When is it good to live in Rus'? Cycles of Russian history. When was life good in Rus'? Rus' will live well

When is it good to live in Rus'? Cycles of Russian history

Olga Naumova

Sometimes, when you see what is happening around you, you feel despair. For what? - we sadly ask ourselves. - Was it really impossible to be born at some more decent time? Have there ever been such “decent”, calm, prosperous times in Russian history? And what do you order us, living today, to do?

First of all, let’s define what “today” is. Where, on what part of Russia’s historical path are we located? (That is, we immediately postulate that this historical path we have.)

From the school course on our native history, most of us learned a terrible mixture of great personalities, uprisings and stages of enslavement of the peasantry (no one really understood who was enslaving them and why, but everyone was very sympathetic).

I remember how, while preparing for the entrance exams to the university, I crammed a chronological table: I walked around the room and, occasionally looking at the textbook, loudly and monotonously listed the dates. At the same time, I appealed to my dog, who looked sympathetically, but occasionally fell asleep, which completely drove me crazy. The use of various mnemonic techniques did not help: the dates did not want to stay in my head and kept trying to pop out.

From all this I learned one lesson, not very original, but vital: what you don’t understand, what you don’t see the meaning and at least some logic in, you can’t wrap your head around.

So is there logic in our history, is there any meaning in what happened once and in what is happening now?

Cycles

Traditionally, three large periods are distinguished in the history of Russia: Kievan Rus, Muscovy and Russian empire. They really differ from each other in all respects. Times closer to us go under the code name “new history” and “ recent history"(I was always interested in what will happen next - the “newest”? Or will it remain “the newest” forever? Or will there be no more history?). Thus, we separate ourselves almost like a stone fence from the entire previous Russia and look at the life of our ancestors as a historical monument - instructive, but fossilized.

And everything would be fine, but suspicious coincidences of some historical collisions are alarming: periodically Rus' is fragmented, then united again, periodically the capital moves, periodically there is a flourishing, and then a decline... Stalin is compared with Ivan the Terrible, the collapse of the USSR - with feudal fragmentation. .. But this just sounds like a metaphor, nothing more.

There are essentially two approaches to history: linear and cyclical. We have already rejected the linear one as being out of our minds. And cycles, in fact, are the subject of our conversation.

Any cycle consists of three phases: birth - flourishing - extinction. In relation to history cycles, this scheme should be slightly expanded.

Stage 0. Even before birth there is a necessity for this birth. Something is already knocking from above, wants to come true, but this “something” still needs to be caught.

Stage 1. Preparation. In order for “something” to descend, you need to prepare a place for it - “build a nest.”

Stage 2. "Spiritualization". Despite the “primacy of matter” that is ingrained in our heads, the spirit is still primary. This is the most beautiful stage: the “conscience of the people” is born, sometimes reflected in some person, image, symbol.

Stage 3. Bloom. Territorial expansion. A splash of culture. International authority.

Stage 4. Spiritual breakdown, extinction. Accompanied by historical cataclysms.

Stage 5, also known as 0. The need for the next round. Not just the very bottom, but even the “bottom of the bottom.” Cataclysms are growing. This cannot continue forever, and in the depths of decline a new birth is already beginning to mature.

Kievan Rus

The principle is clear, now let's return to Russian history. Let's start with the 9th century. There was a story before this, of course, but there is no completely reliable evidence about this time.

Stage 0. Until the end of the 9th century, more precisely until 882, the future Rus' was a huge territory equal to Western Europe and inhabited by tribes of Eastern Slavs. Remember? - glades, Drevlyans, northerners, Dregovichi, Ilmen Slovenians, etc. For the sake of fairness, it must be said right away that these same “tribes” (the word itself evokes an association with something wild, primitive) were, in fact, not tribes, but large alliances of tribes, even “unions of unions,” and in terms of population and territory were comparable to solid European states. But no matter how numerous and powerful these tribes were, they were scattered, and their lands were looked at with appetite by much stronger neighbors: the Byzantine Empire,

Khazar Khaganate, northerners-Vikings. Consolidation of forces was required...

Stage 1. ...Which the legendary one did Prophetic Oleg. In the already mentioned 882, he, an ally or relative of the no less legendary Rurik, descended from Upper Rus' (Novgorod, Ladoga) along the Dnieper, captured Kyiv by cunning and made it the capital of the newborn state that united the North and South. Future historians will call it Kievan Rus. And “having nailed a shield to the gates of Constantinople,” Oleg neutralized his dangerous neighbor - Byzantium. (In another 90 years, Svyatoslav would defeat the invincible Khazaria.)

Stage 2. But the created “nest” was not enough. The newly united tribes remained disparate units. The power of the state cannot glue things together. What was required was a single core, a spiritual basis, an ideology in the highest sense of the word. Usually the acquisition of this spiritual foundation by the young Russian state is associated with the adoption of Christianity in 988, under Prince Vladimir. However, we should not forget about our other source - pre-Christian culture (for some reason, some abusive name for it “pagan” is more common). Cosmic consciousness, merging with Nature and worship of the elements, expressed in the images of Slavic deities, was “balanced” by the Christian ideal, the ideal of love and sacrifice. This determined the spiritual essence of the still young people for many centuries.

And one more name: Princess Olga. She was our first Christian ruler, she spread the civilizing impulse to northern lands, she established relations with the Western powers... But this is not why she remained in history. Her name is surrounded by a halo of legends, many of which are very similar to myths. And it seems that it was she who gave the young state that elusive thing called soul.

Stage 3. The heyday of Kievan Rus is traditionally associated with Yaroslav the Wise (11th century). The state grows and strengthens, the capital - Kyiv - increases many times and receives a new sacred center - the Church of Hagia Sophia. The first monasteries and libraries were founded, the first books and icons were written, the first doctors appeared, and newly founded schools developed. The first written law is drawn up - “Russian Truth”. With the help of dynastic marriages, Rus' became related to all of Europe and became an important element of international politics.

Stage 4. The breakdown occurred in the 12th century, when, under the pressure of nomads and internal strife, the center weakened, and each principality began to live its own life, sometimes fighting for a place in the sun with its own Russian brothers. Even the capital of the state moved - to the Zalessk lands (north-eastern Rus'), to Vladimir-on-Klyazma.

However, the notorious “feudal fragmentation,” usually painted in black terms, had one major positive side: the principalities had the opportunity to find themselves, grow and strengthen. Beautiful temples of the 12th century have survived to our time, scattered like pearls across Rus'. They are no longer as huge and majestic as before (to match a single, powerful state), but more comfortable and subtle. Their unsurpassed peak is the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl in Vladimir.

The swan song of Kievan Rus is the reign of Vladimir Monomakh. He was the only prince who, with his indisputable authority, could reconcile and unite the warring parties.

Stage 5 The invasion of the Horde brought the line under strife and rivalry. It was still possible to do something, to fight back, but, alas, the motto of that time was “every man for himself.” And Kievan Rus, the strongest state of its time, went... no, not into oblivion, but into legends and epics, in the memory of the Russian people.

But amid the chaos, discord and destruction, a figure rises who, many centuries later, will inspire hope and show how a person can act even in the most inhuman conditions. Alexander Nevsky was a great commander who never knew defeat. Having become related to the khan, he could lead a calm and comfortable existence. But he chose at the cost of his own independence, his own life and even, as many believe, his own honor to protect, to overshadow native land from a terrible enemy.

Moscow kingdom

This, as you probably guess, is not the end of Russian history. The historical mission of the people, whatever it may be, can hardly be fulfilled in such a short period - just over four hundred years. This means we need a new round, a new chance.

Stage 0 - see previous. The country is in ruins - physically, morally, and spiritually.

Stage 1. Revival requires a new center. We owe much of the subsequent Moscow history to Daniil (the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky) and his son Ivan Kalita. Having inherited an ordinary and, strictly speaking, microscopic principality, they put it on a par with the largest and strongest. Already in the middle of the 14th century, Moscow disputed the right to a great reign. At the same time, the head of the Russian church, the Metropolitan, moved to Moscow.

Stage 2. And again we are convinced that force and money cannot be united. The stage of “spiritualization” of the young Moscow state is often called the era of the Battle of Kulikovo. This was the time of Dmitry Donskoy and Metropolitan Alexy, Theophan the Greek and Andrei Rublev. But the real teacher of the Russian people for many centuries - and until today - was Sergius of Radonezh. And the symbol of the Trinity showed the path to Light, Love and Harmony.

Stage 3. Having found a center, Rus' is experiencing a new flourishing. Under Ivan III and his son Vasily III, the capital was built again (the current Moscow Kremlin is a memory of those times, the end of the 15th - beginning of the 16th centuries), and culture flourished. Europe discovers a powerful state in the far East, in “Tatary”, and is in a hurry to establish relations with it. After the fall of Byzantium, Russia becomes the head of the Orthodox world, proclaiming: “Moscow is the third Rome.” Ivan III for the first time in Russian history calls himself a tsar, that is, “Caesar.”

Stage 4. The dramatic phase of the breakdown (XVI century) is associated with the odious name - Ivan the Terrible. You can talk and argue a lot about him, but one thing is clear: during his reign, one of the most important ideals of the Russian people - faith in justice - was shaken. The Tsar-Father, a sacred person, a defender of justice, committed lawlessness and tyranny, destroying those for whom he was responsible before God and Fate.

Stage 5. Having lost a just tsar, Russia lost a tsar altogether. The Time of Troubles is coming: anarchy, foreign invasions, riots, hunger and ruin... During the reign of the “Quiet” Alexei Mikhailovich, it seemed that life was beginning to get better. But one event puts everything in its place and says that the time of the former, Ancient Rus' is over. In 1654, as a result of the reform of Patriarch Nikon, the Russian Church and the entire Russian people split into two camps. Some follow the patriarch and the tsar to reform, others continue to keep the faith of their fathers and grandfathers. An irreconcilable contradiction ensues between tradition and the king, its guardian.

The 17th century does not give us such a figure as Alexander Nevsky, who would become an example and show the way to the future. But this century gave birth to people who grasped the need for a new time and prepared the ground for it. These were writers, philosophers, educators, just educated people. Many monasteries become centers of education, introducing Russia to world philosophy. The Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy opens - Lomonosov, Trediakovsky, Kantemir, and many other creators of our culture will later study there. The first Russian ship "Eagle" is being built. The first theater and secular art in general - painting, music - were created. Constant contacts are being established with foreigners, and in Moscow they already inhabit entire areas.

Russian empire

Now comes the fun part. For no matter how much we try to fence ourselves off from history, it is not going to fence itself off from us and dictates its own laws.

So, let us briefly outline the main milestones of this round of our history. Briefly, because this is our turn of history, we live in it and create it. And it is our personal interest and even bias that sharpens our assessments. Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov did not undertake to evaluate the last two hundred years in detail, speaking about the “aberration of proximity.” And yet let's take a risk...

Stage 0 (necessity). Ancient Rus' came to an end. Outside the window, the European Renaissance is ending, the Age of Enlightenment is coming. We are falling behind. And Russia is split again.

Stage 1 (preparation). Peter I began to create a new Russia. None of his reforms - neither military, nor church, nor any other - were his invention; the seeds were sown earlier, in the 17th century. He was inspired by the dream of a new Russia, in which new people would live - free, enlightened. To educate such people, a new capital is being built - St. Petersburg. Peter's work was continued by Catherine the Great, under whom Russia grew and became stronger.

Stage 2 (“spiritualization”). This is where the difficulties in definition begin. We would venture to suggest that this stage is marked by the name of Pushkin. In any case, it is fully worthy of being called the “golden age of Russian culture.” A lot is intertwined here - ancient Russian traditions (remember Pushkin’s fairy tales), and the ideas of the European Enlightenment, and the noble ideal of service, and philosophical literature, and the search for God...

Stage 3 (blooming). Pre-revolutionary Russia- a huge empire that has made a powerful industrial breakthrough and occupies a colossal territory. "Silver Age" of Russian culture. Here - Soviet period and Soviet culture. This is without irony - let's appreciate our past.

Stage 4. The breakdown began, according to the hypothesis stated, not in 1917, but in 1991, with the collapse of the USSR.

Arguments: throughout the entire previous period, from the beginning of the 19th century, Russia was capable of great things, it was inspired by ideals - different at different times: service to the Fatherland, service to the Beautiful, great power, building communism... This is not about how they were formulated these ideals, but that they were. The higher the ideal, the greater the deeds a person can accomplish in its name. A person without an ideal is only capable of small things for the sake of himself. A people inspired by an ideal is a great people. The people who won the Second World War, who defeated the darkness of fascism, are a great people. After all, the soldiers did not fight for Stalin and not for communism. They defended their homeland, the Motherland, they defended Light and Freedom.

And 1991 marked the onset of a new stage, a stage without ideals. All illusions regarding communism have been dispelled (I’m talking about the majority), the time has come for a shift towards “ideals” of a different kind. Plus again disintegration, the desire of parts for self-determination and self-development.

What to do, who is to blame and where to get the money

Well, what a funny picture it turns out to be! This means that we are living in a period that is not even the “bottom”; we still have to reach the “bottom”!

It is at such moments that the “damned questions” of Russian history, mentioned above, arise more acutely than ever. Let's deal with them in order, from the end.

Firstly, God be with them, with money. They have not yet saved anyone either from historical disasters, or from natural disasters, or, ultimately, from death. There is a good comparison: when a huge wave comes, the people standing on the shore are in an equal position. And at this moment the academician will not be helped by his knowledge, the millionaire by his money, the movie star by her irresistible merits. The one who is not afraid and finds a foothold will survive.

Secondly, there is no point in looking for someone to blame here. We are not angry with Nature that winter is coming.

And finally, what should we do? Options “sleep like a bear in a den”, “jump over” and “maybe it will work out somehow?” disappear.

The main thing is not to panic. If you are lost in the forest, then rushing about means getting even more lost. You need to stop, calm down, get your bearings, choose a path and go.

Has it ever occurred to you that it is not in vain that we were born in this difficult place at this difficult time? This can be seen as punishment for previous sins, or it can be seen as a special trust of Fate. After all, when something ends, something begins, but someone needs to see this new thing and show it to others. Showed that you can live this way - in a new, different way.

If Alexander Nevsky had not shown how one can sacrifice oneself for the sake of others, perhaps the quiet voice of Sergius of Radonezh would not have been heard, there would not have been the Battle of Kulikovo and Andrei Rublev’s “Trinity”. If the enlighteners of the 17th century had not dared to shake off the moss of the Middle Ages and overcome outdated canons, there would have been no Peter, there would have been no new Russia, Pushkin, and you and me.

“Nevsky, Peter I, Pushkin... We are not Nevsky!”

Who told you this? In his place, everyone can become a hero or a traitor, love or hate, go or fall... Everyone can walk along the lowest level or the highest... There is always a choice.

So, you and I happen to live in a strange time called the “transition point.” Old ideals have been destroyed, new ones have not yet been created. The new is already knocking from somewhere above, but who will hear it amid the bustle of the market, drunken laughter and screams of panic?.. Only those who listen and wait.

P.S. By the way, do you know what the mystery of the “mysterious Russian soul” is? In the invincibility of her idealism. Russians have always refused to see the gap between dreams and reality, between the desired and the possible. All nations strive for the ideal, but we immediately build it, despite all the impossibilities.

“And spring will certainly come, but how could it be otherwise?”

Bibliography

To prepare this work, materials were used from the site http://www.newacropolis.ru

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An ordinary yard in the city of Tomsk. Around the Khrushchev building, somewhere in the distance, shabby wooden architecture is hidden in the poplars. Two young women share a clothesline. They act silently and harmoniously, without entering into territorial conflicts. Pensioners are sitting on a bench near a flowerbed. A Caucasian boy passes by with a stack of leaflets “I’ll rent an apartment” and pastes an advertisement on the iron door of the entrance.

Don't sculpt! Don't put it on the door! - shouts the granny with the stick. - I'm cleaning this door!

Where should I glue it? - boys < Shka is not going to give up right away.

Don't sculpt here! Go there - sculpt!

It is in such courtyards that a hymn to a simple and measured life is created. There are no events happening here - it's just a housing issue.

We are going to visit the ordinary Frolov family. There are billboards all over the city shouting about the May innovation forum Innovus - Tomsk's answer to the Skolkovo project. It’s June, and the billboards are still standing, broadcasting that the issues of the future are in the past.

Vova

The head of a young family, Vladimir, meets us near the new high-rise building. He is 28 years old, his wife Nastya is 22. Vladimir makes a sarcastic remark to the Lada Priora in which we arrived. The same sheets and duvet covers hang around, as if they were quickly dragged here from the previous yard.

The Frolovs' story began with love and continued with a mortgage. Vladimir and Nastya came to Tomsk from regional villages to enter universities: Vladimir - to the polytechnic, Nastya - to the pedagogical one. Vladimir graduated and ended up at the Tomsk Electromechanical Plant (TEMZ). One day I met Nastya, who needed help with drawings. Helped. We got married. Son Seryozha was born.

Actually, after college, Vladimir chose between three factories. Not to say that the conditions were very different - he would have to start everywhere with a salary of about 10 thousand rubles. Therefore, he focused on objective (where salaries are not delayed) and subjective (whose business is more promising, where managers are better) indicators. I chose electromechanical. And now he himself constantly communicates with students, looking for personnel for the plant. The problem is described simply:

Enterprises select good guys in advance throughout the country; specifically, Tomsk gets only those heads and hands that want to stay here.

The main problem is the low start. Ten thousand rubles is not a lot of money for Tomsk. Naturally, Vladimir stayed here not only out of a great love for wooden architecture. As a promising employee, the plant offered him a mortgage. Duration - 25 years. Vladimir pays off the loan himself, and the company pays interest. In principle, it’s convenient. True, there is a nuance - an additional agreement, which states that in the event of dismissal before the completion of mortgage payments, the employee must return the amount of this paid interest to the company. So the future of the Frolov family is predetermined.

Do you feel like you've been deceived? - I ask Vladimir.

No. From the employer's point of view, everything is quite logical. If there were no such condition, there would be many people willing to purchase an apartment with the help of the plant. But the plant is not a charitable organization. He minimizes his own risks.

Is that how everyone buys an apartment there?

This agreement is signed only with promising ones.

What are the rest doing?

They are filming. Or they are looking for other options.

Did you have others?

The one-room apartment of the Frolov family is located in a new building on the banks of the Tom River. This is the third year Vladimir has been renovating it. The wallpaper in the room has just been hung. Now the hallway, bathroom and room are ready. Next up is the kitchen. There is practically no furniture, only the essentials: a crib, a computer desk and a sofa. The tea table has to be pulled out of the kitchen.

Why don't you hire a team of repairmen? Expensive?

It's not about money, it can be accumulated. - Vladimir speaks as if he had been rehearsing the answer to this question for a long time. - The problem is that we have nowhere to escape from the apartment during the renovation. Parents in the village, relatives in Tomsk live in the same conditions as us.

That is your family in captivity in your own apartment?- I’m being dramatic.

Yes, that’s right,” Vladimir smiles. - But without an apartment it would be worse.

Mortgage and real estate

Despite his daunting dependence on his employer, Vladimir is right that he is lucky: most young Russian families cannot afford a mortgage, and their employer is not willing to help them with interest payments.

In our country, only 15% of real estate is purchased with a mortgage, and in Europe - up to 80%. The cost of a mortgage (how much you need to pay in addition to the cost of the apartment) is an amount that depends on the body of the loan and consists of two parts: the interest that the bank receives for the mortgage, and the refinancing rate at which the Central Bank lends to commercial banks.

Banks earn more or less the same on mortgages all over the world: about 2–3% per year. But the refinancing rate varies greatly: in European countries it is, as a rule, no more than 2%, and in Russia - 8.25%. Our Central Bank prefers not to lower it too much, so as not to provoke inflation: it is believed that if everyone runs to take out cheap loans, there will be too much money in the economy that is not backed by goods and this will cause prices to rise. At the same time, high refinancing rates slow down business activity, including housing construction.

Another major problem that affects the daily life of the Frolovs through mortgages is the low quality of the state. The St. Petersburg Institute for Law Enforcement Problems recently tried to estimate the contribution of “bad institutions” to the price of various types of goods, that is, how much we overpay due to corruption and inefficiency government controlled. It turned out that real estate could cost 25–60% (depending on the region) cheaper if our construction and development industries were not so corrupt.

In addition, the average time for approval of documentation before the start of construction of a multi-story building in Russia is 702 days (in the USA - 40 days). Developers, as a rule, take out a construction loan before the approval procedure begins. And for the entire two-plus years that it lasts, interest accrues on this loan, which Vladimir and Nastya Frolov ultimately have to pay.

One of the product lines of the Tomsk Electromechanical Plant is air-cleaning turbines for the metro. Simply put, huge fans that, if the station becomes smoky, will quickly pump out the smoke. Now there are these at six stations in Moscow. But the contract with Muscovites is not long-term. And the bright future of the Frolov family directly depends on this.

What is your monthly budget?

We are discussing the parameters that influence improving the quality of their life.

Twenty thousand rubles after deducting the amount I pay for the loan body. Nastya is studying now and sits with Seryoga, only I earn money. About six thousand is spent on food, the rest on the child, clothes and repairs. Three to four thousand remain. Seryozha, hearing his name, sits up in his barred bed, but, not finding anything interesting, falls asleep again.

Labor productivity and wages

A specialist of Vladimir Frolov’s level in Europe would receive at least twice as much. And with a salary of 50 thousand rubles instead of 25 and the same level of consumption, he could have paid off the rent in just over three years - and at the moment when we talked to him, he would already be a free man.

Low wages are a consequence of low labor productivity: in Russia they are approximately four times lower than in the United States. This does not mean at all that Volodya and his colleagues work four times worse than the conditional John at an electromechanical plant near Detroit. The problem is with old equipment: on machines from the 30s to 60s of the last century, it is difficult to work at the same speed and produce the same quality product.

To be convinced of this, you don’t need to travel to the USA - just walk around the workshop of the Volodin plant, where in one corner a worker sharpens parts for subway fans on an antediluvian Samara-made machine, and in the other he loads blanks into a Korean milling machine, which turns them in 3D -models.

However, not everything is so bad: both at TEMZ, where Volodya Frolov works, and in Russia as a whole, fixed assets are gradually being updated. As a result, our labor productivity has increased by almost a third over the past 10 years. But still, three quarters of the machines are over 15 years old. They can only be updated with the help of large investments: on average, each machine for which Volodya goes on business trips to Germany costs 300–500 thousand euros.

The state understands that there is no other way, other than a complete update of the technical base of production, to increase labor productivity, and subsequently the salaries of specialists. Therefore, it takes various measures - sometimes quite chaotic, but persistent - both at the federal and regional levels. Thus, Tomsk enterprises receive subsidies from the regional budget to pay interest rates on loans taken out for the purchase of new equipment, that is, they themselves actually become participants in a scheme similar to the Frolovs’ factory-subsidized mortgage. Specifically, TEMZ, where Vladimir works, received such subsidies and tax breaks for 400 million rubles.

In addition, as Vladimir told us, the plant participated in a competition in which the most technologically advanced enterprises can receive 200 million rubles from the federal center for new machines. “We didn’t win, but we’ll apply again next year. We really need this money,” he told us with gloomy determination: with this amount the plant will be able to purchase 20 more new machines.

Another way to modernize factories could be the participation of foreign companies. A year ago, specifically for this purpose, the government reduced the list of strategic enterprises to which access to foreign capital was denied by five times. Of course, many foreigners are afraid to invest in Russia because of the insecurity of the rights of owners, but the president, in pursuit of foreign capital, recently put forward a new initiative. At the upcoming St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Dmitry Medvedev will officially open the Russian Direct Investment Fund. The essence of the idea is that the state will select the most promising projects and invest in them in half with foreign companies, thereby protecting them from corruption and obstacles put up by local officials.

Do you feel confident in the future?

No. Theoretically, orders at the plant could be reduced at any time,” says Vladimir. - If the guys who run our state do something weird somewhere, our plant will immediately have problems. This means that I will have problems too.

What does it take for you to be confident?

A salary of thirty-eight thousand is enough for confidence. If in our state,” Vladimir continues to argue, “there was a reorientation of industry under domestic manufacturer, then everything would be fine. For example, I travel to Germany for work. They basically try to work in all German. I am sure that the key to a good future in Russia is patriotism. - But you yourself recently laughed at a domestic car and go to Germany to buy machine tools...

So, first of all, manufacturers should have patriotism: they are obliged to do everything with high quality. The state must be a patriot of its country. “He doesn’t feel caught at his word at all.” - Necessary normal tax system, loans for businesses should be more accessible, and Russian goods should have priority in the market.

Russian machine tool industry

Our factories today are indeed very dependent on imports: 87% of new machines installed are not made in Russia. And in value terms, according to estimates from the Stankoimport association, the share of Russian machine tools on the market is only 1%. That is, modern and expensive equipment is bought abroad, cheap equipment is bought at home.

The government has been trying to update Russian factories, and at the same time rid them of excessive dependence on foreign suppliers, since 2002 - then the first federal target program “National Technological Base” for 2002–2006 was adopted. 10 billion rubles were allocated for it. Four years later, the project of exactly the same program, but already for 2007–2011, had to admit that not all goals could be achieved “due to insufficient funding.” And 50 billion rubles have already been allocated for the purchase of new high-tech equipment.

In the concept of the third, not yet adopted program for the renewal of Russian industry - already until 2016 - from 100 to 300 billion rubles are allocated for these purposes.

At the same time, the effect from already accepted programs not obvious. The current one, for example, states that government spending - those same 50 billion - will return to the budget in excess in the form of an additional 70.8 billion rubles in taxes paid. But it is impossible to find reports on the real impact of these injections on the state of Russian industry.

Prime Minister Putin, not limiting himself to existing programs, recently said at a meeting with machine tool manufacturers that another federal target program will be adopted - “Development of domestic mechanical engineering and tool industry” for 2011-2016 - and that already this year a billion rubles will be spent on it . And the Ministry of Economic Development came up with the idea of introducing innovations into industry through “technological platforms” - conglomerates of organizations that form a single cycle: from invention (scientific and educational institutions) before production (factories). So far, 27 such platforms have been selected, but how much money will be allocated for them is still unclear.

In the meantime, thanks to state support, our factories will learn to produce competitive products and leave at least part of the money for upgrading production in Russia and not abroad, the state is not going to give up direct protectionist measures.

This can be seen in the example of the same TEMZ. During the crisis, in 2008, the plant survived largely thanks to protectionism. In addition to oil valves and fans, it continues to produce what it specialized in during the Soviet era - jackhammers: due to the fact that these hammers are on the “protected” list, mines are “strongly recommended” to buy them from domestic manufacturers.

We ask Vladimir Frolov if they would have been able to compete if they had not been on this closed list. “No, of course, what can I talk about! The Chinese would immediately sweep us away. They have better quality and are cheaper.

This is not surprising: they can organize the assembly according to open air, and in our workshop in winter, no matter how hot it is, it’s 14 degrees - you have to work quickly, otherwise you’ll freeze.”

Financial system. Taxes, loans, inflation

It is quite possible that the majority of Russian enterprises would have managed without direct financial assistance from the state and protectionism if tax policy and loan rates had been more merciful to them. After all, why do TEMZ owners slowly update their machines? Exit to new level suddenly, taking out a large loan and replacing all outdated equipment, they cannot: the loan is too expensive. And if there is no modern equipment, the products are less competitive, there are no “long contracts”, and the plant has fewer opportunities to obtain “long-term loans” at a more favorable interest rate. The circle closes.

Inflation is driven mainly by two factors: the increase in tariffs of natural monopolies (and one of its reasons is the same technological backwardness and, as a consequence, low efficiency) and an increase in government spending - it was not for nothing that Volodya Frolov complained that every increase in salaries for public sector employees is not for the better side affects their family budget. There is a third factor: competition in the domestic market is suppressed by weak business activity, and it is stifled by interest rates raised to fight inflation. Another vicious circle that the state is actually quite capable of breaking is by developing low-interest lending programs. Not for the population, but for producers of goods and services.

In addition, the fiscal measures taken by the state to increase pensions and salaries for public sector employees reduce the amount of free funds available to large enterprises. Unlike small businesses, which quickly hid “in the shadows” with an increase in social contributions to 34%, enterprises like TEMZ continue to pay exorbitant salaries, because they do not receive cash from their suppliers - oil companies and government agencies. Therefore, they can only reduce investments: this year 36% of machine-building enterprises have already done this. The government is discussing options for reducing social contributions for medium and small businesses, but TEMZ will not be affected by these benefits.

Vladimir’s patriotism, unlike the state’s, is described in absolutely real categories. He wants to stay in Tomsk and work for the benefit of his family and enterprise. A good life in his understanding is the opportunity to travel, have a house outside the city and have three children. He is still fulfilling his civic obligations: he has become a good specialist for the country, he is valued at the plant, he went to work in the production of Russian goods, and technologically innovative ones at that.

The only problem with this usual Russian citizen- lack of dreams. More precisely, his dream came true in real estate. Within the framework in which he lives, it is impossible to fantasize and dream - otherwise everyday life will become unbearable, and he still needs to hold out for twenty-two years. Until the mortgage is paid off.

Nastya

The wife of an ordinary person, Nastya, does not interrupt her husband while he is reasoning, sits calmly next to her and waits for her

turn to talk about the good life. Her ideas are not very different from Vladimir's. Only she would limit herself to two children.

If you forget about the mortgage, when will life be good for you?

When Seryozha goes to kindergarten and I will have the opportunity to get a job. - She, like her husband, answers general questions very quickly: an ordinary family has plenty of time to tell themselves what they want.

To begin with, Nastya would like to receive fifteen thousand rubles, but twenty is better. The future teacher is not going to go to school, due to the negative experience of working as a teacher in a kindergarten: Nastya experimented when she placed her son in a nursery, but two weeks later the boy fell ill and the experiment stopped.

The guys say: there was problem of getting into kindergarten- they stood in line for some twelve thousand.

The quality of life. Social sphere

In our conversation with Vladimir and Nastya, it was felt that they were a new generation who were accustomed to solving their problems on their own, without relying on social security. Therefore, it was not possible to extract complaints from them about the state. Of course, they are annoyed by the healthcare system - in this they are in solidarity with the absolute majority of Russians: according to recent polls, 58% of the country's population are extremely dissatisfied with medical care.

Serezha had some kind of heart murmur,” Nastya told us, “and we rushed to the doctor. “Well, you can stand in line for a month and a half and get examined for free...” the doctor told us. We paid and had results the next day.

Moreover, even for the Frolovs’ modest budget, the doctor’s fee was relatively small - 500 rubles. What irritates me is not so much the corruption of the medical system as its complete unpredictability and lack of rules.

Another serious one social problem One that concerns young Russian families is the lack of places in kindergartens: there are queues of tens of thousands of children in many regions; in total, in Russia, according to the Ministry of Health and Social Development, about one and a half million children are waiting for a place in the kindergarten. The authorities seem to be stimulating the birth rate, but they do not have the appropriate infrastructure for arriving children: many kindergarten buildings have long been rented out for offices, and overly strict rules for registering child care institutions slow down the opening of private kindergartens or make them very expensive due to bribes to registration authorities .

In October 2010, however, new sanitary standards were adopted for preschool organizations, which somewhat simplified the life of private child care institutions and legalized the existence of home nurseries - this form, which requires the least investment, can partly save the situation.

A nanny is not their option, it’s an extra four thousand a month. A private kindergarten is even worse - fifteen. They even offered a bribe to move in line closer to the beginning, but no one took it. Vladimir asked the bosses to influence the situation - nothing came of it. As a result, somehow miraculously one day they were informed that there was a ticket to the garden. Most likely because two new ones were built in their area. The situation with kindergartens is generally interesting. The fact is that the Constitution guarantees us the right to school education, but kindergartens do not fit this definition. In essence, this is a personal problem for citizens.

Now Nastya can’t wait for autumn.

They're going to raise teachers' salaries by thirty percent, are you sure you don't want them?

No, it’s not mine,” she insists. - I would like to go somewhere to the guardianship authorities.

Chicken cutlets are sizzling in the kitchen. Nastya jumps up and runs to save them.

And in general, about thirty percent is terrible news,” Vladimir continues the conversation. - As soon as this happens, prices in stores will rise. And our twenty thousand family budget will decrease.

Nastya imagines another good life in the form of a trip to Sevastopol - her relatives are there. And then to Egypt - there are pyramids. Next is Thailand, because it’s warm and sea, Germany - Vladimir told a lot of good things about it. That's all, actually. In short, all this family needs for a good life is to stop being reclusive in their apartment: due to the fact that there is no one and nothing to leave the child at home with, they almost never go out.

The cutlets were burnt,” Nastya returns with a guilty look.

“Nothing,” her husband reassures. - So, let's eat the burnt ones.

Have you been to the restaurant recently?

“In September,” they answer in unison.

Nastya complains about her neighbors. They also have a housing problem: they are Uzbeks, several families moved into one apartment and live there. In principle, they are normal people, but in their huge ordinary Uzbek family there are too many children. And, of course, everyone speaks their native language. Seryozha sometimes gets scared when he finds himself among them on the street. He doesn't understand anything they say. Nastya is not against Uzbeks, but she would like there to be some centers for their adaptation to life in Russian cities. It would then be easier for newcomers with work, with education, and with neighbors as well. By the way, Nastya is not sure that her neighbors are Uzbeks. It may very well be Tajiks. She doesn’t care, as long as they don’t scare Seryozha.

Factory

To be honest, we didn’t really believe that Vladimir was happy with his work at the plant. It seemed that he plowed there from morning to evening at the machine, like a robot, and then returned home to repeat his life cycle. To some extent this is true, but everything turned out to be not so scary. Firstly, Vladimir works in middle management - between the office area and the workshop. Part of the working time he processes orders, sometimes he goes on business trips, but he can also stand at the machine. Secondly, “old equipment” is not all old. Part of the capacity has been replaced with German machines. The tool shop where they produce precision parts for oil pipelines is at least modern.

Next to the smoking room is a Soviet soda fountain.

Everything for the people? - I nod at him.

Yeah. By the way, water is free,” Vladimir declares with a touch of pride.

With gas?

Sometimes with gas.

It is not yet possible to replace all the old machines with new ones: the company does not earn that much. The main problem of the survival of such a business is the lack of long contracts. The plant is receiving short orders - they will fill it up in the near future. They make money mainly from air purifiers and automated control devices for oil pipelines. They also make jackhammers. But you can't get much for them. The ideal development of the plant, from Vladimir’s point of view, is two or three long-term contracts with oil workers or builders of the Moscow metro. Then they would have healed no worse than the Germans.

You meet ordinary German workers. How is their life different from yours?

They have distinguishing feature“Smiling,” Vladimir recalls the Germans.

Why are they so smiling?

They have confidence in the future. I don’t know for sure, but a German worker is socially packaged in full: swimming pool, gym, health insurance, house, car, and so on. This is an uncertain future for us. For example, they specifically make sure that a person does not overwork, so that he can rest on weekends. This is not a question of humanity. People are a resource in which money is invested.

But you can threaten your employer with dismissal.

First of all, we can't. I have a mortgage. Those, who is more free they can go to another factory, but this does not guarantee them a better life.

Population mobility

Maybe, better life people like Vladimir Frolov would be guaranteed a move to another city, to another production facility. Perhaps specialists of his level - fluent in English and versed in complex modern technology - are very much needed now, for example, in the Leningrad region, which is developing quite quickly. But he has no chance to move there and start earning more: he is tightly tied to Tomsk with his mortgage.

The lack of interregional mobility limits the distribution of labor in the most efficient way. In Russia, only six out of a thousand people move from region to region every year. In the US this figure is four times higher. As the rector of the Russian Economic School, Sergei Guriev, showed in his study, it is problems with real estate and administrative barriers (a young family, for example, in a new place has much less chance of sending their child to kindergarten without permanent registration) that drive Russian families into the “poverty trap” - when you need to leave, but there is nothing to go for.

After the crisis, the government adopted a program to promote labor migration: 800 million rubles were allocated to pay for the move and compensate for the cost of renting housing in a new location during the first three months. But so far only 9 thousand people have taken advantage of this program - in truly attractive regions you cannot rent housing for the money provided by the state.

Secondly, the employer is not against improving our lives, but for now it is not profitable. The problem is that the plant owners also have no confidence in the future, and social guarantees are long-term investments.

What will happen to your mortgage if you have an accident at the factory?

There is insurance for this,” here Vladimir for some reason becomes smiling, like the Germans, “so don’t worry about it. If something happens, my mortgage will be paid by the insurance company.

Vladimir's love for his plant is not an attempt at PR. Imagine a gambler who bet his entire life on zero. What can he do? Just believe.

Already on the way out he stops and says:

To be honest, I was very lucky. Millions of people could envy me.

With the participation of Viktor Dyatlikovich, Maria Ishutina

Photos: Oksana Yushko for RR

For most of its history, Russia was a much better place for happiness than Western Europe.

Almost any history course is a “history of the authorities” - pharaohs, sultans, kings, emperors, generals, nobility, their campaigns, battles and other fascinating events. Novels have been written about them, we admire them (which have nothing in common with the prototypes) on screens.

There are immeasurably fewer attempts at “people’s history,” although there are some. The history of any modern nation is like the skin of a zebra - dark stripes alternate with light ones, almost all of them accumulate more dark ones in total. The dark period for the “bosses” is not always the same for the people, and vice versa, although they often coincide.

Take a look at the map of the settlement of peoples in past centuries and ask yourself: where did the Medes, Kushans, Hittites, Umbrians, Thracians, Phrygians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Tocharians, Pelasgians, Etruscans, Picts, Prussians, Khazars, Orchons, Olmecs, Mayans go? This list is huge. But most of them had their own states, sometimes powerful and extensive. But they disappeared, their population dissolved into other ethnic groups, and in some cases was simply exterminated - genocide was a common occurrence in ancient times. Some states were ruined by the change natural conditions. The surviving nations are the result of a rather ruthless Darwinian selection. No one had a sweet fate.

The classical states that have survived to this day were born in a time when there were no “generally recognized international norms”, no one had heard of “human rights” or “minority rights”. The birth of almost every known nation was accompanied by countless atrocities, now forgotten or glorified. It is striking that the more limited the territory for which the struggle was, the more terrible the past of such places. Especially rich in this ancient history spaces adjacent to the Eastern Mediterranean - read the Old Testament. It happened there that one people ate another - by no means in a figurative sense (Book of Numbers, chapter 14, vv. 7–9).

Europe has also gone far, whose history is a chain of hecatombs that Europeans try not to remember. The calmness of medieval and later sources is striking, telling about the total extermination of the inhabitants of cities and entire regions captured during constant wars. The composure with which contemporary artists depicted all kinds of fanaticism is striking. Let's remember Durer and Cranach, let's remember Jacques Callot's engravings with garlands and clusters of people hanging on trees. We will return to Europe again.

The lot of Asia was no sweeter - take, for example, the “wars of the kingdoms”, which reduced the population of China significantly. Such horrors as a mountain of twenty thousand severed Turkish heads in front of the tent of the Persian Shah Abbas in 1603 or baskets of torn out human eyes as evidence of military victories are quite typical of Asian mutual exterminations. Their reasons were the same as those that tormented Europe: excess population, competition for resources and land.

Different worlds

A small young people who settled in the dense forests of the far end of the then ecumene - although in a fertile land, but terribly far from the centers of civilizations that had existed for thousands of years - avoided many troubles and dangers. True, he had no chance of rising. The fact that this happened is an advance of history, not yet fully worked out by us. There were, of course, difficult periods in the fate of our country, but what could we do without them? But Rus'-Russia knew periods of calm and stability that were amazingly long by world standards.

The combination of a relatively sparse population and the biological wealth of nature greatly diversified the food supply. Fish, mushrooms and berries throughout almost our entire history have been incredibly cheap, from the point of view of foreigners (the saying “cheaper than mushrooms” arose in the Russian environment itself). The endless forests were literally teeming with animals and birds, and therefore, to foreigners, Rus' seemed like a “huge menagerie.” As Nikolai Kostomarov emphasizes, hunting in Russia, unlike Western European countries, has never been a privilege of the upper classes; even the simplest people did it.

There was also no mortal enmity with the Volga-Kama Bulgaria in the east, although mutual campaigns did take place. Only the south was truly dangerous. But the peoples of the “southern underbelly” of Rus' (Obras, Cumans, Pechenegs, Khazars, Torques, Berendeys and others) did not develop an onslaught so powerful as to threaten its very existence. Moreover, they constantly became allies of the Russian princes. Deciding to finally remove the problem of the threat of the steppes, Andrei Bogolyubsky moved the capital from Kyiv to Vladimir in 1157. It could not have occurred to the Grand Duke that in 80 years an evil Horde would come from the depths of Asia, against which Rus' would not be able to resist. The First Great Disaster, therefore, came to our fatherland four whole centuries after the beginning of our written history.

These initial centuries, of course, cannot be called blissful. Pestilence and famine occurred (but never widespread), bloody civil strife did not subside, but in terms of ferocity they were far from Europe. For there, during the same period, several conquests of Italy took place, Frederick Barbarossa destroyed Milan, the Arabs captured Spain, and the Spaniards began the Reconquista, the Hungarians devastated Central Europe for almost a century, the Crusaders ravaged and plundered Constantinople and a significant part of Byzantium, duchies and principalities passed from hand in hand, the Inquisition arose. In 1209, the burning of the city of Beziers (out of seven thousand inhabitants not a single one survived) began the Albigensian Wars, which lasted half a century, during which half the population of southern France was slaughtered. And, to make the general situation clearer, one more detail: at the beginning of the 13th century there were 19 thousand (!) leper colonies in Europe. There was no treatment in them, they were locked there. The rampant disease should not be surprising: there were no baths in Europe at that time.

Does this mean that the ancestors of the modern peoples of Europe were too pugnacious, cruel, and unclean in comparison with ours? Of course not. It’s just that the number of people in Europe (modest by today’s standards) constantly exceeded the ability to feed them. A significant part of the population was always starving, it even went so far as to eat the dead, homeless people roamed everywhere, and the knights lived by robbery. War, uprising, and unrest were always preceded by a crop failure. Hundreds of thousands of believers would not have flocked to the first crusade, if not for seven consecutive hungry years before him. Why did the church ban baths? Because water shortages were widespread.

Now let’s imagine the then Rus' and its outskirts (in those days they said “Ukraine”), especially the outskirts of North-Eastern Rus'. It was surrounded by dense forests. It was possible to delve further and further into them, to settle along countless rivers, where (to quote Georgy Fedotov) “it was easier to burn out and plow up a piece of no one’s neighboring forest than to fertilize an exhausted field.” There were, of course, clashes with Chud, Vod, Yam, Ugra, Meshchera, but, by and large, there was enough space for everyone.

A wooden dwelling was erected in a new location within a week. With such an abundance of forest, who would waste time and energy on a stone one, so that it would later hold it in place like an anchor? This is how our extensive psychology and ease of growth were born, which allowed the Russian ethnos to populate vast spaces. Any people, regardless of language and race, would behave in exactly the same way if they found themselves in this corner of the world, at the edge of an endless forest - fabulously rich, but not hostile, as in the tropics.

The Europeans, squeezed by their geography, had nowhere to go. However, they not only exterminated each other, but also figured out how to increase yields and showed ingenuity, laying the foundations for intensive farming. The forest was not very accessible; they were built from stone, which meant they would last for centuries.

Horde yoke

The invasion of Batu (1237–1241) and the long Horde yoke became the first truly severe blow for Rus'. Many cities, whose names are known from chronicles, have disappeared, and archaeologists argue about their former location. The scale of regression is evidenced by the fact that complex crafts disappear for a long time, and stone construction ceases for many decades. Rus' paid tribute to the conquerors (“exit”). They did not keep garrisons here, but undertook punitive campaigns against the obstinate princes.

At the same time, the Horde stopped the princely feuds for half a century, and even when they resumed, they no longer reached their previous scope. According to Lev Gumilev, although Rus' was a tributary, it did not lose its independence, entering into relations with its neighbors at its own discretion, and tribute to the Horde was payment for protection. Under this protection, the process of consolidation of Russian lands began. This was facilitated by the church, which was freed from tribute.

With the strengthening of the Moscow principality, Horde oppression weakens. Prince (1325–1340) Ivan Kalita achieved the right to collect “exit” from all Russian principalities, which greatly enriched Moscow. The orders of the khans of the Golden Horde, not backed up by military force, were no longer carried out by the Russian princes. The Moscow prince (1359–1389) Dmitry Donskoy did not recognize the khan's labels issued to his rivals and annexed the Grand Duchy of Vladimir by force. In 1378, he defeated the punitive Horde army on the Vozha River, and two years later he won a victory on the Kulikovo field over Khan Mamai, who was supported by Genoa, Lithuania and the Ryazan principality.

In 1382, Rus' was again briefly forced to recognize the power of the Horde, but the son of Dmitry Donskoy, Vasily, entered the great reign in 1389 without the khan's label. Under him, dependence on the Horde began to be nominal, although symbolic tribute was paid.

Much is unclear about the “Horde period” of our history. Genealogical books are replete with entries like: “The Chelishchevs - from Wilhelm (the great-grandson of the Elector of Luneburg), who arrived in Rus' in 1237”; “The Ogarevs are a Russian noble family, from Murza Kutlu-Mamet, who left the Horde in 1241 to join Alexander Nevsky”; “The Khvostovs - from Margrave Bassavola from Prussia, who left in 1267 to visit the Grand Duke of Moscow Daniil”; “Elagins - from Vicentius, “from the Tsar’s nobility,” who arrived in 1340 from Rome to Moscow, to Prince Simeon the Proud”; “The Myachkovs are from Olbug, “a relative of the Tsar of Tevriz,” who went to Dmitry Donskoy in 1369.”

Researchers have different attitudes to the period of the XIV-XV centuries in national history. For some, this is the time of “gathering Russian lands”; for others, it is the era of the decline of veche democracy and “ancient liberties”, the time of the rise of authoritarian Moscow and the strangulation of the city-republics of Novgorod, Vyatka and Pskov. It was even customary to believe that post-Horde Rus' was a ferocious garrison state. But here is what historian Alexander Yanov, an expert on this era, writes: “Moscow emerged from under the yoke as a country in many ways more advanced than its Western neighbors. This “heiress of the Golden Horde” was the first in Europe to put on the agenda the main issue of the late Middle Ages, church reformation... The Moscow Grand Duke, like the monarchs of Denmark, Sweden and England, patronized heretical reformers: they all needed to take away lands from monasteries. But unlike the monarchs of the West, Ivan III did not persecute those who opposed this! Tolerance flourished in his kingdom.”

If Moscow were a “garrison state,” would people from outside flock to it? It would be like a mass exodus from Western countries to the USSR. Lithuania at the end of the 15th century was in its prime, but people fled from it, risking their lives, to Moscow. Who demanded the extradition of the “departures”, who - just like the Brezhnev authorities - called them traitors (“zradtsy”)? Lithuanians. And who defended the human right to choose their country of residence? Muscovites. “Moscow stood firmly behind civil rights! - writes Yanov. - Since the fugitive did not commit harm, did not escape from a criminal court or from debts, he is a political emigrant for her. She insisted on principle and even with liberal pathos on the right of personal choice.”

"Holy Rus'"

The famous emigrant theologian Anton Kartashev argued that it was no coincidence that the Russian people called their country Holy Russia. “By all indications, this is a significant self-determination ... - of grassroots, mass, spontaneous origin,” he wrote. “Not a single Christian nation has heeded the most essential call of the church, namely to holiness, the Divine attribute.” Only Russia “dared to use the super-proud epithet and gave its heart to this unearthly ideal.”

It's amazing if you think about it. Not “good old” (like England), not “beautiful” (like France), not “sweet” (like Italy), not “above all” (like Germany), but “holy”.

This was the historical peak of Russian religiosity. Its bearers did not consider successes in the economic sphere or in competition with other states too important (unless it was a matter of saving fellow believers). “Service to the Truth of God,” although not entirely realized in reality, lived in the popular consciousness as an ideal, helping to convert the peoples of the Russian periphery to Orthodoxy.

If Europe took the baton of Christianity from the hands of the falling Western Roman Empire and, over ten or eleven centuries of self-development, came to the idea of humanism, then Rus' remained under the spiritual patronage of the living and still powerful Eastern Roman Empire for almost five centuries. Humanism gave birth to the European Renaissance, hesychasm on Russian soil - the ethical and social ideal of holiness. Not seeing the real Byzantium with its shortcomings and vices, the Russians imagined Constantinople almost as the Kingdom of Heaven. Greek shepherds in Rus' supported this belief.

“Holy Rus'” could not be shaken by either the reign of Ivan the Terrible, or the Time of Troubles, or even the Schism, because the cultural superstructure remained ideally consistent with its Orthodox basis

Our ancestors perceived themselves as God's chosen people: Russian rulers on the pillars of the Archangel Cathedral are correlated with the biblical kings; in the paintings of 1564–1565, the images of Russian princes continue the genealogy of Christ and the forefathers.

The above is directly related to our topic. If the reconstruction is correct, "Holy Rus'" was a country of predominance happy people, it doesn’t matter whether they are rich or poor, the main thing is those who are deeply religious and happy with their faith.

Its chronological framework and even geographical outlines are, of course, vague. Recalling that history never goes well for long, Trostnikov nevertheless assigns it three and a half centuries: from the time of Ivan Kalita to the beginning of Peter’s reforms. “Holy Rus'” could not be shaken by the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Time of Troubles, or even the Schism, because the cultural superstructure remained ideally consistent with its Orthodox basis. Correspondence was apparently achieved just in time for the 14th century.

“Elements of pagan culture were rethought,” explains Trostnikov. “Perun turned into Elijah the Prophet, Radonitsa on All Souls’ Day, and so on.” The new elements, borrowed from Byzantium, were assimilated so organically that this gives the right to talk about the “exceptional plastic talent of the Russian people.”

Although this idea will not appeal to those for whom the concept of “Holy Rus'” is a purely spiritual phenomenon, it is obvious that between Kalita and Peter in most of the territory of historical Russia the limit had not yet been reached (for the then level of development and use natural resources) population density. According to the calculations of demographer and statistician Vasily Pokrovsky, at the end of the 15th century, in all of what was then Russia (at the same time the word “Russia” appeared) there lived a little more than two million people, six times less than in France. For centuries, chronicles hardly record land conflicts in Vladimir-Suzdal and Moscow Rus'. Anatoly Gorsky, who studied this issue in depth, writes about the “expanse of land” that remained there.

Bathhouse against the plague

Harmony with the "encompassing landscape" promoted other types of harmony. Sometimes it was disrupted by “plagues” and crop failures.

True, not to the same extent as in Europe, where, due to constant overpopulation and problems with hygiene, genuine demographic catastrophes occurred - such as the “Black Death” of 1347-1353. Because of it, England and France even had to interrupt their Hundred Years' War (which they fought with each other with bulldog tenacity for not even a hundred, but 116 years). France lost a third of its population from the plague, England and Italy - up to half, and the losses of other countries were approximately equally severe. Historians state that the great plague, having emerged from China and India and traveled throughout Western and Central Europe, reaching the most remote places, stopped “somewhere in Poland.” Not “somewhere,” but on the border of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (whose population consisted of 90% Russians, for which reason it is also called Lithuanian Rus), that is, on the border of the distribution of the bathhouse. And even more precisely - at the intersection of the absence and presence of hygiene.

Echoes of the “Black Death” then affected some Russian cities visited by foreigners (primarily Novgorod), but the scale of the disaster for the Russians was incomparable with what their Western neighbors experienced. Even the most severe plagues in our history - especially in 1603, 1655 and 1770 - did not cause a demographic crisis for the country.

The Swedish diplomat Petrei Erlesund noted in his work on the Muscovite state that the “pestilence” more often appears on its borders than in the internal regions. According to English doctor Samuel Collins, who had lived in Russia for nine years when this same ulcer appeared in Smolensk in 1655, “everyone was amazed, especially since no one remembered anything like it.” Leprosy was rare in Rus'.

Moscow (like other cities in Russia) was a large village, but this means, reminds the famous historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, that, as it should be in a Russian village, “every house had an extensive courtyard (with a bathhouse) and a garden,” and its inhabitants did not They knew there was a shortage of water, for there were wells in the courtyards.

How much water could ordinary people consume in the cities of Europe, where public wells, before the advent of running water in the 19th century, were only available in some areas (in addition, corpses of cats and rats were always caught from these wells)? May the defenders of ancient piety forgive me, but holiness is more natural to those who have a well and a bathhouse in their yard, even the poorest one.

Where was it more comfortable?

The pinnacle of the Renaissance is the wars of Cesare Borgia. Just one episode: on his orders, seven thousand residents of the city of Capua were killed right on the streets. The English virgin queen Elizabeth I (next to whom Ivan the Terrible is a meek child) executed 89 thousand of her subjects - and this was also a way to combat overpopulation.

During the Thirty Years' War, Germany was practically depopulated, and Cromwell's massacre of Ireland cost the lives of most Irish people. No less horrific were the atrocities of the Spaniards in the Netherlands and the Swedes in Poland. In the Vendée, brave revolutionaries killed between 400 thousand and a million people. And so on. True, in the movies all these events look very romantic.

No matter how blasphemous it sounds, but having once again gotten rid of a significant part of its population - thanks to war or epidemic - Europe made an economic, technological and cultural breakthrough. A labor market emerged, labor became more expensive, and this encouraged innovation and invention, and per capita consumption grew. Only moneylenders and landlords were in poverty.

But even while developing productive forces and trade, Europe gained weight extremely slowly. From the time of the Roman Emperor Augustus, when approximately 26 million people lived in what is now Western Europe, until the end of the 15th century (that is, in 1500 years), its population barely doubled. The next time it doubled in just 200 years, to end of XVII century.

In Russia, over the same two centuries, by the beginning of Peter’s reforms, the population reached 13–14 million, that is, it became six to seven times more numerous. True, this happened not only due to natural growth. According to historian Mikhail Khudyakov's (perhaps overstated) estimate, the annexation of the vast - much larger than modern Tatarstan - Kazan Khanate increased the number of inhabitants of the nascent empire by more than two million people. The conquest of the sparsely populated Astrakhan and Siberian khanates had almost no effect on the picture, which cannot be said about those approximately 700 thousand people led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky who became Russian subjects in 1654. This figure is reliable, since the oath to the Russian Tsar was taken by “the entire Russian people of Little Rus',” or rather, by all heads of families, Cossacks and non-Cossacks. In total, 127 thousand men swore the oath. Which gives, together with household members, 700 thousand souls. If we talk about the population of Russia within the borders of the late 15th century, then it has grown no less than fourfold over the mentioned two hundred years.

If today rapid population growth characterizes the most disadvantaged countries, then the opposite was true. This indicator, which is remarkably high compared to the rest of Europe, demonstrates the comparative well-being of the people.

I have already quoted in Expert (No. 44, 2005) Yuri Krizhanich, a Croat and Catholic, who lived with us during the time of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich for 17 years and saw a significant part of the then Russia, from its western borders to Tobolsk. He condemned the wastefulness of the Russian commoner: “Even people of the lower class line entire hats and entire fur coats with sables... and what could be more absurd than that even black people and peasants wear shirts embroidered with gold and pearls?” Krizhanich demanded “to prohibit ordinary people from using silk, gold yarn and expensive scarlet fabrics, so that the boyar class would be different from ordinary people. For it is not fitting for an insignificant scribe to wear the same dress as a noble boyar... Such disgrace cannot be found anywhere in Europe.” Poor people do not have the opportunity to be wasteful.

It's good to live in Russia

In Europe, where firewood was sold by weight and furs were available to few, ordinary people suffered much more from the cold in winter than in Russia, where winters were harsher, but fur and firewood were easily available. With all the reservations, the quality of life of ordinary people of Rus'-Russia, at least before the Industrial Revolution, was higher than in Western countries. For people who were lively and needy, there were more opportunities to escape, albeit at risk to themselves, from the clutches of social control.

The presence of such outlets led to the gradual settlement of “Ukrainian” lands around the core of the Russian state. But, for example, for the English people, driven to extremes by enclosures and “bloody laws,” such an opportunity first opened up only in the 17th century, with the beginning of the settlement of the colonies.

And also about the quality of life. I will give three quotes from the notes of foreigners relating to the reigns of Fyodor Ioannovich, Boris Godunov and Alexei Mikhailovich about the Russians: “They go two or three times a week to the bathhouse, which serves them instead of any medicine” (Giles Fletcher); “Many Russians live to be eighty, one hundred, one hundred and twenty years old and only in old age are they familiar with diseases” (Jacob Margeret); “Many [Russians] live to a ripe old age without ever experiencing any illness. There you can see seventy-year-olds who have retained all their strength, with such strength in their muscular arms that the work they can endure is beyond the strength of our young people” (Augustin Meyerberg).

There is no doubt about another integral way of assessing the past - I don’t know if anyone has written about this before. The fact that Chinese cuisine recognized almost everything as edible, even insect larvae, speaks very clearly: in this country they starved a lot and for a long time. The same applies to French cuisine. Only solid experience of hungry years could force one to find something attractive in frogs, snails, rotten eggs, rotten meat, and cheese mold. There is nothing similar in Russian cuisine. When we were hungry we ate all sorts of things, like everywhere else, but not for long enough to get used to it. Black caviar in Russia was fed to pigs for centuries until the French opened our eyes.

Another wonderful myth goes like this: before Peter the Great, a woman in Rus' was imprisoned in a mansion. Historian Natalya Pushkareva studied the scope of women's rights in the 10th-15th centuries to own and dispose of property, to acquire and sell land property, and to defend their interests in court. It turned out that the wife could be the guardian, which was absolutely unthinkable in those days in Europe. She was ranked among the first rank of heirs, and the husband who survived his wife found himself in a worse position than her - he could only manage her property, but not own it.

The wife herself, unlike her husband, chose who to pass on her inheritance to. Even an illegitimate wife could claim an inheritance. Having studied the laws on land ownership, Pushkareva showed that already in Ancient Rus' a woman could carry out almost any transaction even without the participation of her husband. For damage to a woman, the laws required the perpetrator to be punished more severely than for similar crimes against a man.

What Peter I abolished

Under Peter, everything that was politically promising in Russia XVII century. Before him, the country had a class-based and at the same time an elected representative body, and there were grassroots elected democratic institutions. We are talking about Zemsky Sobors and Zemstvo administration.

In Europe, where firewood was sold by weight and furs were available to few, ordinary people suffered much more from the cold in winter than in Russia, where the winters are harsher

In 1653, the cathedral decided to accept Hetman Khmelnitsky “with the entire Cossack army” under the royal hand. A positive answer meant an inevitable war with Poland and Crimea, and many participants in the council knew that they would have to take personal part in it. Moreover, this decision became possible thanks to the voices of the merchants; without their money, the enterprise would have been doomed - but the merchants, as one, volunteered to pay the costs. Not with “budget” money, with your own! But to the request for consent to start a war with the Turks for Azov (it required, according to estimates, 221 thousand rubles), the participants in the 1642 council answered so evasively that it was, in fact, a refusal.

If a foreigner came to Moscow from a country that had a representative body, he did not ask for an explanation of what the Zemsky Sobor was. For the Polish subject Philo Kmita, the Cathedral of 1580 is the Diet, the Englishman Jerome Horsey identifies the Cathedral of 1584 as a parliament, the Livonian nobleman Georg Brunno calls the Cathedral of 1613 the Riksdag, and the German Johann Gotgilf Fokkerodt comes to the conclusion that it was “a kind of Senate.” Gerasim Dokhturov, the Russian envoy to England in 1646, sees the English parliament quite symmetrically: “They sit in two chambers; in one chamber sit the boyars, in the other - elected from the worldly people.” The English “boyars” that Dokhturov speaks of sat in the House of Lords.

The Russian equivalent of the House of Lords, the Duma, which had existed since the 10th century, was abolished by Peter. The idea that the boyars did nothing but bow to the kings came from bad literature. The Duma decisions ended not only with the formula “The Great Sovereign spoke, but the boyars sentenced.” They sometimes ended differently: “The great sovereign spoke, but the boyars did not sentence.” Controversial issues aroused “the outcry and noise were great and there were many speeches among the boyars.” Most decisions were made without the sovereign at all. Surprisingly, the Duma’s “verdicts” did not require his approval. Klyuchevsky explains: “There were only two types of boyar sentences, which were always or often submitted to the sovereign for approval. These are the verdicts of the Duma on local disputes (about who is more noble - A.G.) and on punishment for serious guilt.”

In pre-Petrine times, local, zemstvo, power in Russia was elected. The vertical of power, from the voivode down, was represented by district, volost and township self-governing bodies. Cities had their own structures of medieval civil society - “hundreds” and settlements with elected elders. The Code of Law of 1497 prohibited trials without a jury (“at the trial... to be the elder and the best people kissers").

The elders were elected from local nobles, and their assistants - kissers - from local peasants and townspeople. In terms of the participation of the grassroots democratic element in local self-government, pre-Petrine Russia was fundamentally ahead of England, where only the reforms of 1888 and 1894 ended the monopoly of the aristocracy in local self-government.

They say that Peter “led Russia to Europe.” But reunification with Europe would have taken place in any case. The intensive method of development of not so geographically distant Christian countries was increasingly demonstrating its advantages, and there was no reason why Russia would not take advantage of its fruits. From the notes of the Frenchman de La Neuville, who had a conversation with Vasily Golitsyn, the unofficial ruler of the country under Queen Sophia, it can be concluded that the unofficial ruler of the country under Queen Sophia subsequently claimed that he was planning much more thorough transformations than Peter: he intended, in particular, to develop Siberia, build postal roads there, free the peasants from serfdom, and even give them land...

Isn't it wonderful? Serfdom has only recently acquired some completeness in Russia, and Golitsyn is already planning to abolish it. But power went to Peter, who, on the contrary, became the main enslaver in our history.

True, he built St. Petersburg and Taganrog. And also Lipetsk and Petrozavodsk.

Serfdom

Peter left the serfs at the mercy of his landowners by the very fact that he entrusted the latter with responsibility for the supply of recruits and for collecting the poll tax. Even more important was the fact that under Peter almost everyone lost their freedom of action. The nobles, on pain of punishment, had no right to evade civil service, could not move around the country at their own discretion. Only on February 18, 1762, 37 years after the death of Peter, was the Manifesto on the freedom of the nobility followed, allowing not to serve, to bask in one’s village, to travel abroad, and so on. Many peasants believed that from that moment on, serfdom became illegal, and began to wait for the next decree - on the freedom of the peasantry. They had to wait 99 years and one day.

At first, these expectations were so strong that they alarmed the throne. One of the reasons that Catherine II did not dare (although she repeated that she intended) to take a step towards the liberation of the peasants was the example of her contemporary Frederick the Great, who did nothing but worsen the situation of the German serfs. And her successors in the 19th century delayed reform, waiting to see how events would turn in Prussia, Westphalia and other German states, where the liberation of peasants began in 1807, but, according to Franz Mehring, “stretched out for two generations.”

This unrealized expectation broke through with all its force during the Pugachev rebellion. And in more later years, although patriarchal serfdom, being soft in its forms, cushioned social protest, it broke through, went into a self-sustaining mode, and it was difficult to cope with it.

We know very little about real serfdom. It is known that by the time of its abolition, the share of serfs and courtyards in the population of Russia was less than 28%, whereas at the end of the 18th century (six decades earlier) it was 54%. Since the birth rate of the serfs was no lower than that of the free, such a sharp decrease in their share in the population suggests that millions of peasants were freed during this time. How did they come out, what were the mechanisms? Both pre-revolutionary liberal historians and engaged Soviet historians are unanimously silent about this great process of the natural elimination of serfdom. The heirs of Herzen (who was himself a landowner and lived abroad on income from his Russian estate), they always looked for the slightest mention of the tyranny of the serf owners, skipping everything else.

Perhaps, over time, an understanding will come that serfdom was a peasant-landowner condominium, that peasants and landowners, meeting in the same church, could not seriously be antagonists. Patriarchal serfdom, being soft in its forms, absorbed social protest. The estate is not a town where you can call the police, but a relatively remote place. Landowner life would hardly have been possible if the masters had not adhered to unwritten, but obvious moral laws to all. In 1846, the landowner of the Maloyaroslavets district of the Kaluga province of Khitrovo was killed by his peasant women, and the investigation established that the women did this in response to his harassment. But here’s what’s important, I quote: “The district marshal of the nobility was put on trial for failure to report the bad behavior of the said landowner.” That is, their fellow classmates were responsible for the good character of the landowners. Russian estates did not even have fences - not to mention ditches, drawbridges, stone walls with loopholes, these are all the realities of European feudalism.

The most prominent expert on the social history of Russia, Boris Mironov, found a remarkable explanation for the low efficiency of serf labor. He believes that the serf worked until his small primordial needs were satisfied - and no further. “He saw the purpose of life not in wealth or fame, but in the salvation of the soul, in simply following tradition, in the reproduction of established forms of life. He made no attempts to expand the economy, as the bourgeoisie usually does, striving for maximum profit.” For the heirs of Holy Rus', this is very natural behavior.

Components of happiness

An important feature of Russian life has long been the abundance of holidays, church and folk. Russia’s contribution to the world “leisure technology” is not bad at all: it was here that such a socio-cultural phenomenon as dacha life was born about three hundred years ago. Dacha is Russian invention, which is now adopted (or reinvented for itself) by the rest of the world.

In the West, almost everyone agreed with Freud's statement that childhood is the most difficult and unhappy time of life. One of the main themes of English literature is the theme of unhappy childhood. Many people have noted this. The painful childhood of Byron, the painful childhood of Churchill, “Oliver Twist” by Dickens, “The Burden of Human Passions” by Maugham. Not to mention Evelyn Waugh. When there are no exceptions, a dozen or two examples are enough.

What novels, biographies and memoirs have in common is the lack of warmth in the family. Apparently, it has to do with the structure of the English family and the structure of the English educational institutions. The rods in them were abolished only thirty to forty years ago. Aristocratic schools are just bursas. The book “Those Strange Englishmen” says: “For English children, childhood is a period that must be passed as quickly as possible.”

But why are Russian memories of childhood all happy memories? I would venture to suggest that Freud’s teachings are simply more true for Western Europeans than for Russians.

From foreigners who have lived in Russia and speak Russian, I have heard more than once that nowhere in Western world There is no such thing as people staying up until the morning discussing eternal issues. And they all complained how sad they felt without this in their homeland. The American journalist Robert Kaiser, hardly the greatest Russophile in the world, could not resist the following confession in his book “Russia”: “It is worth spending one boring evening in London or Washington, just one long lunch with endless conversations about shopping, restaurants, tennis or skiing to appreciate the charm of Moscow feasts. A mundane, insignificant topic will not linger here. Conversations are the source of the greatest pleasure here, and after spending many hours in Russian conversations, I began to understand that it was this aspect of Russian life that I would miss most of all ... "

The strength of historical Russia

But no matter how you approach Russian literature, it least of all prepared its readers for totalitarianism. There is not a single image of a superman in it, destined by fate itself to control the masses. But she was always on the side of the “little man” - like, perhaps, no other literature in the world. The very presence of the “little man” theme speaks quite clearly of the built-in humanity of the society that gave birth to this literature. There was negativism in it, sometimes there was a frivolous “thirst for a storm,” but there was never pathos of submission (“give me a boss, and I will bow at his huge feet”), or admiration for power.

The Bolshevik utopian project (“a Western European and absolutely non-Russian phenomenon,” according to Oswald Spengler’s definition) was doomed for many reasons, although the one that became the main one would have been enough: it was incompatible with historical Russia.

The Bolsheviks took this force extremely seriously, throwing their entire arsenal of available resources into the fight against it - from the demolition of churches and monuments and the physical destruction of entire classes and estates to the complete denigration of national history. The expressions “damned past” and “birthmarks of capitalism” are still alive in popular memory.

The following fact shows how far the utopian ideologists were ready to go in this direction: in 1930, it was announced that the Cyrillic alphabet would be replaced by the Latin alphabet (in order to “free the working masses from any influence of the pre-revolutionary printed products"). Only the enormous high cost of the event, and even against the background of the breakdown of industrialization, saved our culture from this disaster. As for the slander against the Russian past, it has so permeated the worldview of our compatriots that dealing with it (and the entire subculture based on it) is the work of generations.

Their main leader, Vladimir Lenin, at the XI Congress of the RCP (b) in 1922 showed rare vigilance, saying: “It happens that the vanquished imposes his culture on the conqueror. Didn’t something similar happen in the capital of the RSFSR, and didn’t it happen here that 4,700 communists (almost an entire division, and all the best) found themselves subjugated to a foreign culture?”

It is said very precisely and frankly about the “conqueror” and “foreign culture”. And prophetically: the (supposedly) defeated culture really won - only, unfortunately, much later. History moves slowly.

We owe our victory over utopia to the very structure of our culture. The components on which only totalitarian power can rely are initially alien to her: cruelty and the habit of unreasoning discipline.

Our post-perestroika development is not imitation of someone else's model. Russia has returned to its civilizational choice, which is clear throughout its entire path - from baptism to 1917, and has returned to its essence. But this, alas, does not mean that the restoration of former values and the former natural sense of self is guaranteed.

But, most importantly, the utopia did not take root with us, we rejected it at the tissue level and left the experiment ourselves. But whether, for example, Germany could overcome its totalitarianism on its own is a big question. Hitler did not need five years to become complete master of the country. Civil War and monstrous, unprecedented terror. In a matter of months, he radically changed Germany to the complete delight of its population. Germany, if anyone has forgotten, is a country of “Western civilization”.

The bygone Russia had a high attractiveness. In the 87 years between 1828 and 1915, according to statistics summarized by Vladimir Kabuzan, 4.2 million foreigners moved into Russia, most of them from Germany (1.5 million people) and Austria-Hungary (0.8 million). By the beginning of the First World War, our country was the second center of immigration in the world after the United States - ahead of Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Australia. Left out of the statistics were the inhabitants of its outskirts who moved to Russia proper - the Baltic and Caucasian provinces, Turkestan, the Grand Duchy of Finland, the Poles and Lithuanians of the Kingdom of Poland.

Like any desirable country, large unaccounted immigration was sent to Russia. For example, many people think that our “Pontic” Greeks are the descendants of almost the participants in Jason’s voyage for the Golden Fleece. In fact, most of the “Pontians” moved to Russian possessions in the 19th century from Turkish Anatolia and from Greece proper. Many of them did this bypassing border registration and control - the Black Sea shores knew different interesting routes, read Lermontov’s “Taman”.

Large migrations of Persians, Chinese and Koreans were hidden. That is, instead of 4.2 million people, we may well be talking about, say, five, or rather even six million immigrants.

People do not move to countries of unfreedom - to places where a strict police regime and (or) heavy social control reign, intolerance reigns, and there is no respect for property. You cannot lure people of other faiths and languages into the “prison of nations.” The numbers of migration to Russia refutes all later tales of this kind.

We ourselves chose New Russia

It is impossible to forget how in 1988 the very air of cities changed from the first Russian tricolors, to forget that powerful atmosphere of freedom, enlightenment and solidarity, which reached its peak in the days of hundreds of thousands of rallies on Manezhnaya and Palace Squares and lasted until the “shock therapy” of 1992 and despite it lasted until the referendum on confidence in Yeltsin’s course on April 25, 1993 (the president then received 58.7% of the votes) and much longer, changing, weakening and becoming increasingly fragmented into shades. If the atmosphere had been different, everything would have turned out differently.

And this massive fortitude! There are detailed chronicles of those years, and the final years of perestroika look eerie in them: completely empty stores, attacks on trains, seizures of weapons depots, Western missionaries with sermons prepared for pagans, suspicious sects, financial pyramids, “humanitarian aid,” newspaper reports about abandoned border posts and that food supplies in the country are running out, predictions of an imminent military coup and imminent epidemics, the most fantastic rumors. And against this background - elation, fearlessness, faith: a little more, a little more...;

And on every pillar there are advertisements: “I teach how to use a computer.”

The new Russia was formed almost entirely, down to the smallest detail, in the last months of the existence of the USSR. The quantitative changes of the next sixteen years were, of course, enormous, but almost everything that we observe from modern life - both good and bad - appeared for a reason already then.

I don’t know how this was possible, but someone designated us Russians as unfortunate, for all centuries of our history, and many of us almost believed it.

We have not been unhappy for long in our history; there is immeasurably more light on our zebra. Maybe because of this, according to some law of compensation, we suffered so badly in the 20th century? But we survived. We are in our beautiful country, there is a lot of exciting work ahead.

www.expert. ru

Alexander Goryanin

Don’t be shy for your dear fatherland...
The Russian people have endured enough
He took out this railway too
He will endure whatever God sends!
He will pave the way for himself with his chest.
It’s just a pity to live in this wonderful time
You won’t have to, neither me nor you.
N. Nekrasov

Poem
Chapter 1
Introduction

Sorry, Nekrasov, friend, sorry,
That I touched on your topic.
I have to hold a debate
And reveal the eternal problem.
Your quest, democrat, -
Who lives freely in Rus' -
How the Lord's Prayer is now crammed;
And when you delve into life, it hurts your heart.
Same goals, not the same century
And the law is not royal.
I wrote without knowing the hardships,
About hard slave labor.
Thus, having “shaken” the sovereign throne,
You have become pious
Went to the estate to listen to the groan,
Tormented Russia.
You should be born now
Find out the fate of the people
An eagle's eye would have seen it
And the tenacious claws of supervision.
But it doesn’t matter, old man, don’t be afraid,
In verse, almost like a fairy tale,
I undertake to revive you,
We will pass without publicity.
- Where do we start? - It's up to you,
You seem to be famous -
You are a master at finding mistakes,
And your style is interesting.

Chapter 2
Petrograd

Here in front of us is Petrograd.
Seventeenth autumn.
Rainy day. There's a squad coming
Workers and sailors.
Old man Nekrasov is surprised:
- Are the people really free?
- Hurry up with us, grandfather, let's go!
-Where are you going? We are in Smolny.
-Where is the king? - Are you sick?
- The soldiers will kill you.
- I wish I could go home quickly, grandfather.
To the old woman on the bed.-
The sailors laughed.
The poet is at a loss,
But he walked, contrary to the laws,
In an era of renewal.
- Tell me, brothers, whose will he take?
And how did you decide?
-The people will take power into their hands,
The Soviets promised heaven.
Eh, simple people will live
Quietly, like in a fairy tale:
There will be a little land, your own house,
No wars, no bar, no Easter.
- Without faith, brothers, you cannot live,
I don't agree with you
We are all children of God, friends,
Without faith, the path is dangerous.
- Enough, grandfather, reading the psalter,
We believe in communists.
They want the best for us -
The thorny path is not scary.
All power to the Soviets! - our slogan,
And Lenin leads us into battle.
- Who is this, your instigator?
- Proletarian leader, genius.
- Well, God grant you to break the enemy,
And gain power for the Soviets,
Eat a hearty pie,
And everyone lives in Crimea in the summer.
The old man said and slowed down,
Then he stopped
Raised his collar higher
And disappeared unnoticed.

Chapter 3
Meetings in Moscow
On the Red Square

Years have passed since then...
I'm going as a demonstrator.
And suddenly he comes out of the crowd
An old man at the chime of the chimes.
He looked shabbyly dressed -
Coat, hat, boots.
Well, just like a cadet,
Not busy with work.
He comes up to me, takes off his hat,
Greetings as usual.
Of course I recognized him:
Nekrasov is an excellent grandfather.
We hugged and shed a tear,
And they stepped aside
So as not to disturb the crowd
Following the slogan.
He asked me: how are the people?
Does he live richly?
Who does he believe in, what is he proud of?
And I told him - indistinctly...
- It’s as if everyone is going the same way,
Probably to communism.
- They promise us, we are still waiting,
Like that patient - waiting for an enema.
He looked in surprise
Not knowing what to answer.
And, of course, I couldn’t stand it
He started swearing at everyone.

One - the GULAG started in the country
And destroyed half the world,
The other one kept the country in derma
And he avoided answering.
And the one with the eyebrows drank it all away,
Distributing it to “friends” like brothers.
The people worked and saved,
And his work was hellish.
There was also a marked spot -
Conceived "perestroika"
Finally destroyed the "house"
And he stepped aside.

"GUM" passed, and here is Varvarka.
People are busy with themselves.
I offered him a glass,
Refused - know the patient.

What he heard from me
The old man was excited.
And he suddenly said: “Almighty,
The country's fate is bitter.
Help her, you can
Give or punish.
Russia's path was difficult -
Enough for mother to suffer."
Somewhere a belfry began to sing.
The grandfather bowed with a cross,
And he stepped boldly around the corner.
I met him later...

Chapter 4
In Chertanovo

And it happened: I recently
I looked into our store.
Seemed a little strange to me
The old man is alone.
There was something familiar about him -
Beard and coat.
And suddenly it dawned on me,
Really, Nekrasov?
He looked at the shop windows
Tsokal is important with the tongue -
Like ancient paintings
Guarded under glass.
I approached him from behind,
He lightly touched his sleeve.
He shuddered - he couldn’t control himself -
The head turned;
He looked around with a stern squint,
The daring memory was strained,
In your poor voice
He said, almost tensely:
"How are you living? What are the prices?
Who is ruling this moment?"
- We need, grandfather, changes,
He told me: “Are you a dissident?”
"I mean, yes, there are others -
A thousand times smarter.
Thoughts seem to be good
They originate with us.
Young, who recognized fame,
Smart chess king
Becoming a politician by right
Took a responsible role.
Obsessed with freedom of opinion
And an impatient dictate,
Rejecter of rituals
"United Russia guys";
He walks with his visor open,
In opposition to the authorities,
So that you can breathe more freely
Cities and regions
To avoid conflicts,
Widows appearing
Humiliating verdicts
And empty words to the wind.
It won't be an easy battle
For the minds, freedom of the masses.
Power, throwing us bones,
He keeps us on a chain.
Here I seem to have faltered
I took a little breath.
And Nekrasov looked back
And in my ear, not out loud:
"You, my dear, be careful,
Speak and know your turn.
Is this possible about Power?
This will not go in vain.
This is already the plan -
Our “mother” has to pore over,
And under the authority's auspices
She has to endure it."
We parted carefully
Without saying goodbye forever
God willing, maybe we'll meet again
Or maybe never.

Chapter 5
In the church
...I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry,
And maybe my sadness
All of Russia will share with me!...
N. Nekrasov

Thoughts are like pilgrims
They are looking for the truth in their heads,
Sometimes they are obstinate
And they change their minds.

Here I am - standing in thought -
Why is there a split in the country?
Help, “Holy Abbot” -
Sergius of Radonezh, to me.
Help me understand nature
Impending troubles.
You are a Saint, God's favorite,
Give some sense and advice.

I look at the icon
And, I see a fire.
I hear screams, I hear moans -
People are dying - young and old.

Suddenly, everything went quiet.
Barely audible
A quiet voice said:

"You have forgotten that the Almighty is
He bequeathed to believe in God.
There was a time when people lived in peace
Observed church rites,
They prayed for the grace of Rus',
Ancestors were glorified in commemoration.
Rus' is the land of fathers and grandfathers
And we must take care of it
Everyone, from enemy raids,
Generations are destined.
But there was strife in the Church -
A comprehensive split.
And the people became passion-bearers
And for many years an outcast.
The sanctity of the Church was trampled -
Unbelief of unrest was born.
It was good luck for the enemies.
Such Rus' will be torn apart.
Rus' is strong in unity in the Faith,
In repentance of guilt.
A strong spirit in a healthy body
And in deep thoughts."

I thought about the word
I walked away from the icon.
The bell tower sang with ringing sounds,
The church choir echoed her.

Afterword

When we understand what to do is sinful.

For most of its history, Russia was a much better place for happiness than Western Europe Topics Battle for history: Without an easy victory To survive is a historical duty “Germany lost the war in the fall of 1941” Tags Russia Battle for history Almost any history course is “the history of the authorities” "- pharaohs, sultans, kings, emperors, generals, nobility, their campaigns, battles and other exciting events. Novels have been written about them, we admire them (which have nothing in common with the prototypes) on screens. There are immeasurably fewer attempts at “people’s history,” although there are some. The history of any modern nation is like the skin of a zebra - dark stripes alternate with light ones, almost all of them accumulate more dark ones in total. The dark period for the “bosses” is not always the same for the people, and vice versa, although they often coincide.

Much depended on where one or another people found their territory. Some were luckier - they found themselves protected by difficult natural boundaries (ideally the sea). Others, instead of such boundaries, got powerful neighbors nearby. Take a look at the map of the settlement of peoples in past centuries and ask yourself: where did the Medes, Kushans, Hittites, Umbrians, Thracians, Phrygians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Tocharians, Pelasgians, Etruscans, Picts, Prussians, Khazars, Orchons, Olmecs, Mayans go? This list is huge. But most of them had their own states, sometimes powerful and extensive. But they disappeared, their population dissolved into other ethnic groups, and in some cases was simply exterminated - genocide was a common occurrence in ancient times. Some states were ruined by changes in natural conditions.

The surviving nations are the result of a rather ruthless Darwinian selection. No one had a sweet fate. The classical states that have survived to this day were born in a time when there were no “generally recognized international norms”, no one had heard of “human rights” or “minority rights”. The birth of almost every known nation was accompanied by countless atrocities, now forgotten or glorified. It is striking that the more limited the territory for which the struggle was, the more terrible the past of such places.

The ancient history of the areas adjacent to the Eastern Mediterranean is especially rich in this - read the Old Testament. It happened there that one people ate another - by no means in a figurative sense (Book of Numbers, chapter 14, vv. 7–9). Europe has also gone far, whose history is a chain of hecatombs that Europeans try not to remember. The calmness of medieval and later sources is striking, telling about the total extermination of the inhabitants of cities and entire regions captured during constant wars. The composure with which contemporary artists depicted all kinds of fanaticism is striking. Let's remember Durer and Cranach, let's remember Jacques Callot's engravings with garlands and clusters of people hanging on trees. We will return to Europe again. The lot of Asia was no sweeter - take, for example, the “wars of the kingdoms”, which reduced the population of China significantly. Such horrors as a mountain of twenty thousand severed Turkish heads in front of the tent of the Persian Shah Abbas in 1603 or baskets of torn out human eyes as evidence of military victories are quite typical of Asian mutual exterminations. Their reasons were the same as those that tormented Europe: excess population, competition for resources and land.

Different worlds

To what extent did Russia share the harsh fate of Europeans and Asians? The answer will be surprising to many: to a relatively small extent. We learned from childhood that our ancestors “waged continuous defensive wars, defending their independence.” They did, of course. But they cannot be called continuous. A country without clear natural boundaries could not help but be attacked, but everything is learned by comparison. We have passed the cup that most nations have drunk. A small young people who settled in the dense forests of the far end of the then ecumene - although in a fertile land, but terribly far from the centers of civilizations that had existed for thousands of years - avoided many troubles and dangers. True, he had no chance of rising. The fact that this happened is an advance of history, not yet fully worked out by us. There were, of course, difficult periods in the fate of our country, but what could we do without them? But Rus'-Russia knew periods of calm and stability that were amazingly long by world standards.

The region was chosen exceptionally well - the Russian Plain is unknown to earthquakes, typhoons, dust storms, there is an abundance of water, there is no sweltering heat or excessive frost. The word “dry wind” appeared in our language only when Russia advanced to the lower reaches of the Volga. The combination of a relatively sparse population and the biological wealth of nature greatly diversified the food supply. Fish, mushrooms and berries throughout almost our entire history have been incredibly cheap, from the point of view of foreigners (the saying “cheaper than mushrooms” arose in the Russian environment itself). The endless forests were literally teeming with animals and birds, and therefore, to foreigners, Rus' seemed like a “huge menagerie.” As Nikolai Kostomarov emphasizes, hunting in Russia, unlike Western European countries, has never been a privilege of the upper classes; even the simplest people did it.

We were lucky with our neighbors too. Attempts to attack Rus' from the west in the Middle Ages did not have serious consequences. The northern newcomers, the Varangians (even if we accept the “Norman theory”), quickly disappeared into the Slavic environment: Rurik’s grandson already bears the name Svyatoslav. For comparison: the Normans conquered Britain in the 11th century, but until the 15th century the court and nobility spoke French not only among themselves, but even with the people - the French language of decrees. There was also no mortal enmity with the Volga-Kama Bulgaria in the east, although mutual campaigns did take place. Only the south was truly dangerous. But the peoples of the “southern underbelly” of Rus' (Obras, Cumans, Pechenegs, Khazars, Torques, Berendeys and others) did not develop an onslaught so powerful as to threaten its very existence. Moreover, they constantly became allies of the Russian princes. Deciding to finally remove the problem of the threat of the steppes, Andrei Bogolyubsky moved the capital from Kyiv to Vladimir in 1157. It could not have occurred to the Grand Duke that in 80 years an evil Horde would come from the depths of Asia, against which Rus' would not be able to resist. The First Great Disaster, therefore, came to our fatherland four whole centuries after the beginning of our written history.

And, to make the general situation clearer, one more detail: at the beginning of the 13th century there were 19 thousand (!) leper colonies in Europe. There was no treatment in them, they were locked there. The rampant disease should not be surprising: there were no baths in Europe at that time. Does this mean that the ancestors of the modern peoples of Europe were too pugnacious, cruel, and unclean in comparison with ours? Of course not. It’s just that the number of people in Europe (modest by today’s standards) constantly exceeded the ability to feed them. A significant part of the population was always starving, it even went so far as to eat the dead, homeless people roamed everywhere, and the knights lived by robbery. War, uprising, and unrest were always preceded by a crop failure. Hundreds of thousands of believers would not have rushed to the first crusade if it had not been for seven consecutive years of famine before it.

Why did the church ban baths? Because water shortages were widespread. Now let’s imagine the then Rus' and its outskirts (in those days they said “Ukraine”), especially the outskirts of North-Eastern Rus'. It was surrounded by dense forests. It was possible to delve further and further into them, to settle along countless rivers, where (to quote Georgy Fedotov) “it was easier to burn out and plow up a piece of no one’s neighboring forest than to fertilize an exhausted field.”

There were, of course, clashes with Chud, Vod, Yam, Ugra, Meshchera, but, by and large, there was enough space for everyone. A wooden dwelling was erected in a new location within a week. With such an abundance of forest, who would waste time and energy on a stone one, so that it would later hold it in place like an anchor?

This is how our extensive psychology and ease of growth were born, which allowed the Russian ethnos to populate vast spaces. Any people, regardless of language and race, would behave in exactly the same way if they found themselves in this corner of the world, at the edge of an endless forest - fabulously rich, but not hostile, as in the tropics. The Europeans, squeezed by their geography, had nowhere to go.

However, they not only exterminated each other, but also figured out how to increase yields and showed ingenuity, laying the foundations for intensive farming. The forest was not very accessible; they were built from stone, which meant they would last for centuries. Horde yoke Illustration: AKG/East News The invasion of Batu (1237–1241) and the long Horde yoke became the first truly severe blow for Rus'. Many cities, whose names are known from chronicles, have disappeared, and archaeologists argue about their former location. The scale of regression is evidenced by the fact that complex crafts disappear for a long time, and stone construction ceases for many decades. Rus' paid tribute to the conquerors (“exit”). They did not keep garrisons here, but undertook punitive campaigns against the obstinate princes. At the same time, the Horde stopped the princely feuds for half a century, and even when they resumed, they no longer reached their previous scope.

According to Lev Gumilev, although Rus' was a tributary, it did not lose its independence, entering into relations with its neighbors at its own discretion, and tribute to the Horde was payment for protection. Under this protection, the process of consolidation of Russian lands began. This was facilitated by the church, which was freed from tribute. With the strengthening of the Moscow principality, Horde oppression weakens. Prince (1325–1340) Ivan Kalita achieved the right to collect “exit” from all Russian principalities, which greatly enriched Moscow. The orders of the khans of the Golden Horde, not backed up by military force, were no longer carried out by the Russian princes. The Moscow prince (1359–1389) Dmitry Donskoy did not recognize the khan's labels issued to his rivals and annexed the Grand Duchy of Vladimir by force. In 1378, he defeated the punitive Horde army on the Vozha River, and two years later he won a victory on the Kulikovo field over Khan Mamai, who was supported by Genoa, Lithuania and the Ryazan principality. In 1382, Rus' was again briefly forced to recognize the power of the Horde, but the son of Dmitry Donskoy, Vasily, entered the great reign in 1389 without the khan's label. Under him, dependence on the Horde began to be nominal, although symbolic tribute was paid.

However, this tribute, as Russian historian Sergei Nefedov showed, was very small from the very beginning; the famous “tithe” was spread over seven to eight years. Khan Edigei's attempt to restore the previous order (1408) cost Rus' dearly, but he did not take Moscow. During a dozen subsequent campaigns, the Horde ravaged the outskirts of Rus', but did not achieve their main goal. And there the Horde itself split into several khanates. Much is unclear about the “Horde period” of our history. Genealogical books are replete with entries like: “The Chelishchevs - from Wilhelm (the great-grandson of the Elector of Luneburg), who arrived in Rus' in 1237”; “The Ogarevs are a Russian noble family, from Murza Kutlu-Mamet, who left the Horde in 1241 to join Alexander Nevsky”; “The Khvostovs - from Margrave Bassavola from Prussia, who left in 1267 to visit the Grand Duke of Moscow Daniil”; “Elagins - from Vicentius, “from the Tsar’s nobility,” who arrived in 1340 from Rome to Moscow, to Prince Simeon the Proud”; “The Myachkovs are from Olbug, “a relative of the Tsar of Tevriz,” who went to Dmitry Donskoy in 1369.” And so on.

That is, during the time of the “yoke” (Gumilyov often put this word in quotation marks), foreigners go to serve the princes of seemingly defeated Rus'! And every sixth one is from the Horde.

Researchers have different attitudes to the period of the XIV-XV centuries in Russian history. For some, this is the time of “gathering Russian lands”; for others, it is the era of the decline of veche democracy and “ancient liberties”, the time of the rise of authoritarian Moscow and the strangulation of the city-republics of Novgorod, Vyatka and Pskov. It was even customary to believe that post-Horde Rus' was a ferocious garrison state. But here is what historian Alexander Yanov, an expert on this era, writes: “Moscow emerged from under the yoke as a country in many ways more advanced than its Western neighbors. This “heiress of the Golden Horde” was the first in Europe to put on the agenda the main issue of the late Middle Ages, church reformation...

The Moscow Grand Duke, like the monarchs of Denmark, Sweden and England, patronized the heretical reformers: they all needed to take away lands from the monasteries. But unlike the monarchs of the West, Ivan III did not persecute those who opposed this! Tolerance flourished in his kingdom.” If Moscow were a “garrison state,” would people from outside flock to it? It would be like a mass exodus from Western countries to the USSR.

Lithuania at the end of the 15th century was in its prime, but people fled from it, risking their lives, to Moscow. Who demanded the extradition of the “departures”, who - just like the Brezhnev authorities - called them traitors (“zradtsy”)? Lithuanians. And who defended the human right to choose their country of residence? Muscovites.

“Moscow stood firmly for civil rights! - writes Yanov. - Since the fugitive did not commit harm, did not escape from a criminal court or from debts, he is a political emigrant for her. She insisted on principle and even with liberal pathos on the right of personal choice.” “Holy Rus'” The famous emigrant theologian Anton Kartashev argued that it was no coincidence that the Russian people called their country Holy Russia. “By all indications, this is a significant self-determination ... - of grassroots, mass, spontaneous origin,” he wrote. “Not a single Christian nation has heeded the most essential call of the church, namely to holiness, the Divine attribute.” Only Russia “dared to use the super-proud epithet and gave its heart to this unearthly ideal.” It's amazing if you think about it. Not “good old” (like England), not “beautiful” (like France), not “sweet” (like Italy), not “above all” (like Germany), but “holy”.

Many authors, including the famous philosopher, mathematician and Orthodox thinker Viktor Trostnikov, convincingly argue that between the 14th and 17th centuries this ideal was achieved, that “Holy Rus'”, which recognized faith and service to the Truth of God as its main cause and main difference from others peoples, was a spiritual and social reality. This was the historical peak of Russian religiosity. Its bearers did not consider successes in the economic sphere or in competition with other states too important (unless it was a matter of saving fellow believers). “Service to the Truth of God,” although not entirely realized in reality, lived in the popular consciousness as an ideal, helping to convert the peoples of the Russian periphery to Orthodoxy.

Rus' took to itself the First Epistle of the Apostle Paul, addressed to Christians living among the pagans: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people taken as an inheritance, in order to proclaim the perfections of Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light; once not a people, but now the people of God; once they were not pardoned, but now they have been pardoned.” Our ancestors perceived themselves as God's chosen people: Russian rulers on the pillars of the Archangel Cathedral are correlated with the biblical kings; in the paintings of 1564–1565, the images of Russian princes continue the genealogy of Christ and the forefathers. The above is directly related to our topic.

If the reconstruction is correct, “Holy Rus'” was a country dominated by happy people, no matter rich or poor, most importantly, deeply religious and happy with their faith. Its chronological framework and even geographical outlines are, of course, vague. Recalling that history never goes well for long, Trostnikov nevertheless assigns it three and a half centuries: from the time of Ivan Kalita to the beginning of Peter’s reforms. “Holy Rus'” could not be shaken by the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Time of Troubles, or even the Schism, because the cultural superstructure remained ideally consistent with its Orthodox basis.

Correspondence was apparently achieved just in time for the 14th century. “Elements of pagan culture were rethought,” explains Trostnikov. “Perun turned into Elijah the Prophet, Radonitsa on All Souls’ Day, and so on.” The new elements, borrowed from Byzantium, were assimilated so organically that this gives the right to talk about the “exceptional plastic talent of the Russian people.” Although this idea will not appeal to those for whom the concept of “Holy Rus'” is a purely spiritual phenomenon, it is obvious that between Kalita and Peter in most of the territory of historical Russia the maximum population density (for the then level of development and use of natural resources) had not yet been reached. According to the calculations of demographer and statistician Vasily Pokrovsky, at the end of the 15th century, in all of what was then Russia (at the same time the word “Russia” appeared) there lived a little more than two million people, six times less than in France. For centuries, chronicles hardly record land conflicts in Vladimir-Suzdal and Moscow Rus'.

Anatoly Gorsky, who studied this issue in depth, writes about the “expanse of land” that remained there. Bathhouse against the plague Harmony with the “containing landscape” promoted other types of harmony. Sometimes it was disrupted by “plagues” and crop failures. True, not to the same extent as in Europe, where, due to constant overpopulation and problems with hygiene, genuine demographic catastrophes occurred - such as the “Black Death” of 1347-1353. Because of it, England and France even had to interrupt their Hundred Years' War (which they fought with each other with bulldog tenacity for not even a hundred, but 116 years).

France lost a third of its population from the plague, England and Italy - up to half, and the losses of other countries were approximately equally severe. Historians state that the great plague, having emerged from China and India and traveled throughout Western and Central Europe, reaching the most remote places, stopped “somewhere in Poland.” Not “somewhere,” but on the border of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (whose population consisted of 90% Russians, for which reason it is also called Lithuanian Rus), that is, on the border of the distribution of the bathhouse. And even more precisely - at the intersection of the absence and presence of hygiene. Echoes of the “Black Death” then affected some Russian cities visited by foreigners (primarily Novgorod), but the scale of the disaster for the Russians was incomparable with what their Western neighbors experienced. Even the most severe plagues in our history - especially in 1603, 1655 and 1770 - did not cause a demographic crisis for the country. The Swedish diplomat Petrei Erlesund noted in his work on the Muscovite state that the “pestilence” more often appears on its borders than in the internal regions. According to the testimony of the English doctor Samuel Collins, who lived in Russia for nine years, when this same ulcer appeared in Smolensk in 1655, “everyone was amazed, especially since no one remembered anything like this.”

Leprosy was rare in Rus'. Moscow (like other cities in Russia) was a large village, but this means, reminds the famous historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, that, as it should be in a Russian village, “every house had an extensive courtyard (with a bathhouse) and a garden,” and its inhabitants did not They knew there was a shortage of water, for there were wells in the courtyards. How much water could ordinary people consume in the cities of Europe, where public wells, before the advent of running water in the 19th century, were only available in some areas (in addition, corpses of cats and rats were always caught from these wells)? May the defenders of ancient piety forgive me, but holiness is more natural to those who have a well and a bathhouse in their yard, even the poorest one.

Where was it more comfortable?

Why did wars not subside in Europe both in the Middle Ages and in modern times? Having studied hundreds of wars, the famous Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin published the conclusion back in 1922 that “no matter what labels are applied to the motives of war,” they are ultimately fought for survival, for food resources. Exceptions (for example, dynastic wars) against this background are rare. And very often the path to survival is simply reducing the number of eaters. The pinnacle of the Renaissance is the wars of Cesare Borgia. Just one episode: on his orders, seven thousand residents of the city of Capua were killed right on the streets. The English virgin queen Elizabeth I (next to whom Ivan the Terrible is a meek child) executed 89 thousand of her subjects - and this was also a way to combat overpopulation. During the Thirty Years' War, Germany was practically depopulated, and Cromwell's massacre of Ireland cost the lives of most Irish people. No less horrific were the atrocities of the Spaniards in the Netherlands and the Swedes in Poland. In the Vendée, brave revolutionaries killed between 400 thousand and a million people. And so on.

True, in the movies all these events look very romantic. No matter how blasphemous it sounds, but having once again gotten rid of a significant part of its population - thanks to war or epidemic - Europe made an economic, technological and cultural breakthrough. A labor market emerged, labor became more expensive, and this encouraged innovation and invention, and per capita consumption grew. Only moneylenders and landlords were in poverty. But even while developing productive forces and trade, Europe gained weight extremely slowly. From the time of the Roman Emperor Augustus, when approximately 26 million people lived in what is now Western Europe, until the end of the 15th century (that is, in 1500 years), its population barely doubled. The next time it doubled in just 200 years, by the end of the 17th century.

This figure is reliable, since the oath to the Russian Tsar was taken by “the entire Russian people of Little Rus',” or rather, by all heads of families, Cossacks and non-Cossacks. In total, 127 thousand men swore the oath. Which gives, together with household members, 700 thousand souls. If we talk about the population of Russia within the borders of the late 15th century, then it has grown no less than fourfold over the mentioned two hundred years.

Since we are talking about times when in all countries, without exception, the overwhelming majority of the population were peasants, women gave birth to as many children as God would send, and growth limiters were (in addition to hunger, epidemics and wars) infant mortality, overwork, drunkenness, poor hygiene, stress, the general heaviness of life - this figure speaks volumes. If today rapid population growth characterizes the most disadvantaged countries, then the opposite was true. This indicator, which is remarkably high compared to the rest of Europe, demonstrates the comparative well-being of the people.

It's good to live in Russia In Europe, where firewood was sold by weight, and furs were available to few, ordinary people suffered much more from the cold in winter than in Russia, where winters were harsher, but fur and firewood were easily available. With all the reservations, the quality of life of ordinary people of Rus'-Russia, at least before the Industrial Revolution, was higher than in Western countries. For people who were lively and needy, there were more opportunities to escape, albeit at risk to themselves, from the clutches of social control. The presence of such outlets led to the gradual settlement of “Ukrainian” lands around the core of the Russian state.

But, for example, for the English people, driven to extremes by enclosures and “bloody laws,” such an opportunity first opened up only in the 17th century, with the beginning of the settlement of the colonies. And also about the quality of life. I will give three quotes from the notes of foreigners relating to the reigns of Fyodor Ioannovich, Boris Godunov and Alexei Mikhailovich about the Russians: “They go two or three times a week to the bathhouse, which serves them instead of any medicine” (Giles Fletcher); “Many Russians live to be eighty, one hundred, one hundred and twenty years old and only in old age are they familiar with diseases” (Jacob Margeret); “Many [Russians] live to a ripe old age without ever experiencing any illness. There you can see seventy-year-olds who have retained all their strength, with such strength in their muscular arms that the work they can endure is beyond the strength of our young people” (Augustin Meyerberg).

An important feature of Russian life has long been the abundance of holidays, church and folk.

Another wonderful myth goes like this: before Peter the Great, a woman in Rus' was imprisoned in a mansion.

Historian Natalya Pushkareva studied the scope of women's rights in the 10th-15th centuries to own and dispose of property, to acquire and sell land property, and to defend their interests in court. It turned out that the wife could be the guardian, which was absolutely unthinkable in those days in Europe. She was ranked among the first rank of heirs, and the husband who survived his wife found himself in a worse position than her - he could only manage her property, but not own it. The wife herself, unlike her husband, chose who to pass on her inheritance to. Even an illegitimate wife could claim an inheritance. Having studied the laws on land ownership, Pushkareva showed that already in Ancient Rus' a woman could carry out almost any transaction even without the participation of her husband. For damage to a woman, the laws required the perpetrator to be punished more severely than for similar crimes against a man.

What Peter I abolished

During the reign of Peter, comparative prosperity was ended. Official history called him great, but the people’s memory had a different opinion: “Antichrist”, “replaced”, “world-eater, the whole world was eaten up”, “he ruined the peasants with their houses”, “he took everyone as soldiers”. Beginning with this monarch, the extreme tension of all the forces of the state for a hundred and fifty years literally squeezed the juices out of the tax-paying classes. Under Peter, everything that was politically promising in Russia in the 17th century was stopped. Before him, the country had a class-based and at the same time an elected representative body, and there were grassroots elected democratic institutions.

We are talking about Zemsky Sobors and Zemstvo administration.

The councils of 57 convocations are reliably known (historians argue about the council of 1698, which condemned Queen Sophia). The direct analogue of councils, the French States General, was convened fewer times, but the French parliamentary tradition comes precisely from them, and it turns out that we have no parliamentary tradition. Meanwhile, the powers and functions of the councils were completely parliamentary. They resolved taxation issues; the most important legislative documents in the history of Russia of the 16th-17th centuries were adopted: the Code of Law of 1550, the “Sentence” of the Council of the First Militia of 1611, the Council Code of 1649, the “Conciliar Act” on the abolition of localism of 1682. The councils had the right of legislative initiative and resolved issues of church structure, internal administration, trade and industry. In 1653, the cathedral decided to accept Hetman Khmelnitsky “with the entire Cossack army” under the royal hand. A positive answer meant an inevitable war with Poland and Crimea, and many participants in the council knew that they would have to take personal part in it. Moreover, this decision became possible thanks to the voices of the merchants; without their money, the enterprise would have been doomed - but the merchants, as one, volunteered to pay the costs. Not with “budget” money, with your own! But to the request for consent to start a war with the Turks for Azov (it required, according to estimates, 221 thousand rubles), the participants in the 1642 council answered so evasively that it was, in fact, a refusal.

Zemsky councils resolved the issues of electing a new king to the kingdom. In 1584, the cathedral elected Fyodor Ioannovich. The elected tsars were Boris Godunov, Vasily Shuisky, Mikhail Romanov. In 1682, young Ivan and Peter were chosen as co-tsars. Zemsky councils could remove the tsar from power; in 1610, Vasily Shuisky experienced this himself. During the “kinglessness”, it was the cathedral that assumed full supreme power in the country. After the Time of Troubles, councils were engaged in the “organization” of the state. If a foreigner came to Moscow from a country that had a representative body, he did not ask for an explanation of what the Zemsky Sobor was. For the Polish subject Philo Kmita, the Cathedral of 1580 is the Diet, the Englishman Jerome Horsey identifies the Cathedral of 1584 as a parliament, the Livonian nobleman Georg Brunno calls the Cathedral of 1613 the Riksdag, and the German Johann Gotgilf Fokkerodt comes to the conclusion that it was “a kind of Senate.”

Gerasim Dokhturov, the Russian envoy to England in 1646, sees the English parliament quite symmetrically: “They sit in two chambers; in one chamber sit the boyars, in the other - elected from the worldly people.” The English “boyars” that Dokhturov speaks of sat in the House of Lords. The Russian equivalent of the House of Lords, the Duma, which had existed since the 10th century, was abolished by Peter. The idea that the boyars did nothing but bow to the kings came from bad literature. The Duma decisions ended not only with the formula “The Great Sovereign spoke, but the boyars sentenced.” They sometimes ended differently: “The great sovereign spoke, but the boyars did not sentence.”

Controversial issues aroused “the outcry and noise were great and there were many speeches among the boyars.” Most decisions were made without the sovereign at all. Surprisingly, the Duma’s “verdicts” did not require his approval. Klyuchevsky explains: “There were only two types of boyar sentences, which were always or often submitted to the sovereign for approval. These are the verdicts of the Duma on local disputes (about who is more noble - A.G.) and on punishment for serious guilt.” In pre-Petrine times, local, zemstvo, power in Russia was elected. The vertical of power, from the voivode down, was represented by district, volost and township self-governing bodies. Cities had their own structures of medieval civil society - “hundreds” and settlements with elected elders.

The Code of Law of 1497 prohibited trials without a jury (“at the trial... to be the elder and the best kissers”). The elders were elected from local nobles, and their assistants - kissers - from local peasants and townspeople. In terms of the participation of the grassroots democratic element in local self-government, pre-Petrine Russia was fundamentally ahead of England, where only the reforms of 1888 and 1894 ended the monopoly of the aristocracy in local self-government. They say that Peter “led Russia to Europe.” But reunification with Europe would have taken place in any case. The intensive method of development of not so geographically distant Christian countries was increasingly demonstrating its advantages, and there was no reason why Russia would not take advantage of its fruits.

From the notes of the Frenchman de La Neuville, who had a conversation with Vasily Golitsyn, the unofficial ruler of the country under Queen Sophia, it can be concluded that the unofficial ruler of the country under Queen Sophia subsequently claimed that he was planning much more thorough transformations than Peter: he intended, in particular, to develop Siberia, build postal roads there, free the peasants from serfdom, and even give them land... Isn’t it wonderful? Serfdom has only recently acquired some completeness in Russia, and Golitsyn is already planning to abolish it. But power went to Peter, who, on the contrary, became the main enslaver in our history. True, he built St. Petersburg and Taganrog. And also Lipetsk and Petrozavodsk.

Serfdom

Peter left the serfs at the mercy of his landowners by the very fact that he entrusted the latter with responsibility for the supply of recruits and for collecting the poll tax. Even more important was the fact that under Peter almost everyone lost their freedom of action. Nobles, under pain of punishment, had no right to evade public service and could not move around the country at their own discretion. Only on February 18, 1762, 37 years after the death of Peter, was the Manifesto on the freedom of the nobility followed, allowing not to serve, to bask in one’s village, to travel abroad, and so on.

Many peasants believed that from that moment on, serfdom became illegal, and began to wait for the next decree - on the freedom of the peasantry. They had to wait 99 years and one day. At first, these expectations were so strong that they alarmed the throne. One of the reasons that Catherine II did not dare (although she repeated that she intended) to take a step towards the liberation of the peasants was the example of her contemporary Frederick the Great, who did nothing but worsen the situation of the German serfs. And her successors in the 19th century delayed reform, waiting to see how events would turn in Prussia, Westphalia and other German states, where the liberation of peasants began in 1807, but, according to Franz Mehring, “stretched out for two generations.”

This unrealized expectation broke through with all its force during the Pugachev rebellion. And in later years, although patriarchal serfdom, being soft in its forms, cushioned social protest, it broke through, went into a self-sustaining mode, and it was difficult to cope with it.

We know very little about real serfdom.

It is known that by the time of its abolition, the share of serfs and courtyards in the population of Russia was less than 28%, whereas at the end of the 18th century (six decades earlier) it was 54%. Since the birth rate of the serfs was no lower than that of the free, such a sharp decrease in their share in the population suggests that millions of peasants were freed during this time. How did they come out, what were the mechanisms? Both pre-revolutionary liberal historians and engaged Soviet historians are unanimously silent about this great process of the natural elimination of serfdom. The heirs of Herzen (who was himself a landowner and lived abroad on income from his Russian estate), they always looked for the slightest mention of the tyranny of the serf owners, skipping everything else.

In 1846, the landowner of the Maloyaroslavets district of the Kaluga province of Khitrovo was killed by his peasant women, and the investigation established that the women did this in response to his harassment. But here’s what’s important, I quote: “The district marshal of the nobility was put on trial for failure to report the bad behavior of the said landowner.” That is, their fellow classmates were responsible for the good character of the landowners.

Russian estates did not even have fences - not to mention ditches, drawbridges, stone walls with loopholes, these are all the realities of European feudalism. The most prominent expert on the social history of Russia, Boris Mironov, found a remarkable explanation for the low efficiency of serf labor. He believes that the serf worked until his small primordial needs were satisfied - and no further. “He saw the purpose of life not in wealth or fame, but in the salvation of the soul, in simply following tradition, in the reproduction of established forms of life. He made no attempts to expand the economy, as the bourgeoisie usually does, striving for maximum profit.” For the heirs of Holy Rus', this is very natural behavior.

Components of happiness

An important feature of Russian life has long been the abundance of holidays, church and folk. Russia’s contribution to the world “leisure technology” is not bad at all: it was here that such a socio-cultural phenomenon as dacha life was born about three hundred years ago. The dacha is a Russian invention that is now being adopted (or reinvented) by the rest of the world.

By contrast, Protestant Europe and America saw little rest between the 17th century and the First World War. Sunday was dedicated to church and household chores; vacation was still a rarity. A thin layer of rich loafers were resting. In the West, almost everyone agreed with Freud's statement that childhood is the most difficult and unhappy time of life. One of the main themes of English literature is the theme of unhappy childhood. Many people have noted this. The painful childhood of Byron, the painful childhood of Churchill, “Oliver Twist” by Dickens, “The Burden of Human Passions” by Maugham. Not to mention Evelyn Waugh. When there are no exceptions, a dozen or two examples are enough. What novels, biographies and memoirs have in common is the lack of warmth in the family. Apparently, it has to do with the structure of the English family and the structure of English educational institutions. The rods in them were abolished only thirty to forty years ago. Aristocratic schools are just bursas. The book “Those Strange Englishmen” says: “For English children, childhood is a period that must be passed as quickly as possible.”

But why are Russian memories of childhood all happy memories? I would venture to suggest that Freud’s teachings are simply more true for Western Europeans than for Russians. From foreigners who have lived in Russia and speak Russian, I have heard more than once that nowhere in the Western world is it possible for people to sit up until the morning and discuss eternal issues. And they all complained how sad they felt without this in their homeland. The American journalist Robert Kaiser, hardly the greatest Russophile in the world, could not resist the following confession in his book “Russia”: “It is worth spending one boring evening in London or Washington, just one long lunch with endless conversations about shopping, restaurants, tennis or skiing to appreciate the charm of Moscow feasts. A mundane, insignificant topic will not linger here. Conversations are the source of the greatest pleasure here, and after spending many hours in Russian conversations, I began to understand that it was this aspect of Russian life that I would miss most of all...”

The strength of historical Russia

What was she like? At least not like we were told at school. “Eugene Onegin” is, of course, not an encyclopedia of Russian life; this title is more suitable for “Ivan Vyzhigin” by Thaddeus Bulgarin - despite the incomparability of the authors. But no matter how you approach Russian literature, it least of all prepared its readers for totalitarianism. There is not a single image of a superman in it, destined by fate itself to control the masses. But she was always on the side of the “little man” - like, perhaps, no other literature in the world. The very presence of the “little man” theme speaks quite clearly of the built-in humanity of the society that gave birth to this literature. There was negativism in it, sometimes there was a frivolous “thirst for a storm,” but there was never pathos of submission (“give me a boss, and I will bow at his huge feet”), or admiration for power. The Bolshevik utopian project (“a Western European and absolutely non-Russian phenomenon,” according to Oswald Spengler’s definition) was doomed for many reasons, although the one that became the main one would have been enough: it was incompatible with historical Russia. The Bolsheviks took this force extremely seriously, throwing their entire arsenal of available resources into the fight against it - from the demolition of churches and monuments and the physical destruction of entire classes and estates to the complete denigration of national history.

The expressions “damned past” and “birthmarks of capitalism” are still alive in popular memory. The following fact shows how far the utopian ideologists were ready to go in this direction: in 1930, it was announced that the Cyrillic alphabet would be replaced by the Latin alphabet (in order to “free the working masses from any influence of pre-revolutionary printed materials”). Only the enormous high cost of the event, and even against the background of the breakdown of industrialization, saved our culture from this disaster. As for the slander against the Russian past, it has so permeated the worldview of our compatriots that dealing with it (and the entire subculture based on it) is the work of generations.

The implementers of utopia were especially keenly aware of the alienness of Russian culture to their ideas, hence the slogan of “organized simplification” and “degradation of culture”, which was advocated by Nikolai Bukharin (holder of the title “favorite of the party”), Alexei Gastev, Mikhail Levidov and others. Their main leader, Vladimir Lenin, at the XI Congress of the RCP (b) in 1922 showed rare vigilance, saying: “It happens that the vanquished imposes his culture on the conqueror. Didn’t something similar happen in the capital of the RSFSR, and didn’t it happen here that 4,700 communists (almost an entire division, and all the best) found themselves subjugated to a foreign culture?” It is said very precisely and frankly about the “conqueror” and “foreign culture”. And prophetically: the (supposedly) defeated culture really won - only, unfortunately, much later.

History moves slowly. We owe our victory over utopia to the very structure of our culture. The components on which only totalitarian power can rely are initially alien to her: cruelty and the habit of unreasoning discipline. Our post-perestroika development is not imitation of someone else's model. Russia has returned to its civilizational choice, which is clear throughout its entire path - from baptism to 1917, and has returned to its essence. But this, alas, does not mean that the restoration of former values and the former natural sense of self is guaranteed. But, most importantly, the utopia did not take root with us, we rejected it at the tissue level and left the experiment ourselves.

But whether, for example, Germany could overcome its totalitarianism on its own is a big question. Hitler did not need a five-year civil war and monstrous, unprecedented terror to become the complete master of the country. In a matter of months, he radically changed Germany to the complete delight of its population. Germany, if anyone has forgotten, is a country of “Western civilization”.

For example, many people think that our “Pontic” Greeks are the descendants of almost the participants in Jason’s voyage for the Golden Fleece. In fact, most of the “Pontians” moved to Russian possessions in the 19th century from Turkish Anatolia and from Greece proper. Many of them did this bypassing border registration and control - the Black Sea shores knew different interesting routes, read Lermontov’s “Taman”. Large migrations of Persians, Chinese and Koreans were hidden. That is, instead of 4.2 million people, we may well be talking about, say, five, or rather even six million immigrants. People do not move to countries of unfreedom - to places where a strict police regime and (or) heavy social control reign, intolerance reigns, and there is no respect for property. You cannot lure people of other faiths and languages into the “prison of nations.” The numbers of migration to Russia refutes all later tales of this kind.

We ourselves chose New Russia

There is not the slightest doubt: the rejection of communism and democratic reforms were the historical creativity of the “Soviet people,” especially the Russian people. Yegor Gaidar knows what he’s talking about: “If you think that it was the Americans who imposed democracy on us in the form in which it arose in 1990–1991, then this is not true. We ourselves chose this path, the Americans played the last role in this and will play the last.” It is impossible to forget how in 1988 the very air of cities changed from the first Russian tricolors, to forget that powerful atmosphere of freedom, enlightenment and solidarity, which reached its peak in the days of hundreds of thousands of rallies on Manezhnaya and Palace Squares and lasted until the “shock therapy” of 1992 and despite it lasted until the referendum on confidence in Yeltsin’s course on April 25, 1993 (the president then received 58.7% of the votes) and much longer, changing, weakening and becoming increasingly fragmented into shades.

If the atmosphere had been different, everything would have turned out differently. And this massive fortitude! There are detailed chronicles of those years, and the final years of perestroika look eerie in them: completely empty stores, attacks on trains, seizures of weapons depots, Western missionaries with sermons prepared for pagans, suspicious sects, financial pyramids, “humanitarian aid,” newspaper reports about abandoned border posts and that food supplies in the country are running out, predictions of an imminent military coup and imminent epidemics, the most fantastic rumors. And against this background - elation, fearlessness, faith: a little more, a little more... And on every pillar there are advertisements: “I teach how to use a computer.”

Many people suddenly felt that they had gotten rid of something oppressive and painful that they had been living with without noticing it. The discomfort to which one has become accustomed throughout life has gone, just as one becomes accustomed to the stench. The new Russia was formed almost entirely, down to the smallest detail, in the last months of the existence of the USSR. The quantitative changes of the next sixteen years were, of course, enormous, but almost everything that we observe from modern life - both good and bad - appeared for a reason already then. *** I don’t know how this was possible, but someone designated us Russians as unfortunate, for all centuries of our history, and many of us almost believed it. We have not been unhappy for long in our history; there is immeasurably more light on our zebra. Maybe because of this, according to some law of compensation, we suffered so badly in the 20th century? But we survived. We are in our beautiful country, there is a lot of exciting work ahead.