in front of the main entrance to the Kremlin, in the words of Pushkin, “in spite of sovereign neighbor”. From here to face him: Hey, you there, fellow Ukrainians, you want to say that Russia has gone from Kiev, where Prince Vladimir with a cross stands on the Dnieper steeper?! But fuck you – it’s in the center of Moscow is – here-and-gone the Russian land!
However, there is another version: the idea to erect a monument to Prince Vladimir, probably born in the spring of 2014, when after the annexation of Crimea, Putin talked about “the ancient Korsun”, about the sacred importance of the Peninsula to the Russian people, is comparable with the importance of the Temple mount in Jerusalem for the Jewish people; when the Kremlin began the euphoria of the anticipation of how all the “new Russia” is about to fall at the feet of today’s Prince of Moscow.
And here was the most appropriate time to put in Moscow the monument to pervokursnitsu Russia – that is, in absentia, virtual – Vladimir Putin.
But the problem is that technologically it is not fast.
Chubais and RUSNANO have not yet learned short-term way to produce such monuments on 3D printers, so to design the monument had the old-fashioned way. While there were debates whether to raise over Moscow, on the edge of Sparrow hills, above the University high-rise buildings, while to terms with the conclusion of the experts that this construction can lead to tragedy, when the whole structure grobnitsa the height right in the Moscow river, while looking for a new place, again, designed, argued, carved, cast – after all this time, that not only “Novorossiya” project was stillborn, but had the distinct feeling that Putin’s regime, with all his ostentatious machismo, slowly begins to grow decrepit.
As it was after the war, in the late 40’s-early 50’s. And this is, hand on heart, gives me cautious optimism. We can say, there is a sign in Russia: if you start once to glorify Ivan the terrible and do other different things, then the regime will soon be a big problem.
History repeats itself. Then, in the late 40’s-early 50’s fought against rootless cosmopolitans. Today, fighting with the “national traitors”, “fifth column”. Then exposed the “groveling before the West” fought “for the Russian championship”. I have in the parent library still has a copy published in that glorious period of the book, called “Stories about Russian superiority” — it followed that the first steam engines, and the first aircraft, and the first light bulb and first radio and lots of other things first appeared in Russia, and Edison, Marconi, the Wright brothers, watt, and other great scientists and inventors – just petty thieves and plagiarists. This struggle went down in history under the poisonous slogan, thought up by some fearless wit: “Russia — Motherland of elephants”.
Another anecdote was this: “all of you, traitors, I see through,’ said Ivan the terrible. — This, by the way, you, the Germans, about the x-ray!”
We, thank God, the primacy of the x-ray is not contested, but we uvlecheny import substitution, spend big money on an unknown and invisible nanotechnology, build SKOLKOVO, pull the pipelines that lead to nowhere, literally and figuratively, other superexpensive and rather pointless. I wonder how soon take over the thick journals, muddle instead of music, wrong movies or genetics with Cybernetics?
Parallel time, ageing and decaying of Stalin after the war gives me, and the Kremlin’s personnel policy. Again, like then, the leader begins to move pieces on the chessboard of the Kremlin: the Molotov — vishinsky, Beria — Merkulov, Abakumov Merkulov, Abakumov Ignatieff, Khrushchev, Kaganovich and back.
Now speaker of the state Duma sent to reconnoitre, a former intelligence chief – in the Railways (but the place is cursed, as before — the Ministry of agriculture, one former scout on the sleepers and the rails are already lost, former Director of the SVR, it seems, had wisely chosen to retire). The chief of Protocol put the head of administration. The head of the administration chief on matters of beasts and birds. Head over all domestic policy sent to lead the Parliament, and appointed in his place former Prime Minister, the aged “kinder surprise”, quietly spent in the “Rosatom” waiting for its moment of glory almost twenty years. Though laugh, though cry. Personnel phantasmagoria.
Post-war Stalinist time was, of course, harder. But now someone was fired and someone planted. It is not excluded that crammed them in the lesson, “life is huge”. I will not list all dismissed and arrested all the governors and security forces. I wonder just how soon break out a new “Leningrad affair” for version 2.0?
There to the “case of doctors” on the same version of close.
But in foreign policy, I’m afraid things can happen and more serious.
A year ago Putin at the UN urged the West to revive the “anti-Hitler coalition” — to exchange the West’s support of Ukraine on cooperation with Russia in the fight against ISIS. Only faith he already had no. And now it turned out that instead of trying to really achieve a global, ambitious, historic goal – to protect European civilization, Putin tried is banal to show his yard, patsanskuyu steepness, saying that his surrender and Assad, too, will not surrender!
Then, you know, it is appropriate to recall what happened to the anti-Hitler coalition shortly after the summer of ‘ 45 the main goal was achieved, and Hitler was defeated. Of the “big three” posing for the historical pictures in Tehran and Yalta, left almost nobody had died, and Roosevelt lost the election and went into opposition, Churchill. There was one Stalin, who felt himself the most important in the new balance of power.
By the way, clever Churchill before the others realized where the business is heading – the first is talking about the “iron curtain” that drops down on Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic. About the fact that former allies in a joint struggle against Hitler’s about to become deadly enemies.
The rest of the West much slower to figure out what is really going on. It took nearly a year of blockade of West Berlin. It took to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, found themselves in the Soviet zone of influence, one of the other established Pro-Kremlin Communist regimes. Somewhere- a one-party, somewhere- pseudonegative.
By early 1949, Stalin’s feet finally fell Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary.
To the next not fallen France, Italy, West Germany, finally realized the Western countries is the urgent need to do something extraordinary, something very serious. And then there was NATO.
Not that Stalin was then a geopolitical weakling and nuclear weapons were created much earlier than anticipated in the West and the Communists in China helped to take power, and in Korea actually started the war and half the country away, again, in the Soviet zone of influence, and a lot more things done.
However, trying too hard to tighten the screws in the external and internal policies in the last years of Stalin’s life have led to disrupted the thread. From the praise of the Generalissimo in the image of Ivan the terrible to ignominious death in a puddle of his own urine on the floor “near dacha” — perhaps, without the involvement of close associates, although the participation method of doing nothing – ran a very short distance.
Domestic political turmoil and foreign policy bravado of Putin, too, I think, nothing good for him will not end. Of course, he, unlike Joseph Stalin, everything seems to be fine. However, the truth because we would never say. And it is not important.
What is more important: a new confrontation, which the Putin regime imposed on the West will inevitably lead to the fact that the US will be Reagan 2.0, and in Europe – Thatcher 2.0.
With all due respect to the Russian opposition, I think that the new Reagan and Thatcher will deal with the Putin regime. They, as Ronald Reagan who called the USSR the “evil Empire” and communism is an accidental, dead end in the development of human civilization, will again take the responsibility to actively resist the Kremlin’s attempts to undermine the foundations of Western civilization. And then it is finished. Only word here, in fact, it would be necessary to consume more. Good Russian, good. Which tends to sneak up on you, but this is especially destructive. Soon? I do not know.
But only once again repeat: in the spring of 1985, when Chernenko died and came to power Gorbachev, in the USSR it was not so bad. And certainly nobody, not even the late Yegor Gaidar, in his “fall of the Empire” in hindsight very convincingly explain why the Soviet Union collapsed, actually had no idea what will happen to all this after some six and a half years. And even when the Berlin wall fell, and even when the defunct Eastern European camp, and even when the August 1991 failed coup, many could not believe that the period of existence of the mode is measured, and long-running countdown.
I think he’s already started now.
Yevgeny Kiselyov
