Alina Vitukhnovskaya: "Poverty in Russia is a vice"

Alina Vitukhnovskaya, writer*

Russia has slipped into poverty, ahead is the Beggarism station. However, people are surprisingly tolerant of poverty. That which should cause despair and shame, only causes humility and indifference, generously seasoned with domestic "spirituality".

The headlines of the press articles are scary. We are offered to switch to "poor men" to "learn how to manage a budget"! Don't believe me? Check it out! The article is titled exactly like this "What benefits bring relationships with a poor man: 5 advantages".

All this will soon be flavored with aggressive sixties with a guitar and songs about "...in a hut" ("with one's beloved, even a hut is heaven" - it's an old russian proverb, - noted by editor). The star of domestic goat journalism immediately arrived, counting eggs in boxes. I knew a writer who, in general, translated his whole life into eggs. I just sat and counted how many eggs the salary was enough at one time or another.

This approach is a consequence of the Soviet statist and paternalistic thinking, in which the state is still viewed as a patronizing father and at the same time a “Motherland”, that is, a kind of milch transgender, an all-consuming red androgyne who has absorbed all hopes and aspirations of the prison of the peoples of this international hydra.

The very image of "Motherland" is monstrous if you look closely at it. She is waiting for you around the corner in a red Phrygian cap on a bald skull. In her paw is a police baton with lead embedded in the core. Her blow will be fatal. And "cargo-200" does not sober anyone in Rossiyushka. He kind of calms and gives such a languid, melancholy, charming vodka melancholy, such a war-valium, such a busty housewife from an agitprop movie, who has not yet had time, and even could not, flatten herself with her colorful death in fur.

This is how Russian mothers flee from dressing gowns tattered with evil polka dots, from wrinkles, old age and ugliness, from the nonsense of total being, which was suddenly licked by sweet despair and rolled somewhere in the uterine flesh somewhere on the still unatrophied, still passionate flesh, and collapsed there. And he calmed down as a playful anonymous monster, connected to this world by an insatiable uterine throat, surpassing any abyss in its merciless and laughing depths.

The imagination and the image of the father, the paternalistic pillar of the mass unconscious, more often called the leader, is also striking, as if taken from a chthonic, indigenous cult. In fact, the punishing, unsuccessfully cosplaying of the deceased "god" is the average Russian "father", often just something hysterical-kitchen monster yapping with curses. At the same time, she resignedly obeys the mother and pathologically sacralizes her image. "I'll kill for my mother!" He shouts. No, it won't. All this hysterical Oedipus fits perfectly into the Zonian format of relations. TV journalist Viktor Muchnik writes:

“The thief is sentimental. According to Shalamov, the main sentiment of thieves is the "mother of a thief". Our mothers now have a heroic history of the fatherland, first of all, "Motherland". Sometimes - kitties and birds, too. This is "the sentimentality of a person who is bandaging a wound to some bird and is able to tear this bird alive with his own hands in an hour, for the spectacle of the death of a living creature is the best spectacle for a highgrader".

By the way, it is these pseudo-men who shed a tear, looking at a profane TV show like "Wait for Me". This is how people who are incapable of relationships compensate for their incapacity. They often call their spouses "mother" in everyday life. The same expression is often used by infantile informals in relation to their girlfriends.

Poverty is a state legalized by default for the above-described creatures, the golems of the Russian world. Before the October Revolution of 1917, poverty was also shrouded in an aura of holiness, icon-painting nobility. And then it was taken up by the proletarian Soviet ideology. And practically without loss, it has migrated through the centuries to the present, generously fertilized with the culture of the sixties, who snatched all the worst from Russian literature and polished it with socialist realism, that is, something bad by definition.

Now we are dealing with a stylized cultural imprint that is being intensively implanted into the heads of Russians. And briefly formulated as "Poverty is the norm of life", directly by analogy with the common late Soviet slogan "Sobriety is the norm of life." If you analyze the headlines further, you can see a lot of interesting things. After a painfully familiar bodypositive, which is a form of a new world, global socialism, the very legalization of poverty, in the course went articles on nutrition and foods. It was interesting to know that, it turns out, sausage is useful. And cereals are best kept in special cans, which were in vogue in the early 1970s.

The radical economy on appearance, on the aesthetics of clothing and interiors, on forms and types of recreation, according to the concept of cultural instigators of militant poverty, should be compensated by a desperate animal, insanely instinctive impulse, a kind of Soviet Freudianism, from which the very founder of this trend would have a real panic attack. And here Motherland will again be happy, because new children, born in the bustling darkness of stripped concrete caves, can be chewed for a long time and with a savory crunch, but even prepared for future use.

And the post-Soviet downshifting, senseless and merciless, seems to have finally finished off those small sprouts of the middle class that were formed in the 1990s.

When a poor man in the street or an intellectual infected with the bacillus of spirituality falls into the hysteria of sacralized poverty, this can still be understood. But the ex-oligarch, banker Oleg Tinkov played along with the new “myth of the poor”, which is being built before our eyes. A man of European type, who can afford, if not everything, then almost everything, having fallen ill with an incurable disease, falls into depression and literally writes the following:

“The first half of your life you try to get out of poverty, you do not sleep, you plow for 16 hours, you fly 2 times a week to Singapore from St. Petersburg. You shuttle, you risk your freedom and life and try to provide for your young family.

At this time, the "man in the street" is lying on the sofa, playing with toddlers, hugging his wife. Relatives do not understand you, classmates and simply numerous "friends of childhood and adolescence" openly criticize and do not want to deal with.

20 years of continuous and hard work of the brain and body pass, you have your first success ... And suddenly numerous "childhood friends", classmates and relatives of all stripes begin to notice you".

"So was it worth it all, these half-life of struggle...", - Tinkov sums up, noting that now they only want money from him.

This pseudo-perception surprisingly coincides with the current Russian matrix and domestic propaganda. I am sincerely sorry that Tinkov does not understand that his financial success is an opportunity to fence himself off from the hell of Russian life and domestic medicine. That the possibility of a decent treatment is already a huge chance, which many of his "unsuccessful" compatriots do not have. The conclusion suggests itself that certain properties, imprints, subcortical mental parasites that determine the self-consciousness of a Russian person are as destructive as they are not removable from an individual personality. And any dangerous trigger can serve as an impetus to return to the initial settings.

I would like to cancel these very initial settings, eliminate the very possibility of their revival and growth in the minds of new generations of Russian citizens. Fear of the future, achrony, constant striving into the past - this is what is afraid not so much of the person himself, but as that set of unconscious attachments, cultural-parasitic formations that have mutated from God-fearing serf to helpfully Soviet and are still, unfortunately, observed conformist.

* The opinions of the authors may not coincide with the position of the editors and are published in a discussion order.