They are many even in Moscow - those who believe that it is not worth demolishing monuments to Vladimir Lenin. Throughout Russia, according to the Levada Center, as many as 79 percent. The role of Lenin in history is positively assessed by 56 percent of the respondents. 11 years ago such people were 40 percent. One can speak of the triumphant return of the first executioner of Soviet Russia as a nationally revered figure. If we add to this the consistently high popularity of Stalin, then it's time to declare almost complete rehabilitation of the USSR in the eyes of Russian citizens.
Russian journalist Konstantin Eggert in the commentary for DW notes that the growing popularity of Lenin and the entire Soviet is a moral catastrophe of Russian society and a challenge for the opposition.
The "Red Empire" comes back The success of Putin's propaganda is evident. 17 years of television wailing on the theme "What country is lost!" Brought fruit. It turns out that despite more than a quarter of a century of life in the conditions of any freedom of information, the average Russian still believes that his homeland is the USSR. The historical Russia for more than a thousand years for the majority - a phantom. Lenin remains for these people the founder of "their" state.
The authorities, of course, are completely satisfied with this. The country's top leadership, including the president, consists of fully Soviet people, mostly born in the first post-war decade. They, for the most part, did not find Stalin's time and did not survive the war. These people sincerely believe: the Soviet Union needed to go under the leadership of Yuri Andropov along the Chinese way, and then everything would be fine. They believe that the former chairman of the KGB died too early to be able to turn into a Soviet Deng Xiaoping, fill the shelves of stores, shoot who should be and save, as Alexander Prokhanov likes to say, the "red empire". Apparently, most Russians agree with them.
The Kremlin is in a very favorable position. Reproduction of Soviet myths in the national outlook strengthens his position. After all, the Soviet model of consciousness suggests that it is power, and not citizens, that "brings order" to life.
New martyrs, sausage and reconciliation Post-Soviet man found himself unable to assess the monstrous crimes and lies of the Soviet system. He selectively forgets what to remember unpleasantly-shot ancestors, humiliating lines absolutely for everything, blat and "sausage trains". But he remembers that "we were all afraid", "the pension was 132 rubles, and the sausage - 2. 90 "," order and stability ". In essence, we are talking about aggressive irresponsibility, elevated to the rank of a national idea. Behind the duty phrase "Do not demolish Soviet monuments - this is our history" lies the unwillingness to reflect on one's own responsibility for the fate of the country and the oblivion of the main national tragedy of the 20th century - the Gulag.
This is nothing but a moral disaster. First, for the intelligentsia, which for almost 30 years has not convinced the people that there are no goals for which power has the right to humiliate and kill citizens.
Secondly, for the Russian Orthodox Church, which (not without some reason) considers itself the guardian of national traditions and memory. Neither the widely advertised veneration of the new martyrs-clergy and laity killed by the Communists, nor the canonization of the royal family, nor the actual Christian sermon, in fact, had any effect on the views and daily life of the modern Russian person. It turns out that he still believes in the fact that "when the forest is being cut down, the chips are flying," and in the fact that they "did not put it in vain," and if they did, they "won the war". Patriarch Kirill has long understood: do not go against the flock and the Kremlin. In his public speeches, he has been actively justifying the Soviet Union for several years, offering to "reconcile" the imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet periods of history.
Thirdly, it is a catastrophe of the Russian society itself. It was in captivity of its own past. State TV managed to convince the Russians that the demolition of Soviet monuments in Ukraine is both "blasphemy" and "senseless business". That is, to call executioners hangmen is bad, and, in addition, distracts from something else, very important. Only from what - no one can say. Ukrainians were not afraid to call things by their own names and risked (albeit not without mistakes) to look to the future.
Change without a future?.
Russia is inexorably approaching the changes caused by the increasingly noticeable decrepitude of the current political regime. However, only a minority (if you believe the same "Levada Center", no more than 14 percent of the population) imagines the image of the future Russia as a democratic country that condemned Soviet practices, buried Lenin and respects its citizens. The majority - even against the backdrop of a growing outrage of corruption by the powers that be - either continues to believe in a "just king", or breaks down into dreams of mass executions of corrupt officials as the main means of Russian ills. For the time being, the democratic opposition is afraid to talk about both the legacy of the past and the future, fearing to scare off the majority. However, without this conversation is indispensable.
And meanwhile, inspired by the results of the Levada Center poll, the Russian authorities may well on the anniversary of the revolution, finally, allow themselves to return to the Lubyanka Square a monument to Dzerzhinsky. It is hard to imagine a more visible symbol of the false "reconciliation" that the Kremlin imposes on society and which turns into the posthumous victory of the Soviet empire and its creators.
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