On the death of Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928 - 2017) I always admired Zbigniew Brzezinski. He was a head! Unlike our dependent and independent political scientists, he played and won on different chessboards. He was the most successful opponent of the imperial statehood of Russia in all its forms. She knew her political skeleton perfectly: not skin, not meat, namely the skeleton, on which meat and skin change from time to time, but the essence does not change from this.
Russia many times rushed to the Poles with cries of Slavic love. In fact, she did not release the Poles from herself, not because she loved, but because she wanted at their expense to approach the core of Europe with her special imperial feelings. For the sake of absorbing Poland into itself, Russia was ready for anything, including Katyn.
Poland's hatred of Russia was selective - anti-imperial.
Russia responded with hatred for the hatred of the Poles: a stream of lies, up to the assertion that Poland unleashed a second world war.
The Soviet army liberated not the state of Poland, but once belonged to the empire territory and strengthened here as the creator and ruler of the artificial regime. This is the difference between the liberation of France by the Allies.
Some part of the Polish intelligentsia believed Stalin for a very short time. Still, any Poland has reappeared on the map. But it soon became clear: a political monster appeared.
Brzezinski lived away from such a monster. He has held many years of senior positions in the US administration and various international commissions. Delovito, without foam on his lips, he defined the weaknesses of the Soviet regime and beat them with precision. These were not abstract battles. Brzezinski saw his opponent as an aggressive, often incompetent and muddled power, insistent on bureaucracy, corruption, cross fear, ignorance of international realities.
It was he who created the "third basket" of the 1975 Helsinki accords, the basket of human rights into which Soviet power failed, breaking his neck in the fight against dissent.
This he pushed the Soviet Union to a deadly war in Afghanistan, an analogue, in his view, of the Vietnam War for America.
This he contributed to the development of the arms race, which the USSR could not stand, having lost the cold war.
He criticized the countries of the West, who did not realize that the collapse of the USSR would cause revanchist sentiments that would breed a meme about the biggest catastrophe of the twentieth century: the death of the USSR. Here, however, no one listened to it, deciding that the story had already ended and totalitarianism was finally destroyed. But, when the West realized it, it promoted NATO's advance to the east, which actually threw Russia out of Europe.
But here's the paradox! Criticizing Soviet Russia, Brzezinski paid tribute to Marxism. He knew him deeper than the Soviet philosophers who turned Marx into a dogma. Brzezinski actually considered Marxism the ideology of the future, accidentally fell into the hands of a political businessman from a communist utopia Vladimir Lenin. In any case, he considered Marxism an excellent tool for economic and philosophical analysis. At the center of America's political life was a genuine Marxist!.
The history of the relationship of the Poles to Russia is full of paradoxes. For example, the first Chekist, the Pole Dzerzhinsky. In Russia there are still a lot of its lovers, especially among the colleagues of the siloviki. Why not put a monument to Dzerzhinsky? But if you look closely at Dzerzhinsky's activities, he will prove to be the most radical destroyer of the foundations of Russia. Bolshevik-internationalist, he despised Russian values.
Compared with Dzerzhinsky, Zbigniew Brzezinski is simply a passionate admirer of Russia!.
Summarize Brzezinski's ideas, and you will see that they are more likely to resonate with the political dreams of Russian culture than to refute them. Russian culture in most cases sympathized with the revolt of the Poles against Russia. Sometimes there were misunderstandings when Russia was perceived (or should have been perceived?) As a country, and not a source of totalitarian values ??(the case of Pushkin). But the vector of anti-imperial criticism was mostly common and uncompromising. It all ended, however, as always, is bad: the intelligentsia hated the imperial regime so much that it overthrew the stick and gave birth to Bolsheviks, reborn in super-imperial Stalinists.
Polish thought, judging by the position of Brzezinski, cuts Russia in half. She hates the regime, which imposes its values ??on her until the complete destruction of Polish self-identity. But she eats creative revelations of Russian culture and is enriched with it for the struggle against the Russian Empire.
Brzezinski believed that Russia's withdrawal from the historical crisis is impossible without a rapprochement with the democratic systems of Europe. This does not mean a loss of independence of the Russian mentality. This is a meeting with our own, strengthened and dying, and again resurgent independent ideology of Russia, which has so far proved incapable of manifesting itself in a long-term everyday policy. And in the opposition this ideology is torn to pieces in internal disputes and mutual accusations.
In short, Brzezinski believed in us, the inhabitants of Russia, more often than we - in themselves. And he knew us more often than we do. Why? Yes, because analytical thinking from the very beginning of his work was flawless. Pole, born in a diplomatic family, not in Kharkov or in Warsaw, educated in Canada and the United States, Brzezinski showed that Russia can be understood by the mind, but it is impossible to understand the muddle.
He died without waiting for the restoration of relations between Europe and Russia. Perhaps he was too optimistic, and this recovery will never come. In the forms and boundaries that exist today. Enemy optimist, this is a special Polish title.
Brzezinski, of course, was not alone in his respect for Russian culture and hatred for the empire. He belonged to the Polish pleiad of reasonable critics of the eastern neighbor, who contributed to the defeat of imperial values, and, together with them, the political regime.
Together with John Paul II, and also the poet Czeslaw Milos, the director Andrzej Wajda, the philosopher Leszek Kolakovsky (these three creators I knew and loved), other brilliant thinkers Brzezinski pulled Poland out of the grave of Soviet pseudosocialism.
Poland is gone forever to the West. And Kremlin Russia has gone into itself. And moaning with happiness. From this strange prison happiness.
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