Four theses to support the revolution,

Nowadays in Russia the struggle against the revolution has become the new national ideology. The government and the system opposition, the church and intellectuals have risen to fight the “orange revolution.” There is not any significant political or ideological force in the country that would support the revolution – everyone wants the changes to be smooth, or, as Hasek said, they are “the party of moderate reforms within the law.” So, the propagandists’ strokes miss their goal since we should not take a dozen of loyal writers and public activists properly leading the demonstrators watched by the police and party leaders talking to the president about the problems of registration as Jacobins-Trotskyites.

However, the counter-revolutionaries do not give any arguments about the good and sated life in Russia. Their arguments are tried-and-true: from de Maistre’s antiquated speculations (about how well the French would have lived ruled by legitimate Bourbons and protected by the holy church) to rehashes of the White immigrates’ moans like eternal Averchenko’s phrase: did the tsar prevent you from selling seeds?

The problem is that over the past 150 years in Russia during the crisis periods the revolutions did not happen until the “sense-making class” stopped speculating that the revolution was not needed and that the government would carry out all the necessary and burning reforms on their own. As soon as the intellectuals stopped repeating those mantras, another crisis immediately relegated the regime into oblivion. Since the time of Alexander II the Russian progressive intellectuals have played the role of atlantes holding the sky of the “educated” Russian authorities.

That is why when in the summer 2009 the judge Danilkin demonstrated his accusatory inclinations (he issued the first absolutely illegal decree to keep Khodorkovsky and Lebedev under arrest even without written motion of the prosecution) it became clear that the next Russian revolution was inevitable since after the second sentence to Khodorkovsky the intellectuals will not be able to persuade the society that the liberal evolution of the regime is possible.

Rational arguments about the damage of revolution are numerous and realistic: the supply gets worse, the chaos grows, new authorities’ lawlessness rule, collapse and horror… From the point of an average person any changes, even progressive ones are the absolute evil. Thirty years ago Astafiev, Rasputin, and other country prose writers sadly depicted the crushing blow upon the moral of the village youth (their characters would have been 70 now and they would have told everybody spirituality) given by the increasing life standards of the kolkhoz members under Malenkov’s and Khrushchev’s rule: while all the teenagers’ diet consisted of the wholemeal bread and onions (“bitter apples”) everything was OK but the prosperity led to the quick moral degradation. Things began to take off: the variety store was burnt down and became the portent of the universal catastrophe: market and privatization. Then the Georgians came to the markets and everything became clear even without Nostradamus.

If you proceed from the eternal maxim about “one child’s tear” the universal history should be stopped. Please, don’t argue that Stalin’s holodomors and GULAG are not a revolution but a reaction (resumption of the Byzantine despotism) since as professor Preobrazhensky from one of the best Russian-language anti-revolutionary pasquinades said: the revolution came and rubbers disappeared, then choral singing started and the sewage broke down.

However, joking apart. The revolution will come, Putin will be overthrown and Chulpan Khamatova Foundation will not receive any donations. Aren’t you sorry for children?! However, maybe the doctors mobilized by the revolutionary commissaries will start treating children for free? Professors Preobrazhenskys cannot build their exclusive prosperity illegally aborting 15-year-old lovers of people’s commissars and then working off their academic ration holding up to shame double-dealer Bormental who turned to be “a wrecker in a white overall.”

Here are four theses to support the revolution.

The first one (from the intellect). The revolution creates new legitimacy. When it is impossible to take the necessary resolutions through the labyrinths of the old system, the revolution legalizes them itself. I do not understand why the authority of a hundred-thousand meeting at the Red Square means less for constitutionalism than professor Zorkin’s authority. The arguments that the other side also can gather a hundred-thousand meeting are worthless since everybody knows which meeting is supported by the nation and which one is stimulated by employer’s severe look and the bonus of 30 dollars.

The second one (from the spirit). The revolution gives a chance to build a fair society, realize the social ideal and renew a social contract, if you wish. The conservative intellectuals taught us during the whole 20th century that yearning for justice is the most terrible thing. The world is not perfect, it should not be improved and there is no truth in the world… However, the society cannot live normally without any clear idea and hopes to make it true.

The third one (from the soul). The revolution makes a person a subject of history and takes it out from the state of feeling one’s unimportance in the enormous and merciless world and gives a possibility to both revolutionists and counter-revolutionists to feel them defending the right. All those who say today that the revolutionists are doomed to a deep disappointment should try an experiment: meet the newlyweds near the register office with a poster showing the divorce rate.

The fourth (from the flesh). The revolution is able to block the catastrophic development of the society. There are probably not many people in the modern world who would not consider the February revolution of 1933 in Germany a very good alternative: after Hitler was appointed Reichschancellor the general political strike would have started and the Labor Front would have come to power and unite the social-democrats and communists.

The history has made an interesting experiment of disintegrating two Slavonic empires based on local civilizations: the USSR (the Russian civilization) and the SFRY (the Balkan civilization). If Yugoslavia had had its own August of 1991 (as it happened in October 2000) the result would have been the same: 6-7 independent national states having relatively liberal pro-Western regimes waiting for their turn to join the EU (by the way, their turn would have come long time ago). However, several hundred thousand people would have been alive. Milosevic would have been alive, too: he would have been moving from the presidium of the opposition conference to the government as our Rogozin does. So, the hypothetical Belgrade revolution of 1991 would have done much good to Serbia.

On the other hand, if the Russian democrats had been defeated (by the State Committee of the State of Emergency or the ultra-right, imperial-nationalist wing of the anti-communist movement) Sevastopol would have looked as modern Gagra, Moscow as Sukhumi, and Riga as Tskhinvali as a result of the bloody civil and national war. From the world of Kabakov’s Nevozvrashchenets (The Defector) that concentrates all the intelligentsia’s nightmares of the spring 1988 (hunger and ruins in post-revolutionary Moscow, the democrats’ leader goes to work to the Kremlin in a white tank, Wahabees cut people’s heads with swards) not only contemporary Russia but Russia of the turbulent 1990s would look as a prosperous and stable paradise.

The problem of violence makes a separate issue. The tactics of the local partisan war proved to be politically inefficient as compared to peaceful mass protests that is why the appeals to the revolutionary violence do not correspond to Tolstoy’s and Gandhi’s theories or the Beatitudes, they push to the historical deadlock. Moreover, revolutionary terror is always the sign of decline of the civil movement and acts of despair. The other thing is the sacred right of the people for self-protection when the government kills the civilian population.

Revolution is like a war. Sometimes it can be pernicious and should be avoided at all costs as it was in July 1914 when all the reasonable people realized that Europe-wide war threatened the basis of civilization. In other cases avoiding the war means being on the verge of defeat as it happened in September 1938.

Let’s get back to the present. If Russia is fated to have another revolution, the anti-Putin’s one, it will be an attempt to create ideal Russia, not a copy of England (as in 1905), or a copy of France (as in March 1917) or a copy of the US (as in August 1991), but the country where the various ideas about the ideal constitution, parliamentarianism, democracy, law, and economy will have a chance to be realized. It will not be the eternal attempt of the Russian intelligentsia to re-invent the wheel but a sincere desire to create unique combinations out of the elements tried all over the world. We already have the whole pleiad of the people having bright and independent ideas, we have the 20-year-old experience of the market economy and public politics.

That is why every intellectual protesting against this attempt and supporting maintenance of the status quo (even if they do not urge to vote for Python Kaa) contributes to leaving political prisoners in jails; to new vicious verdicts to thousands of victims of the “raiders’” and “drug addicts’” processes; to the ideal-commercial gangsterism of various “jugends” grown by the Kremlin; to the Latin American social stratification; to the total corruption and social necrosis of another stagnation era; to the faschizoid anti-orange zeal; to the ethnical nationalism growth and to schools clericalization. Such intellectuals betray Russia’s future. They are betrayals just as people convinced that it better to modestly live in occupation and feed their family than heroically die at the front and leave starving old mother and widow with little children at the rear. They are betrayals just like a prisoner loudly denouncing an escape plan (of captives or prisoners) to be timely heard by the guards and squealers saying that they will be caught and killed and those who stay will be searched, beat, put into cells, deprived of their stashes and small favors.

(www.grani.ru)