It seems that Dissernet won an important victory. The WAC Expert Council on History decided that the doctoral thesis of Vladimir Medinsky's Minister of Culture is a meaningless set of propaganda cliches and falsifications, no relation to science that does not have. The dispute between those who submitted a statement on the need to deprive the Medina degree, and the minister himself, has been dragging on for several months and has become of fundamental importance, writes a Russian journalist, military expert Alexander Golts.

Professional historians pointed to not only obvious mistakes, which testify to the author's profound ignorance (which is, for example, the claim that the Bible was more accessible to the Russians of the epoch of Grozny than to their Catholic contemporaries, since "in the Orthodox believers all church books were written in Russian"). They pointed out meticulously that the author practically does not quote the original sources, because he did not consider it necessary to work in archives. That when he quotes translations of foreign texts, he uses not the best of them and draws his conclusions based on the mistakes of translators.

It was impossible in principle to object to these murderous arguments. And Medina, a professional PR man, made a fantastic somersault. He said that history as an objective science does not exist at all. The real story is that it "corresponds to the national interests of Russia", and in order to provide them, any, even sucked from the finger, the arguments are good. At the same time, what is the interests of Russia, is it determined by Medinsky himself, or by his high boss, who loves to speculate about Chersonesos as the spiritual cradle of the Fatherland.

Here the Russian government, which is under obvious pressure from obscurantists and charlatans, has come to an important point. It is worth acknowledging that if history as a science should be in Russia's interests, then tomorrow there will be progoods who will offer "correct", "nationally oriented" physics, chemistry, biology, cybernetics. Once in our country it was already: genetics and cybernetics, proceeding from the primitive (Stalinist) interpretation of Marxism, were declared "corrupt maidens of imperialism". And the then bacchanal also began with a landmark work in the field of the humanities - the work of the leader "on linguistics". All this, as we now know, has discarded domestic science for at least fifty years.

It would seem that Putin, dreaming about the digital revolution and the creation of artificial intelligence, must make a choice in favor of real scientific objectivity. But here there is a problem. A true scientist can not be said: do not go here, you go there. Invent yourself in your physics and chemistry, but in history, and most importantly - in politics, do not go. Of course, the desired can be achieved through mass repression. But then another concept of the development of science is required. Namely - through sharashki. To the creator stimulated the hope for an additional meeting with relatives and an additional portion of oil. But in due time and it did not help much. Lavrenty Pavlovich, responsible for the nuclear project, quite distinctly demanded that his assistants stop their affairs from informing about seditious conversations of physicists - an atomic bomb was more necessary than ideological purity. After spending some time in one of the leading American universities that gave the world a lot of Nobel laureates, I can say: all these creators are people extremely politically active. The reluctance of the authorities to react to their position in one way or another affects their scientific activity. So the choice that put Medinsky and Poklonsky before Putin is not as simple as it seems.

And bureaucrats from science prefer to fluctuate according to the party line. It is not by chance that several scientific councils, under different (sometimes completely shameful) pretexts, evaded the analysis of Medina's "labor". And now the moment of truth has come. People who are members of the Expert Council of the Higher Attestation Commission for History, have made a fundamental decision: the thesis of Medinsky has nothing to do with science. These people, exposing the minister of culture as a charlatan, perfectly understand that it can threaten them with troubles.

However, when their professional reputation was put on the map, they could not maneuver and called things by their proper names, that is, they called the Medina shit thesis. In recent years, I have observed with regret the total degradation of the domestic expert community (at least in the sphere I can judge of). Scientists who until recently seemed serious, on questions directly related to their subjects, prefer to speak in the style of an ensign of an anecdote. If the comrade major thinks that the crocodiles are flying, then one can not disagree with the guiding point of view: well, except that it is short, short ... People who call themselves political scientists, seriously argue that democracy does not exist at all, but there are only different forms of autocracy. That there are other, "non-Western", Asian, laws of development of society. And they try to reconcile Russian reality with the dynamics of world development. In fact, there is a widespread prostitution of the profession.

Historians rebelled. Soon we will find out whether this rebellion had a chance to end in luck. Here the Minister of Education "has included the little fool," stating that there was no plagiarism found in Medina's work. The point is not in plagiarism, but in the fact that the entire thesis of Medina is unscientific nonsense. It is not ruled out that the VAK presidium uses some formal excuse to retain Medinsky the title of Doctor of Science. But now, if an important Putin dignitary is deprived of the scientific title that he stole, this can be interpreted as a publication in the Pravda newspaper on April 4, 1953. On the deprivation of Lydia Timoshuk of the Order of Lenin, received for exposing "murderers in white coats". Arrest of Beria, exposure of Stalin's crimes, Khrushchev's thaw - ahead. The likelihood of such a development of events is extremely low. But what the hell is not joking.