People, nation, population... What word to call the citizens of Russia

Sergey Baimukhametov

Multiple-meaning games with the word and the concept of "people" are exclusively Russian, Russian, Soviet troubles. For everyone else, it's just people, population: people, nation, folk. In our country, this word also includes something spiritually sovereign-revolutionary-God-bearing and at the same time condescending - “common people”.

Again, the confusion began with the borrowing of foreign words natio, nationality, nationalité, denoting nationality - citizenship, nationality. Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, a Russian poet and publicist, proposed translating them as “nationality”. But in Russia, over the years, "nationality" has come to mean ethnicity.

And the word "nationality" was instantly picked up by the literary community, changed its meaning: "nationality" began to call something close to the broad masses ("national"?), Reflected in poetry, prose, drama. Naturally, there were controversies. Pushkin in the 1920s noted:

"For some time now it has become a habit among us to talk about nationality, to demand nationality, to complain about the absence of nationality in literary works, but no one thought to define what he meant by the word nationality." Citing the example of Shakespeare and Racine, who wrote about kings, princes, knights, he asked: does this mean that they are deprived of "the dignity of a great nation"?

Belinsky introduced Gogol's phrase into a wide circulation: "The true nationality consists not in the description of the sundress, but in the very spirit of the people".

Russian classical literature has always portrayed the "little man", the people - as an exceptionally suffering side, a victim of an unrighteous order of life, an unrighteous government. Undoubtedly, in this artistic dominant, a decisive role was played by the eternal feeling of guilt among the Russian intelligentsia before the people, aggravated by the origin of the classics - representatives of the serf nobility.

By the end of the 19th century, the canon was shaken, albeit slightly, by common writers. They did not make an icon out of the people, since they themselves came out of it, and evaluated it soberly.

Some called the people soil. From which we all grow. Dostoevsky formulated the Manifesto of the Pochvenniki: “We now know that we cannot be Europeans ... Our task is to create for ourselves a new form, our own, native, taken from our soil, taken from the national spirit and from the national principles”.

It was about the rapprochement between the top and bottom. Ideological, spiritual.

On the other hand, their contemporaries, the populists of the 60s of the 19th century, were completely concrete, in contrast to the soil people. In order to alleviate the fate of the people with even small deeds, they "went to the people." It was a holy movement, born of a sense of guilt, for the fact that they live without knowing the plow. So they found out. They plowed and sowed. They taught.

But populism ended, because the people did not understand them and did not accept them, they still considered them masters. Mocked them! At best, he said: "Wonderful gentleman..." This is on the one hand.

On the other hand, the populist phraseology was picked up by chatterboxes and nachelists. Which Chekhov displayed with merciless precision. Pay attention, everyone who preaches "advanced views" calls for a decisive correction of the existing order: "The worker bends his back and swells with hunger. You don't have to wait, you have to fight ”- the characters are unsympathetic. And Petya Trofimov from The Cherry Orchard, and the lawyer Kocheva or Polina Rassudina from the novel Three Years, and the heroes of numerous stories: “Let's go together to the village, dear, we'll work there! Oh, how good it will be! " At the same time, of course, they do nothing. But their well-fed idleness is justified by the fact that it is a "sign of the times", and they are "people of the sixties." Some contemporaries reproached Chekhov for mockery of populist ideas. And he was forced to explain in letters: “I meant those thoughtful idiots ... who, having nothing in their heads ... try to appear above the average level... why they stick labels on their foreheads .... The sixties is a holy time, and to allow fools to usurp it is to trivialize it. "

On the third hand, disappointment with the people and going among the people turned into a terrible terror of Ishutin's "Hell" and Zhelyab's "Narodnaya Volya". Moreover, their main goal was (ten assassination attempts!) Not just anyone, but Alexander II - the Tsar-Liberator, who delivered the very people from serf slavery.

In the USSR, the official, ideological, demagogic cult of popular worship ruled for 75 years. Of course, in the literature, praising the "common man", "working". I remember that in the early 1980s, at one of the plenums of the Writers' Union in the autonomous republic of the Volga region, a local prose writer, getting into a rage, was ardently indignant from the rostrum: “Why do we say that the people were dark before ?! The people are always bright!"

Of course, not all writers thought so, but at that time they could not say what they thought. There were exceptions, though. The powerful village writer Fyodor Abramov in August 1979 published in the regional newspaper Pinezhskaya Pravda, Arkhangelsk Oblast, an open letter to his fellow countrymen from the village of Verkola - with impartial assessments of local customs and customs. The letter, with abbreviations, was reprinted by Pravda! The noise spread all over the Soviet land. Fyodor Abramov received dozens of messages with curses, and the Verkol peasants drove around day and night on rumbling tractors under the windows of his house.

After the collapse of the USSR, after the accession of the dictator Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan (a 12-meter golden statue in the center of Ashgabat!) and not published) wrote: "The people were a homogeneous pliant mass, ready to apathetically accept any ideology and any leader... The people do not want to ask empty questions".

And what are the "people"?

For example, I will propose to begin with the wording: "The people are the majority of the population that does not have power and capital, earning a living not by mental or creative labor." So after all, some mentally creative people will immediately jump up: "Are we not the people?" Perfectly understanding their coquetry, posture. In fact, if you seriously call them "people", they will be offended. Those who have power and money will pretend to be offended. Although they certainly believe that the people are the masses who periodically go to the ballot boxes in order to provide them with further power and further money. At the same time, they always shout loudly that they are a people, flesh of flesh. However, some of them are not held back and potential voters are directly called "shit" and "rabble".

Finally, there is a general idea, or myth, that there is some truth behind it, the people. More precisely, he not only knows the truth, but, without knowing it, is its bearer. Well, just like in the Constitution, according to which the people are the bearers of the supreme power.

And all this together forms an utter conglomerate in which we live.

Starting with the triad, which was invented by the count and the tsarist minister Uvarov: Orthodoxy - autocracy - nationality. By the way, they are now trying to pass it off as the basis of a new (as if there was an old) national idea (as if it exists in nature at all, a national idea). And few people notice a destructive contradiction: a pretty trinity, if after seventy years the people overthrew the autocracy and destroyed the Orthodox churches...

The communists who came to power have completely confused the situation. Note that their party, the RCP-VKP (b) -KPSU, was never called a people's party, but only "expressed the thoughts and aspirations of the people." Because initially the party was - of the working class. Then the "working peasantry" was allowed. Well, and the "layer" between them - the intelligentsia. And Soviet village writers, as if in response to discrimination against the countryside, willingly or unwillingly inclined the public opinion to the idea that the people were exclusively peasants.

In the early 1970s, an official theoretical concept was born: "a new historical community - the Soviet people." In my opinion, accurate in every sense. In general, according to communist theory, only the advanced working people could be called a people. In foreign countries - only the oppressed part of the population and the progressive intelligentsia. And we had no oppressed people! And we had to admit in small print, imperceptibly, in books unreadable by anyone, that our people is the entire population. Poor communist science!

All this nonsense, naturally, gave rise to a response - an ironic one. My cherished friend, a brilliant critic, literary critic, poet, who passed away early, Yevgeny Sergeyev, in 1980, at one of our feasts, said: "There are no people - there is a population!"

Zhenya's maxim was openly polemical. At that time it sounded like a refutation of both the communist ideologeme and the intellectual axiom about a certain “people”. Zhenya argued that he owed nothing to the "people", but that the "people" owed everything they had to the intelligentsia. Because in progress, especially in technical progress, there is not a drop of "people's" contribution, but only the contribution of the intelligentsia. If it weren't for her, today they would pick the earth with a plow and sip cabbage soup with bast shoes...

At the same time, I introduced another aphorism into circulation in our small circle, which was already completely mocking: "It's a shame to ride in a taxi when people are suffering!" That is, again, he made fun of that very sense of intellectual guilt.

Ironic traditions have not been interrupted, they continue to this day. Moreover, already in printed form. Thus, the aphorism of the journalist Akram Murtazayev: "The electorate is a disposable people" will become an unconditional sign of the times.

But the traditions of profound idiocy were not interrupted either. As we remember, according to communist theory, in the civil war, the people fought with Denikin's, Kolchak's and others. That is, there was no "people" on the other side? Who then fought? And since today the ball is ruled by the same ideological scribes, now we are told that the people "were deceived by the commissars". But if “the people are great and wise,” then it is impossible to deceive them, but if they were deceived, then it is not great and not wise?

Relations between the people and the authorities turn into a fantastic farce in half with rudeness (under the communists such public rudeness was never allowed). I will give just two examples from today. Residents of Krasnoyarsk, as you know, literally suffocate in the clouds of gas emissions from industrial enterprises. And they write about it in social networks. Andrey Agafonov, Advisor to the Governor of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, read their statements and commented on Facebook:

“How did people get into this, this aching pile of shit? Such a person wakes up in the morning and thinks - damn it, I haven't choked yet! We must take a little breath! Separate compliments to the fighters of the invisible front, who brought up a whole generation of hysterics "in the black sky mode". These are not residents of Siberia, they are not Russians at all, they are some kind of whiny rabble".

And therefore, probably, a deputy from the Mari Autonomous Republic, Vladimir Kozhinov, during a meeting with labor veterans, indicated how we are all supposed to behave:

“You can't do it in spite of the authorities. This is how the Jews said: I met the boss - what needs to be done? Bow down! Power is from God. How can you quarrel with her? And we are trying to prove something all the time”.

Probably, by "Jews" he meant the Apostle Paul, who wrote in the "Epistle to the Romans": "Let every soul be submissive to the higher authorities, for there is no power not from God".

What is the tragedy of the situation? They shout loudly that they are people too. But at the same time they do not consider themselves a people and they despise the people. But in reality, they are the most that neither is the lower manifestation of the masses, from which among themselves they deny themselves with all their might.

These are the typical Russian and Soviet troubles that arise with the word "people".

September 17-19 - elections to the State Duma. To some extent, the present and future of the country depends on them - at least for the next 5 years. Who will determine it? Officials with their "administrative resource"? People? Population?

In general, we can assume that the "people" is what was born. And there's nothing you can do about it.