Aleksey Lebedinsky
Today, the future of Russia looks frightening. I have fear. Really, I do.
I am frightened because Russia has Putin. You certainly know why.
However, I would be frightened if Russia lost Putin. Because for the last 15 years, the people in Russia were deprived of the opportunity to get acquainted with any decent and well-educated person who would be able to win the people’s trust, and also to take over the governing of the country and its people given the pathetic shape they are in right now. Therefore, if Putin goes, his place will be taken by one of his courtiers, who has his hands and his thoughts as dirty as Putin’s. Things might get worse.
So, Putin or no Putin, nothing good will happen to my dear, beloved country in the foreseeable future. Nothing good will happen to my family, close friends, colleagues, and, generally, to all the decent and luminous people of Russia, because they cannot be brownnosers. That makes me especially afraid.
And it is not the current regime that instills fear in me. Rather, it is this aggressive and merciless howl of the Russian lumpen-proletariat, of the people who have gone mad in their looking forward to the approaching slaughter. These people have no historic memory whatsoever. They are ready to rename their cities, again, honoring the names of the murderous maniacs who have arranged the genocide of their own people, the sadists who are obviously guilty in wiping out millions of human lives – including the lives of grandfathers and great-grandfathers of these very lumpen-proletarians.
The crowd that has gone mad, the crowd of men and women who have lost all their reason and memory, is a terrifying thing. On the other hand, the genes have the memories of their own, and these genes are waking up, and they are the ruthless genes of those whose ancestors used to be executioners and secret agents, the bloody hands and the heartless toy soldiers of the regimes that rid themselves of humanity, the regimes where it was normal to betray a person’s mother or child, reporting them to the secret police. And why did these ancestors of the contemporary Russians do all those terrible things? What for? Ask the contemporary Russians – and you will see that they still cannot quite understand that or sort that out. They remind me of the scene from an old Soviet movie, “Chapaev,” where one Red Army commander is asked by his aid-de-camp, “Are you fighting for Bolsheviks or for Communists?” The commander looks bewildered, but then says: “I am for the International!” The aid-de-camp asks, “For which International, for the First or for the Second? The commander gets totally confused, but then blurts: “For whatever Lenin is, I am fighting for that, too!”
These people have instantaneously swallowed the bait thrown into their brains, crippled by cheap movies about the Chechen war or about brave Russian troops liquidating domestic terrorists or even Mexican drug cartels. Their minds are also made foggy by the Russian government campaigns aimed at banning Americans from adopting Russian children (the so-called “Law of Dima Yakovlev” and the like). And what is this bait? Well, it is the contemporary “Russian National Idea.” This idea is simple, although impossible to explain or prove rationally. It is the idea that Russia is far superior to all other countries and that a Russian person is far superior to a person of any other nationality in the whole world. Moreover, this idea implies that Russia is somehow more important for a Russian than the life and freedom of his or her own children.
So this crowd is triumphantly carrying this precious National Idea, which, no doubt, will very soon develop into the Idea that it is OK to physically kill anyone, including your own neighbors, friends, or colleagues merely for their thoughts that do not match the Idea. There will be the ultimate “Those who are not with us, are against us” time.
Does it remind us of something? Oh yes, and this something happened so recently, less than a century ago. However, only very few survivors (of that tragedy, the Communist revolution of 1917 and the subsequent decades of terror and genocide. –GP) remember the horrible pain of losing their families, friends, the pain of torture and deprivation. Very few of them are alive now. But even if they are alive and want to share their stories, nobody will ever listen to them. The headless, mindless Millions Who Are For The Idea are incapable of listening.
These headless creatures can be fought only using brutal physical force and deceit. Yet, my friends and colleagues do not know how to use force, and they cannot deceive. They haven’t accumulated enough brutality and enough skills to deceive, because they have always been too busy implementing the words of a Russian poet, Nekrasov, who said that the goal of a noble, decent person is to “saw the seeds of rationality, kindness, and eternity.” Therefore, at the moment, the outcome of the possible battle is quite obvious.
Well. I am no Batman. So the only thing I can do is to pray for all of us. As we all know, when the cannons talk, the muses are silent. Hardly can we expect that a song and dance will be of any use. Although… maybe it will. I know for sure that somewhere, deep inside me, there is still this voice, powerful, husky, and overcoming all indecisiveness or doubt.
Aleksey Lebedinsky, a professor of music from Moscow
Translated by George Pinchuk
Source: FB post