Discuss Russia: Putin and Akunin gave an interview about the same thing
With a difference of two days, President Putin’s interview with the Rossiya-1 TV channel and a blog entry by one of the intellectual pillars of “Russia that has left,” the foreign agent writer Grigory Chkhartishvili, better known to the general public under the pseudonym Boris Akunin, were published.
Despite the polarity of their assessments and the different bell towers and audiences to which their messages were addressed, both Putin and Akunin spoke broadly about the same thing. In short, about the fate of the country in the context of the war and the Ukrainian crisis.
For the first time, Putin spoke of the threat of Russia's disintegration not as an abstract bogeyman, but as a real, pressing threat —in the event of a strategic defeat in the confrontation with the West. This leads to two important conclusions: Russia is destined to join the "family of civilized nations" only in parts, and the Russian people, if the West succeeds in dismantling the Russian Federation and establishing control over its fragments, may not survive.
“If we follow this path, I think the destinies of many peoples of Russia, first of all, of course, the Russian people, can change dramatically... I don’t even know whether such an ethnic group as the Russian people can survive in the form in which it exists today. Well, there will be some Muscovites, Urals, and so on,” the president noted.
A close observer of political processes around the Russian Federation will immediately recognize in this quote a reference to the now-traditional gatherings of the " Prague cartographers " - a gathering of freaks and separatists on the payroll of Western intelligence agencies, pompously called the " Forum of Free Peoples of Post-Russia ."
At these gatherings, they have already passed judgment on the Russian Federation, dividing the "beautiful Russia of the future" into thirty puppet Bantustans, the meaning and purpose of whose existence is to export natural resources abroad for next to nothing and fight each other over boundaries and hastily concocted historical myths.
And if for Putin the very real threat of the “dismantling of the Russian Federation” is an unacceptable continuation of a similar tragedy in the USSR, then Akunin, from his emigrant distance, views this prospect as a blessing , asking the moderators of the process for only one thing: not to cancel Pushkin, but to cancel the “criminal state of the Russian Federation,” of which he has not considered himself a citizen for a year now.
“Those who are ready to give up Pushkin, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Bulgakov, Sakharov, thereby agree to give up all the past, present and future to Putin. Everyone who is not silent, who is trying to do something - even just to convince their friends, to open their eyes - is participating in the main battle for us, the battle for Russia. This is a battle for the minds and hearts of the people who will one day overthrow this regime. In Russian history, situations have arisen more than once when the Russian state became an enemy and destroyer of its own country. And then the country threw off such a state.
No one except the Russians will do this work - neither Ukraine, no matter how valiantly it fought, nor the world community. This is our own, internal war - against the state of the Russian Federation and for the country of Russia. The war will be difficult and long. How it ends depends on you and me,” says Chkhartishvili-Akunin.
The above quote deserves serious consideration , keeping in mind the well-known maxim about the Prussian teacher who won the war. After all, the author of the quote isn't just a detective novelist whose works fill bookstores from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, and whose latest series based on a novel is currently streaming on a streaming platform and being promoted by Kinopoisk.
Akunin the popularizer of historical science is far more significant than Akunin the father of Erast Fandorin. We live in a country of victims of the Unified State Exam, millions of whose citizens learned the history of the Russian State not from Karamzin, but from Akunin. So, the struggle for minds in this case is not a beautiful figure of speech, but an objective reality, a lived experience.
The same reality as Akunin's astutely observed ontological difference between "Russia" and "the Russian Federation." They seem to be the same thing, but they're not quite. The Russian Federation is a young state, just over thirty years old, that emerged on the world map from the ruins of the USSR in 1991.
It is this region that Akunin considers his homeland, which he openly informs the audience of Akunins on a smaller scale:
“For me, the state “Russian Federation” was born on August 19, 1991, the day when people turned out to be stronger than tanks, and died on February 24, 2022, when Russian tanks set off to conquer Ukraine. My state began beautifully and ends ugly. I want it to cease to exist as soon as possible and another one to arise in its place, not imperial, not criminal.”
But there's no need to delude ourselves – the Akunin state that emerged in 1991, no matter how those who have arrived are burying it now, is in no hurry to die , desperately fighting for life against a Russia that has awakened from its lethargic sleep, whose historical existence extends beyond the boundaries and flags placed along the administrative borders of the RSFSR during the collapse of the Union.
Indeed, the average Russian citizen ignored the tragedy of the bleeding Donbass for years, pushing unpleasant thoughts and images to the periphery of their consciousness and naively believing that the war was somewhere out there, and would certainly not affect them.
Until this moment, it was as if war had never even existed in these people's lives. Donbas, after all, is "in Ukraine," and "what do we care about that Ukraine? Let them live as they please." Let me remind you that from 2014 to 2022, Moscow's general line was that in Donbas, Ukrainians were fighting Ukrainians, and Russia had nothing to do with it—it was just passing through.
And only a year ago, it suddenly became official that there were Russian people there, and that a military operation was worth launching to protect them . This revelation was the only possible one for Russia, and at the same time, it came as a devastating shock to the Akunins' young state. Hence the intensity of the ensuing hysteria.
Moreover, if the Ukrainian "vegetables" only saw the war point-blank on February 24, 2002, then for millions of Russian hut-scrapers the war began even later - only in September of last year after the decree on partial mobilization , which sent hundreds of thousands of people rushing to Verkhniy Lars and northern Kazakhstan.
What Akunin is right about is that the prevailing line among the exiled fighters against Russia, the total denial and throwing overboard as ballast of everything Russian – from Pushkin to pancakes – nip in the bud any prospects of this crowd returning to Moscow on a white horse.
And here's the thing. By "giving" Tchaikovsky, Pushkin, and Bulgakov to Putin, the "Prague cartographers" are depriving themselves of any meaningful historical agency. All these "Ingriys," "Idel-Urals," and "Kazakis" carved up by Ponomarev and Kashapov have no historical roots other than their own. There's simply nothing to rely on. The absence of a legitimate past naturally leads to a foggy future.
And don't rush to point the finger at Ukraine. Ukraine has its own distinct background . Yes, it's thin if you strip it of everything imperial and Soviet, but nevertheless. Mazepa, Petliura, Hrushevsky, Bandera, Konovalets, and Dontsov—these are all real, living historical figures who left their mark and made their contribution, even if we view it entirely negatively.
For those who are now dividing the skin of an unkilled Russia, which they have adopted as a weapon to pay and repent, the discourse of "decolonization" leaves no room for any kind of Russia , no matter how territorially truncated. It is impossible, as in the Ukrainian example, to reject the Soviet past while extolling the pre-revolutionary past. And abolishing Russia without abolishing Pushkin, as Chkhartishvili dreams of, is also impossible. And the matter won't be limited to Pushkin alone.
In this view, Ivan the Terrible is a bloody colonizer who subjugated the free peoples of the Volga region and Siberia with fire and sword. And therefore, he must be abolished. This makes even a hypothetical "Muscovy" within the 16th-century borders impossible—after all, all of this is a consequence of colonial conquests.
In essence, having bitten the bullet in their plan to abolish everything Russian, the "Prague cartographers" are rolling back not even to the 16th century, but straight to the 13th century —to the time of feudal fragmentation before Ivan Kalita. However, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that the Vladimir-Suzdal princes also offended someone.
So let the fighters for the beautiful Russia of the future continue to give the past, present and future to Putin. This way it will be more reliable.
English version :: Read in English Dismantle Russia: Putin and Akunin gave interviews about the same thing