Alexander Nikonov Behind the facade of the empire. A short course in Russian mythology

Entering the slippery slope, or Introduction to Russian mythology

Our youth has faded in the shadow of the barracks
On a single exhalation of alcohol...

Sergey Danilov

Why don't Russians smile?

This question is not easy to answer, although it is asked often. After the “Iron Curtain” collapsed, we ourselves noted this trait of ours that we had not previously noticed - increased gloominess. It’s clear why we didn’t see this before: there was nothing to compare with. If a person is instilled with fear under hypnosis and then brought out of the trance, he will continue to shake. But if you ask how he feels, the person will answer: “Fine.” He perceives his condition as the norm, this is his starting point. And only if the subject is explained that he was put into a trance and instilled with a feeling of horror, he realizes: “Oh, that’s why I’m pounding all over!..”

So, when the Iron Curtain collapsed, millions of people went beyond its ruins and were surprised to discover the difference: abroad people smile at each other for no reason, but at home everyone’s lips are in a stern line. Prickly glances. Indifference. A man lies on the street - citizens pass by. A passenger ship with children is sinking - two ships are sailing past on the Volga. A dead man with a broken head lies on the beach in Lytkarino, a police squad is shifting around him, waiting for criminologists, and a hundred meters from the corpse, vacationers who have just arrived are located and calmly begin to fry meat on the grill.

It's Russia…

To the question “how are you” you will never receive a joyful answer “great!” At best, they will throw out a dry “fine,” which, in addition to the sad look, can be translated as “not dead yet.” And some begin to complain in response, as if making excuses for their generally good life. As if if you say “I’m fine”, this very “everything” will be immediately taken away...

Russians not only don’t smile. They don't even want to live. The electrician who was installing wiring at my friend’s dacha did it with the air of a real martyr, and on the third day of work he asked the sky with hope: “When will I die?”

In terms of suicide rates, Russia is one of the first in the world. In terms of murder rates, it is perhaps first, if we take into account not the crafty statistics of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but the real state of affairs. The statistics of the Ministry of Internal Affairs should not be taken into account, since in only one village of Kushchevskaya, where after the noisy massacre a high commission from Moscow visited, more than 1,500 crimes, including serious ones, were discovered hidden from registration by the local police. And if you dig not in one locality, as you did, but throughout the country?..

The eight-hundred-page volume with the characteristic title “Theoretical Foundations of the Study and Analysis of Latent Crime” weighs a lot. The authors of this study from the Research Institute of the Academy of the Prosecutor General's Office studied the state of affairs regarding crimes in Russia for about ten years and came to sad conclusions: complete moral degradation of the population and total rotting of law enforcement agencies. The authorities cheerfully report a decrease in murders and other crimes, and their number is growing from year to year. Example: officially in 2009, 3 million crimes were registered, and according to research institutes, 26 million were committed. An order of magnitude more...

But the main thing, of course, is the murders. While in reporting their number is steadily decreasing, in fact it is steadily growing. In the mentioned year, the Ministry of Internal Affairs registered 18 thousand murders, and more than 45 thousand applications for murders by people alone were filed! At the same time, the number of unidentified corpses found is 78 thousand. And the missing (read, unfound corpses) are 48.5 thousand. Plus it yourself.

Half of the citizens who died between the ages of 20 and 40 died as a result of “contact with blunt and sharp objects.”

But if you believe for a second the false statistics of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which transfers part of the murders to the column “serious bodily harm resulting in death,” still, even according to official data, Russia is one of the first places in the world in terms of murder rates. Our country is included in the so-called “Big Twenty” - along with Honduras, Namibia and Suriname... And this, I repeat, is according to official, many times underestimated data!

What do these statistics of suicides and murders mean? The nation is actively self-destructing. There's no time for smiles...

Nature itself seems to help Russians in their reluctance to drag out their mortal existence. Life expectancy is rising throughout the developed world. And even in underdeveloped conditions it grows. And in countries in an intermediate position - in the so-called “Second World” - it is also growing. Only ours is falling. Is it due to poverty? No! According to data at the end of 2008, the average life expectancy of men in the European Union was 76.5 years. For example, say, in Bosnia, which cannot be called a rich country, it is 75 years. In impoverished India, where millions of people live in cardboard boxes and wash their clothes in ditch - 67 years. And in Russia - 59.2!

And this is not at all connected with “Gorbachev’s perestroika” and “Gaidar’s liberal reforms that led us to poverty,” as some demagogues like to speculate over a glass of cognac, skewering a piece of lightly salted salmon on a fork - they say, capitalism turned out to be incompatible with socialist Russian genetics. The people seem to have lost confidence in the future. Whether it was under the Soviets - everyone was confident in the future, that’s why they lived long and quite happily...

It's exactly the opposite! In the last few years, the average life expectancy in Russia has increased by about three years - precisely thanks to economic reforms and rising living standards. And the mysterious and unnatural decline in the life expectancy of Soviet people began exactly at the height of “socialist prosperity” and “confidence in the future” - in the sixties. That is, in those years when, according to the Reds, the people were absolutely crazy about socialism.

You know, it happens that a cancer patient, who passionately wants to live, overcomes a fatal illness. And it happens that a healthy person does not want to live so much that he ages before his eyes and quickly dies. This, for example, happens to life prisoners who have no hope of being released. By the age of forty they are already old people. They have no reason to live. And nature quickly cleans them up by turning on accelerated aging.

Why does nature clean up Russians?

My father, who is well over eighty at the time of writing and is vigorous, healthy and active, has this saying. Each time, having listened to the wishes of his numerous relatives to live longer at his next birthday, he makes a toast in response: “I’m glad to try, and there is a desire!”

Both agree and disagree with the previous reviewer. I agree that Nikonov has collected near-historical nonsense in this book (although not all of it; in recent years it has spread through the roof), but I do not agree that he exposed it. The trouble is that Nikonov is an ardent supporter of this nonsense. It is enough to read his books, and it is immediately clear that he is an ardent market activist, an ardent admirer of liberal capitalism, that he is an outright anti-Soviet, who does not even want to see anything positive in this period of our history. In addition, he is a man with pronounced delusions of grandeur. In this book, he positions himself as nothing less than a mentor to the younger generation, ready to open their eyes to our damned past. Read the last sentence of his book: “However, perhaps it is one and the same thing - to die as a Russian and to rise as a European.” A Russophobe's dream! Look at what myths of Russian history he debunks. In the first part, these are Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy and Peter the Great, three iconic figures of our history, three pillars of the national mentality. Moreover, the “debunking” is based on the frankly delusional writings of amateurs, which were long ago and successfully refuted by real historians. In the second part, he mixes up the Soviet period of our history with manure, again relying on very dubious sources. And in the third part, Soviet cosmonautics is “debunked,” which under Nikonov’s pen really turns into a theater of the absurd. Moreover, while criticizing the country for poverty and backwardness, he does not point out that this poverty was due to the very course of our history, the severe consequences of the First World War, the Civil War and the Second World War, although, in his opinion, the main culprits of all these troubles (well, maybe, except for the First World War) are, naturally, communists who ruined a beautiful and rich country and were unable to do anything in it for the good of the people. It is enough to read the pages telling about the “bright and happy” life of the Russian people before the revolution with universal literacy (80% of the population!), luxurious apartments for workers, powerful industry and highly developed agriculture. I would like to know whether Nikonov read anything other than the “works” of domestic and foreign Soviet-phobes, although for a normal reader interested in history this should not be a problem. It would be possible to analyze the author’s “gems” page by page, but doing this in a review is simply difficult. He cites figures whose dubiousness is visible to the naked eye. And sometimes it uses the traditional approach of people who want to embellish reality - it gives comparative indicators. Us. 174, speaking about the “outstanding” achievements of pre-revolutionary Russia, he talks about the powerful growth of its industry: the amount of cast iron produced increased in the 20 pre-war years (apparently in 1893-1913) by 250%, steel - by 225%, copper - by 375%, coal - by 300%, manganese - by 364%! Shine! It's worth looking at the real numbers, though. How much product was produced in real terms in 1893, how much in 1913? It’s one thing if the increase was determined by millions of tons, another if by thousands. For example, if three tons of metal were produced, and they began to produce 300 tons, then the increase is as much as a hundredfold. But did this increase really meet the needs of the state and society? Why did such a powerful state, according to Nikonov, miserably lose the first war with Germany, having very strong allies on its side? And why did the USSR, which went through industrialization “unneeded by anyone,” according to Nikonov, be able to withstand in splendid isolation two years of a difficult war against virtually all of Europe? At least think about it, the self-proclaimed “apostle of truth”! In addition, the book is simply full of factual errors, which are simply indecent for a person with even a basic education to make. Examples? Please. Us. 90 Nikonov writes that Ivan the Terrible became a “tsar” only after he conquered Kazan and Astrakhan. Actually BEFORE that. Us. 58 we learn that Dmitry Donskoy was cursed by the patriarch (I wonder which one) and excommunicated from the church (when). Does Nikonov know that the patriarchate in Rus' appeared 200 years after the death of Dmitry Donskoy? Who, in his opinion, believes that the Battle of Kulikovo “put an end to the Tatar yoke in Rus'” (p. 64)? It seems that everyone should know from school days that this happened 100 years after this battle. And these are just three examples. Those interested can find dozens of similar “discoveries.” Therefore, reading this book was simply disgusting. So I wouldn’t recommend it to a normal person, especially to schoolchildren.

Entering the slippery slope, or Introduction to Russian mythology

Our youth has faded in the shadow of the barracks
On a single exhalation of alcohol...

Sergey Danilov

Why don't Russians smile?

It's Russia…

Half of the citizens who died between the ages of 20 and 40 died as a result of “contact with blunt and sharp objects.”

What do these statistics of suicides and murders mean? The nation is actively self-destructing. There's no time for smiles...

Why does nature clean up Russians?

Why shouldn’t he live happily if life brings only joy? Children are coming for a birthday party. And grandchildren. And relatives. And everyone is cheerful. The pension is normal. The store is full of everything. The dog is kind. Why not live?

My father is a completely atypical Russian...

And my book is about typical Russians. And what made them that way.

The quality of life in a country can be judged by economic parameters. Or maybe biologically. Well, imagine that we don’t have any economic data about life in the country. Just a second. This is such a strange country - there is no data on it, and that’s it! But we do have biological data characterizing the species of intelligent creatures inhabiting it. And we, for example, see that the life expectancy of individuals is increasing, and they themselves are becoming larger. What does this mean?

From biology we know: in a zoo animals live longer - they are given proper care, nutritious food, doctors and antibiotics, no stress from incoming predators, sexual intercourse... We also know that with a lack of nutrition, the size of individuals decreases. If you don't feed enough, they don't grow well, that's understandable. And if you are constantly “stressed”, the body will not want to grow either. The wife of the Tver governor, who adopted an orphanage child, told the newspapers: “All the children there are like that! You go into a group, and they are all terribly short. They have psychosocial stunting. Due to stress, children do not grow and develop there.”

Psychosocial short stature and underdevelopment - this is the diagnosis I would give to our entire society...

Once upon a time, Soviet newspapers wrote with delight about acceleration, that is, about the fact that the generation of post-war children is on average taller than their fathers and grandfathers. Indeed, after the war the children began to grow up. Indeed, the generation of their fathers and grandfathers was not giants - when Soviet troops entered German cities on a victorious march, the Germans perceived our soldiers as short and bow-legged. It was a type...

How did Voinovich describe his Chonkin - this collective image of a Russian soldier? Here's how: “Ivan Vasilyevich Chonkin, short and bow-legged, was a purely rural man...”

Our youth has faded in the shadow of the barracks

On a single exhalation of alcohol...

Sergey Danilov

Why don't Russians smile?

It's Russia…

Half of the citizens who died between the ages of 20 and 40 died as a result of “contact with blunt and sharp objects.”

What do these statistics of suicides and murders mean? The nation is actively self-destructing. There's no time for smiles...

Nature itself seems to help Russians in their reluctance to drag out their mortal existence. Life expectancy is rising throughout the developed world. And even in underdeveloped conditions it grows. And in countries in an intermediate position - in the so-called “Second World” - it is also growing. Only ours is falling. Is it due to poverty? No! According to data at the end of 2008, the average life expectancy of men in the European Union was 76.5 years. For example, say, in Bosnia, which cannot be called a rich country, it is 75 years. In impoverished India, where millions of people live in cardboard boxes and wash clothes in ditch, 67 years. And in Russia – 59.2!

And this is not at all connected with “Gorbachev’s perestroika” and “Gaidar’s liberal reforms that led us to poverty,” as some demagogues like to speculate over a glass of cognac, skewering a piece of lightly salted salmon on a fork - they say, capitalism turned out to be incompatible with socialist Russian genetics. The people seem to have lost confidence in the future. Either it was the case under the Soviets - everyone was confident in the future, and that’s why they lived long and quite happily...

It's exactly the opposite! Over the past few years, the average life expectancy in Russia has increased by about three years, precisely thanks to economic reforms and rising living standards. And the mysterious and unnatural decline in the life expectancy of Soviet people began exactly at the height of “socialist prosperity” and “confidence in the future” - in the sixties. That is, in those years when, according to the Reds, the people were absolutely crazy about socialism.

Why does nature clean up Russians?

My father is a completely atypical Russian...

And my book is about typical Russians. And what made them that way.

From biology we know: animals live longer in a zoo - they are given proper care, nutritious food, doctors and antibiotics, no stress from incoming predators, sexual intercourse... We also know that with a lack of nutrition, the size of individuals decreases. If you don't feed enough, they don't grow well, that's understandable. And if you are constantly “stressed”, the body will not want to grow either. The wife of the Tver governor, who adopted an orphanage child, told the newspapers: “All the children there are like that! You go into a group, and they are all terribly short. They have psychosocial stunting. Due to stress, children do not grow and develop there.”