The book "SPECIAL OPINION" with Viktor Shenderovich (2014-2016) "- fragments of dialogues on the radio" Echo of Moscow "; Chronicle of three dramatic years of recent history.

Here, for the seed, the background of the ether from February 13, 2014, - a reminder of the unforgettable circumstances of that time (unforgettable, at least for the author).

On February 10, 2014, three days after the start of the Sochi Olympics, I published on the "Daily Journal" website a text called "Putin and the Girl on Skates". It was devoted to universal enthusiasm and unity, "patriotic" blindness, which even in those days affected strong minds.

On the poor "Hedgehog" long forbidden in Putin's Russia, almost nobody would have noticed this text in Russia, but it was reprinted by the site of "Echo of Moscow".

Almost immediately there was a scandal, which grew into a short but intense state baiting.

The requirement to apologize to veterans (for comparing the Sochi Olympics with the Berlin Olympics, 1936), and then publicly crawling on my knees on Red Square, was the innocent part of the proposals I received in those days.

The range of those who were indignant at my comparison - from Navka to Julia Latynina - impressed me in earnest. The collective of "state" Jews, the faithful heir of the Soviet Anti-Zionist Committee, loudly renounced me, its lousy sheep. According to VGTRK, in prime time, people were shown pornography made of falsified film with my participation. In general, it was something.

The fact that the legs of this abomination grow out of the guiding asshole was quite understandable, and before the conjecture was documented, at the autopsy of the nomenclatural correspondence. But the reasons for such an acute government inadequacy remained a mystery: God sees, I happened to publish texts much more evil and even personalized.

I called my friend, the editor of EZh Alexander Golts, and asked: do you understand something?.

He did not understand either.

We did not understand anything for two more weeks, before the annexation of the Crimea.

Then, of course, it reached us.

I just hit it in the nerve itself. Incidentally, of course. When in the text of the article I mentioned Sudeten, annexed two years after the Berlin Olympics (Olympiad, which legitimized the Hitler regime and so successfully united all the Germans) - I certainly had no idea about Putin's similar plans. Just trying to reason logically, brought analogies from the history textbook, nothing more.

It turned out, of course, much more instructive than I expected.

The striking detail of that plot. Speaking about the price that the world paid for that German, national upsurge in 1936 and the victory of the handsome athlete Horst Velke, I (in the series of other horrors of World War II) mentioned Khatyn.

Even after the publication of the text, I learned that the destruction of Khatyn happened, to a large extent, in retaliation for death, at the hands of partisans, this same Horst Velke, a favorite of Hitler.

Here is such literalism sometimes allows himself a teacher-story. Here are such sports successes are in her zagashnika.

About sport, you say, you are peace? Oh well.

In Sochi, Russia won the medal standings.

The people, in tears of happiness and affection, rallied around their leader; Sociologists recorded a noticeable growth in the rating. Until the massacre in the Donbass was a couple of months.

None of this was known either by me or by my interlocutor on that February broadcast. And we spoke mainly about the "style of polemics".

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