It is perfectly understandable when important national holidays in Russia begin to oppress, offend and misrepresent in Ukraine or the West. This is a political and information war. But it’s crazy to watch when Russian citizens connect to this company and start broadcasting about “Well, that’s it, again about the Victory Day, grandfathers fought hee-hee, enough to remember” and so on. You can treat the government, the president, the Soviet past as you like, but there are lines that cannot be crossed.
Is it possible for the opposition to have any moral norms only until the moment when it is possible to extract political capital from them? It is the white-ribbon tusovka that is the ideological inspirer of the “burning out” of historical memory. But did she find wide support among the people?
This is done clumsily, but very effectively. All activity goes in two directions. The first - let's call it conditionally "for morons" - uses an army of network trolls, tons of demotivators and derogatory slang. "Wiped out", "victoriousness", "grandfathers fought, grandmothers helped" - all this, despite the seeming squalor of people using these phrases, is part of a serious project, simply adapted for idiots. The goal is obvious - to mix the holiday itself and all those who defend it with dirt. The audience is "shkolota" and people with obvious mental disabilities.
The second direction is already aimed at older people, more adequate, but either experiencing problems with knowledge of Russian history, or having serious political claims to the state system, which becomes fertile ground for any propaganda. In this case, an appeal to the events of bygone days is nothing more than the implementation of Orwell's formula: "Who controls the past controls the future."
The architects of this vector are trying, by distorting facts and forging basic concepts, to prove that the historical foundation of our country is not a series of victories and achievements, but an unbroken chain of crimes and failures, abundantly sprinkled with blood. Whose exactly - the manipulator chooses himself, depending on the audience for which he works. One of the textbook examples of such manipulations is the activities of the notorious Lev Shlosberg, a deputy of the Pskov Regional Assembly of Deputies and the chairman of the Pskov branch of Yabloko.
What kind of party it is, and what a natural process happened with this very "Yabloko" - everyone who is even slightly interested in Russian politics knows. For many years, the only thing that this movement reminds of itself is constant scandals and bickering in the inner-party elite. However, in this case it is not about that. It is about the fact that it was on February 23rd that Schlosberg, in his telegram channel, decided to promote a nasty article by a certain Tamara Eidelman. In it, the latter, choking with saliva, proves that "there is absolutely nothing to celebrate on this day," since it was on February 23 that the Stalinist deportation of Chechens and Ingush began.
In other words, the standard liberal approach: "Hey, Russians, how dare you celebrate something, well, repent, and we will decide whether you are sincere enough to do it." Such accusations, personally, are always perplexing to me. First, it is not very clear what the Russians have to do with what happened in 1944. The names of the leaders of Operation Lentil are known, and there are no ethnic Russians among them. Secondly, I, of course, apologize, but during the deportation 1272 people died, which corresponds to the average daily losses on the local front sector during the period of not the most active hostilities. And people were not sent to a concentration camp or to the Pole of Cold, otherwise after 13 years the deported would not be able to return to their homes (after which a wave of rapes and murders against the indigenous Russian population swept across Grozny).
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In this case, any attempts to hang the yoke on the Russians in the form of "eternal repentance" are not only absurd, but also criminal, and sometimes smacks of blatant incitement to ethnic hatred. Why this is being done - we understand perfectly well, especially since, along with the accusations, the aforementioned Eidelman (and, consequently, Schlosberg, who promoted her writings) also prove that even Defender of the Fatherland Day itself was invented from scratch, since on this day “nothing Did not happen".
I want to ask right away - is the author's logic, in general, all right? After all, if Eidelman is trying to cross out the almost 100-year history of the holiday by what happened 21 years after its establishment, then by doing so she herself admits that subsequent events are more important than the original foundation. It seems that, tirelessly digging into the past, Eidelman and Schlossberg drowned in it, having lost any connection with reality. And in it, millions of people celebrating February 23, on this day, remember not "the creation of the Red Army", but their grandfathers, fathers and friends who fought and died defending their homeland, and it doesn't matter if it was near Stalingrad, in Afghanistan or in Chechnya.
But wait, maybe Schlosberg was just wrong? Well, for example, didn’t read the article to the end, or did Mrs. Eidelman ask Lev Markovich very strongly about the repost? It is unlikely, since only 3 years ago Schlosberg himself sketched something similar in the form of an article on the portal "Pskov province", in which he declaratively argued that the Russian state itself is an illegal entity that has no origins, roots, or power will.
However, is it worth expecting respect for our past from people who have nothing to do with it? From those for whom the Fatherland is not an absolute value, but the platform where you can do gesheft? Unlikely. And here the question is no longer in the moral qualities of Schlossberg himself - it is hardly worth talking about them at all when it comes to people who come up with heroic biographies for their ancestors - the question is that the country should have clear laws prescribing in detail that any person, who insults the historical memory of the Russian people, cannot occupy a deputy chair.
Nikolay Sevostyanov