The heiress in a straight line: how the Russian lie is similar and how it differs from the Soviet lie

Sergey Mitrofanov

Those who grew up in the USSR, whose collapse is considered by many to be “the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century”, know that this was a kingdom of lies.

Lies were learned in social studies lessons, for example, about democracy, although there was a secret knowledge that power in the USSR belongs to a group of elders from the Communist Party sealed for us.

The Soviet Constitution was a lie, poets, all sorts of Yesenins and Mayakovskys, poeticized the lie until they committed suicide. Or until they were killed by the special services.

In literature lessons, we passed that Yesenin hanged himself because he could not accept an iron horse, but wanted a good old warm live horse that eats hay. Those. saw a tractor and was so upset that he hanged himself. And not because he actually saw what his friends from the Cheka showed him in the basements. And we were not at all surprised by this concept, we rattled off it in the classroom.

But the lies of the USSR were created under the influence of a certain religious imperative.

Soviet people sincerely believed that, in spite of everything, they really were the pinnacle of social evolution. And their situational lie is like an additional row of teeth obtained as a result of natural selection. Or like a stick in a great ape walking into humans. And they dreamed that with her, with this stick and extra teeth, they would conquer the whole world, although they lied that they were bringing peace to this world. Solzhenitsyn's "not to live by lies", thus, was not so much an ethical literary postulate of his time as an invitation to rebellion against the basic basis of this system. By the way, the “elders” understood this perfectly, in contrast to the “people”.

The paradox, however, is that today, after a series of "uprisings" (1985-1991, 1993 and the "dashing nineties"), we again fell into the realm of total lies with the installation "they are not there" and "we have the legal right to spheres of influence, "again we have the Constitution, from which the constitutional content, the courts, controlled by the bell, and other strange things and qualities have been completely purged.

As Alina Vitukhnovskaya writes, "with the pathological logocratic nature of Russia, its blind faith in the word, everything here is saturated with lies. Literally, to live is to lie. The text here is not identical with the meaning, the person is speech."

There is no sincerity now at all, not even false sincerity, although we are not going to conquer the world yet. We are only going to conquer ourselves, to concrete the approaches to what we have, although I cannot guarantee that in development this will not change in the future. Today we demand from the West, threatening it with missiles, not too much, just to get rid of us with all sorts of claims...

That they shot down a plane, that they poisoned and landed opponents, and that they created an irreplaceable aristocracy, like the same elders from the Communist Party and their career assistants. This is, as it were, our sovereign right. We live as we want.

And there is no cover-up in this. Everything is practical, utilitarian. This is the realm of lies, wild in their representativity. Perhaps even more terrifying than the previous one. Because today lies are served like a banner. Like a fig leaf, emphasizing indecency and allowing one to guess WHAT is behind it.

The Soviet lie nevertheless assumed a salutary doublethink, since there was always a second hidden series of thoughts and feelings about what was happening, in which one could hide and preserve one's soul. And today's Russian lie is a wild one-dimensional lie beyond any humanitarian competition and alternatives.

There is nowhere to hide, either you are with us, or you are a foreign agent.