In September 1922, by the expulsion of the first of the five “philosophical ships”, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars V.I. Lenin began the official expulsion of culture from Soviet Russia. According to various sources, from 228 to 272 “dissenters” were deported on five steamship voyages – professors-philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergey Bulgakov, Mikhail Osorgin, Pitirim Sorokin, Sergey Trubetskoy and eighteen more, as well as writers, journalists, engineers and other figures culture, art and science.
But even before this action, that is, immediately after the October coup, the most perspicacious fled the country – Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Nabokov, Bunin, Sokolov-Mikitov, Gippius, Merezhkovsky, Balmont, Remizov, Kandinsky, Chaliapin, Tsvetaeva, Shklovsky, Berberova, Khodasevich , Chagall and less famous, but perhaps no less gifted and talented. In addition, a huge number of professionally educated talents went into exile with white officers. This allows me not to be tied to a specific date of departure of the “philosophical ship”, but to look at the process of getting rid of Russia from culture historically. At the same time, I will not write a study on the topic “The Expulsion of Culture from Tsarist Russia”, but will limit myself to an excursion into the past and present century.
The country got rid of the Provisional Government, which consisted of educated ministers, in just a few months, replacing it with the Council of People’s Commissars, half of which had not only higher, but even secondary education. On the other hand, with the “iron broom” and other radical means, this Council began to drive the “educated” out of the country, making this term abusive. “It is necessary to organize the matter in such a way that these “military spies” are caught and caught constantly and systematically and sent abroad,” Lenin ordered.
It is noteworthy that this government rather quickly got rid of several commissars with higher education, including Lenin himself, replaced them with half-educated Stalin-Budyonny-Molotov and, perhaps, therefore, remained in power for decades, as more corresponding to the level of citizens remaining in the country. And Lenin’s successor, Stalin, gave the teacher’s initiative a mass character and changed its direction: now, instead of the West, the “cultured” and “educated” were driven by the thousands north and east to extermination labor camps or simply “put up against the wall.” Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Vvedensky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Nikolai Gumilyov, Sergei Korolev, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Nikolai Klyuev, Andrei Tupolev, Nikolai Likhachev, Boris Kornilov, Nikolai Vavilov, Georgy Langemak, Georgy Zhzhenov, Isaac Babel, Yuri Dombrovsky, Nikolai Erdman, Julius Dunsky , Valery Frid… countless! According to official figures, in 1937 alone, the Bolsheviks shot 353,074 people, about 1,000 people a day. And pay attention to the particularly creative approach of the executioners to the “educated”: after torture, before his death, Vsevolod Meyerhold was broken in turn by all his fingers, and then drowned in sewage. The writer Boris Pilnyak was tortured into signing that he was a Japanese spy, after which he was immediately shot. Academician Vavilov was starved to death in a prison cell. The poet Nikolai Zabolotsky was so tortured that he signed a confession that he was digging an underground passage to Bombay. Academician Kozyrev was given 10 years for trying to “steal the Volga from Russia to the West.” The seventy-year-old sculptor Isaac Itkind had his eardrum knocked out and his testicle crushed with a boot. in 1937 alone, the Bolsheviks shot 353,074 people, about 1,000 people a day. And pay attention to the particularly creative approach of the executioners to the “educated”: after torture, before his death, Vsevolod Meyerhold was broken in turn by all his fingers, and then drowned in sewage. The writer Boris Pilnyak was tortured into signing that he was a Japanese spy, after which he was immediately shot. Academician Vavilov was starved to death in a prison cell. The poet Nikolai Zabolotsky was so tortured that he signed a confession that he was digging an underground passage to Bombay. Academician Kozyrev was given 10 years for trying to “steal the Volga from Russia to the West.” The seventy-year-old sculptor Isaac Itkind had his eardrum knocked out and his testicle crushed with a boot. in 1937 alone, the Bolsheviks shot 353,074 people, about 1,000 people a day. And pay attention to the particularly creative approach of the executioners to the “educated”: after torture, before his death, Vsevolod Meyerhold was broken in turn by all his fingers, and then drowned in sewage. The writer Boris Pilnyak was tortured into signing that he was a Japanese spy, after which he was immediately shot. Academician Vavilov was starved to death in a prison cell. The poet Nikolai Zabolotsky was so tortured that he signed a confession that he was digging an underground passage to Bombay. Academician Kozyrev was given 10 years for trying to “steal the Volga from Russia to the West.” The seventy-year-old sculptor Isaac Itkind had his eardrum knocked out and his testicle crushed with a boot. Vsevolod Meyerhold, after being tortured, before his death, was broken in turn by all his fingers, and then drowned in sewage. The writer Boris Pilnyak was tortured into signing that he was a Japanese spy, after which he was immediately shot. Academician Vavilov was starved to death in a prison cell. The poet Nikolai Zabolotsky was so tortured that he signed a confession that he was digging an underground passage to Bombay. Academician Kozyrev was given 10 years for trying to “steal the Volga from Russia to the West.” The seventy-year-old sculptor Isaac Itkind had his eardrum knocked out and his testicle crushed with a boot. Vsevolod Meyerhold, after being tortured, before his death, was broken in turn by all his fingers, and then drowned in sewage. The writer Boris Pilnyak was tortured into signing that he was a Japanese spy, after which he was immediately shot. Academician Vavilov was starved to death in a prison cell. The poet Nikolai Zabolotsky was so tortured that he signed a confession that he was digging an underground passage to Bombay. Academician Kozyrev was given 10 years for trying to “steal the Volga from Russia to the West.” The seventy-year-old sculptor Isaac Itkind had his eardrum knocked out and his testicle crushed with a boot. The poet Nikolai Zabolotsky was so tortured that he signed a confession that he was digging an underground passage to Bombay. Academician Kozyrev was given 10 years for trying to “steal the Volga from Russia to the West.” The seventy-year-old sculptor Isaac Itkind had his eardrum knocked out and his testicle crushed with a boot. The poet Nikolai Zabolotsky was so tortured that he signed a confession that he was digging an underground passage to Bombay. Academician Kozyrev was given 10 years for trying to “steal the Volga from Russia to the West.” The seventy-year-old sculptor Isaac Itkind had his eardrum knocked out and his testicle crushed with a boot.
But even after all the shootings and executions, on January 1, 1938, there were 1,881,570 prisoners in the USSR, on January 1, 1941 – 2,368,548 people, and on January 1, 1949 – 2.4 million prisoners plus their paramilitary guards – 165 000 people. At the same time, in 1939, the NKVD personnel by national composition were: Russians – 80.2%, Ukrainians – 7%, Jews – 6.3%, Belarusians – 2.1% … “Thus,” writes G.M. Ivanov in his work “The Gulag in the System of a Totalitarian State”, the NKVD cadres were formed mainly from the Russian strata of the population, which was fully in line with the resurgent imperial traditions of the Russian state… Hatred of prisoners was cultivated by all means among the guards, cruel treatment of convicts was encouraged, all hints of humanity were severely punished… Over the years of the existence of the Gulag, more than a million Soviet citizens have been among its workers. They lived in society, raised children, communicated with relatives and friends, and thereby broadcast the subculture of violence formed in the camp world to the family and society as a whole… According to the GULAG researcher Frenchman J. Rossi, who spent almost a quarter of a century in Siberian camp barracks, “Of all the concentration camp systems, including Hitler’s concentration camps, the Soviet Gulag was not only the most enduring, having existed for 73 years, but also the most accurate embodiment of the state that created it.”
I apologize for the long quote, but, firstly, it answers the well-known question of Sergei Dovlatov, “Who wrote four million denunciations?” (Dovlatov himself served as a Vokhrovite), and, secondly, he substantiates the main thesis of my article: throughout the twentieth century, Russia expelled culture from itself even more violently than they exorcise the devil in any of the famous films on this topic.
The Second World War, perhaps, equalized the chances of “lousy intellectuals” dying in battles with the less educated, but it’s hard for me to imagine Joseph Utkin, Bulat Okudzhava or Viktor Nekrasov in SMERSH. However, the war forced Stalin to save the lives of talented prisoners – Tupolev, Korolyov, Glushko, Stechkin, Solzhenitsyn, Voznesensky, Timofeev-Resovsky, Urvantsev and thousands more workers of Stalin’s “sharashkas”, without whom victory would have been impossible.
But after the war, the total “crackdown” resumed – the restoration of the “Iron Curtain”, the fight against cosmopolitanism, repeated landings, the execution of the leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and other representatives of the Jewish intelligentsia, including writers and poets Isaac Fefer, Peretz Markish, David Bergelson and my beloved Lev Kvitko, whose poems I recited for three years, marching home from kindergarten: “I wrote a letter to Klim Voroshilov: Comrade Voroshilov, red commissar! ..”. The murder of Solomon Mikhoels, the ban on the publication of “ideologically harmful works” by Mikhail Zoshchenko, Anna Akhmatova and other authors “alien to the spirit of the party”, the extermination of “decadent tendencies” in music and theater, the expulsion of all geneticists from academicians and the ban on genetics itself, as “anti-science”.
How many “Stalin’s falcons” and simply operatives in all spheres and crevices of the Soviet state carried out these patriotic actions?
At the same time, at school and in school history textbooks, we were told about the progressive role of Ivan the Terrible and his guardsmen and so effectively instilled hatred for the entire West that in the sixth grade I refused to learn English, telling the teacher: “I am not going to talk to contemptible imperialists ! But it’s one thing when a Soviet schoolboy says this nonsense in 1950, and another thing when in 2022 such nonsense is carried by the “Speaker of the State Council of Crimea” Vladimir Konstantinov. “Why should we blindly follow the path of the English language? Why study what is not necessary if a person will never go to London? – he said. “The English have been at war with us for a thousand years, and we continue to study them, spend money … English should be excluded from the school curriculum.” And after this “speaker” another – this time the speaker of the Russian parliament Vyacheslav Volodin said that “all factions of the State Duma are ready for accelerated work on the legislative rejection of the Bologna education system.” I wonder when they ban the use of English in Russia, what will their position be called – “talker”, “chatterbox”?
However, I’m getting ahead of myself, sorry. After all, Stalinism did not end with the death of the “leader of all times and peoples.” In this regard, the diary entry of the actor Georgy Burkov, who is practically my age, is typical: “Kill me, but Stalinism is a disease. Mass mental illness. A kind of kleptomania. Some kind of monstrous combination of poverty, lack of culture, religiosity (with the substitution of “God”), herdism, already brought to hysteria … How many people, the smartest people, were trampled into the mud or physically destroyed! To please, to the joy of the mob.
Now, this is already close to where I drive my lay research. It’s not just that in the USSR we were raised in hatred for the West and contempt for “lousy intellectuals”, “bespectacled”, “cultured” and “educated”. We, deprived of access to the achievements of world culture and art, were instilled with a sense of superiority over the entire civilized world, a kind of “higher spirituality of the Soviet person”, our right to be rude to other peoples and control them. And no, it was not Soviet “know-how”, Khrushchev’s start-up, pounding his boot on the UN podium. “Russia importunately orders, intervenes, teaches the whole world how to live. Having succeeded only in building the Gulags and insane, monstrous massacres in them against their own people, this country to this day (and now even more than before) amuses its messianic complexes, imagines itself to be the Third Rome, the only righteous civilization, a kind of navel of the earth, called to teach the sinful West and the rest of the world how to live. With the persistence of a pug, Russia yelps from the doorway at everyone in whom it instinctively senses spiritual superiority over itself,” this is from Boris Stomakhin’s book The ABC of Freedom, which he wrote in fits and starts in Russian prisons in 2014-2019.
I can cite a lot of such (and much cooler) quotes from the writings of Russian authors, but I will limit myself to a couple more: “There is no culture in Russia, because it is not in the minds of the vast majority … Almost the whole country cheats, weighs, robs, ascribes and writes off, takes and gives… My homeland is drunken, drug-addicted cities and towns, railway stations that stink of homeless people. Schools infested with pedophiles. Deadly night streets and porches. Policemen, corrupt officials, swindlers, sadists, fascists. The Evsyukovs, the Pichushkins, the Grechushkins, the Ageevs… The whole Russian patriotic fuse goes into chattering about holy origins, about the insidiousness of foreigners… And at the entrance to any Russian city there are mountains of rubbish and stinking rot,” Nikolai Varsegov, journalist .
“ Which of us did not want to escape forever from this prison, which occupies a fourth of the globe, from this monstrous empire, in which every police officer is a tsar, and the tsar is a crowned police officer … Speaking of Russia, they constantly imagine that they are talking about the same state as others; in fact, this is not true at all. Russia is a whole special world submissive to the will, will, imagination of one person – whether he is called Peter or Ivan, that’s not the point: in all cases it is the same – the personification of arbitrariness. In contrast to all the laws of human society, Russia marches only in the direction of its own enslavement and in the direction of the enslavement of other peoples. – Alexander Herzen, 1812 – 1870
So, “Who among us did not want to break out of this prison? The last two hundred years of Russian history are answered by: A.S. Pushkin wanted to, but they didn’t let him out; Turgenev, Gogol, Goncharov, Fonvizin, Dostoevsky, Gorky, Ehrenburg, Mayakovsky, Yesenin escaped to breathe the air of European freedom … But I promised not to delve into history, I turn to the present. “I took Russia. Apologia for the Russian emigration,” Roman Gul titled his three-volume memoirs in 1981, and how much Russia was taken away by those who were thrown out of the USSR in those years or who fled at the first opportunity – Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, as well as Rudolf Nureyev, Lyudmila Belousova and Oleg Protopopov, Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich, Ernst Neizvestny, Viktor Korchnoi, Maxim Shostakovich (son), Andrei Tarkovsky, Yuri Lyubimov, Alexander Zinoviev, Alexander Godunov, Savely Kramarov, Mikhail Alexandrovich, Alexander Galich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Vasily Aksenov, Vladimir Maksimov, Sergei Dovlatov and hundreds more, and with Jewish emigration, thousands. And at the same time, “dissidents” were sent to exile, camps and psychiatric hospitals – Academician Sakharov, General Grigorenko, Vladimir Bukovsky, Roy Medvedev, Igor Shafarevich, Anatoly Krasnov-Levitin, Gleb Yakunin, Yuri Orlov, Alexander Ginzburg, Alexei Murzhenko, Natalya Gorbanevskaya… According to the KGB of the USSR, the “potentially hostile contingent” in the USSR “consisted of 8.5 million people.”
But if you squeeze the most valuable thing out of a nation for centuries, what will be left? Sucks. “You can’t imagine how much human rubbish we have accumulated over many centuries of extermination of the best people, when small-hearted opportunists, scammers, executioners, and oppressors mostly survived,” wrote Ivan Yefremov, winner of the Stalin Prize, in the novel The Hour of the Bull . And someone fromof today’s Moscow writers said that today in Russia 25% of the population is liberal, 25% are Putin’s “patriots”, and the remaining 50% are a swamp. And I think that from the first quarter, almost all passionaries capable of moving have already left Russia, because only the sludge of the sludge can do what the Russian invasion is doing today in Bucha, Mariupol, Kharkov – and throughout Ukraine. “The main feature of the Russian national character is cruelty, and that cruelty is sadistic. I’m not talking about individual explosions of cruelty, but about the psyche, about the soul of the people. I looked through the archive of one court for 1901-1910. and I was seized with horror from a huge amount of incredibly cruel treatment of people … For 1917-1919. the peasants buried the captured Red Guards upside down so deep that their legs stuck out of the ground. Then they laughed at how those legs twitched. Or high on a tree they nailed one arm and one leg and enjoyed the torment of the victim. The Red Guards, on the other hand, ripped off the skin of the living Denikin-counter-revolutionary prisoners, hammered nails into the head, cut out the skin on the shoulders, like officer epaulettes. – Maxim Gorky (1922).
And I also think that the latest dose of bestiality and oscotinization was brought to Russia by the general and public transition to the mat. Moreover, as far as I remember, this linguistic “newcomer” began to take root from Putin’s “wet in the toilet”, “hang by the balls” and “wrap snot around his fist.” Twenty years of this vaccination and please – the generation that grew up in such a “great and mighty” is the Russian army. As the famous archaeologist Lev Samoilov wrote after leaving the camp, “it took mankind forty thousand years to come from a wild state to civilization, but a person who finds himself in a camp sometimes takes a minute to return to savagery.” If in the nineties of the last century Russia had an attempt at “new thinking”, then with the advent of the new century, it successfully returned to its “highly spiritual” self. “Our tankers, infantrymen, artillerymen, the signalmen caught up with the column of refugees and, forgetting about duty and honor and about the German units retreating without a fight, they attacked women and girls in thousands … Those who bleed and lose consciousness are dragged aside, children rushing to help them are shot … And the next unit is already behind. And again a stop, and I can’t keep my signalmen, who are also already getting into new queues, and my telephone operators are choking with laughter … To the horizon between mountains of rags, overturned wagons, the corpses of women, old people, children … ”- Leonid Rabichev, writer, former front-line soldier.
If from today’s Ukraine, which is publicly, in front of the eyes of the whole world, raped by her sister Russia, and from Germany, where in August 1945 the German women of Berlin had thirty thousand abortions, if from these historical milestones one glances at Paris in 1814, where French women “bistro” learned the pose on all fours “a la Cossack”, then here is the diagnosis of three famous and purely Russian writers:
“There are two Russias. The first – Kyiv has its roots in world, and at least in European culture. The ideas of goodness, honor, freedom, justice were understood by this Rus’ in the same way as they were understood by the entire Western world. And there is another Rus’ – Moscow. This is Rus’ of the Taiga, Mongolian, wild, bestial. This Rus’ has made bloody despotism and wild cruelty its national ideal. This Muscovite Russia from ancient times was, is and will be a complete denial of everything European and a fierce enemy of Europe” – Alexei Tolstoy, while working on the novel “Peter the Great”, 1940
“Russians are a people that hates freedom, deifies slavery, loves fetters on their hands and feet, loves their bloody despots, does not feel any beauty, is dirty physically and morally, lives for centuries in darkness, obscurantism, and has not lifted a finger to something human, but always ready to captivate, oppress everyone and everything, the whole world ”- Ivan Shmelev, an Orthodox thinker, was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“ As long as we praise patriotism and instill it in the younger generations, we will have armaments that destroy both the physical and spiritual life of peoples, there will be wars, terrible, terrible wars, like those for which we are preparing and in a circle which we are now introducing, corrupting them with our patriotism” – Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy.
***
Okay, we can talk endlessly about the expulsion of culture from Russia, let’s talk about Russian culture in exile. But not about the exile, when the nth part of Russia still listened at night to Alexander Galich from Munich, Dovlatov from New York and, pardon the boasting, my Red Square from London. When Solzhenitsyn lived as a “Vermont hermit” in the USA and wrote his “Red Wheel” there, he wrote it for the Russian reader in Russia. And Brodsky, and Aksenov, and Maximov, and, I think, even Limonov, working on his poetry and prose, saw before him a reader behind an iron curtain. In August 1989, having flown from the USA to Moscow, I received the most valuable literary award – my novels “Journalist for Brezhnev” and “Red Square” in cardboard samizdat covers and typewritten on carbon paper on tissue paper. “We were given three years for these books,”
And quite recently, until February of this year, many Russian-speaking authors, living according to the Gogol-Turgenev tradition outside their beloved homeland, wrote for the Russian reader. But didn’t this reader come to Ukraine today?
“My friend, a practicing psychotherapist in Kiev, wrote on her Facebook about the main request of her clients after Bucha and Irpin,” poet and journalist Elena Fanailova told Radio Liberty. “These are not psychotraumas from the murders of relatives and neighbors, not victims of rape… These are citizens in whose houses the Russian military have spoiled (not only robbed, not only smashed). In bedrooms, on dining tables, in children’s rooms. They wrote the letter Z on the walls with shit and threatening phrases: “We will feed the dogs with the bones of your children.”
“When we left Khorol along the road broken by tank tracks and went to catch up with our army that had gone ahead, we constantly came across inscriptions made with brown, blood-like paint on the fences and walls of destroyed houses: “We ripped off all the dill in Poltava and Khorol!” and “As soon as the guns died down, we fucked the dill. Let the dill fight – we will blow them in the asses too! Hungry cats sat on the fences above these “poems”, skinny, dirty dogs sat under them, and there were no people anywhere – neither in miraculously survived huts and huts, nor in gardens dug up by mines … But such a quantity of human excrement, and simply speaking, shit in abandoned houses, I have never seen and could not even imagine that people are able to defecate on walls, in kitchen sinks, on window sills and – imagine – on ceilings and chandeliers! Whether dill, retreating,
This, I beg your pardon, is a quote from my novel Preemption, published in Moscow in 2015 by the AST publishing house. Notice with what caution back in 2015 I warned the world about the specific details of the inevitable invasion of the Russian army into Ukraine. But it turns out that Stanislav Lem spoke on this topic much earlier than me. Comparing the rationality of the evil of the German Nazis with the behavior of Russian soldiers in Germany, he wrote in the collection Letters, or the Resistance of Matter (2002): , carpets, altars; in this shit to the whole world – what a joy it is! to trample, to crap, and to +++++++++++++++++++ this is also to rape and kill. And, commenting on this observation, Elena Fanailova suggests: “Let’s look at the symptom, which Lem elevates to the syndrome of the country… The soldiers in the Ukrainian towns crap not only from fear and stress. They behaved in an archaic way: if it is allowed to kill, then everything is allowed, and unpunished deviant behavior is the syndrome of an archaic “territorial invader”, they marked it like aggressive animals.”
Is it not because, brought to the last, animal state, the army chose for itself the last letter of the alphabet – Z – as a distinctive sign? And Vladimir Mashkov, undoubtedly a talented Russian director and actor, adorned the facade of his theater with this three-story letter, and forty other theaters throughout Russia did the same after him. I wonder what cultured person will go to the theater under such a swastika? “In general, decent people do not need to be in Russia. Any normal person should leave from there,” Rovshan Askerov, a Russian journalist and famous participant in the TV game “What? Where? When?”. “Let them be alone with their laws, their supporters, and live the way they want.”
But in this case, colleagues, which of us can now work for the Russian reader and viewer who remained there, with its newly flared syndrome of “invader of territory” and “shit for the whole world”?
Of course, Boris Akunin-Chkhartishvili, my fellow Bakuvian Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Baryshnikov can disown Russia behind the new Iron Curtain and declare themselves “Real Russia”. Although, in my opinion, in the same right they can call this initiative “Real Georgia” or even “Real Jewish-Armenia”. But it’s not about them. The fact is that even twenty million Russian-speaking citizens of the United States and Europe are no longer Russia and will never be, if only because their children and grandchildren will no longer write or read Russian, and their great-grandchildren will generally forget the Russian language. . As they say in the USA, I have news for you: the real Russia is Putin’s Russia, this is its current human content and content, these are its women who bless their husbands and sons to rape Ukrainian women, to torture and kill “Khokhlov” and “Ukrops” and parcels with Ukrainian toilets awaiting them. And exceptions, a certain number of “cultured” and “educated”, unfinished or not yet expelled, only confirm the rule. Once I read and even quoted Academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR Fedor Uglov and Professor Vladimir Zhdanov, who claimed that the schedule for conceiving moronic children in Russia coincides exactly 97.4% with the alcohol consumption curve, and that if a certain percentage of the birth of moronic children is exceeded, debilitation the whole nation becomes irreversible. At the same time, Yulia Latynina claims that the debilitation of Russia is being done deliberately. But this conclusion is unsubstantiated, since about ten years ago in Russia they stopped publishing information about the birth of moronic children, and we do not know the current state of affairs in this area.
And therefore, we, Russian-speaking authors, doomed to the unremovable shackles of the Russian language, found ourselves in a new reality. “In fact, there is no Russia, it only seems to be. This is a terrible phantom, a terrible nightmare that crushes the soul of all enlightened people … No “Russian civilization”, no “Russian culture”, – Vasily Rozanov. 1914
But “Comrade, believe: it will rise, the star of captivating happiness, Russia will wake up from sleep! ..” Chaadaev promised “our everything” back in 1818. No, colleagues, it has not revived even in two hundred years. Will we still wait?
Континент
