Posted 9 февраля 2021, 12:31
Published 9 февраля 2021, 12:31
Modified 24 декабря 2022, 22:37
Updated 24 декабря 2022, 22:37
The blog of journalist Maria Orlova started a discussion about 1991. Some claimed that for them his events were a historical trauma, while others, on the contrary, remembered him with gratitude. Summing up the discussion, Orlova turned to another historical event - 1917, which undoubtedly became a trauma for all residents of the country, without exception:
“Surprisingly, the older generation, and my peers, for a significant part of their lives were convinced by all means of state propaganda that the October Revolution was the best thing that happened to the Russian population in history. Now I am rereading Paustovsky's "The Story of Life" (I have been reading it once a year since I was 12). This is how he describes the events of 1917, as if they were really holy holidays. It was impossible to write otherwise in the 1960s.
The current 60-70-year-old citizens (including President Putin and his entourage) grew up watching films about the Civil War, songs about wounded regiment commanders and an eaglet that is supposed to fly to the village, and tell how their son was taken to be shot, on "Red Devils" and "Wedding in Malinovka". But it is precisely this age category that is now most frightened by the possibility of a revolution, which they present on the basis of patterns more than a hundred years old.
Recently, in the comments of a respected friend, I read: they say, now students are holding rallies, and drunken sailors and shoemakers from Berdichev will come after them. As if all the shoemakers from Berdichev had not perished in the fire of repression and the Holocaust, as if their descendants had not left for Haifa and Brighton Beach. Well, the sailors factor is overestimated: there are already other technologies in the fleet.
Fortunately, such a revolution that breaks the whole structure is no longer possible. We live in a completely different country today. In pre-revolutionary Russia, the main population was the patriarchal peasantry. His way of life has not changed for millennia. Due to the fact that the second third of the 19th century was the years when Nicholas I froze the economy, and bourgeois modernization was late, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, everything began to develop too quickly. Patriarchal peasants were first pulled out of their villages to work in factories, and then they were sent to fight in the First World War. And who was sent? Young guys who, due to their age and intellectual underdevelopment, did not feel sorry for themselves or others.
At the same time, there was a sharp social modernization within the Pale of Settlement, the same thousand-year way of life of the Jewish kagals disintegrated.
And this youth, who came out of patriarchal care, became the driving force of change. Cruel, sweeping everything in its path.
I remember three years ago I was severely limping, and I realized that metro stations in the center of Moscow were built by young healthy people for young healthy people, low mobility was not taken into account at all. All these long passages, stairs and so on. The parents of these young people remained in Russian villages and Jewish townships to sit on the rubble, to live out. And they were creating a new world.
Yekaterina Shulman gave such statistics. In 1919, the average age of the inhabitants of Petrograd was 19, and men prevailed. And now the average Russian is over 40 years old, with women prevailing. What kind of revolution would a middle-aged woman arrange? No, she will arrange something. Especially if someone encroaches on the children who were given to her with such difficulty (also no longer small). But due to her age and experience, the Russian woman understands that it is she who will have to restore order and clean up the consequences.
And yet, unlike Russia in 1917, we are now all literate. Most even have a higher education, and the younger, the more educated.
In general, dear readers, do not be afraid. There will be no more revolutions like the October Revolution. Even if students of all universities take to the streets of St. Petersburg, drunken sailors and shoemakers from Berdichev will not follow them, they simply do not exist..."