“There are no barriers for a person with talent and love for work,” Beethoven once said. If someone needs material to illustrate this thesis, he is unlikely to find an example better than the life of the Russian scientist Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov.
Lev Gumilyov took part in the Great Patriotic War, spent 14 years in camps and prisons on fictitious charges, experienced enormous difficulties in finding a job and publishing his works, but, nevertheless, in addition to numerous articles, he managed to write 14 books, and all of them managed to come out during the life of the author.
He created the theory of ethnogenesis and passionarity, which literally turned our understanding of the historical process and left no stone unturned from the theory of linear "progressive" historical development of mankind. L. Gumilyov's book "Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of the Earth" existed for a long time in one copy, but the All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information, where it was deposited, made 20,000 copies of it upon request.
L. Gumilev. Ethnogenesis and the Earth's biosphere, Estonian edition
The thoughts presented in the writings of L. Gumilyov are so bold and unexpected that many readers experience a real shock at the first acquaintance with them. At first, they are usually loud and noisy indignation. Some indignantly throw the seditious tome into the farthest corner, but there are those who read it again (and, perhaps, more than one), and then start looking for other works of this author. The fact is that the theory created by L. N. Gumilev, is universal and "works" in application to any country and to any era. You can agree or disagree with some of Gumilyov's views (for example, about the positive influence of the Mongols on the course of Russian history), but no one bothers anyone, using the tool created by our compatriot to draw their own independent conclusions.
Monument to L. Gumilyov in Kazan
It all began by no means brilliantly. Anna Akhmatova was a good poet, but a very difficult person to communicate and a very bad mother. Faina Ranevskaya wrote later:
"There is also a death penalty - these are memories of Akhmatova of her best friends."
Ranevskaya does not accuse these friends of slander, no - she complains that they are telling the truth. Ranevskaya herself said:
"I do not write memoirs about Akhmatova, because I love her very much."
We will not give examples, so as not to write a separate and very voluminous article.
N. Altman, Portrait of A. Akhmatova, 1914
The future great scientist was also a nobleman, and therefore, after graduating from school in Bezhetsk, he did not manage to enter the university. Having settled in the Geological Committee as a collector worker, he, as part of various expeditions, visited the Southern Baikal region, Tajikistan, the Crimea, on the Don, which, however, never regretted. Only in 1934, at the age of 22, did Gumilev get into the student audiences of Leningrad University, but a year later he was arrested for the first time. It was at this time, sitting in solitary confinement, that he first thought about the reasons why all historical phenomena occur. According to Gumilyov himself, then he “achieved the formulation of the question. And the formulation of the question contains the solution in its implicit form. " The first conclusion was short-lived, and soon Gumilyov continued his studies at the university, but in 1938.was arrested again and from the fourth year of the university got first to the Belomorkanal, and then to Norilsk. In the prison "Crosses" he again began to think about the driving forces of history and for the first time realized that "all the great wars are committed not because someone needs them, but because there is such a thing that I called passionarity - this is from Latin passion ".
Then there was the Great Patriotic War, which Gumilev graduated from in Berlin. Returning to Leningrad, he passed all the tests and exams for a year and a half at the university as an external student, and also "quickly passed the candidate minimum and, along the way, the state exam." After that, Gumilyov got a job at the Museum of Ethnography, but six months later he was arrested again, and in Lefortovo prison he again returned to the main questions of his life: what is passionarity and where does it come from? “Sitting in the cell,” recalled Lev Nikolaevich, “I saw a ray of light falling from the window onto the cement floor. And then I realized that passionarity is energy, the same as that absorbed by plants … Then there was a break of ten years, "which he spent in the camps of Karaganda and Omsk. During this "break", while working in the library of the Karaganda camp, Gumilyov wrote the book "Hunnu", and while in the hospital of the Omsk camp - the book "Ancient Turks". On the basis of the latter, he defended his doctoral dissertation.
L. Gumilyov's second doctoral dissertation on geography was later not approved by the Higher Attestation Commission on the grounds that it "should be assessed higher than the doctoral dissertation." As compensation, he was approved as a member of the academic council for the award of scientific degrees in geography.
The next step in the creation of the theory of passionarity and ethnogenesis by Gumilev was made after acquaintance with the book by V. I. Vernadsky "The chemical structure of the Earth's biosphere and its surroundings." After analyzing this work, L. Gumilev came to the conclusion that any ethnos is a closed corpuscular system that does not exist forever, but has its beginning and its end. For the birth and development of a new ethnos, the geobiochemical energy of the living matter of the biosphere is required. A person is born with a given level of production and consumption of this energy - neither increase nor decrease this level. The presence in an ethnos of a sufficient number of passionate individuals, who, due to the excess of this energy, have a tendency to sacrifice for the sake of achieving the set goal and the ability to overstrain to carry out the tasks assigned to them, is, according to the theory of L. N. Gumilyov, the driving force behind ethnogenesis and history:
“Due to the high intensity of passionarity, there is an interaction between the social and natural forms of the movement of matter, just as some chemical reactions take place only at high temperatures and in the presence of catalysts. The impulses of passionarity, as the biochemical energy of living matter, being refracted in the human psyche, create and preserve ethnic groups that disappear as soon as the passionary tension weakens”.
"Any ethnic system can be likened to a moving body, the nature of the movement of which is described through three parameters: mass (human population), impulse (energy content) and dominant (coherence of the elements of the system within it)."
Ethnic groups do not exist in isolation and actively interact with neighbors, who may be their peers, or be older or younger. A group of ethnic groups, consisting of peoples close in blood and traditions, who were born at the same time, under the influence of one and the same passionary impulse, are part of a superethnos. But the ethnic groups themselves are not homogeneous, since they include a number of sub-ethnic groups, which in turn are divided into consortia and konviksii. For example, the Western European super-ethnos, which took on the name of the Civilized World, includes the ethnic groups of the British, Irish, French, Italians, Germans, Swedes, Danes, and so on. The French, in turn, are divided into sub-ethnic groups of Bretons, Burgundians, Gascons, Alsatians, Normans and Provençals. Among these sub-ethnic groups, there is a division based on the community of life (convixies - the circles of relatives and close friends) and on the community of fate (consortia - sects, political parties, creative associations, etc.).
All ethnic groups arise and exist in a certain territory. However, sometimes situations arise when two or more ethnic groups are forced to coexist on the same territory. There are three options for such coexistence. The first of them is symbiosis, when representatives of each of the ethnic groups occupy their own ecological niche, without pretending to the traditional spheres of activity of their neighbors. An example of symbiosis is the peaceful coexistence of the Slavic farmers of Kievan Rus and the "black hoods" - nomads who were engaged in cattle breeding on the steppe outskirts of the Russian principalities. Dairy products, meat, skins "black hoods" were exchanged for grain and handicraft products. In addition, as light cavalry, they took part in campaigns against other nomads, receiving a share in the booty.
Another option is "Xenia" (from the Greek guest "): in this case, a small group of representatives of a different ethnic group lives among the aborigines, not differing from them in their occupation, but not mixing with them. An example is the Chinatowns in many cities in the United States, or the famous Brighton Beach area in New York.
Chinatown, San Francisco
Brighton Beach
And, finally, the "chimera", in which two or more alien superethnic ethnic groups coexist on the same territory, one of which occupies a dominant position and exploits the others. An example of a "chimera" is the Khazar Khaganate, in which the Jewish community was engaged in trade and politics, the Muslims were involved in military affairs, and the disenfranchised indigenous Khazar population played a subordinate role, serving both.
Now let's talk about passionarity and other factors that influence the fate of a person. In his works L. Gumilev came to the conclusion that human behavior is determined by two constant and two variable parameters.
Constant parameters are instincts (self-preservation, procreation, etc.) and egoism, which are present in each individual person.
Variable parameters are passionarity (passion), which gives a person the ability to overstrain in order to achieve a set goal, and attractiveness (attraction) is a striving for truth, beauty, justice.
According to the definition given by L. N. Gumilev, passionarity is:
“An irresistible inner striving (conscious or more often unconscious) for activities aimed at achieving some goal … This goal seems to be more valuable to a passionate individual even than his own life, and even more so - the life and happiness of his contemporaries and fellow tribesmen. The passionarity of an individual can be combined with any abilities … it has nothing to do with ethics, equally easily giving rise to feats and crimes, creativity and destruction, good and evil, excluding only indifference."
Passionarity has the ability to induce, that is, it is contagious: harmonious people, being in the immediate vicinity of passionaries, begin to behave as if they themselves were passionary. Gilles de Rais, being next to Joan of Arc, was a hero. But when he returned home, he quickly turned into a typical feudal tyrant and even entered folk lore as Duke Bluebeard.
Gilles de Rais
Louis-Alexander Berthier was Napoleon Bonaparte's remarkable chief of staff. When he is next to the emperor, it seems that we are dealing with a person close to him in business qualities and talents. However, Napoleon said about him: "This gosling, from which I tried to grow an eagle."And indeed, as soon as Berthier was left alone, an intelligent staff officer immediately demonstrated indecision and creative impotence. When on November 27, 1812, Murat, having learned about Napoleon's departure, asked Berthier in Vilna to advise him on what to do, he replied that "he was used to only sending out orders, not giving them."
Louis-Alexander Berthier
It is interesting that a passionary personality is capable of feats and super-efforts only when he acts in a suitable environment - in his own ethnic field (at home or as part of an expeditionary army, a gang of explorers, a Viking squad, a detachment of conquistadors). Here is Leon Trotsky, for example: when he found himself in Moscow or Petrograd, the workers went to the barricades, and during the Civil War, where Trotsky's armored train appeared, barefoot, hungry and practically unarmed Red Army men began to defeat the white armies. However, finding himself in exile, the great leader, like the mythical Antaeus, lost contact with the soil that raised him and led the life of an unremarkable bourgeois. Therefore, he died much earlier than his physical death. And Sofya Perovskaya told her comrades: "I would rather be hanged here than live abroad." And she died on time. While in exile, the excellent commander, Bonaparte's rival, General Moreau, did not find use for his talents. Sad fate, forced to leave Carthage, Hannibal. The genius of N. Gogol withered under the hot sun of Italy.
I must say that many of our passionate poets and writers intuitively felt where the source of their creative power was: Bryusov, Akhmatova, Blok, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Yesenin and many others refuse to leave the revolution and the Civil War of Russia. V. Bryusov, by the way, also joined the Communist Party.
V. Bryusov. The only Symbolist to become a member of the Communist Party
Returning to Soviet Russia A. K. Tolstoy, A. Bely and M. Tsvetaeva.
“I'm not needed here. I’m impossible there,”Tsvetaeva, who returned to Russia, soberly assesses the situation.
In 1922, the departure of A. Bely to the USSR, one of the emigrants commented on the following verses:
“What a time! Everything is strange and complicated
Vinaigrette of narcotic dreams:
How to comprehend these fictions can be:
Red White and White Krasnov?"
"Red" Andrey Bely, aka "fiery angel" Madiel (we'll talk about how the poet became an "angel")
But what about Nabokov and Brodsky then? They can be attributed to the Russian classics with the same reason with which tennis player M. Sharapova, a US citizen, is stubbornly called a Russian woman. Nabokov and Brodsky wrote mainly in English and belong to the English-speaking culture. Don't believe me? Take Brodsky's collection of poems: beautiful, interesting, sometimes even flawless, but in some places it looks like a rhymed interlinear translation and, most importantly, it's cold! But from the poems of Pushkin, Nekrasov, Yesenin warmth in the soul. This feeling is called complementarity. Complimentarity can be positive or negative; it is an unaccountable feeling of liking or disliking, liking or disliking. Positive complementarity is at the core of patriotism. And it also allows a person to unmistakably identify himself as a Russian, English or Spaniard. The presence of complementarity also explains the feeling of nostalgia: once in a foreign ethnic field, a person yearns and does not find a place for himself, although, it would seem, he is in optimal conditions of existence for himself. For example, a Russian person lives in a good (this is important!) Area of Paris, all around is clean, in shops - 200 sorts of beer, 100 sorts of cheese and sausages, at every step there is a cafe with Beaujolais and croissants, the climate is almost a resort. Everything is there - Montmartre, Sorbonne, Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, but something is still missing for happiness. And in Russia - and dirty entrances are not uncommon, and cigarette butts on the sidewalks still come across, some gloomy people, cold, rains, snowstorms, but the soul is easy. An example of negative complementarity is the work of Zurab Tsereteli: he is a good sculptor, in Tbilisi he would probably be worn on his hands, and in Moscow everybody is scolding his monuments. And nothing can be done about it - you cannot order your heart.
For the sake of fairness, it should be said that it is much easier for people of technical specialties to realize themselves in a foreign ethnic field than for humanities. Since the rulers, compasses and laws of perspective are the same everywhere, a good architect will build a building of the right size and in the required style even in Rome, even in London, even in Tokyo. An intelligent programmer can write a new accounting program with equal ease in a Moscow apartment and in the New York office of Microsoft. But it doesn't get rid of nostalgia.
Passionarity is a hereditary trait (moreover, a recessive trait, which is manifested by far from all descendants of a passionary individual): it either exists or it does not. But attractiveness depends on education.
Negative passionarity and low attractiveness make a person a cowardly selfish man in the street, a deserter, a traitor, a dishonest mercenary. These people are alien to such concepts as a sense of duty, patriotism and love for the homeland.
On April 12, 1204, the great Constantinople was taken by a small army of crusaders, who lost only one (!) Knight during the assault: the subpassionaries did not want to die on the fortress walls - they preferred to be killed in their own homes.
The complete absence of passionarity with high attractiveness is characteristic of the eternally reflective "Chekhov" intellectuals. V. Rozanov said about Chekhov:
"He became a favorite writer of our lack of will, our lack of heroism, our everyday life, our mediocre."
Many such characters can be found in the works of Dostoevsky. But a person with positive attraction, in whom passionate and instinctive impulses balance each other, is a law-abiding citizen, a harmonious personality. Such people are the foundation of any society, the more there are in a given country, the more prosperous it looks. The only drawback of a social system with a predominance of harmonious personalities is its extremely low resistance and inability to withstand external influences. Harmonious people are patriots of their country and, if necessary, do not refuse to fight, but they are extremely bad at it. So, during World War II, the entire Danish army managed to kill 2 and injure 10 German soldiers. Field Marshal List's by no means large army in the spring of 1941 managed to capture 90,000 Yugoslavs, 270,000 Greeks and 13,000 British, losing only 5,000 killed and wounded. The harmonious Decembrists failed to seize power, which literally lay under their feet for a whole day, and, being arrested, immediately began to repent: S. P. Trubetskoy named 79 of his comrades, E. P. Obolensky - 71, P. I. Pestel - 17. But their passionate comrades Sukhinov, Bestuzhev, Pushchin, Kuchelbekker, Lunin demonstrated a completely different model of behavior: they could easily go abroad, but preferred the long-term hard labor of a relatively prosperous life in emigration.
An insignificant passionarity in the presence of certain abilities makes a person a scientist, artist, writer or musician, and without such abilities - a successful entrepreneur or a major official.
A person with a high degree of passionarity becomes, depending on inclinations, a national leader, a rebel, a great conqueror, the founder of a state or religion, a prophet or heresiarch. The most tragic combination that kills a person, rather than the plague, is the combination of a pronounced passionarity with a high degree of attractiveness. It makes him a martyr of the first centuries of Christianity, or a "perfect" Cathar who refuses to buy his life at the cost of killing a dog or chicken. And also Spartacus, Jeanne d'Arc and Che Guevara. A high degree of passionarity with a relatively low attractiveness also kills, but not immediately: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte first beat a mass of people, and only then went to the grave themselves - to the applause of the grateful audience.
Hearing the names of great ambitious and conquerors, readers may remember the term coined by Max Weber. It's about charisma (from the Greek word for grace).
M. Weber
Even the ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote that the dominant principle that determines the actions of an individual is the will to power: individuals predisposed to rule have a certain elusive quality that puts them above the rest. A charismatic leader is a vivid example of a passionate personality with a low degree of attraction. The lives of hundreds or thousands of people for him are worth less than a penny.
But back to the laws of ethnogenesis. The triggering mechanism of ethnogenesis is a passionary impulse, the cause of which Gumilev considered micromutations due to the impact of certain types of cosmic radiation. These emissions are usually absorbed by the ionosphere and do not reach the Earth's surface, but under certain conditions, about once every thousand years, it still happens. The passionary impulse does not capture the entire surface of the Earth - its area is a narrow strip elongated in the meridional or latitudinal direction: it seems that the globe is striped by a certain ray, moreover, on the one hand, and the propagation of the passionary impulse is limited by the curvature of the planet”(L. Gumilyov). As a result of these micromutations, passionaries appear in a certain region - "people striving to create more than is necessary to support the life of their own and their offspring": after all, "the world must be corrected, because it is bad" - this is the behavioral imperative of passionate people of this phase of ethnogenesis … Mutations “do not affect the entire population of their range. Only a few, relatively few individuals mutate, but this may be quite enough for new “breeds” to emerge, which we fix over time as original ethnic groups”(L. Gumilev). A small group of "new" people (consortium) capable of heroic and sacrificial deeds are joined by the masses around them. This connection is possible thanks to passionary induction and resonance: people unconsciously reach out and strive to imitate the brightest passionary in their field of vision.
Sometimes passionarity enters the region not from outer space, but through "genetic drift" - the dispersion of the passionary trait through random connections. The Normans were particularly successful in this field. For more than two centuries of the Viking Age, ships with passionate men continuously went to sea from the shores of the Scandinavian countries. Few of them returned to their homeland: they drowned in the sea or died in battles, leaving offspring in England and Normandy, Ireland, Sicily and southern Italy, along the entire Baltic coast and on the territory of Kievan Rus. According to the author of The Tale of Bygone Years, Novgorod, formerly a purely Slavic city, during the life of Nestor, due to the constant influx of Normans, was "bred", and recent studies in one of the counties on the coast of England showed that the vast majority of its inhabitants are genetically Norwegians.
So, with a passionary impulse, energy enters the system, which, in full accordance with the laws of physics, is constantly consumed and gradually dries up. Therefore, ethnic groups are not eternal. Nations are born, come into being, they are going through the age of reckless youth, the time of wise maturity, but everything ends with senile insanity, betrayal of everything for which they once fought and went to the stake, oblivion of moral norms and spiritual values, mockery of ideals. And when this decline reaches its lowest point, old peoples die, lose their historical memory and merge with new, young peoples. The descendants of the Assyrians and Sarmatians, Phoenicians and Parthians, Thracians and Goths still live among us, but they have adopted other names and consider their history to be alien.
The average lifespan of an ethnic group is 1200 years. During this time, all ethnic systems go through certain stages in their development.
Immediately after the passionary impulse, there is a phase of ascent (its duration is about 300 years), during which the passionarity grows, at first slowly, then very quickly. Passionate people are actively looking for the meaning of life, and when they find it, the stereotypes of social behavior change. The fact is that the passionaries of the ascent phase require super-efforts not only from themselves, but also from the ordinary people around them. The most striking example is the Yasa of Genghis Khan, according to which, if a person drowned, the Mongol was obliged to jump into the water, regardless of whether he could swim. On pain of imminent death, it was necessary to feed an unknown traveler encountered in the steppe, return the lost weapon to a friend, not flee from the battlefield, etc.
Statue of Genghis Khan in Tsongzhin-Boldog
During the ascent phase in Ancient Hellas, the common nouns “idiot” (a person who avoids public life) and “parasite” (this is one who goes to other people's dinners) appeared. In Western Europe, which is at the same stage of ethnogenesis, there was a negative attitude towards healthy beggars and monks. F. Rabelais, for example, wrote:
"A monk does not work like a peasant, does not protect the country like a warrior, does not treat the sick as a doctor, does not preach and teach the people, like a good evangelical doctor of theology and teacher, does not deliver items convenient and necessary for the state, like a merchant."
The ascent phase is replaced by the akmatic phase, during which the number of passionaries in society reaches a maximum, and they begin to interfere with each other. And since these people are not inclined to compromise, they do not argue, but destroy each other. During this phase, the stereotype of social behavior changes again. Let's give an example. During the upswing period, every resident of Italy, be it a nobleman from Milan, a Venetian merchant or a Neapolitan fisherman, had his own duties, which he, in order to be respected by those around him, had to strictly fulfill and not stand out from the general mass. If you are not a priest, then there is no need for you to read, and if not a knight, then why do you need a sword or a sword? Was he planning to rebel? But then a new system of views - humanism - penetrates into all strata of society and rapidly spreads. For the first time in the history of Western European civilization, the value of a person as an individual, his right to freedom, happiness, development and manifestation of his abilities is recognized. The welfare of a person is considered a criterion for assessing social institutions, and the principles of equality, justice, humanity are considered the desired norm of relations between people. The imperative of this phase is “be yourself”. Italians no longer want to be ordinary people, they are passionate about listening to music, expressing their opinions about paintings and reading translations of Greek authors. So that some stupid and wild aristocrats do not interfere with normal people to study Aristotle and discuss the works of Herodotus and Plutarch, in Florence the grandees are deprived of all rights. And in Venice they come up with a carnival lasting 9 months a year: put on a mask - and everyone is equal in front of you. It would seem, live and rejoice. But where is there: the Genoese fought with the Venetians, the Guelphs with the Gibbelins, the French regularly come to Italy, not because the sea is warm there and the houses are beautiful, but to fight the Spaniards. But Dante and Giotto are already doing.
During the next phase (fracture phase), there is a sharp decrease in passionarity. “We are tired of the greats,” say the townsfolk and the passionaries are out of work. This is a very dangerous period in the life of an ethnic group, which becomes extremely vulnerable to any influences and, in the presence of aggressive neighbors, may even die. In Byzantium, iconoclasm became a manifestation of the breakdown phase. And in the Czech Republic of the era of the Hussite wars, a division into parties took place, which, not limiting themselves to repelling the crusades, clashed among themselves: the irreconcilable taborites and selflessly brave "orphans" were destroyed by the utraquists.
This is followed by an inertial phase, which L. Gumilev called "the golden autumn of civilization." During this period, the number of passionaries reaches the optimal value and the accumulation of material and cultural values occurs. In ancient Rome, the inertial phase began with the reign of Octavian-Augustus, in Italy - the era of the High Renaissance began. Gumilev wrote about this:
“People of this phase of ethnogenesis always think that they have come to the threshold of happiness, that they are about the completion of development, which in the 19th century. began to be called progress."
People of states that have reached the inertial phase of development invariably think that their countries "will prosper until the end of the world, and no effort will be required from them to maintain this prosperity." But the process does not stop there, the level of passionarity falls and the phase of obscuration begins, when “hard work is ridiculed, intellectual joys cause rage” and “corruption is legalized in public life” (L. Gumilev). If in the inertial phase the social imperative was the proud “Be like me”, now the townsfolk insistently demand: “Be like us” (I just want to remember the term “mass culture”). This society is a paradise for sub-passionaries, who in previous eras were not even considered people. But now, amid pleasant conversations about human rights, whole generations of professional parasites appear (in ancient Rome they were called proletarians), for whom gladiatorial fights are arranged (in other countries - free concerts and fireworks on holidays). Drug addicts and homosexuals no longer hide in dens, but arrange parades and colorful processions in the central squares of the largest cities. Thirsty for affordable pleasures, sub-passionaries now do not want to take care of either their parents, who, as a rule, are forgotten by everyone, die in nursing homes, or about children. The birth rate is falling, and the territory of the indigenous ethnos is gradually settled by newcomers - a new Great Migration of Nations begins. Ethnic groups at this stage of development are slowly but steadily losing their resistance and ability to resist and defend themselves. Such a miserable picture was presented by the Roman Empire of the era of soldier emperors, when the income of one circus rider was equal to the income of a hundred lawyers, and on one ordinary day there were two holidays. The legions, the striking force of which were the Germans, still held the borders of the empire, but how can a hedge help a rotten tree? It is significant that in 455, after the destruction of Rome by vandals, the descendants of the great conquerors discussed not how to rebuild the destroyed city, but how to stage a circus performance.
Rome, which entered the phase of obscuration, died, but there are exceptions to this rule. In this case, the phase of homeostasis begins, in which the ethnos quietly and imperceptibly exists on the territory that was not needed by any of the neighbors. So Przhevalsky compared the Mongolia of his day to an extinct hearth in a yurt. If an ethnic group retains some heroic legends from earlier times, this phase is called memorial. But this is not always the case. In the event of a new passionary impulse, the regeneration of the ethnos may occur.
But if passionarity is a recessive trait, then it may well manifest itself in the descendants of sub-passionaries, right? Do such passionaries have a chance to prove themselves in the society of the phase of obscuration or homeostasis? No, the old and tired society does not need them. At first, the last passionaries of the ethnos go to make a career from the sleepy province to the capital cities, but the passionary tension continues to fall and then they have only one way - to seek happiness abroad. Passionate Albanians, for example, left for Venice or Turkey.
Sometimes the theory of L. Gumilyov is “put on the same level” with the concept of “challenge and response” by A. Toynbee.
A. Toynbee
This point of view cannot be called justified. Toynbee divided all types of society known to him into 2 categories: primitive, not developing, and civilizations, which he counted 21 in 16 regions. If 2-3 civilizations arise in succession on the same territory, the subsequent ones are called daughter ones (Sumerian and Babylonian in Mesopotamia, Minoan, Hellenic and Orthodox Christian in the Balkan Peninsula). Toynbee singled out “abortive” civilizations (Irish, Scandinavians, Central Asian Nestorians) and “detained” civilizations (Eskimos, Ottomans, nomads of Eurasia, Spartans and Polynesians) in special sections. The development of societies, according to Toynbee, is carried out through mimesis ("imitation"). In primitive societies, old people and ancestors are imitated, which makes these societies static, and in "civilizations" - creative individuals, which creates the dynamics of development. This is an absolutely wrong position, since in this case we are not talking about different types of civilizations, but about different phases of development: imitation of creative personalities is characteristic of people of the inertial phase, and imitation of elders is characteristic of homeostasis.
Civilization, according to Toynbee's theory, develops "in response to a challenge in a situation of particular difficulty, inspiring an unprecedented effort." Talent and creativity are seen as a reactive state of the body to an external pathogen. I think that this position does not need special comments: if there is talent, it will manifest itself both in favorable conditions (Mozart's gift was carefully nurtured by his father), and in unfavorable (Sofia Kovalevskaya, for example), if there is no talent, it will not appear despite what are the "challenges". The "challenges" themselves are divided into three types:
1. Unfavorable natural conditions.
A very controversial position. Here, for example, is the "challenge" that the Aegean Sea allegedly "threw" on the ancient Hellenes. It is completely incomprehensible why this, extremely convenient for navigation, warm sea, which, according to Gabriel García Márquez, "can be crossed on foot, jumping from island to island", is viewed by Toynbee as an unfavorable natural condition, and not vice versa. And why do you think the Swedes in the Viking Age responded to the “challenge” of the Baltic Sea (and how), while the Finns living in similar conditions did not? There are many such examples.
2. Attack of foreigners.
The scope for criticism is simply unimaginable. Why did the Germans and Austrians respond to Napoleon's "challenge" with surrender, while the Spaniards and Russians, despite the hardest defeats, continued to fight? Why has not a single state been able to respond to the "challenges" of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane? Etc.
3. "Rotting" of previous civilizations: the emergence of Western European civilization as a response to the "debauchery and ugliness" of the Romans, for example.
Also a very controversial thesis. The first viable feudal kingdoms appeared in Western Europe 300 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the response to the “challenge” was too late. In addition, it seems to me that in this case it is generally more appropriate to speak of a positive influence (Roman law, the system of roads, architectural traditions, etc.), and not of a “challenge”.
Toynbee's theory, of course, played at one time a positive role in the development of science, but it should be admitted that at the present time it has mainly historical significance.
At what stage of ethnogenesis is modern Russia? Special care should be taken in this matter as there may be an error due to proximity aberration.“We do not know the time in which we live,” LN Gumilyov usually answered questions about where we are in development. It is extremely ungrateful to make assumptions about the phase of ethnogenesis that modern Russia is going through. But without pretending to be an absolute truth, you can still try.
Kievan Rus, which was in a phase of inertia, after the death of Vladimir Monomakh's son Mstislav, slowly but steadily slipped into the phase of obscuration. The exact date of the change in the color of time, of course, cannot be called, but we have one landmark.
In 2006, after the death of L. N. Gumilyov, on the territory of the Church of the Annunciation on Myachin in Novgorod, a necropolis with burials was discovered, the lower bar of which belongs to the period of pre-Mongol Rus. It turned out that at the turn of the XIII-XIV centuries the anthropological type of Novgorodians changed. In the X-XIII centuries, Novgorodians were tall, long-headed, with a high or medium-high face and a sharply protruding nose. Later they became shorter, more round-headed, with a lower face, with a less prominent nose. There was no influx of foreigners to Novgorod during this period. He "became obsessed" (according to Nestor) much earlier, was not conquered by the Mongols, refugees from other Russian principalities were hardly too numerous to significantly affect the demographic situation, moreover, they were representatives of the same ethnic group as the Novgorodians. Such a sharp change in the anthropological type may be a sign of a mutation of the passionary impulse. So, on the eve of the Mongol invasion, the ancient Russian principalities had to be in the stage of obscuration. Let's try to find confirmation of this thesis, let's see what was happening in Russia at that time.
In 1169, Andrei Bogolyubsky not only captured one of the greatest cities in Europe - Kiev, but gave it to his troops for a three-day plunder. In terms of scale and consequences, this action is comparable only to the defeat of Rome, perpetrated by the vandals of Henzerich or Constantinople by the crusaders. (according to a number of historians, Kiev in the 12th century was second only to Constantinople and Cordoba in terms of wealth and importance in Europe). All contemporaries were horrified and decided that the bottom of the abyss had been reached, and there was nowhere to degrade further. But where is there! In 1187 the Suzdal armies attacked Ryazan: "Their land is empty and burned all over." In 1203 Rurik Rostislavich again brutally ruined Kiev, which had barely managed to recover. The Orthodox prince ravaged St. Sophia and the Church of the Tithes ("all the icons are odrash"), and his Polovtsian allies "hacked all the old monks, priests and nuns, and the young matresses, wives and daughters of the Kievites were taken to their encampments." In 1208, the Vladimir prince Vsevolod the Big Nest went to Ryazan, took the inhabitants away from there (in our time it is called forced deportation), the city burned down. The battle of the Suzdal people with the Novgorodians on Lipitsa in 1216 claimed more Russian lives than the defeat of the troops of Yuri Vladimirsky from the Mongols on the City River in 1238. Mstislav Udatny (lucky, not daring), the hero of the Battle of Lipitsa, claiming the laurels of a great commander, after a collision with the Mongols on Kalka, runs ahead of everyone. Having reached the Dnieper, he chops down all the boats: let the Russian princes and soldiers perish, but he himself is now safe. And during the invasion of Batu Khan, the subpassionary princes indifferently watched the cities of their neighbors burning. They were accustomed to using the Polovtsians in the fight against their Russian enemies and hoped to come to an agreement with the Mongols on the same terms. Yaroslav, the brother of Vladimir Prince Yuri, did not bring his troops to the camp on the City. Yuri died and in the spring of 1238 Yaroslav ascended the throne. The citizens were indignant and accused him of cowardice and betrayal? It never happened: "There is joy for all Christians, and God delivered them from the great Tatars." It is true that the Tatars were besieging Kozelsk at that time, but apparently not Russian people or Christians lived there. But even if we assume that all Russian princes, without exception, were calculating and cynical egoists and scoundrels, their passivity during the siege of Kozelsk by the Mongols is completely incomprehensible. The terrible and invincible Tatar army, which captured such large and well-fortified cities as Vladimir, Suzdal and Ryazan, was suddenly stuck under a small, unremarkable town for 7 weeks. Think about these figures: the proud Ryazan - "Sparta" of the ancient Russian world - fell on the 6th day. The fierceness of resistance is evidenced by the fact that Ryazan, unlike Moscow, Kolomna, Vladimir or Suzdal, was not reborn in the same place: everyone died, and there was no one to return to the ashes. The capital of the principality was the city that took over the glory of Ryazan - Pereyaslavl. Suzdal fell on the third day, the Mongols approached the capital of North-Eastern Russia Vladimir on February 3 and captured it on February 7. And some Torzhok resists for 2 weeks! Kozelsk - as much as 7 weeks! Whatever they say about the heroism of the defenders of Torzhok and Kozelsk, such a delay can only be explained by the extreme fatigue and weakness of the Tatar army. After all, then the Russians will think about it 10 times before hitting the Tatar with a saber, for the first time they fought for real. Nomads from the tribes conquered by the Mongols, which were traditionally used by the victors as "cannon fodder", suffered huge losses in the capture of large cities. And it would never have occurred to Batu Khan to send elite Mongolian units (totaling 4,000 people) to the fortress walls: the inglorious death of heroes from the banks of Onon and Kerulen would not have been forgiven him in Mongolia. Therefore, the Mongols did not storm Kozelsk, but besieged it. By the end of the siege, the Kozelites grew bolder and when the Mongols imitated a retreat, the squad and the city militia rushed in pursuit - they decided to finish off! The result is known - they were ambushed, surrounded and destroyed, after which the city fell. Did the nearest neighbors really know about this - the Smolensk and Polotsk princes, Mikhail of Chernigov and the same Yaroslav Vsevolodovich? In order, if not to destroy, then at least thoroughly pat the weary invaders, they would have enough troops. Moreover, this could be done with absolutely impunity: after all, returning to Smolensk or Vladimir for the Mongols is fraught with the danger of getting bogged down in the maze of opened rivers and thawed swamps and being destroyed in parts. Later the Russian princes will helpfully accompany the armies of punishers, show the roads and fords, and help to catch the "foreign" peasants hiding in the forests. In addition, Batu Khan just at that time had a quarrel with his brother Guyuk and his position was very unstable: Guyuk is the son of the great khan and himself will soon become a great khan, and Batu's father has long been in the grave. There is no need to hope for help in case of defeat. But the Smolensk, Polotsk and Chernigov armies did not move, and during this time the Vladimir army managed to make a victorious campaign to Lithuania. The Tatars calmly left with a load and booty into the steppe, where they united with Mongke's army. After that, a campaign against Chernigov and Kiev became possible. Further - more: while the Mongols smashed Pereyaslavl and Chernigov, the squad of the Vladimir prince Yaroslav took the Russian city of Kamenets by storm, among the prisoners was the wife of the Chernigov prince ¬¬– “Princess Mikhailova”. Now tell me why the Mongols need allies if they have such enemies? But Russia has not yet been conquered or broken, the people are anti-Tatar, the forces of the princes are not exhausted. After the death of Yaroslav, the younger brother of Alexander Nevsky, Prince of Vladimir, Andrei and Daniil Galitsky, began to prepare a joint action against the Tatars, but were betrayed by Alexander, who was not too lazy to go to the Horde and personally bring "Nevryuev's army" to Russia. The Rostov princes did not come to the aid of Andrei, in a fierce battle his army was defeated, and the last defender of Russia from the Tatars fled to Sweden. Those of his warriors who were captured by the Mongols were blinded - no, not by the Tatars, but by the Russians - on the personal order of Alexander. And off we go: "Every day, brother to brother to the Horde carries izvet …". Disgusting and disgusting. Indeed, "life, which is worse than death." But the drive of passion, which affected the northeastern principalities in the XIV century, brought the already dying country out of the impasse, transforming Kievan Rus (a conventional term coined by historians of the XIX century) into Moscow Rus. The miserable fate of Kiev, Chernigov, Polotsk, Galich, who remained outside the zone of passionary impulse - so rich and strong once, and now have become provincial outskirts of neighboring states, shows what Novgorod and Pskov, Moscow and Tver, Ryazan and Vladimir managed to avoid. And after 600 years, according to the inexorable laws of ethnogenesis, Russia entered the akmatic phase of its development with all the ensuing consequences in the form of revolutions and the Civil War. And the communist ideology condemned by some has absolutely nothing to do with it. There were a lot of passionaries in Russia and they would not have left the Romanov dynasty alone, even if they had not the slightest idea of Marxism - the revolution would have begun under different slogans and different banners, but with the same results. The famous passionary Oliver Cromwell did not read the works of Marx and Lenin, but nevertheless taught the British monarchs the rules of good behavior.
Monument to Oliver Cromwell, London
The French Jacobins also did fine without Marx and Engels. And the harsh dictator of Geneva, Jean Calvin, was completely inspired by the texts of the Holy Scriptures. Priests subordinate to him came to their homes to inspect the style of the nightgowns of their parishioners' wives and check for sweets in the kitchen, and the children regularly and with pleasure reported on insufficiently pious parents.
Wall of the Reformation, Geneva. Jean Calvin - second from left
A similar situation was in Florence at the end of the 15th, when the Dominican monk and preacher Girolamo Savonarola came to power in it. The manufacture of luxury goods was banned, women were ordered to cover their faces, and children were ordered to spy on their parents. In January 1497, on the day of the beginning of the traditional carnival, a "burning of the bustle" was arranged: on a huge bonfire, along with playing cards, fans, carnival masks, mirrors, books by Petrarch and Boccaccio, paintings by famous artists, including Botticelli, who personally brought them for burning.
Savonarola, a monument in Ferrara, the city where the violent Dominican was born
With equal justification, the troubles of Russia can be blamed on both the communists and the cyclones that come to us mainly from the northwest, and not, say, from the southeast. But as long as the Gulf Stream and the laws of physics exist, cyclones will come from the northwest.
However, let's return to the Russian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. The situation here was no worse than in the Italy we have described. There is Protorenaissance, and we have the "Silver Age"! Ivan Bunin is terribly disliked that it is not he, a gentleman and an aristocrat, who is the idol of reading Russia, but Valery Bryusov - "the son of a Moscow merchant selling traffic jams." But it is no longer enough for Bryusov to be a fashionable poet - no, he is the "Feeder in a dark cloak" and "The Secret Knight of the Wife Clothed in the Sun". The complex relationship in a love triangle V. Bryusov - N. Petrovskaya - A. Bely is not an anecdote, but a mystical story about the tragic struggle for Renata's soul between not very smart, but brave and noble Ruprecht and the "fiery angel" Madiel. At the same time, along with recognizable characters, Agrippa of Nestheim, Faust and Satan were involved in the action. Readers understand everything, but nobody seems ridiculous or inappropriate.
Nina Petrovskaya. She shot at Andrei Bely, who rejected her, but the pistol misfired. After the release of the novel, "The Fiery Angel" converted to Catholicism and changed her name to Renata
By the way, if someone, due to an incredible misunderstanding and an absurd coincidence, has not yet read the novel "The Fiery Angel" - read it immediately. You will not regret.
Vladimir Mayakovsky found himself on a short leg no longer with the devil, but with the Lord God Himself, to whom he at first amicably suggested "arrange a carousel on the tree for the study of good and evil", and then frightened him with a penknife. Gorky said on this occasion that "he never read such a conversation with God, except in the biblical Book of Job." Velimir Khlebnikov, too, did not complain and appointed himself the chairman of the globe.
Velimir Khlebnikov
Anna Akhmatova is called “the wrathful of the winds”, “the messenger of blizzards, fevers, poetry and wars”, “the crazy devil of the white night”: what can you say here - modestly and with taste.
Marina Tsvetaeva addresses in her letter to Pasternak: "To my brother in the fifth season, sixth sense and fourth dimension." In our time, probably, something else about Mars or Alpha Centauri would add.
And at the same time, our classics, just like Italians, do not like each other terribly. Chekhov once said that it would be good to take all the decadents and send them to prison companies. The steamer Anton Pavlovich, later called "philosophical", as an alternative to prison companies, would probably also fit and like it. And the famous actors of the Moscow Art Theater, according to Chekhov, are "not cultured enough": you can see an intelligent person right away - after all, he did not call any drunks or rowdy! I could have.
A. Akhmatova also treats Chekhov himself without much respect: he calls him "a writer of unmanly people", and considers his works "completely devoid of poetry and saturated with the smells of colonial goods and merchant shops."
Leo Tolstoy writes to Chekhov: "You know that I hate Shakespeare … But your plays are even worse."
Bunin is sincerely surprised:
"What an amazing cluster of sick, abnormal … Tsvetaeva with her incessant shower of wild words and sounds in verse …, consumptive and not without reason writing from a male name Gippius, puny, dead from diseases Artsybashev …"
A. I. Kuprin "answers" Bunin:
Poet, your deception is naive.
Why do you need to pretend to be Fet.
Everyone knows that you are just Ivan, By the way, and a fool at the same time."
At this time, kings and ministers are persecuted no worse than the grandees in Florence: revolutionaries, journalists, the public in expensive restaurants and cheap inns poison them like wild wolves, so they sit in their palaces and try not to appear on the street once again. Being an aristocrat is bad manners, and therefore the daughters of princes and governors general cut their hair, buy a Browning and "go into the revolution."
Makarov I. K. Portrait of the daughters of the actual privy councilor, member of the council of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the governor of St. Petersburg, Count L. N. Perovsky Maria and Sophia, 1859. Sophia - in the foreground
Monument to Sofya Perovskaya, Kaluga
The heirs of millions of fortunes have been distributing leaflets among illiterate workers for three days. Then, infuriated by their importunity, the workers inform the police. During the political process, undergraduate students tell such horrors about their loved ones that it becomes clear to everyone: terrorists of an international scale are in the dock. The judges pass severe sentences and the heroes, who are very pleased with themselves, go to hard labor with their heads held high: after all, only sub-passionaries or harmonious personalities do not understand what happiness it is to suffer for the truth! The entire educated society applauds the martyrs of the revolution and stigmatizes the henchmen and satraps of the bloody emperor, who send beautiful and pure (and this is true) children to suffering and certain death.
Vera Zasulich
Then the grown-up children find themselves in emigration, and in response to requests for their extradition, Britain, France and Switzerland with undisguised pleasure show the stupid tsarist regime a huge zero. Here, for example, is the story of Lev Hartmann: in 1879.after an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Alexander II, he fled to France. Russian diplomats are making great efforts to extradite him, practically achieving a positive result, but a formidable shout from Victor Hugo follows - and the French authorities cowardly retreat: they expel Hartmann … to Britain! And from England, as from the Cossack Don, "no extradition."
Lev Hartman
And then came the time of revolutions, and the forces of the opponents were not equal. The so-called "fiery revolutionaries" are passionaries of the purest water, and their opponents are, at best, harmonious personalities. And the people at all times and in all countries follow the brightest passionary, whatever his name is - Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon Bonaparte, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky. What to do: there is something in these people that attracts everyone, except for the most marginal sub-passionaries, whose homeland is where they will be offered a drink. Russian workers and peasants at the beginning of the twentieth century were absolutely not interested in external problems, but they were extremely interested in internal issues. Indeed, why shoot at the Japanese, Germans or Austrians, when the hated landlords and "accursed capitalists" can be spent? That is why, torn apart by excessive passionarity and internal contradictions, Russia could not win either the Russo-Japanese or the First World War. “But passion is cooled by the blood of martyrs and victims”: during the Civil War and the repressions that followed, a significant part of Russian passionaries perished. But the remaining ones were enough to defeat Germany, which was in an inertial phase. The Germans were excellent soldiers - well trained, disciplined, and also educated and cultured people. They easily dealt with the French, Belgians, Greeks, Poles and so on. Even the descendants of the indomitable Vikings - the Norwegians - could not offer them any resistance. But in Russia, victorious German troops faced the first generation of berserkers! There were not very many of them, but thanks to passionary induction, a transformation of the behavior of the harmonious people around them took place. And the Germans immediately start complaining.
From a letter from Corporal Otto Zalfiner:
“There is very little left to Moscow. And yet it seems to me that we are infinitely far from it … Today we walk over the corpses of those who fell in front: tomorrow we ourselves will become corpses."
V. Hoffman, officer of the 267th regiment of the 94th division:
“Russians are not people, but some kind of iron creatures. They never get tired and are not afraid of fire."
General Blumentritt:
"With amazement and disappointment, we discovered at the end of October (1941) that the defeated Russians did not seem to even suspect that as a military force they had almost ceased to exist."
Halder, June 29, 1941:
"The stubborn resistance of the Russians forces us to conduct battles according to all the rules of our military manuals. In Poland and in the West, we could afford certain liberties and deviations from the charter principles; now this is already unacceptable."
Heinz Schrötter. Stalingrad. M., 2004, p. 263-264:
“The 71st Infantry Division surrounded the grain warehouses that were defended by Soviet soldiers. Three days after the encirclement, the Russians transmitted by radio to their command post that they had nothing else to eat. To which they received the answer: "Fight, and you will forget about hunger." Three days later, the soldiers transmitted over the radio: "We have no water, what should we do next?" And again we received the answer: "The time has come, comrades, when food and drink will replace your mind and cartridges." The defenders waited two more days, after which they transmitted the last radio message: "We have nothing else to shoot with." Less than five minutes later, the answer came: "The Soviet Union thanks you, your life was not meaningless." This case became widely known in the German troops, when the German command could not help its encircled units, it told them: "Remember the Russians at the silo tower."
Goebbels in his diary (1941):
July 24: "Our situation at the moment is somewhat tense."
July 30: "The Bolsheviks are holding on much more firmly than we expected."
July 31: “The Russian resistance is very stubborn. They stand to death."
August 5: "It will be worse if we fail to complete the military campaign before the beginning of winter, and it is highly doubtful that we will succeed."
Hitler, at a meeting on July 25, 1941:
“The Red Army can no longer be defeated with operational successes. She doesn't notice them."
Reich Minister of Armaments Fritz Todt to Hitler, November 29, 1941:
"Militarily and militarily and economically, the war has already been lost."
Now there is a lot of talk about the fact that the Soviet commanders did not spare their soldiers. In some cases it was so: passionate people are not accustomed to spare either their own or other people's lives.
“Maybe we’ll wait a day or two, and the Germans themselves will leave this height,” says some chief of staff.
“Are you out of your mind? We'll take it in half an hour! Go guys! For the homeland, for Stalin!”- the commander of the regiment or battalion is responsible. Or maybe even pull out a pistol and ask: "Who are you with us - a coward or a traitor?"
A. I. Yakovlev, who fought in the Marine Corps, testifies:
“This is a system in which a person is not sorry, but it is also a system in which a person and himself are not sorry. And the commanders did not reckon with the losses, and the soldiers themselves went to their deaths even when it was possible to get by with less blood."
And the harmonious German machine gunners went crazy at the sight of the terrible, meaningless attacks of Soviet berserkers. What can we say about sub-passionaries, who were valued so low in the passionary environment that they did not even talk to them. Let us illustrate this position with a story given by B. V. Sokolov in the book "Secrets of the Second World War" (this is an extremely anti-Soviet and anti-Russian book, on a par with V. Rezun's "Icebreaker"). In July 1944, a platoon of Vlasovites was captured in the Brest Fortress. The Soviet commander says to the prisoners: “I can submit your case to the tribunal, and everyone will be shot. But I speak to my soldiers. As they decide, so it will be with you. " The soldiers immediately raised the traitors to bayonets, refusing to listen to what reasons they began to serve the Germans. Now you understand why Stalin immediately, without trial or investigation, sent the Vlasovites received from the British and Americans to the Magadan camps? This was the safest place for them! Imagine the situation: in 1946, a dozen front-line soldiers work in the shop of a factory, several guys whose fathers died in the war, a woman rationing woman who was freed from a Nazi concentration camp by Soviet troops and a former ROA serviceman. Do you think the valiant Vlasovite will live for a long time in this team? Yes, at the first opportunity he will be pushed under some moving mechanism - an industrial accident, with whom it does not happen.
L. Gumilev believed that the most terrible moment in the life of any ethnic system is the reflection of the total onslaught of another ethnic group - not a local conflict over straits, provinces or islands, but a war of destruction: “then, if death does not occur, a breakdown that never passes painless. The Great Patriotic War became such a test for Russia. It led to the mass death of a huge number of passionate Russians. Many of them did not have time to start a family and pass on the genes of passionarity to their descendants. The Soviet front-line poet David Samoilov wrote very well about this:
“They made noise in the lush forest, They had faith and trust.
But they were knocked out with iron, And there is no forest - only trees”.
And because as soon as the victors of the fascists grew old and retired, the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia barely survived. In my opinion, it is the collapse of the Soviet Union that is irrefutable evidence that our country has entered a tragic phase of breakdown.
“Today our people want one thing from the state:“Finally, let us live like a human being, you bastards!”
- wrote in July 2005in his article, one of the authors of the Kaluzhskiy Pererestok newspaper (in which I then had an intellectual column). I remembered this phrase because this Kaluga subpassionary, without suspecting it himself, quoted Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov. This is not just a biting phrase - it is a diagnosis, that is, "definition" (translated from Greek). In this case, we have an almost literal definition of the social imperative of the breakdown phase:
"Let me live, you bastards", - this is the author's formulation of L. N. Gumilyov.
What to do? The breakdown phase must be adequately lived through. In two or three generations, Russia will enter an inertial phase of development. The phase in which Europe, now writhing at the stage of the most severe obscuration, experienced an era of high renaissance. Our task is to prevent the disintegration of Russia, not to give up the Kuril Islands to Japan, not to arrange some kind of clownish national repentance on Red Square, to prevent the restoration of the monarchy, etc. In a word, do not do stupid things, for which later it will be ashamed in front of our harmonious grandchildren.
