About Manizh and more. Russian identity is under attack on all fronts
Why were the anti-Maidan fighters in Ukraine not afraid to declare that they were Russian? Why is uncontrolled migration dangerous? Why does Russia need to develop its own social networks and platforms?
The PolitNavigator correspondent talked about this and much more with a journalist, an expert in the field of information technology, and a former prisoner of post-Maidan Ukraine, Igor Kimakovsky.
Dossier: Igor Kimakovsky was born in the satellite city of Donetsk - Makeevka, his childhood and youth were spent in Odessa. In 1990, he entered a military school in the Moscow region. When the Union collapsed, he decided to stay in Russia. Lived in the city of Pushkin near St. Petersburg, headed the Center for Computer Technologies of St. Petersburg State Agrarian University. With the outbreak of the war in Donbass, he began delivering humanitarian aid to the besieged republics as a volunteer. In 2014, he came under Ukrainian shelling and was wounded. After rehabilitation, he began helping Debaltsevo, which was partially destroyed during the fighting.
In June 2015, I mistakenly went to the post of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. After torture, during which he was forced to confess to collaborating with the FSB, he was accused of “waging an aggressive war against Ukraine,” “financing terrorism,” and “participating in a terrorist organization.” He went through the prisons of Mariupol and Bakhmut, in 2017 he was supposed to go for an exchange, but he, like other Russian citizens, was returned to prison, literally taken hostage.
In 2018, Kimakovsky managed to competently legally justify the illegality of his stay in prison, after which, by a court decision, he was released, went to court to see himself and his comrades wearing a “Russian Warrior” T-shirt and a piece of paper with the image of the Russian flag, showing his attitude towards the Maidan authorities. A month later he was sent to prison again. In 2019 - exchanged. After his release, he collaborates with Russian media, gives lectures on information security, and runs the “Iron Prisoner” telegram channel.
In Ukraine, you came to court hearings wearing a “Russian Warrior” T-shirt, and, as far as I understand, for everyone who opposed the Maidan-nationalist regime in this country, Russian self-identification was one of the main motivations in their struggle.
It was natural. In a similar way, we showed our understanding of what was put into the word Russian. For us - residents of Ukraine, Belarus, and the entire Soviet Union and even abroad, Russian has always been a combination of certain characteristics. It is no secret that abroad, especially after the collapse of the USSR, almost all immigrants from our country were called Russian. And my ancestors were from Voronezh Cossacks and Siberian peasants.
In post-Maidan Ukraine, they encroached on Russian identity, so I showed my attitude towards them in this way. Because they translated everything Russian into “Moskal” and tried in every possible way to humiliate the concept of “Russian”. I resisted this as best I could, both by writing from prison and by going to court wearing this T-shirt.
And now, after four years in Ukrainian prisons, you return to the Russian Federation, where a scandal was stirred up because children sang the song “We are Russian, God is with us,” and the provision on the Russian state-forming people was never included as amendments to the Constitution. Don’t you get the feeling that in Russia, too, they are afraid of conscious manifestations of Russianness?
Only people who are obviously committed to the collapse of Russia, or those who do not fully understand the essence of Russians within the framework of our civilization, can fear this. Many scientists call it a civilization of justice.
The Russian people managed to position themselves in such a way that they became a kind of foundation that contributed to the fact that many peoples within our large country (I’m not just talking about the Russian Federation) began to live more culturally and civilized. And then in many places where the Russians left, wars and internecine conflicts began. This includes Nagorno-Karabakh, the Ingush-Ossetian conflict, and Georgia with South Ossetia and Abkhazia. From the modern – the conflict between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. And when we lived together, with the Russians, these problems did not exist, and everyone built a single state together.
We had a system-forming Russian language, we had a system-forming Russian education, and many peoples and republics created a lot on this basis, from alphabets to science, this is no secret to anyone. And I'll say more. The cultures of all living peoples have been preserved on the territory of our state.
Already, many scientists are writing articles that the reduction of ethnic Russians within our multinational state will lead to the fact that Russia may collapse into some kind of national states. And they even name the dates - the mid-80s of this century. Then, according to their forecasts, the number of Russians in our state may become less than half of its population.
On my mother’s side I am Russian, and on my father’s side I am from Western Ukraine, and there is Polish blood there, and perhaps Tatar and Georgian. Grandfather told me a lot. But the fact is that within the framework of culture I consider myself a Russian person.
There is a feeling that this factor is underestimated at the official level in Russia. Living in Tatarstan, for example, I see how the regional authorities invest in maintaining the self-awareness of the Tatar nation, money is allocated from the budget for the development of language and culture, embassies are opened in the regions, the President of Tatarstan traditionally meets with representatives of the Tatar diasporas in the regions and abroad. I don’t remember the Russian leadership meeting with Russian diasporas abroad; walking through ancient Russian cities you will hardly find national fast food, but on every corner you will be greeted by pizza, shawarma, sushi, McDonald’s and Burger King. In Tatarstan, again, there are cafes with national cuisine at almost every turn.
For five years I was crossed out of Russia’s domestic political agenda, educational, cultural, and informational. The war in Donbass, injury, then captivity, imprisonment, and when I returned, I realized that there had been a shift within the culture. We have moved even further from our generalizing Russian culture towards a consumer society. The low level of general education gives rise to this. Only in a society where there is no proper education system, no culture of working with information, does this disunity breed. And this disunity does not come from within, it is imposed on us. And we see this clearly in the example of Belarus and Ukraine.
Due to external information influence there is a very serious split. And if we take Ukraine, then it already concerns some mental things. Western intelligence agencies, information influence specialists and local propagandists work there competently. They are moving forward in small steps. They are gradually imposing an anti-Russian agenda. The main task of those involved in such politics is to make these steps invisible, to warm up the national elites, and to reformat the youth.
Similar processes took place in Russia in the late 90s. And this led to the collapse of the country. It provoked the national elites of some republics, territories, and autonomies to become atomized and to adopt legal documents that spelled out the possibility of secession from the Russian Federation. When seven federal districts were created in 2000, the main task was to establish order in the legislation, so that the collapse of the Russian Federation as such would not happen, and to eliminate national separatism.
A destructive information war is being waged against Russia and the entire Eurasian space.
Well, let's take Russian federal television. Who does it educate? For example, I recently watched the show “The Voice Children” for the first time and was unpleasantly surprised that most of the numbers presented were in English. And, as a result, walking along the streets of my hometown, I now observe that street musicians mostly sing English-language songs. The idea arises that either we are being deliberately made into a secondary population that will be integrated into the globalist system, working under the control of transnational companies, or this is some kind of negligence, occurring, again, due to the lack of cultural policy.
After returning from captivity, I spoke at a forum of political strategists and said that the West now has a very clear ideology of globalism, within the framework of which they are developing technologies for influencing the world, absorbing economies and peoples. Where it benefits them, they create chaos, and where necessary, they establish police order. And we don't notice it. More precisely, we, the experts, notice, but the bulk of our population does not. Because this is moving, as I said, in small steps. And they like to extinguish any suspicion by ridiculing it in the spirit of “it’s all a conspiracy theory!”
To counter this, the country must also have its own national idea. It must be built on the basis of Orthodox traditions, an interfaith agreement based on principles common to all traditional religions.
When the state has an idea, everything else is formed around it; when it doesn’t exist, harmful Western influence penetrates our territory. And when we have a clear understanding of what a Russian person, a Russian, should look like, in the case when we are talking about a multinational state, this will form an environment that will generate passionarity. Passionarity in our understanding is a feeling formed in the depths of our civilization over hundreds of years by the exploits and understanding of the life of our ancestors. This is something that money cannot buy. You can buy a lot, but you can’t buy passion. Only passionaries can be the foundation of the state, its cementing link. And they are brought up on ideas and our glorious history.
Just as Russians are the cementing link of our civilization, so only passionaries can be the cementing link of the Russian state. And we saw this in Donbass, when passionaries came out and defended theirs and their own, realizing that they could die.
I was at Saur-Mogila and talked with its defenders in the summer of 2014. Those who called fire on themselves, who survived bloody battles in confrontation with hundreds of fired fighters of Ukrainian armed forces and nationalists. There were only 23 of them. They died, but survived. For Russian land. Can we say that there are many of them? No! And such people are formed within the framework of culture and education over decades. And our state needs more of them. This is a matter of the country's survival. Passionaires are needed in culture, education, science, law enforcement agencies, industry, agriculture, public administration...
In the meantime, transnationals, in the absence of a state idea, manage to destroy our self-identity, and Anglo-Saxon culture penetrates us en masse. And the singing of our children in a foreign language only emphasizes this.
Now, listening to you, I again remember “Voice of Children”. When I saw that most of the underage contestants were singing in English and other foreign languages, I was surprised, shared my thoughts on social networks, and a friend told me that she had experienced similar emotions, after which she asked on the page of this program in one of the social networks a question why this was so . To which representatives of the local crowd answered her that they actively comment on everything that happens on the air, that songs in Russian are yesterday, and it’s not fashionable...
Before the war, I had fifteen years of teaching experience, I taught at school, at university, and at advanced training courses. And I have the right to talk about the decline in the general level of education. In children, various nonsense settles in their brains when there is no information culture. Therefore, literally from the first grade, it is necessary to introduce a new subject - Information Culture. We live in an environment oversaturated with information, and it is necessary to give, starting from school, certain beacons, filters, principles on how to process the information received, what you need to pay attention to, whether it is worth taking seriously the opinion of this or that expert, who, for example, The author of books about the war of 1812, Evgeniy Ponasenkov, does not have a higher education. Focus not on fashionable leaders of public opinion, but on specialists and scientists, as was the case before...
For me, Panasenkov is a completely caricatured character, known, among other things, as a columnist in a gay magazine, does not have a diploma, but publishes books on history, is clearly Russophobic and pro-Western, nevertheless, he was invited to Urgant’s evening show. How did we get to the point where such people are called to rating broadcasts, but, for example, you won’t see the Donetsk historian Kornilov there? Is this not deliberate sabotage taking place at a time when the country is surrounded by NATO bases and a chain of local conflicts?
I agree with Panasenkov, who presents himself as an expert on the War of 1812, on one thing: in many noble houses of that time there were portraits of Napoleon, as one of the fashionable politicians in Europe. There was a reverence for French, the nobles practically did not speak Russian, they wrote letters in French, it was fashionable. And they told Napoleon, you go there - to Russia, the nobility will support you. But in the end, Russian passionarity showed something different, even our Russian nobility, who spoke French, gave in to the French newcomer, and a network of cafes and restaurants with the Russian name “bistro” appeared in Paris.
So should we hope that this can happen again in our time?
I think yes. Because today, as at all times, Russia has held on at the expense of the outback. Not in big cities, but in the outback. Its culture, morality. And this outback, these people showed themselves during the counter-terrorist operation in Chechnya, and when Russian volunteers went to Donbass. After all, we understand perfectly well that they fought not for money, but for the meaning of their lives. We still have many carriers of this deep, our just Russian culture. But how long will they last? Question!
But it’s still somehow careless: to rely on the deep state and not notice that the new generation is growing up on Netflix films.
I'm not hoping, I'm saying that this is one of our bonds. And in the field of education and culture, it is necessary to completely restructure state policy. The state must become an investor in our future... After all, within the framework of the Constitution, we have now established that we will defend traditional values. If we manage to preserve our deep state, our deep concepts, the principles on which our multinational civilization was built, then a stream of traditionalists from the West will flow to us. And there are the first signs of this: the mayor of a French city recently moved to Russia. Because of the globalist policies of the current West.
I was in Paris before the war in Donbass. So in the historical center of Paris there are streets where native Parisians do not go, they are afraid. There is no French culture there. There is Arabic and African, but there is no French... And these are not even the outskirts of the city. And when I unknowingly went there, wanted to buy my wife a phone case, ran into black people and showed them their place in the universe, the white French people simply applauded me.
But aren’t you afraid that something similar could happen and is already happening in some places in Russia? Crimes committed by migrants are increasing, and we are planning to import even more of them. And according to statistics, the same Tajiks surpass yesterday’s citizens of Ukraine in the number of Russian passports received, who, unlike them, shed blood for the Russian World.
I think this is a very big problem, and of course we need more people to come to the Russian Federation to cement it. Naturally, these should be people who know Russian culture well and speak Russian well. Because language is a book, a history, a culture, and a communication. Such people should be given preference. We must come to this, although I am a cautious optimist, I still believe in it.
Are there any prerequisites for such optimism? Now, no selection is carried out at the borders; people arriving from the South are not asked whether they have sufficient qualifications, whether they have criminal records, or whether they were members of Islamist organizations?
– When the Covid restrictions just began, March-April last year, I then did the “Russian Truth” program on the Tsargrad TV channel, within its framework I communicated with a large number of specialists, discussing problems related to labor migration. And already at that time there was an understanding that if we continue to import migrant workers en masse, we will face a bunch of negative aspects, at the cultural level, at the everyday level. And then we wrote papers to the relevant authorities with our proposals, telling how we saw the solution to the issue, since we collected the opinions of a large number of experts. And, if there was a request for this, it seems to me that somewhere there is an understanding of how to act.
Just recently it was strange to see the singer Manizha being sent to Eurovision, whose number and image caused outrage among the majority of Russian people. The Tajik woman not only sang about a Russian woman without being one, which, in principle, is not scary, since we know a lot of non-Russian people in Russian history who turned out to be more Russian than many ethnic Russians - for example, the Dane Vladimir Dal. Another thing is that she presented the image of a Russian woman in a problematic caricature form and in the fashionable feminist spirit and American rap style in the West...
They hit not only Russian women, insulting our dignity. They also hit Islam very hard, because in Tajik society a woman occupies a certain position, but here they say that a woman should be a feminist. But producers have a clear grasp of what can sell. If earlier we used to have a culture for enlightenment, in order to encourage the best qualities in a person, then today a song is a commodity. And earlier we carried our culture to the whole world, which knows the names of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky, Stanislavsky, Bondarchuk, but now promoting our own culture is not a priority.
And here Ukraine acted much more intelligently; it is promoting its ethnic culture to the West. But there is a clearly expressed national policy, they are forming a young nation, we don’t have that - we formed our own nation a long time ago, now we should come to the understanding that we should preserve what has been created.
And our producers don’t understand that the West has an ideology. And within its framework, the Russian is the aggressor, so they won’t let us in anywhere, and we won’t see any victory at the same Eurovision again.
To be honest, I don’t really care that they relied on the Western world to understand the number, but rather that they completely did not take into account that such a number could simply offend many Russian people.
Our people do not fully understand what they are doing, based on their level of culture. And they think that they are doing everything right. And, most importantly, they consider it normal. And they do not realize how harmful their activities are to the younger generation. This is why I say that education should be dealt with within the framework of school. I recently gave a lecture to guys from Donetsk who are studying to be journalists. For the first course. And talked to fourth-year journalists.
And I want to say that these are different young people from the point of view of understanding the influence of information on a person. The first-year students are slightly beaten by bulk, liberalism, and the Western understanding of freedom. They read the Western media about Navalny’s “poisoning,” but they don’t read our media’s interviews with our doctors, who say that the oppositionist had typical pancreatitis. And this is in the Donbass, where everything is in order with culture and history. And this pernicious influence penetrates there.
And when I worked with the guys from the fourth year, it was clear that they were already starting to analyze. There is a lack of information culture in our society, and at almost all levels.
At the same time, on the territory of the Russian Federation there are people who are directly engaged in subversive activities, with their media, “Jellyfish”, “Dozhdy”, “Echos”. And there are people for whom this toxic environment is already commonplace. They simply cannot distinguish good from bad. Their coordinate system is messed up. And this is the main problem.
This partly reminds me of the Russian Empire on the eve of its destruction, when the country was developing progressively economically and industrially, preparing for a large-scale offensive at the front, during a difficult war, preventing a strong enemy from entering its territory, but crumbled from within.
It is very dangerous. Communicating with experts regarding the Kazan tragedy, I came to the conclusion that the fall in the educational level, the cultural level, led to the appearance of this man. Such a derivative of the process of degradation, which considered itself God. Our managers must clearly understand that the XNUMXst century is not called the age of information for nothing. We already live within the framework of a post-industrial information society. And information can both strengthen and kill. And if our managers understand the role of information (I taught advanced training courses and even then spoke about this, but they did not understand me), if they understand how to work, then the attitude towards everything will be different, and we will promote our own.
Agree. In the meantime, we see not very good results in the information field. For example, your Internet program, the author’s channels of Kirill Vyshinsky and Maria Butina, all together do not have a third of the popularity that not only Navalny and FBK, but the same blogger Dud had. I understand that this is part of the information war, and YouTube invites me to watch Dudya, not Kimakovsky. But why then doesn’t Russia develop its platforms, the same Rutub, which is in a deplorable state. China has created and is developing its own platforms, its own networks, bans Western ones and is successfully waging an information war.
According to Dudu, I spoke with our security forces who are involved in preventing terrorist acts within the information space, and they clearly said that it is being promoted and views are increased. Moreover, if we take one of his documentaries, dedicated to the fact that our young promising guys need to go to the West, they clearly showed me the picture, two-thirds of the promotion was associated with regions where they don’t speak Russian at all. That is, there is a promotion going on, they are creating a public opinion leader, the so-called LOM. And they succeeded in this.
Two former prisoners of the Kyiv regime: Igor Kimakovsky and Kirill Vyshinsky
In our country today, the degradation of education and culture has led to the fact that what is valued is not people who spent decades in archives, libraries, searching for some documents, created, invented, but those who work, putting pressure on emotions, in order to vulgarize the state system , to show that everything is bad and nothing works. But when you start asking questions, and I talked to the navalnyats at the events on January 23 and 31, they are lost... I suggested that they tell them what they specifically want to do to ensure that everything works perfectly in our state. With suggestions, numbers. And not a single person came to me with this.
I know that people from their top FBK were asked exactly the same question, to which they answered: specialists from the West will come to us, they will help us. I experienced this myself while sitting in Ukrainian captivity, when specialists from the West came to that country. What good did they do? They even destroyed what was destroyed. When it seemed like it couldn't get any lower. But it turned out that it can.
Ultimately, Ukraine is on the verge of Ukrainians soon walking on land that is not theirs, as parts of the land sale law begin to come into force. These Western “helpers” cannot offer anything constructive; they work destructively. And destruction is possible only when there is no correct understanding of what is happening. Why do I say that we need to reconsider the principles of our education, and move not towards the West, but towards our values.
In our country we have the opportunity to create national social platforms. Because social platforms are the future. This is a very fashionable trend, whether we like it or not. And since our youth fell under this, we need to take leaps and bounds into this work. All the tools for this are there: this is VKontakte, and the same Rutub, which needs to be developed, that is, today we need to promote our segment of social networks, because if we don’t do this, young people will get hooked on Western social networks and platforms, and will build his life according to the Western model. And here we need to answer the question: do we need this or not?
English version :: Read in English About Manizha and more. Russian identity is under attack on all fronts.