On November 7, 1917, the most terrible social experiment of the 20th century began. The background is, of course, disgusting: the virus, prices, salaries wish the best and the lock on optimism will not add. And so – everything is fine.
Photo: Alexey Merinov
So why not take a break, look at the calendar and remember that November 7 was such a holiday, the red day of the calendar? One hundred and four years have passed since that night, memorable to all Soviet veterans. But we remember! We went to school, we taught poetry, visual agitation hurt our eyes. Yesterday – early, tomorrow – late; Aurora missile; women's battalion; “Who's here temporarily?”; telegraph, bridges, train stations; Lenin in a wig and in October. VOSR: Great, October, socialist, revolution! The beginning of the Soviet period in our history. And the end of old, tsarist, bourgeois Russia.
Gone is Russia's one hundred thousand aristocratic nests, European culture, business and patronage. The country is far from ideal, with regular famines, average government, and somewhat peculiar kings; a country where only one class was at least a little loose and whose representatives could not just be taken and flogged. It is possible to dispose of the property by royal will, but it is not possible to whip it. Well, it's not that it was impossible, it used to be that it was whipped, but the whipped man can then shoot himself, they will converse, mumble, so it's priceless.
In the second and second centuries, counted from the manifesto on the freedom of the nobility, from Pyatimetrov and Saltychich, through selection and scratches of life, the heroes of Chekhov's games, Russian officers, the Mighty Handful, the creators of the great Russian, literature and art emerged. There was also a lot of trash to be honest. Once Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was working hard in Omsk, one of his comrades enlightened in disaster: “You (nobles) are iron noses, pecking at us!” It was clear to Soviet readers of “Notes from a House Dead”: 70 years before the revolution, the people promised an answer.
War communism replaced the somewhat unfettered pre-revolutionary freedom – and in general, it stayed with us until the end. This is how we lived until the mid-1980s. We are soldiers and our “wives and jokes of our soldiers,” said one lieutenant in the reserve.
November 7, 1917 – This day was the beginning of the most terrible social experiment of the 20th century. People came to power who, out of ignorance, practical inexperience, and primitive thinking, decided to be subordinate to the fate of the world, to know who was worth living and who was not, which class was the most advanced, and which was the most reactionary to life. organized for all people on the planet in all its details until the end of time. How many socks, pants, suits and ties depends on one person. Everything has been measured and rationalized, and since then everything has become a scarce commodity. The only thing that was immeasurable, which was always a lot, was arrests, conditions and punishments.
First they took dissatisfied, then potential dissatisfied, then all in general, simply because with the success of building socialism the intensity of the class struggle increased. In the skilled hands of the socialist legal authorities, the kolkhoz family became a German spy, the ballerina turned into an underground worker, and the state's top officials turned into a “vile gang of murderers and traitors.” Many people have dreamed for centuries of improving unreasonable and disorganized reality, but only the Russian Bolsheviks have managed to conduct an experiment at the level of a vast country.
What do our enlightened publicists usually want to talk to the public about on the eve of November 7?
We lost what an amazing country – rich, cultural, enlightened – on November 7th. Which is not true. Russia was industrially underdeveloped, with poor agriculture and a non-free country. Sometimes they remember the civil war, how brutally, using forbidden methods, the Bolsheviks won the war. And what wonderful people were on the other side, in the camp of Denikin, Wrangel, Kolchak, Yudenich and other white generals and admirals. He dreams of how Russia could develop if white won.
I am sure that after the victory in the Civil War, the white forces would have established a regime that no one thought much about. It might be over soon, but the ground wouldn't escape the bloody bath. It would certainly not be a regime of professional assistants and cadet intellectuals, but it would be a regime of black hundreds and reactionaries. Anyway for a while.
What else usually comes to mind on the occasion of a revolutionary anniversary? About the victims of Stalinism, about the tens of millions who died in the camps, starved, shot in cellars and suburban forests, about how ideologically clueless and stupid communist dreamers and utopians, how abnormal in the economic sense their ideas were. About the “yawning heights” the country was led by the “path to slavery” (as the remarkable Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek called the communist experiment). And all this is true.
But I'm talking about something else. About how painfully we say goodbye to our past. It would seem that we have long since forgotten what the communist regime is, people under the age of 45 do not even remember what happened there in the new style on November 7 and who overthrew whom. The first post-Soviet years are now called hard times. And this is partly true. Many of them had a hard time. The state has shifted “population care” to the shoulders of the people themselves. And the government accepted all the curses on its head.
People who gladly welcomed the changes in the late 1980s cursed Gajdar, Yeltsin and Gorbachev a few years later. After all, “how well we lived badly” in the 80's! We pretended to work and the authorities pretended to be paid. Instead of meat, the shops had plans to cut down the carcasses of cows and pigs, and we townspeople sat in kitchens, drinking Georgian tea, sometimes vodka and port, reprimanding authorities, listening to the Voice of America and the BBC. Occasionally we were rewarded with Indian tea or a bag of buckwheat at work, and we rarely tripped around the city for “discarded” products and other scarce goods, such as toilet paper, and returned home hung with this paper like huge beads. How proud we of the tribe of communist builders were to be ourselves and our prey at that time!
There were no packages, it was embarrassing to carry a shopping bag to work, so family members carried a string bag (a mesh bag tied with nylon threads) in their coat pockets. Just in case, at random: what if you run a deficit?
And suddenly it all ended. Many institutions and industries have stopped working (and how we made fun of these numerous and pointless institutions and industries!). Collective farms have collapsed. It all collapsed. Along with the salary – even a small one, but we lived on it! And retirees no longer have anything to buy and are not available in pharmacies …
Determined people appeared: some went to the bandits, others to the militia, but which was almost the same. Other determined people borrowed from relatives and went abroad, near and far: they bought clothes, shoes, cosmetics and any other goods that were not in our cities, and they returned home with huge suitcases, went to the markets or handed over the goods to the wholesaler. .. On trains with broken glass, people carried shoes and other goods to small and large cities in the country in huge suitcases, some making money on bread, part on vouchers for Gazprom's share repurchases.
For ten years, the great country lived like a huge caravanserai. They cursed Gajdar, elected Žirinovsky, sometimes worked in three jobs, feared for children (an epidemic of drug addiction broke out in the country), tried to survive …
But it was these years that became the freest and most important for the new Russia. We looked to the future with apprehension and watched the prices. We were afraid of populists. But as it turned out, the danger came from the other side.
When we said goodbye to the Socialist yesterday, we proudly believed we were post-Soviet. Sociologists have literally proved in their research that the Soviet people remained in the past. We inspected the full shelves of the stores and were convinced that the process of change was “irreversible”.
Our enthusiasm was understandable. We witnessed Soviet citizens faint when they first entered Western supermarkets. How Yeltsin shed tears when he first saw an ordinary sausage counter in an American store. It was at this full counter that we stopped in our reform enthusiasm. Iron door to the apartment, new plumbing and a clogged freezer.
– Freedom of speech is a dangerous double-edged sword! Why do you need it? People don't need a “blackhead” about accidents and explosions. People need a balanced information policy!
– Power exists to take care of its people! And people will work for future generations and serve as a pillar of power. So why choose and limit this power?
– The Parliament of the 1990s is a bunch of speakers and proud phrasers, there is a need to elect people who are ready to work for the good of the people instead of talking and make the laws necessary for the people! So why maintain a balance between the three branches of government?
Caring people who promised to provide us with work, housing, warmth, had to be given the opportunity to prove themselves. Why bother them – what about the fact that they consider human rights less important than the rights and needs of the state?
That's how it went and the goods on the shelves slowly thinned. And then, like the devil of the cross, a covid jumped out of the snuff box. And suddenly new “yawning heights” were revealed: confidence in the supreme power goes hand in hand with distrust of its basic institutions and severe suspicions of “chipping” the population. Propagandists are clueless and consumers of television shows, and rumors of a worldwide conspiracy are painfully trying to identify the main enemy.
But despite all the fears, I am sure that on November 7, we, the former Soviet people, will remember the former holiday. Some with love, some with disgust and most – with indifference. New problems have emerged in our lives and old recipes for justice and happiness no longer work for everyone. New wine will not remain in the old skins.
And our modest post-Soviet experience only says that we have to think for ourselves, that we have to rely on ourselves and our loved ones, that we have to be able to survive regardless of the goodwill of the authorities. If that's enough – I don't know, but it seems to be our only way into the future.