The Soviets have their own pride (V. Shilov) - “Labor Russia”

Present-day Russia is overwhelmed by rabid and evil anti-communist and anti-Soviet hysteria, to the point of condemnation of communist ideology and attempts to ban the Communist Party. Every day, all over the media, streams of outright lies, slander and abuse of the Soviet regime are poured out on us, attributing all mortal sins to it. Just look at the possessed, hysterical and hooligan Mr. Zhirinovsky, who publicly declared himself “anti-communist No. 1” almost from the cradle! The inspirers and organizers of anti-communism and anti-Sovietism set the main goal of eradicating people's memory everything is Soviet. However, they have nothing to oppose to the generally recognized achievements and advantages of Soviet power, as specific historical facts remind us.

1.Firstly, the principle of planned management and development of the economy and everything National economy in the Soviet Union, which was picked up and used in its own way by the leading capitalist countries in their socio-economic development.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chubais’s denationalization and privatization of all national property created by the labor, sweat and blood of millions, the so-called liberal reforms and free market relations plunged the entire economy (and especially agriculture) into a state of chaos and anarchy, as well as the arbitrariness of the authorities.

2. Unprecedented in the world pace of scientific, technical, socio-economic, cultural and spiritual development USSR in the pre-war years. In just 10-12 years, to the amazement of foreigners, the Soviet government made a rapid leap from the plow, shovel and splinter to the heights of industrial and technological progress and to second place in the world in terms of industrial production. This is how the first Soviet “economic miracle” arose.

With the liquidation of Soviet power, as President V. Putin admitted, in 10 years we were still unable to overcome the lag behind the level of development in 1989 - 1991. Today Russia is forced to solve a more than modest task: to catch up and overtake Portugal, the weakest in the European Union. There is no time to compete with America.

3. Even having suffered colossal losses and destruction during the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet Union refused in the post-war years to accept humiliating and enslaving American aid under the “Marshall Plan”. Relying only on our own strength, in 4-5 years we managed not only to restore everything destroyed, but also to make a scientific and technical breakthrough, creating atomic and hydrogen bombs and rocket technology. This was the second Soviet "scientific and technological miracle." About labor and creative pathos Soviet people G.V. Sviridov beautifully told it in his patriotic musical suite “Time, forward!” I wonder what melody can be used to express forced labor in plundered capitalist Russia today?

Having lost his own material and human resources and squandered natural resources - oil and gas, President V. Putin, during all foreign visits and summits, calls and entreats foreign businessmen to invest money in our economy and social sphere. It is clear that this inevitably leads to the loss of national security and enslavement by foreign capital. Talk about the mythical “doubling of GDP” by 2010 turned out to be another bluff.

4. Without the firm discipline of everyone, a clear and strict routine in everything, the fight against corruption, bribery and theft of socialist property, without preserving the unity, integrity and independence of the country, there would be no Soviet “industrial-economic miracle” in the pre-war years, no scientific and technological breakthrough in the post-war years, there would not have been our victory in the Great Patriotic War over Nazi Germany.

This is unthinkable today, when the last presidential address to the Federal Assembly declared the creation of a “free and democratic state” as the main political task. Freedom is a great word. Under the banner of Freedom, fighters for the people's happiness and independence of the Motherland fought, shed their blood and died. In the Yeltsin-Putin interpretation, “freedom” is permissiveness and irresponsibility, arbitrariness and lawlessness, in which, according to President V. Putin himself, up to 70 thousand people disappear without a trace every year; corruption of all branches of government, interethnic and religious conflicts and prospects for the loss of the integrity and independence of the country.

5. Real and guaranteed by the Soviet government constitutional rights of citizens to paid work, annual leave and sick leave, affordable recreation, free education, medicine, comfortable housing and a dignified, secure old age were crossed out by the scanty Yeltsin Constitution of Russia and the anti-people Putin “Labor Code”. The army of unemployed (especially among young people) and numerous delays in wages, which force workers, teachers, and doctors to go on strikes and hunger strikes, are a shame for the country. Only high-ranking officials have free housing, ordinary people I don’t even dream about it anymore. A huge mass of homeless people and homeless children. Hired "slaves" in private business are forced to work as long as they require, often without days off, without vacation, without paid sick leave. A meager pension dooms old people to vegetation, painful illness and death.

6. B Soviet times The achievements of our scientists, masters of art and sports were recognized and highly appreciated abroad. The whole world greeted and enthusiastically applauded the ballet of the Bolshoi Theater, the drama groups of the Maly and Art Theaters, the State Dance Ensemble under the direction of Igor Moiseev, the unrivaled dance magician M. Esambaev, and the star Olympic hockey team. Where is it now, our star Olympic team?!

The collapse of the Soviet Union made the state of science, culture, art and sports deplorable. Tens and hundreds of thousands of scientists, musicians, singers, actors, painters and athletes, in search of work and a tolerable life, scattered around the world, earning money and gaining fame foreign countries. Many of them have almost lost their historical and national-folk roots.

7. In the 50-60s. the Soviet school was called the best and most advanced in the world. Let us remember the shock the United States experienced after the launch of the world's first Soviet artificial satellite Earth on October 4, 1957 and Yu.A. Gagarin’s first flight into space on April 12, 1961. American President John Kennedy was forced to create a congressional commission to study the experience of the Soviet school. On English language translated Soviet school and university textbooks on mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry and other subjects; American schoolchildren and students had to relearn. Regarding this, Teacher's Newspaper published an article “Why does American Johnny know less and worse than Russian Ivan?” A real triumph for our school and education system.

What kind of “triumph” can we talk about today, when the pseudo-democratic government, under the pretext of integration and globalization of knowledge and education, blindly copies the alien and dubious “experience” of the American and European schools? Good school national traditions have been forgotten and the national spirit and character of education have been lost. Today, full-fledged education is available only to the “solvent” part of the population. Secondary and high schools are imbued with a commercial spirit and corruption (i.e. bribery), extortion, paid " additional services"What could be more terrible and immoral than a bribe-taking teacher?!

8. Soviet power, Soviet school, Soviet education, strong family foundations formed among the Soviet people a high spiritual and moral potential, which showed itself worthily at all stages of the development of the Soviet state, especially during the Great Patriotic War. The undoubted advantage and superiority of the Soviet man were his moral and volitional qualities: selfless patriotism and selfless internationalism, collectivism and humanism. The main commandment is “man is friend, comrade and brother to man”; responsibility for everything that happens and national pride, which V. Mayakovsky said well: “The Soviets have their own pride, we look down on the bourgeoisie!”; generosity and compassion, self-discipline and self-organization.

In bourgeois Russia, personal enrichment and the cult of consumerism were declared the main values, and the main standard of a person’s social significance became his property and the amount of money. The moral degradation of society has even penetrated into the “holy of holies” - our army, in which corruption flourishes among the generals and officers at the top and ominously disgusting “hazing” among the “lower ranks”, from which hundreds of recruits die or become disabled every year in peacetime. Horror grips parents when they send their sons to serve in the army. People, for the most part, have lost modesty, shame, conscience, decency, kindness and empathy. Today, an aggressively cruel, “cool” attitude towards each other is in fashion. The pursuit of personal enrichment, life benefits and pleasures turned the people into an obedient and submissive “biomass” to the authorities, deprived of the ability to think and resist the imposed way of life.

9. Middle-aged and older people feel nostalgia for good and affordable Soviet prices for basic material and spiritual goods. When, for example, the monthly rent for a two-room standard apartment (with telephone and electricity) was 10-15 rubles. A single trip on public transport cost 5 kopecks. For a Soviet penny you could buy a glass of sparkling water without syrup, a box of matches, a notebook, and a pencil. For a ruble you could visit any museum in the country, including the Tretyakov Gallery, the State Hermitage and the Russian Museum. For 30-40 kopecks you could get to a play or concert at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, the Bolshoi, Maly and Art Theaters. We published in mass circulation the most accessible fiction in the world. Children's books cost from 5 kopecks. And finally, the cheapest bread in the world is 14-28 kopecks, depending on the type.

If, on the initiative of I.V. Stalin, from 1949 until his death, in the Soviet Union there was an annual reduction in retail prices for basic food and industrial goods, but in bourgeois Russia prices for everything are rapidly climbing up. Thus, the cost of living in a two-room standard apartment for four people has increased (if there are no benefits and subsidies) by 250-300 times, and in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vorkuta even more. The cost of a single trip on public transport is 150 - 250 times. Today, the Russian kopeck, five, ten, fifty kopecks and even one ruble are purely symbolic signs. Bread has risen in price 70-80 times, a ticket to a museum, a play or a concert rarely costs less than 100 rubles - more often than not 300. The criminal authorities have adopted predatory laws on housing and communal services reform, on real estate taxes and land- - a new noose on the neck of the average consumer. And this is far from the last word of capitalism. The people are no longer “silent”. As in the case of monetization of benefits, he takes to the streets, holds pickets, rallies, and talks about actions of “civil disobedience.”

That is why the ruling “tops” are so afraid and hate Soviet power, that is why they are doing everything to prevent its revival. I would like to believe that our long-suffering Russian people, who, according to I.V. Stalin, showed “a clear mind, persistent character and long patience” during the Great Patriotic War, will finally wake up from shock and hibernation and, having gathered all their strength, in Mayakovsky’s expression, with a “clenched, united, striking fist,” he will say his weighty word in defense of Soviet power.

We, representatives of the older generation - war and labor veterans, home front workers, pensioners, are contemptuously called "scoops" by anti-Soviet people. Yes, we are "scoops". Because we were, are and will remain Soviet people until the end of our days.

We have something to be proud of, something to remember and something to compare our current nightmarish, miserable and miserable life with. We have retained high moral and spiritual ideals, we still value our native Soviet power that was stolen from us and trampled by traitor-shifters. Well, what can the currently successful gentlemen businessmen - businessmen and gentlemen officials - be proud of? Unless by criminal means at the expense of the working people with the “bucks” obtained.

It was surprising to learn that the greatest Western economist of the 20th century, John Keynes, worked in Moscow in the 20s, after the Great October Socialist Revolution. There, he said, was "main laboratory of life" . He also argued that Soviet Russia, “like no one else, close to both the earth and the sky.”
After the Great October Revolution, the globe began to live differently. News from the Land of Soviets came in a stream, crowding each other. Laboratory! Everything was for the first time, for the first time in human history. And the great, high, like the sky, goal is to build on this sinful earth a society of justice, a society without exploitation, a society for the free development of working people.
It was impossible not to respond to the challenges posed to the capitalist world by October. Starting already in 1917, a global, powerful, non-stop propaganda flywheel of anti-Sovietism was launched.
Anti-Soviet propaganda emphasizes the thesis that the October Revolution of 1917 turned a huge country off the “main path of human development”, from the “high road of civilization.” Ukrainian writer-deputy Vladimir Yavorivsky is right there: “The so-called revolution interrupted the course of history” (TV channel “1+1”, 08.11. 2007). The utopia about the need to “return to civilization” was actively imposed on the public consciousness by the so-called “sixties”. In 1990, one of them, the well-known Yuri Karyakin, who soon became a member of the Presidential Council under B. Yeltsin, dramatically stated in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda: “Given: October Revolution. Given: by 1917, Russia was, if not in the top five, then in the top ten countries according to all main criteria.” They say that the Bolsheviks interrupted such a successful development of the state. Here, as usual in the reasoning of the “democrats,” if you look more closely, there is a false message. Yes, by 1917 Russia was not among the top five or ten. The country was exhausted and devastated by a “hateful and incomprehensible” (the definition of the famous Russian emigrant philosopher G. Fedotov) war, which in itself moved the people towards revolutionary sentiments. Beginning in 1914, 16 million people were sent to the fronts of the First World War through general mobilization in Tsarist Russia (four million from Ukraine alone), mostly, of course, peasants.
The situation in Russia in those years was characterized by A. Denikin, commander of the White Army, in his “Essays on the Russian Troubles”:
“...boundless hatred spilled around... bitterness accumulated over centuries, bitterness from three years of war.” It's about him, oh“centuries of accumulated bitterness” , wrote the great Russian poet, sophisticated and honest Alexander Blok: “Why do they shit in the noble estates dear to the heart? Because there they raped and flogged girls: not from that master, but from a neighbor.” . The great writer of Ukraine Mykhailo Kotsyubinsky described “an old, wild hatred for the master, whoever he may be” , in the poignant short story “Laughter.” When the hero of the story, lawyer Chubinsky, revolutionary events 1905 spoke at rallies, “his words flew out of his chest like birds of prey, boldly and accurately” . He could not even imagine that his own indignant attacks about “the opposing interests of those who give work and those who are forced to take it” , directly relate to him personally. A terrible epiphany came one day after the suppression of revolutionary uprisings, when the Black Hundreds carrying portraits of the Tsar carried out their cruel reprisals, not forgetting the “rebel intellectuals.” Chubinsky shared the feeling of fear that gripped him with a “living soul” in his apartment with dense closed windows- with his hired help, Varvara, a housekeeper, whom he sincerely considered his friend. “The gentlemen are being beaten,” he explained plaintively. And unexpectedly “I was surprised to see that Varvara’s well-fed body was shaking, as if from suppressed laughter...

And suddenly that laughter broke out. - Ha ha! They beat... and let them beat... This wild laughter galloped alone around the hut, and it was so painful and scary, like a crazy dance of sharp knives, shiny and cold.” . And only then Chubinsky“I saw something that I passed by every day, like the blind man. These bare feet, cold, red, dirty and cracked... The shingles on the shoulders that did not provide warmth... The blue fumes in the kitchen, the hard bench on which she slept... between the slop, dirt and fumes... A sad, muddy life, a century in the yoke... And he wanted more affection from her...”
And again we return to Denikin’s forced assessments from his “Essays on Russian Troubles”:“... in the whole country, except for the Bolsheviks, there was not a single effective organization that could lay claim to its difficult heritage fully armed with real force.”
“All weapons of real power” were determined primarily by broad popular support. Following fresh traces of events, the chairman of the secretariat of the Ukrainian Central Rada, and then the chairman of the Directory, wrote about this support in 1920
Vladimir Vinnichenko:“Our influence was less. The Bolsheviks, however, also did not have large, disciplined units, but their advantage was that all of our broad masses of soldiers did not offer them any resistance or even went over to their side; that almost all the workers of every city rose up behind them; that in the villages the rural poor were clearly Bolshevik; that, in a word, the vast majority of the Ukrainian population itself was against us. And of course, in such conditions we could not win. City after city, province after province passed into the hands of the Bolsheviks.”
Generally speaking, it would be beneficial for the Bolsheviks to compare the results of their activities with 1917, i.e. choose a starting point, so to speak, “according to Karyakin” (given: October Revolution; given: by 1917...). And it would be even more profitable to count down from 1921, when the country lay in ruins after two revolutions - the February and October, after the World War and the Civil War, after a multi-directional post-revolutionary foreign intervention. Against such a background, any slight progress forward would seem significant. However, the Bolsheviks acted honestly. Out of principle. They made comparisons with 1913, the year of the highest achievements of Tsarist Russia. For the Bolsheviks, it was a matter of principle to compare the successes of the socialist economy with the maximum successes of the non-socialist, pre-revolutionary economy. And the achievements of the Land of Soviets were amazing, which should be known to the scientist Yu. Karyakin, since it is known to the whole world.
Already by 1926, the level of industrial production of 1913 had been restored in the USSR, and by 1939 it was exceeded more than nine (!) times, i.e. the growth was 900 percent. The same figure for France in the same 1939 was 93%, for England - 113%, for the USA - 120%, for Germany - 131%. If in 1913 the volume of industrial production in Tsarist Russia was 6.9% of the corresponding figure in the United States, then in 1980 the USSR was already producing 80% of the industrial output of the United States.
The Bolsheviks took responsibility for their every step, every decision. Responsibility is not only courage and pride, but also a heavy historical burden that cannot be shifted to others.
The current successive countless bourgeois governments of “independent” Ukraine compare the results of their activities either with the results of the previous year or with the results of the work of previous governments. And nothing more. Here is a typical example. Yulia Tymoshenko stated in the TV show “Freedom of Speech” (06/15/2007):“I was in power for less than seven months. Was it possible, without having the opportunity to rely on anyone in particular, to correct what was done in 16 years?” . And bribes are smooth. A year before this statement, she had exactly the same whining:“We cannot eradicate all seventy years of post-Sovietism and fifteen years of corruption in a few years. They offer enormous both financial and intellectual resistance.” (“High Castle”, July 20, 2006).
You see, “post-Sovietness” bothers her.
A constant associate of Yulia Tymoshenko, People's Deputy of Ukraine from the BYuT faction, Doctor of Economic Sciences Oleg Belorus, meanwhile, is perplexed:“When I worked in the UN system as director of the Department of Industry, Science and Technology, I was always proud of the fact that, according to the UN classification, Ukraine was considered a super-developed state, which was among the top ten countries in the world. Today it is a state of beggars. Absurd!" (“Evening Kiev”, October 27, 1998).
Interesting, isn’t it, the recording of the time of maximum prosperity of Ukraine - “when I worked in the UN system...” Well, the language does not dare to indicate that time own name. The era when Ukraine was a super-developed state was called, Mr. Belarusian, Soviet.
Anti-Sovietism somehow surprisingly lowers the intellectual and ethical bar of reasoning: elementary, habitual scientific conscientiousness disappears, deliberately false arguments are used, because if honest arguments are given, the field for anti-Sovietism begins to narrow like shagreen leather. And it, anti-Sovietism, is in great demand by the current “masters of life”, as it is used as the main justification for their bastardism. There is no other excuse. Like, the worst thing, i.e. Soviet power is already behind us. It, anti-Sovietism, is well paid for by the “masters of life”.
Anti-Sovietism takes revenge on artists and creators who betrayed the country, “close to both earth and sky, like no one else.”
Already in our treacherous times, the outstanding playwright Viktor Sergeevich Rozov emphasized:“After the October Revolution, talents poured in (literally poured out!) in all types of literature and art. And now - nothing. Simply amazing!” Film director and actor Vladimir Menshov (Oscar winner for the film “Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears”) reminds:“Take, for example, the first ten years of Soviet power, five of which were spent in the war. Then there was a huge surge of talent in all areas of creative activity. And what amazing cinematography it was! And it did not come from the inertia of the old, it was a fundamentally new cinema, based on the ideas of the October Revolution.”
Sergei Eisenstein, director of the famous "Battleship Potemkin", recognized " best film of all times and peoples,” he excitedly recalled:“There was the pathos of revolution. There was a pathos of the revolutionary new. There was hatred of the bourgeois culture. And the devilish pride, and the thirst to “ruin” the bourgeoisie on the film front too.” . Vladimir’s lines are about this same “devilish pride”
Mayakovsky:“The Soviets have their own pride. We look down on the bourgeoisie!”
And now, dear readers, let’s try to remember what the so-called Orange Revolution gave to culture. What?! What, besides “Grynjol” and two or three films that have already been forgotten by everyone?
The foundations of the current rabid anti-Sovietism were laid by those same notorious “sixties”, about whom it is now customary to speak enthusiastically, with aspiration. But there are many people who do not like them, the “sixties”. It is difficult to love them, if only because they love themselves too much. However main reason the rejection of the “sixties” lies in the fact that it was they who brought criticism of the Soviet system to the denial of this system."Since the 60s, - notes S. Kara-Murza,“There is a search for any clue to create an anti-Soviet hysteria.”
The point is not that criticism of the state of affairs in the country, in the workforce, in your city or in your village is unacceptable. Every thinking person always critically perceives the surrounding reality. Any society is imperfect, because we humans are imperfect. The same Sergei Georgievich Kara-Murza notes that in the country, especially among the intelligentsia, there has always been“mental sport of criticism of the Soviet system.” But our society was based on agreement in the main, socialist idea. Criticism, indignation, and dissatisfaction were caused by defects in the actual implementation of this idea. Those. criticism came from the left. The outstanding Russian thinker V. Kozhinov recalls:“When I came to the university in 1950, to Moscow State University, there was such an atmosphere there, I would say, to the left of Stalin”; Sergei Yesenin wrote in his autobiographies of 1922 and 1925:“During the years of the revolution I was entirely on the side of October, but accepted everything in my own way, with a peasant bias... In the RCP (Russian Communist Party. - S.G.)I’ve never been a member because I feel much more to the left.”
The “sixties” felt much more to the right. Criticism, but agreement, unity for the sake of the main idea is one thing, criticism and doubt in the idea, and then its denial (including denial for the sake of a “return to civilization”, to its “main” road, which, by the way, is another thing) , goes no more than 15% of humanity).
When today they talk about the generation of the “sixties,” they mean only the liberal and pro-Western oriented part of it, which later degenerated into the current “democrats.” But there were other people from the sixties. The artist Geliy Korzhev, a brilliant master of the Great Soviet style of painting (his painting “Raising the Banner” and the series of canvases “Scorched by War,” painted in the 60s, are widely known), recalled today, in 2001:“There is such an established term - “sixties”. But for me, the sixties are not Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. These are, first of all, people who emerged from the flames of war. It was they who carried within themselves a new idea of ​​the universe, of life, of art. An entire generation came from the war with a passionate dream of a peaceful life, a thirst for knowledge, and a thirst for work. It was this generation that formed the spirit of the era, which was later picked up by the “rotten intelligentsia” and soon dissipated.”
S. Kara-Murza (by the way, he himself is from the generation of the sixties) is extremely harsh and honest in his assessments:“The dissidents very quickly subordinated all their activities to the goals of the enemy of the USSR in the Cold War.” On their conscience is the heaviest suffering of huge masses of people and a lot of blood. They sawed off the main pillar of the state - agreement in the recognition of several sacred ideas. Such ideas included the idea of ​​justice, brotherhood of peoples, and the need to survive the Cold War with the West. This had fatal consequences at the time of generational change and during the Cold War.
Before the period of the destruction of the USSR, even in the most nightmares we could not have imagined that on its territory in interethnic clashes, heated up in each of the republics by “democrats”-separatists, more than 600 thousand of our former fellow citizens would die in ten years (“Soviet Russia”, 04/20/1999). And - no massive accusatory rage about this from demo-journalists, “human rights activists” and the like. The fact that over 32 years (from 1921 to 1953) in the Soviet Union 642,980 people were sentenced to capital punishment is recalled with indignation and tirelessly, and about 600 thousand who died in ten very recent years in the maelstrom of bloody massacre , if they remember, it is casually, sluggishly, rarely. Double standards stifle the conscience.
This spring, after provoked merciless clashes between the Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, which resulted in the terrible death of hundreds of people in the Osh region of Kyrgyzstan, hundreds of thousands of mortally frightened people fled from this country towards the border with Uzbekistan. The whole world saw these images: dense crowds want to cross the border, people without things, despair on their faces, hugging small children... The number of these refugees exceeded the number of Crimean Tatars deported to Uzbekistan during the Great Patriotic War and was comparable to the number of deportees to Kazakhstan of Chechens and Ingush. However, who today (not even a year has passed) remembers the refugees from Kyrgyzstan? Where are the angry condemnations? You can't hear them. Is it a matter of once again branding “Stalin’s deportations.” Here is Nikolai Zhulinsky, one of the nationally-favored “democrats,” speaking on April 5, 2000 with the rank of Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine at a hearing in the Verkhovna Rada on state policy to ensure the rights of the Crimean- Tatar people, stated:“The forced relocation of people on ethnic grounds was carried out in such cruel forms that are unknown to the civilized world. It is difficult to even find any analogues to those criminal actions in other countries.”
It is difficult to write about the tragedy of deportations, including the deportation of the Crimean Tatars. However, N. Zhulinsky, in an anti-Soviet rage, spoke about the impossibility of finding any analogues to “those criminal actions.” Therefore, one cannot remain silent. Well, why can’t you find analogues, Mr. Zhulinsky? It's quite possible. Everything is relative.
The leading British political and economic weekly, the Financial Times, just conducted a quantitative comparison of “Stalin’s deportations” and the total number of refugees in former borders Soviet Union (“Digest of news about Ukraine”, No. 21, 1996). In both cases, we are talking about analogues - about involuntary mass movements of people based on nationality. The weekly published information from a report prepared in 1996 for a conference in Geneva, held under the auspices of the OSCE and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Since 1989, nearly 9 million people have “involuntarily changed their place of residence” within the borders former USSR. The report further noted:“These are the largest, most complex and potentially the most destabilizing population movements in the world since the Second World War... There is no solution in sight to the refugee problems in the CIS countries.”
The report provided information on the ten largest population movements “within the borders of the former USSR” since 1989:
From Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan - 684,000.
From Kazakhstan to Russia - 614,000.
Within Tajikistan - 600,000.
From Chechnya to Russia - 487,000.
From Kazakhstan to Germany - 480,000.
From Uzbekistan to Russia - 400,000.
From Tajikistan to Russia - 300,000.
From Azerbaijan to Armenia - 299,000.
From Kyrgyzstan to Russia - 296,000.
From Abkhazia to Georgia - 273,000.
For comparison, the Financial Times in its article emphasizes that, on Stalin’s orders, three million people were deported between 1936 and 1952 (the exact figure, according to the NKVD archives, is 2,562,144 people).
“There are 13 million refugees on the planet today, - G. Zyuganov noted in 1998. —Of these, 10 million are our compatriots.”
So, in terms of the number of people who were forced to leave their homes, the current “democratic” regimes have left the Soviet “totalitarian” regime far behind. But N. Zhulinsky also spoke about “cruel forms that are unknown to the civilized world.” I wonder how he would comment on the open letter published on November 13, 2002 to the President of Kazakhstan, signed by more than 300 families of Chechen refugees living in a tent camp on the territory of Ingushetia. After spending three winters in tents and fearing the onset of a fourth, they turned to Nursultan Nazarbayev with a request for temporary refuge in the places of Stalin’s deportation of their ancestors and addressed him the following lines:“No matter how bitter the Chechens’ memory of Stalin’s deportation, we are forced to tell you, dear Mr. President, that our current situation (8 years of war, homelessness and complete uncertainty) is even more difficult than deportation... Our old people remember how the Kazakhs shared with them the last piece of bread..."
Refugees are spontaneous mass flows of people rushing into the unknown in horror. The deportations, despite all the understandable costs, were carried out in an organized manner, according to the announced rules. The “democratic” bourgeois government is so cunningly and vilely structured that it seems impossible to find fault with it - well, who drove this particular person from his place? I ran myself. The Soviet government was distinguished by the fact that it always took responsibility for even its most harsh and cruel decisions.
Deported Chechens, like the Crimean Tatars, were allowed to take with them the most necessary things, money, valuables, food, small equipment - 100 kg for each person, but not more than 500 kg for a family. The NKVD memorandum addressed to Stalin noted:“Upon arrival in Kazakhstan, each family was given a loan of 5 thousand rubles with a repayment period of seven years and one head of cattle according to an exchange receipt to account for what was left at home. 75 thousand premises were prepared for resettlement, mainly due to the density of local residents. The majority have been allocated land plots.”
The deportees, like all Soviet people, were provided with free medical care. Their children were raised in kindergartens and received free secondary and higher education.
Ruslan Khasbulatov, a Chechen by nationality, graduated from the law and economics faculties of Moscow State University, Doctor of Science, whom we know as the chairman of that convocation of the Supreme Council of Russia, the legitimate body of power, on which tank fire was opened on the orders of the ardent “democrat” Yeltsin, recalled his childhood :“After all, we were deported and, it would seem, the party, Soviet leaders - who will ask them if they put pressure on us. No, they treated us as equals, asking: “How are you living? How are the kids, are they fed? Our school was four kilometers away, and one day I didn’t go to school. So our Russian teacher, Vera Vladimirovna, came in a snowstorm, in thirty-degree frost, to find out what happened to me.” (“Tomorrow”, No. 33, 1998). The conditions for the deportation and subsequent resettlement of the Crimean Tatars in Uzbekistan were the same.
Let us return again to N. Zhulinsky’s statement regarding the fact that“It is difficult to find any analogues to these criminal acts in other countries.” Well, why is it difficult, Mr. Zhulinsky? This can be done easily. For example, in England in 1939, all ethnic Germans, including those who fled Germany from Nazi persecution, were sent to concentration camps in remote areas. Some of them were transported all the way to Canada, to a concentration camp in Quebec.
In the United States, after the attack of Japanese samurai on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, by order of President Roosevelt No. 9066 of February 19, 1942, 120 thousand people of Japanese nationality were evicted from the Pacific coast of the United States in one night, 60 percent of whom were US citizens, the rest had an official residence permit. Persons who had even just 1/16th of Japanese blood were subject to eviction. Those evicted were taken to 13 concentration camps in the remote deserts of Nevada and Arizona with a harsh climate, where they were forced to work in the mines. It was only in 1986, after a lengthy legal battle, that an American appeals court found that the Japanese held in concentration camps until the end of the war “posed no threat to national security.”
And then, in February 1942, advertisements were posted in settlements on the west coast of the United States:“An order is issued to all persons of Japanese descent... U.S. citizens or not, subject to deportation... The size and weight of baggage is limited to what an individual or family can carry in their hands.”
Do you feel the difference, Mr. Zhulinsky? Between the norm of 100 kg of property per person and what this “individual person” can carry in his hands? Another difference was that neither anti-Tatar nor anti-Chechen propaganda was allowed in the Soviet Union. And in the United States, the deportation of the Japanese was preceded by persecution based on their nationality. Thus, the influential American newspaper Los Angeles Times, published on the west coast of the United States, in those days published in an editorial:“A viper remains a viper, no matter where it lays its egg. So an American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to become Japanese, not American." (“Duel”, No. 47, 2002).
But the most important, decisive difference between the deportations to the USA and the USSR was, of course, that during the entire war an enemy soldier never set foot on American soil, and there was a war on the territory of the Soviet Union. Roosevelt ordered the deportation on a preventive basis, fearing espionage from any of the thousands of deportees, fearing that in the event of a Japanese army landing in California, a “fifth column” of local Japanese who knew the terrain and situation well would act on its side. In the Soviet Union, the “fifth column” was real. In Chechnya, 63% of men drafted into the Red Army deserted and took weapons to the mountains. When the Germans had already reached the North Caucasus and were eager for Grozny oil, armed detachments of Chechens established contact with them and carried out military operations in the rear of the Red Army. The leadership of the Chechen “fifth column” sent a “Memorandum” to the fascist leadership with a proposal for a joint military-political alliance against the USSR.
The “fifth column” of fascists in Crimea were Tatar nationalists, whose declared goal was the creation of a Crimean Tatar state under the protectorate of Nazi Germany. Of the 90 thousand Crimeans conscripted into the Red Army, 20 thousand Crimean Tatars deserted when our troops retreated from Crimean territory. The same number - 20 thousand - of Crimean Tatars then consisted of units of the German army stationed in Crimea.
The armed formations of the Crimean Tatars, together with the Nazis, destroyed 86 thousand civilians, 85 thousand representatives of the Soviet activists and 57 thousand Red Army soldiers (V. Orlov. “About political repression in USSR". - K., 2000). Many Crimean Tatars, knowing the mountain and forest paths, became indispensable guides for the Germans when carrying out brutal punitive operations against Soviet partisans. But those partisan detachments also included Crimean Tatars, who remained Soviet patriots. Thus, as of January 15, 1944, there were 3,733 partisans in Crimea, of which 1,944 were Russians, 348 Ukrainians, and 598 Crimean Tatars. In retaliation for the actions of the partisans, the Nazis burned 134 settlements in the foothills and mountainous areas of Crimea, 132 of which were predominantly Crimean Tatar.
The Crimean Tatars split during the Nazi occupation. A significant part of them followed the national radicals and massively went over to the side of the Germans. Together with the Germans, they were defeated during the liberation of Crimea. About six thousand people from enemy agents were arrested (in Chechnya - two thousand people). It is clear that these were not all accomplices of the occupiers.
The war on the territory of the USSR was still going on, Soviet soldiers were still dying in battle, the possibility of war with Turkey, an ally of Germany, was not yet ruled out, and then Crimea would certainly again become a territory of hostilities. The bodies of the People's Commissariats of State Security and Internal Affairs of the USSR came to the conclusion that“the undesirability of further residence of the Crimean Tatars on the border outskirts of the Soviet Union” and on May 10, 1944, they submitted a proposal to Stalin for consideration“eviction of all Tatars from the territory of Crimea.”
Stalin knew about Roosevelt's actions. If Roosevelt considered himself to have the right to preemptively evict all Japanese from the “border outskirts” of the United States, Stalin even more considered himself to have the right to make the same decision in the context of fierce military operations on the territory of his country.
Extremely painful aspect tragic events associated with wholesale deportation based on nationality is that modern law does not recognize collective punishment. After all, even the Nazi leaders in Nuremberg were tried individually. And they received cruel, fair sentences individually. During the deportations, contrary to legal legality, the peoples suffered collective punishment. But not everything in this matter is as clear as it seems at first glance. S. Kara-Murza talks about his friend, a Tatar by nationality, who was deported with about a hundred of his relatives. When people delved into the alternative, he said, they chose deportation not only to Uzbekistan, but also to Chukotka. S. Kara-Murza explains:“The deportation was a punishment of the people on a joint basis for the guilt of some men. By applying such punishment, the state refused to clarify the individual guilt of each man and persecute individuals. The unusual nature of this punishment is evident from the fact that party and Komsomol organizations were not liquidated during the deportation of Chechens. This type of punishment, difficult for everyone, was a salvation from death for a large part of the men, and therefore for the ethnic group. If the trials were carried out individually according to martial law, then the loss of such a significant part of young men would undermine the demographic potential of the people. However, the number of Chechens has grown by the same amount as that of other peoples of the Caucasus who were not subject to deportation . (The number of deported Crimean Tatars, as demographers note, has increased significantly. - S.G.).
You can conduct the following thought experiment: let each of those who curse the USSR for the “criminal deportation” of peoples imagine themselves in the place of the father or mother of a family in which the son fought on the side of the Germans. Now, the Germans have been driven away, and the parents are asked what they prefer - for their son to be tried according to “civilized” laws and shot as a traitor who fought on the side of the enemy, or for the whole family to be evicted to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan?.. It’s another matter that detractors of the USSR the fate of Chechen or Crimean Tatar men, as well as all their peoples, was, frankly speaking, of no concern.”
If they, the detractors of the USSR, were really not indifferent to the fate of the deported peoples, then they would be just as concerned about the fate of the huge number of current refugees. However, they cannot squeeze reasons for anti-Sovietism out of the refugee problem, and therefore it does not interest them. In the same way, no words of indignation are heard from the anti-Soviet “democrats” due to the fact that today (today, and not in the Soviet years!) Ukraine has taken first place in the world in terms of the monstrous indicator - excess mortality among working-age men. Today, a tuberculosis epidemic has been declared in Ukraine, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has expressed extreme concern about the possibility of the spread of severe forms of tuberculosis from Ukraine to other European countries. From Ukraine! From Ukraine, where, as throughout the Soviet Union, acutely progressive forms of tuberculosis were practically eradicated. From Ukraine, where, as throughout the Union, it acted so efficient system anti-tuberculosis protection (created, we emphasize, in 1918, a year after the October Revolution), that the same WHO recommended it as a model for other countries. Today, in “independent” Ukraine, without wars and without any sentences from the NKVD, the population has decreased by six million people, not only due to a decrease in the birth rate, but also due to an increase in mortality. People are not sentenced to premature death, but doomed to it. And the “effectiveness” of population reduction in peacetime breaks all records. However, any specific current Ukrainian government, unlike the Soviet leadership, does not take responsibility for this.
It was the responsibility of the Soviet government that gave rise to unique feature life under this government - confidence in the future.
I remember how struck I was by the statement of one teacher from Tbilisi, sounded in the “Time” program on the First TV channel of Russia. I even wrote down the date - September 18, 2002. That teacher said:“Under Soviet rule, everything was bad. But one thing was very successful - the parents were calm about the future of their children.” . Yes, after all, anti-Sovietism is a disease. A contagious disease that deprives a person of the ability to think rationally. Where is the logic?! Everyone felt bad, but they were calm about the future of the children. But confidence in the future of children, in the future, is not a separate indicator, but an indicator that generalizes many others, an integral one! This is precisely what the unforgettable Alexander Zinoviev emphasized:“The most important achievements of the communist system were guaranteed work, guaranteed education, and education of the highest level, free medical care, pension payments. I can add the following: confidence in the future. We had it, but in the West people don’t have it... It must be said frankly that in terms of living conditions for the majority of the population, our system was unique. She will become legendary over time."
Without this priceless feeling—confidence in the future—it would be impossible to say that our country is “like no one else, close to both earth and heaven.” It would be necessary to leave only “to the ground”, to leave only pragmatism, which is being imposed today as the only acceptable lifestyle. But we loved and continue to love the Land of October, which was close “to both the earth and the sky”! We know all the mistakes and tragedies of its history, we have criticized and continue to criticize many things in it. But - on the left! Its main ideals are selfless and immortal.

The life of an ordinary Russian is filled with the spirit of independence, a special mission, and obvious superiority over the West and over the United States in particular. One could go on and on about the features in which Russia and the Russians are better than Europe and America.

Here are the gay inclinations of the “Westerners”, and the general decay there against the backdrop of our spiritual enlightenment, and our willingness to abandon everything in the world and replace all imports with our native, natural and healthy ones - even at the cost of tightening our belts to the point of intestinal colic. The president, patriarch and deputies talk about this, and 85% of Russians support them in this.

And this spirit of self-superiority will not allow Russia to collapse. Because a typical Russian lives every day with this spirit. What is a typical day like for an ordinary Russian patriot?

A Russian wakes up in the morning and goes to wash his face. Brushing his teeth. By the way, the toothbrush was patented in 1870 by the American Wadsworth. And toothpaste in a tube was invented in 1892 by the American Shefield. This achievement of the damned West came to Russia only in the middle of the 20th century...

If a Russian is a man, he usually shaves in the morning. Some people prefer an electric razor - it was invented by the Briton Chic in 1927. But many Russian men prefer to shave with a razor with thin blades. It was invented in 1895 by the American Gillette.

And if our Russian is a Russian woman, then she brings beauty to her face. That is, he puts on makeup. Mascara, lipstick, powder, cream... By the way, mascara was invented by the Briton Rommel in the mid-19th century. Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, the American William improved it for his sister Maybelline. This is how the world-conquering mascara was born Maybelline. And in 1958, Elena Rubinstein, an American of Polish-Jewish origin, finally invented a tube with a brush....

The proud Russian woman also paints her lips. Lipstick, which was first produced by the French in 1883. And it was packaged - in its current form, in a tube - by the Americans from the company Guerlain. Then again there was Elena Rubinstein, who created an inexpensive, publicly available lipstick... And the American Elizabeth Arden with her lipstick... And the American Max Factor with her indelible lipstick... And in 1947, the Americans finally came up with a machine that could produce a piston tube with lipstick, now known to everyone. And things started...

Having finished washing, shaving or putting on makeup (depending on gender), the average Russian goes to have breakfast. Everyone eats breakfast differently.

Many people love yogurt. Patriots believe that it was invented by the Russian scientist Mechnikov. Others are sure that yogurt was born in ancient times, in Thrace. One way or another, the French company Danone began mass production of yoghurts in the early thirties of the last century. In Russia, yoghurts appeared in the late 70s of the last century. And some people like sausages for breakfast. They were invented in 1805 by the Austrian Laner. And some people prefer a croissant. Where he was born, apparently, is not even worth explaining...

It is clear that Russians take sausages, yogurt or eggs for omelettes from the refrigerator. Which was invented in 1841 by the American Gorry. Mass production of refrigerators began in the USA in 1919. In the USSR, the first refrigerators appeared twenty years later...

The Russian will cook his breakfast on a gas stove. Which was invented in 1825 by the American Sharp. In the 30s of the last century, there were already 14 million gas stoves in America. In Russia (USSR), the first gas stoves appeared in 1957.

Well, maybe not on gas, but on electric stove the Russian will cook porridge for himself. Such an electric stove was invented in 1893 by the Canadian Ahern; the first mass-produced stoves were produced by the German company AEG in 1903. The first electric stoves appeared in Russia in 1962...

Finally, an indispensable part of the breakfast of most Russians is coffee.

Coffee has not grown in Russia, is not growing and will not grow. It happened. And not everyone likes to brew coffee in a cezve (which many call a Turk) - it takes a long time and is also troublesome. It's easier to use instant coffee. Which was invented in 1901 by the American Kato. True, many people love coffee from a coffee machine. Which was invented in 1901 by the Italian Bezzera. And in 1902, mass production of coffee machines began. They have it.

How will a typical day go for an ordinary Russian, filled with feelings of Russia's special mission and condescending contempt for Western civilization?

Many ordinary Russians watch TV or read the Internet during breakfast to find out news about Russia's special path. It is believed that television was invented by the Russian scientist Zvorykin. This is, in general, true, with only one “but”: in 1919, at the age of 31, Zworykin became an American, and in the same America he patented his television. Today, most Russians have TVs made by Korean companies. Samsung– 32%. Then comes the Dutch Phillips, Japanese Sony, Japanese Toshiba and Korean LG.

As for the Internet that Russians use, it was invented by the American military Advanced Development Agency DARPA in 1969.

After having breakfast and watching the news about the decaying West, incapable of anything, the Russian goes to work. He leaves the apartment and takes the elevator down to the entrance. This elevator, by the way, in its modern form was invented by an American engineer named Otis in 1854. Leaving the house, the Russian gets into the car to go to work. It is believed that the car was invented by Ivan Kulibin. True, the first mass production of cars began in Germany in 1888 by Karl Benz. Who had a daughter named Mercedes. It was followed by Peugeot in France, Oldsmobile and Ford in America...

Today in Russia, out of the top ten best-selling cars, three are Russian Ladas (the start of production of which, as we remember, is inextricably linked with Fiat). The rest are “Japanese”, “Koreans”, “Germans”, “French”, “Americans” (even if they were collected in Russia). Here I would also like to note that if our Russian is an ordinary person, but at the same time a little more “ordinary” than all other Russians - say, the president, or the prime minister, or the patriarch - then he drives an “almost ordinary” Mercedes. Or Maybach.

Our ordinary Russian goes to work on an asphalt road. These first appeared in France in 1832. The current great oil power, Russia, laid its first asphalt streets 30 years later - from imported asphalt... Until 1873, Russia did not have its own asphalt...

It is clear that on the way to work, the average Russian stops at intersections - at traffic lights. It just so happened that the traffic light was not invented in great Russia, and in America by Garrett Morgan in 1914. While our Russian is standing at a traffic light, he may be calling on his mobile phone. Which was invented by an American company Motorola in 1973. Today 92% of Russians have mobile phones. However, the most common ones are Samsung, Nokia, HTC, Apple, Sony.

And if a Russian doesn’t call, he listens to the radio. The car radio was invented in the USA in 1929. If he feels hot in the car, the Russian turns on the air conditioning. Which was invented in 1902 by the American Carrier. And the first domestic air conditioners Carrier appeared on sale in 1931, and in 1936, automobile air conditioning was first installed on a bus on the Damascus-Baghdad route...

True, it may still happen that our ordinary Russian goes to work on a tram. Or on a trolleybus. And then on the metro. The tram was invented in Germany by Ernst von Siemens in 1879. The trolleybus was invented in 1890 in the USA by Charles Depaul. The first trolleybus in Europe was put into operation in 1911 in Austria-Hungary, and the first trolleybuses ran in the USSR in 1933. And the metro, the first line of which opened in London in 1863, was invented by the Briton Brunel two decades earlier.

In general, that's not the point. Our ordinary patriot has finally arrived to work. And most likely, the first thing he did was turn on the computer. Which was invented in 1941 by the German Konrad Zuse. In 1946, the first computer was launched in the USA - the prototype of digital machines. Eniac. The Russian's computer runs on American operating system Windows. Or on the American system Lunix. Or in American iOS. The Russian creates all his documents using the American program Microsoft Office. And then prints it out on the printer. The printer was invented by an American company Remington in 1953. Today there are a dozen and a half printer manufacturers in the world, but there are no Russian printers. Or a Russian can send the document by email. It was invented by the American Thomplison in 1972.

Well, in the evening the ordinary Russian will return home. Perhaps he will watch football. This is a game that was invented by the British in the 19th century. Or maybe the Russian will watch hockey. This is a game that was invented at the end of the 19th century in Canada.

In general, this is how a typical day would go for an ordinary Russian, filled with feelings of Russia’s special mission and condescending contempt for Western civilization. Good night!

Vladimir Bekish – expert in the field of strategic security

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IT IS UNLIMITED that many young people today will say who owns the words in the title of Chapter 9. “Poems about the Soviet Passport” by Vladimir Mayakovsky is not included in curriculum on literature in anti-Soviet “Russian” schools. And just in these verses there are lines that were famous in their time:

The Soviets have their own pride,

We look down on the bourgeoisie...

These words contain the legitimate pride of free people who want to decide their own destiny. These people sang:

Nobody will give us deliverance,

Neither a god, nor a king, nor a hero!

We will achieve liberation

my with my own hand!

Should we stand still?

We are always right in our daring!

But this same pride is visible in the no less famous, but also rather forgotten words of Alexander Nevsky in “Russia”:

“Whoever comes to us with a sword will die by the sword!

This is where the Russian land stood and will stand!”

And in the words of Alexander Suvorov:

“Where a deer goes, a Russian soldier will go.

Where a deer will not pass, a Russian soldier will pass!”

That is, Russian pride and a sovereign sense of self-worth have always lived in the best Russian people, at all times!

In 1764, the Russian industrialist and leader Ivan Maksimovich Solovyov sailed with a detachment of 55 people to the Fox Islands, part of the Russian Aleutians... He returned to Kamchatka in 1766, losing 28 people, but presenting on July 28 to “The noble and honorable Mr. Ensign Timofey Ivanovich Shmalev of the company of the Irkutsk merchant Yakov Ulednikov from the ship that arrived from the sea islands, called the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, from the sailor and leader of the Tobolsk townsman Ivan Solovyov Report "...

Two days before Solovyov’s “report” - on July 26, Warrant Officer Shmalev received a similar “report” from “the sailor and leader of the city of Vaga, Verkhovazhsky quarter of the Kyanskaya tithe of the palace peasant Ivan Korovin with his companions,” who returned from the Aleutian islands of Unalaska and Umnak on the ship “Holy Life-giving” - the beginning of the trinity."

Why did you go into the stormy cold ocean Ivan Korovin?

Here's why:

“... for the expansion of Her Imperial Majesty’s Russian Empire and the hoped-for state benefit to the increase of Her Imperial Majesty’s highest interest, to bringing into subjection under the highly autocratic Her Imperial Majesty the hand of the shady people living on the found sea islands in yasash payment, and especially to the search for some useful similar to the state of profits..."

Why did Ivan Solovyov go into the stormy ocean? Well, in his “report” he answered this question also clearly and distinctly:

“...for the search for good, for the development of the state, for the spread of Her Imperial Majesty’s Russian empire of interest, for the hunting of animals and for the search of unknown islands and the ignorant peoples living on them, I bring under the highly autocratic hand of Her Imperial Majesty...”

These were simple Russian people, but these were people filled not with petty calculations, but with the same sense of power and the same pride that gave strength to Nevsky, Peter the Great, Suvorov and his “miracle heroes”!

But isn’t Lenin’s already familiar words permeated by the same active pride for one’s Motherland:

“...We have the material in natural resources, in the reserve of human strength, and in the wonderful scope that the great revolution gave to folk art - to create a truly powerful and abundant Rus'. Rus' will become such if it throws away all despondency and all phrases, if, gritting its teeth, it gathers all its strength, if it strains every nerve, tightens every muscle...”

But how the enemies of Russia and the Russian people want to trample this pride in us and present Russians as subhumans... And how deep are the roots of this desire and hatred of Russia!

Here are two excerpts from Polish early medieval chronicles. The first is from the so-called “Chronicle of Gallus Anonymus,” dating back to the beginning of the 11th century:

“...King Boleslav (Boleslav the Brave, crowned in 1025 - S.K. ) <…>invaded with great courage the kingdom of the Russians and scattered those who at first tried to resist, but did not dare to start a battle, in front of his formation like dust. He did not linger, however, according to enemy custom (that is, in the view of Anonymous, according to the custom of the cowardly and greedy - in contrast to the “knightly braves” of the Poles - Russians. - S.K. ) on the way to capture cities and collect money, but hurried to the capital of the kingdom of Kyiv... And the king of the Russians, due to the simplicity [characteristic] of his people (that’s right, then yes! - S.K. ) , was at that time catching fish from a boat with a fishing rod, when [he] was unexpectedly informed that Boleslav was approaching. He had a hard time believing it, but in the end... he was horrified. Then, bringing a large one to his mouth and index fingers and, according to the custom of fishermen, spitting on the bait, he said, they say (well, well. - S.K. ) , to the shame of his people, the following words: “Since Boleslav is not engaged in this art, but he is accustomed to amusing himself with military weapons, it means that the Lord [himself] is transferring this city, and the kingdom of the Russians, and [its wealth] into his hands.” So he said, and, without hesitating for long, ran away.

And Boleslav, without meeting any resistance, entered a huge and rich city, struck the Golden Gate with a naked sword...”

The truth here is that after the death in 1015 of the Grand Duke of Kyiv Vladimir I Svyatoslavich, who baptized Rus', in 1015–1019 in Rus' there were internecine wars between the sons of Grand Duke Vladimir for the grand princely throne. Taking advantage of this, the Poles launched a campaign against Kyiv in 1018. On July 22, 1018, on the Bug River near Volyn, a battle took place between Boleslav and Vladimir’s son, Yaroslav, who then reigned in Kyiv and was later called the Wise. Only the defeat of the Russians, and not Yaroslav’s passion for quiet fishing, opened the way for Boleslav to the Russian capital.

Having entered Kyiv in August, the Poles, having plundered it, fled a month later. And soon Yaroslav again accepted the reign of Kiev.

By the way, Boleslav could not strike at any Golden Gate with a sword in 1018, since they were built by Yaroslav only in the 30s of the 11th century. And I don’t know from which finger – the thumb or the index finger – Gallus Anonymous sucked out the story about the supposedly great courage of the Poles and the supposedly unprecedented cowardice of the Russians. But it is clear that Anonymous was sucked out of the Gallus chronicle already yours the story of the “great deeds” of Boleslav, “before which even the dumb become eloquent, and the eloquence of the most glorious becomes numb,” a later Polish chronicler - Master Wincenty Kadlubek. At Kadlubek, Boleslav also “with frequent blows of the sword carved a sign of dependence on the Golden Gate” and then “put it there (this is in Russian Kyiv! - S.K. ) king of some (? – S.K. ) your relative."

Master Kadlubek says:

“...He is the Russian king himself (Boleslav the Brave. - S.K. ) defeated not even in battle, but only by plunging him into miserable fear. After all, he was told that Boleslav was threatening, when he was amusing himself with fishing, he threw the fishing rod and the kingdom with the words “We fell for the bait of someone who did not learn to catch catfish.” As soon as he uttered these words, he immediately fled with fear, being more successful in flight than in combat..."

And this is about the same thing, well known to the reader, Yaroslav Vladimirovich the Wise! He fought with his brother Mstislav, in 1026 he divided the state with him, in 1030 he united it again and reigned in Kyiv until his death in 1054. Under Yaroslav, “Russian Truth” was compiled, under him the medieval Russian state reached the peak of its power... Yaroslav (Christian name Yuri) founded the Russian city of Yuriev (present-day Tartu) in the Baltic States, married his daughters to the kings of Europe, who rejoiced at this honor...

And this proud figure of Russian history is portrayed by Polish chroniclers as a pathetic idiot and a coward.

FOR US, this long-standing pseudo-historical fuss is interesting because it well illustrates from what distant times the enemies and haters of Russia tried to instill in Russians a sense of civilizational and human inferiority.

Alas, in old Russia this issue often took place, starting with the fact that at the Russian court and among the Russian nobility in the 19th century, the everyday language was often not Russian, but French, or more precisely, “a mixture of French and Nizhny Novgorod.” But Soviet Russia put an end to these anti-Russian provocations quickly and decisively. And already at the turn of the 20-30s of the 20th century Mayakovsky - “ greatest poet of our proletarian era,” as Stalin rightly called it, – in “Poems about the Soviet Passport” he wrote with open mockery:

To some passports - a smile at the mouth,

Others have a careless attitude...

For example, they take passports with respect

With double English "left"

Looking out through the eyes of a kind uncle,

Without ceasing to bow, they take it,

It's like they're taking tips.

American passport...

About the Polish passport it was said this way:

They look at Polish like a goat on a poster,

Eyes bulge out in Polish

In the stupid police elephantiasis:

“Where do they come from and what is this?

Geographical news?...

One of the descendants of fellow citizens of Yaroslav the Wise quite adequately assessed the “weight” of the passports of the descendants of Boleslav the Brave’s subjects in Europe in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century. But the Soviet people developed a completely legitimate pride in their renewing Motherland. It’s just a pity that “dear comrades, descendants” of Mayakovsky himself, ninety years after writing the proud “Poems about the Soviet Passport”, they are leading to the fact that in the last stanza above, the word “Polish” can well be replaced with “Russian”.

However, wait and see! Russians harness for a long time, but drive quickly, because what Russian doesn’t like to drive fast!

Almost the entire first decade after graduation Civil War Russia, in fact, “harnessed” - it quickly “went” only in the second Soviet decade. In the meantime, we had to somehow hold on.

On December 30, 1920, at the First All-Union Congress of Soviets, the single state, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A new and most encouraging stage in Russian history was beginning. And, as has always been the case in this story, Russian pride struggled with “racial” clumsiness, and even direct betrayal of the interests of Russia. However, now Russian sovereign pride had strong defenders and supporters. Here's an example...

“...Today Kamenev told me<…>about the need to approve an agreement with French merchants on the organization of a mixed company for the sale of our platinum, and we must provide at least 60 poods (960 kilograms, almost a ton. - S.K. ) platinum, but we ourselves refuse to enter the foreign market with our platinum. Since there are no elements of “mixedness” in this draft agreement (the platinum is all ours, the French don’t have any platinum, they are just commission agents,<…>Moreover, one must assume that since platinum is an almost monopoly product, they, the French, will try to sell a minimum of platinum in order to please American platinum sellers and give them the opportunity to sell American platinum at exorbitant prices), but on the contrary, the entire agreement is a complete mockery of Russia , I suggested to Comrade Kamenev to call all supporters of the agreement and talk with them on the merits, advising him to cancel the agreement on the “mixed” society, offering the French a certain percentage of the total amount of platinum sold for a commission ... "

This was the new one - not only Russian, but already Soviet pride, which allowed us to look at the “bourgeois” as bourgeois - that is, with the understanding that the bourgeois does not and cannot have honor and conscience in his soul, but only profit. And the profit from the sale of Russian (now Soviet) goods will not hurt us!

The path to gaining such pride was difficult for us - the country lay in desolation. To understand how difficult it was for Soviet Russia to rise from devastation, it is enough to get acquainted with the data that Stalin cited on December 3, 1927 in the Political Report of the Central Committee at the XV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

According to the State Planning Committee, in 1925/26 the consolidated budget (single state budget plus local budgets) was equal to 72.4% of the pre-war level (5024 million rubles). In 1924/25, gross industrial output was 63.7% and Agriculture– 87.3% of the pre-war level (that is, in 1913). Railway freight turnover in 1924/25 was 63.1% of the pre-war volume. The total turnover of foreign trade decreased by 1924/25 to 27% of the 1913 level.

These figures contained an extremely compressed but accurate picture of the economic situation of the USSR by the mid-20s. Successes in the moral and cultural transformation of Russia were already more than visible and significant, but in material terms life was meager, half-starved.

However, successes in the economy were becoming more and more clear every year!.. Thus, the consolidated budget for 1927/28 was planned at more than 7 billion rubles - 110–112% of the pre-war one. Already in 1926/27, agricultural production amounted to 108.9% of the pre-war level, and industry - 100.9% of the 1913 level. Railway freight turnover in 1926/27 increased to 99.1% of the pre-war level, and in 1927/28 it was expected to grow even more - to 111.6%. And even the volume of foreign trade, which the West stupidly blocked, in 1927/28 was planned at 37.9% of the 1913 level.

At the same time, one of the reasons for the slow pace of development of foreign trade was the fact that “we cannot trade according to the bourgeois formula: ‘we ourselves are undernourished, but we will export’...”.

And Stalin, as he always did, spoke the truth. In 1926/27, the USSR exported 2 million 178 thousand tons of grain, and a year later - only 344 thousand, and 248 thousand tons even had to be imported. The reason was not the crop failures, but the fact that in the years following the end of the Civil War, the peasants were able - if we recall the words of Wells - to “make things more comfortable.” And now the village did not want to give grain to the state “cheaply”. A peasant's plot is not a flooded mine, not a factory without fuel and raw materials, not a blown-up railway station. The peasant under Soviet rule, without a tsar and a landowner, lived well: he sowed, plowed and, by the grace of God, bread from the field and milk from the barn to myself And his I had at least enough food for the kids. And the city - arrange it as you want !

The kulaks simply sabotaged government supplies and, having inventories, waited for market prices to rise, as a rule, three times (!). The city was malnourished, and they speculated on grain.

In the 10s, the average resident of the Russian Empire had one teaspoon of sugar per day. The peasant did not see sugar at all. In a report to the Fifth Congress of Authorized United Noble Societies in 1909, its author V. Gurko said:

“The export of grain occurs not from wealth, but from need, and occurs at the expense of the population’s nutrition. Our people, as you know, are forced vegetarians, that is, they almost never see meat.”

Even earlier, on the eve of the 20th century, Professor A. N. Engelhardt in his book “From the Village” asked a completely reasonable question:

“Why should a Russian peasant have only what is necessary to somehow lose his soul? Why shouldn’t he, like an American, eat ham, lamb, and apple pies even on holidays? No, it turns out that black rye bread is enough for a Russian peasant, and even with cedar, a bell, a fire and all sorts of rubbish ... "

In peacetime, tsarist Russia exported a lot of grain from the hungry belly of the peasant, and not from large-scale commodity production. When the First World War began, this weakness of Russian agriculture became evident very quickly. And not the Bolsheviks, but the tsarist government, on November 29, 1916, first introduced the concept of “forced food appropriation” by issuing a decree “On the appropriation of grain grain and fodder.”

The reason was clear! That man who, malnourished, fed Europe and at the same time - after all - also fed himself and his family, now had to feed himself at the expense of the state. But there was not the required number of large bread producers in Russia. All this was quite definitely shown by the well-known economist in Tsarist Russia, Professor Kondratiev, in his book “The Bread Market and Its Regulation during War and Revolution.”

For example, Kondratiev cited data on the norms of per capita consumption of cereals (by the way, they are also fed to livestock, receiving meat and milk) in different countries for 1908–1912... Belgium consumed 20.1 pounds of wheat and rye, France - 16.4; Germany – 15.3; Russia – 14.8 and Austria-Hungary – 13.1 poods. And from these figures Kondratiev drew an obvious conclusion:

“Noting the presence of a surplus of grain to cover their internal needs, we must simultaneously emphasize that the standards of grain consumption per capita in Russia are relatively low...

We see that the consumption rate in Russia is the lowest after Austria-Hungary. Therefore, we can say that the surplus of grain in Russia, the marketability of this grain and the development of their export are based, in general, on the relatively low consumption standards of the broad masses of the population...”

So, the tsar’s grain exports depended on the peasant’s malnutrition, without any benefit for the latter, but with great benefit for the former. There would have been no patches on Ivan and Marya’s backside, and their august ruler would not have been able to provide his and the Grand Dukes’ mistress, the ballerina “Malechka” Kshesinskaya, with either a palace or diamond sets.

The Soviet government gave the peasant land and satiety ! In the second half of the 20s, with the restoration of pre-revolutionary grain production, it was exported four to five times less than before.

As a legacy from centuries of tsarism, the average peasant was left with a horizon that did not extend beyond the outskirts of his village. In the circumstances of those years, this threatened not just the preservation of backwardness, but the death of the country. Russia simply would not be able to develop or defend itself.

AT THE TURN OF THE 1920s and 1930s, Russia stood on the eve of the epic of industrialization, the drama of collectivization and the triumphs of the turbulent cultural revolution. It was necessary to simultaneously create a new economy and a new person. And one was impossible without the other.

New relationships were quickly formed in the country, affecting everyone - from top to bottom and from top to bottom. This was manifested “in a big way” - in public reports of the country’s leadership on what was done and planned in the form of materials of party congresses and conferences, materials of industry all-Union conferences, etc. It also manifested itself in supposedly “little things”, which in fact became a serious and exciting sign new. So, on July 25, 1929, Stalin left an entry in the logbook of the cruiser Chervona Ukraine:

“I was on the cruiser Chervona Ukraine. Attended an amateur evening.

General impression: wonderful people, brave, cultured comrades, ready to do anything for our common cause.

It's a pleasure to deal with such comrades. It’s nice to fight enemies in the ranks of such fighters...”

“The development of new personnel for socialist industry from people of the working class and working people in general, capable of managing enterprises both socio-politically and production-technically, is the primary task of the moment.

Without fulfilling this task, it is impossible to transform the USSR from a backward country to an advanced country, from an agricultural country to an industrial country, to a country of electrification and metal, to a country of cars and tractors...

The first graduation of the Industrial Academy is its first arrow, fired into the camp of our enemies, into the camp of industrial routine and backwardness...”

“Greetings and congratulations on the victory to the workers and management staff of the first Red Banner tractor giant in the USSR. The 50 thousand tractors that you must give to the country every year are 50 thousand shells that are exploding the old bourgeois world and paving the way for a new, socialist way of life in the countryside...”

Never and nowhere before had the Supreme Power found such words for those over whom it towered. However, in the Land of the emerging Soviet Good, the government did not rise above the people, but was at arm's length from them - only after the assassination of Kirov, Stalin was forced to limit his movements and refuse to walk freely on the streets of Moscow. But through his Kremlin office there was a daily flow of the most different people. This was the living connection between Power and the Masses.

And when and where before was the Supreme Power so frank with the people? At the time of the severe crisis of capitalism and the formation of Roosevelt’s “New Deal” - in the 30s - the president undertook something like radio conversations with the people. These were his famous “Fireside Conversations”... But here the bourgeois president, in critical conditions for the “golden elite”, simply took - to the extent possible for him - the example of the Bolsheviks, who made business conversation with the people one of the principles of their policy.

However, the Bolsheviks could not pursue any other policy - otherwise they would not be Bolsheviks!

On February 4, 1931, at the first All-Union Conference of Socialist Industry Workers, Stalin uttered his famous words:

“We are 50–100 years behind advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do this or we will be crushed.”

He spoke about this at the 16th Congress of the CPSU(b).

The XVI Congress is the year 1930, this is the congress of the “full-scale offensive of socialism along the entire front.” A third of the 20th century minus one hundred years is a third of the 19th century. Almost the Napoleonic era... Maybe Stalin went overboard here? Alas, this was exactly the case: even at the peak of its development, tsarist Russia was catastrophically behind the leading industrial powers in all parameters of development - qualitative and quantitative, even in absolute numbers. Not to mention per capita figures. Some industrial indicators in Russia in 1913 were at the level of indicators of the mid-19th century, even for the relatively backward Austria-Hungary. For example, in Austria already in the 40s of the 19th century there were more industrial workers than in the Russian Empire in its “peak” year of 1913.

Gurko, well known to the reader, reported to the noble commissioners:

“All countries, without exception, are several dozen times ahead of us. The annual productivity of one resident in Russia in 1904 was only 58 rubles, while in the United States it reached 346 rubles fifteen years earlier.”

In 1913, Russia ranked first in the world only in peat production and was in second place in the world in production (but not consumption!) of beet sugar, grains and flax.

Russia occupied second place in Europe in oil production - foreigners were always eager for Russian oil and contributed in every possible way to the development of our oil industry. For all other positions, as a rule, it ranks fifth in the world, fourth in Europe. We were in fifth place in Europe in coal production, in seventh place in electricity production, and did not produce electric steel, steam locomotives, cars, tractors, or combine harvesters at all.

At the beginning of the 20th century, expenditures on public education per capita in Russia were twelve times less than in England, the length of railways per capita was almost fifteen times less than in the USA. Moreover, Russian railways, unlike European ones, were entirely single-track, and two of the three locomotives were built before 1880, that is, they could not provide either decent traction force or ground speed.

And in ten years the USSR had to go the distance of a century!

In ten years!

VICTORS accused Stalin and his associates of the “insane pace” of industrialization and collectivization. But the pace was determined by simple calculation.

Here is the year 1930 with its plow, the peasantry at the level of the last century, with science - which had already moved away from its former restlessness under the tsar, but had not yet become a major productive force, and with industry, which, although it had prepared for the stress of the first five-year plan, did not yet know What is she really capable of?

And here it is - 1940. This year, almost immediately after the end of the First World War, was defined by sober analysts - both bourgeois and communist - as the threshold from which a new major world conflict became possible. At the same time, the First World War quickly turned into a war of engines, where oil flowed even more powerfully than human blood.

So, ten years: 1930–1940. During this period, the Soviet Union had to go from the plow to the T-34 tank, the Il-2 attack aircraft and rocket artillery.

And it was also necessary to move from the hem of a shirt, instead of a handkerchief and drunken sprees, to mass ownership of technology, to millions of scientists, engineers and technicians, skilled workers, agronomists, pilots, tank crews, sailors, aircraft mechanics, radio operators, teachers, doctors, geologists and builders...

And in ten years, from 1930 to 1940, the Soviet Union went from a bast Russia to a power that could and did withstand the most severe external aggression.

In ten years, Russia was rebuilt, thousands of new powerful enterprises were built, agriculture from semi-natural became a large-scale commercial one.

In ten years!

Could this be done without drawing on the best in people? After all, the Soviet government was still not yet fully able to reward a strong worker with a ruble - it didn’t have that many of these rubles, and even then it could buy a little with them!

But a generation of enthusiasts was already growing up in Russia, and among the mature citizens of the Country of Soviets there were many enthusiasts - after all, it was they who carried out the October Revolution, won the Civil War and did not intend to give up their position in the peaceful construction of Russia. All spiritually healthy and honest people in the country then cast their gaze into the future, knowing that the future now depended on them.

But they also remembered the past... On December 12, 1930, Stalin wrote a sharp letter to the poet Demyan Bedny - in response to his letter of December 8. The criticism was friendly, but that made it even harsher.

Stalin wrote:

“...Instead of comprehending<…>the greatest process in the history of the revolution and rise to the height of the tasks of the singer of the advanced proletariat, went somewhere into a ravine and<…>began to proclaim to the whole world that Russia in the past represented a vessel of abomination and desolation, that<…>“laziness” and “the desire to sit on the stove” is almost a national trait of Russians in general, and therefore of Russian workers, who, having carried out the October Revolution, of course, did not cease to be Russian. And you call this Bolshevik criticism! No, dear Comrade Demyan, this is not Bolshevik criticism, but slander against our people, the debunking of the USSR...”

“Is the feeling of national pride alien to us, Great Russian conscious proletarians? Of course not! We love our language and our homeland, we work most of all to ensure that its working masses<…>raise to conscious life…

We are proud that<…>The Great Russian working class created a powerful revolutionary party of the masses in 1905... We remember how half a century ago the Great Russian democrat Chernyshevsky, devoting his life to the cause of the revolution, said: “A pitiful nation, a nation of slaves, from top to bottom - all slaves.” Overt and covert slaves - Great Russians (slaves in relation to the tsarist monarchy) do not like to remember these words. But in our opinion, these were words of true love for the homeland, a yearning love due to the lack of revolutionary spirit among the masses of the Great Russian population. She wasn't there then. Now it is not enough, but it already exists. We are full of a sense of national pride, for the Great Russian nation<…>also proved that it is capable of giving humanity great examples of the struggle for freedom and socialism..."

Stalin himself was a man of honor and deeds, and therefore he understood well what a powerful means in the development of Russia a genuine and massive human pride. By the way, for the first time in the history of human development!

It is unlikely that many young people today will say who owns the words in the title of Chapter 9. “Poems about the Soviet Passport” by Vladimir Mayakovsky is not included in the literature curriculum in anti-Soviet “Russian” schools. And just in these verses there are lines that were famous in their time:
The Soviets have their own pride,
We look down on the bourgeoisie...
These words contain the legitimate pride of free people who want to decide their own destiny. These people sang:
Nobody will give us deliverance,
Neither a god, nor a king, nor a hero!
We will achieve liberation
With my own hand!
AND:
Should we stand still?
We are always right in our daring!
But this same pride is visible in the no less famous, but also rather forgotten words of Alexander Nevsky in “Russia”:
“Whoever comes to us with a sword will die by the sword!
This is where the Russian land stood and will stand!”
And in the words of Alexander Suvorov:
“Where a deer goes, a Russian soldier will go.
Where a deer will not pass, a Russian soldier will pass!”
That is, Russian pride and a sovereign sense of self-worth have always lived in the best Russian people, at all times!
In 1764, the Russian advanced industrialist Ivan Maksimovich Solovyov sailed with a detachment of 55 people to the Fox Islands, part of the Russian Aleutians... He returned to Kamchatka in 1766, losing 28 people, but presenting on July 28 to “The noble and honorable Mr. Ensign Timofey Ivanovich Shmalev of the company of the Irkutsk merchant Yakov Ulednikov from the ship that arrived from the sea islands, called the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, from the sailor and leader of the Tobolsk townsman Ivan Solovyov Report "...
Two days before Solovyov’s “report” - on July 26, Warrant Officer Shmalev received a similar “report” from “a sailor and leader of the city of Vaga, Verkhovazhsky quarter of the Kyanskaya tithe of the palace peasant Ivan Korovin with his companions,” who returned from the Aleutian islands of Unalaska and Umnak on the ship “Holy Life-giving” -members of the trinity."
Why did Ivan Korovin go into the stormy cold ocean?
Here's why:
“... for the expansion of Her Imperial Majesty’s Russian Empire and the hoped-for state benefit to the increase of Her Imperial Majesty’s highest interest, to bringing into subjection under the highly autocratic Her Imperial Majesty the hand of the shady people living on the found sea islands in yasash payment, and especially to the search for some useful similar to the state of profits..."
Why did Ivan Solovyov go into the stormy ocean? Well, in his “report” he answered this question also clearly and distinctly:
“...for the search for good, for the development of the state, for the spread of Her Imperial Majesty’s Russian empire of interest, for the hunting of animals and for the search of unknown islands and the ignorant peoples living on them, I bring under the highly autocratic hand of Her Imperial Majesty...”
These were simple Russian people, but these were people filled not with petty calculations, but with the same sense of power and the same pride that gave strength to Nevsky, Peter the Great, Suvorov and his “miracle heroes”!
But isn’t Lenin’s already familiar words permeated by the same active pride for one’s Motherland:
“...We have the material in natural resources, in the reserve of human strength, and in the wonderful scope that the great revolution gave to folk art, to create a truly powerful and abundant Rus'. Rus' will become such if it throws away all despondency and all phrases, if, gritting its teeth, it gathers all its strength, if it strains every nerve, tightens every muscle...”
But how the enemies of Russia and the Russian people want to trample this pride in us and present Russians as subhumans... And how deep are the roots of this desire and hatred of Russia!
Here are two excerpts from Polish early medieval chronicles. The first is from the so-called “Chronicle of Gallus Anonymus,” dating back to the beginning of the 11th century:
“...King Boleslav (Boleslav the Brave, crowned in 1025 - S.K.)<…>invaded with great courage the kingdom of the Russians and scattered those who at first tried to resist, but did not dare to start a battle, in front of his formation like dust. He did not linger, however, according to enemy custom (that is, in the view of Anonymous, according to the custom of the cowardly and greedy - in contrast to the “knightly braves” of the Poles - Russians. - S.K.) on the way to capture cities and collect money, and hurried to the capital of the kingdom of Kiev... And the king of the Russians, in the simplicity [characteristic] of his people (that’s true, yes! - S.K.), was at that time catching fish from a boat with a fishing rod, when [he] was unexpectedly informed, that Boleslav was approaching. He hardly believed it, but in the end... he was horrified. Then, raising his thumb and forefinger to his mouth and spitting, according to the custom of fishermen, on the bait, he said, they say (well, well. - S.K.) , to the shame of his people, the following words: “Since Boleslav is not engaged in this art, but he is accustomed to amusing himself with military weapons, it means that the Lord [himself] is transferring this city, and the kingdom of the Russians, and [its wealth] into his hands.” So he said, and, without hesitating for long, ran away.
And Boleslav, without meeting any resistance, entered a huge and rich city, and struck the Golden Gate with a naked sword...”
etc.
The truth here is that after the death in 1015 of the Grand Duke of Kyiv Vladimir I Svyatoslavich, who baptized Rus', in 1015–1019 in Rus' there were internecine wars between the sons of Grand Duke Vladimir for the grand princely throne. Taking advantage of this, the Poles launched a campaign against Kyiv in 1018. On July 22, 1018, on the Bug River near Volyn, a battle took place between Boleslav and Vladimir’s son Yaroslav, who then reigned in Kyiv and was later called the Wise. Only the defeat of the Russians, and not Yaroslav’s passion for quiet fishing, opened the way for Boleslav to the Russian capital.
Having entered Kyiv in August, the Poles, having plundered it, fled a month later. And soon Yaroslav again accepted the reign of Kiev.
By the way, Boleslav could not strike at any Golden Gate with a sword in 1018, since they were built by Yaroslav only in the 30s of the 11th century. And I don’t know from which finger - the thumb or the index finger - Gallus Anonymous sucked out the story about the supposedly great courage of the Poles and the supposedly unprecedented cowardice of the Russians. But it is clear that from the chronicle of Gallus Anonymus, the later Polish chronicler, Master Wincenty Kadlubek, has already sucked out his story about the “great deeds” of Boleslav, “before which even the dumb become eloquent, and the eloquence of the most glorious becomes numb.” At Kadlubek, Boleslav also “with frequent blows of the sword carved a sign of dependence on the Golden Gate” and then “installed there (this is in Russian Kiev! - S.K.) king of some (? - S.K.) his relative.”
Master Kadlubek says:
“... He (Boleslav the Brave - S.K.) defeated the Russian king himself not even in battle, but only by plunging him into miserable fear. After all, he was informed that Boleslav was threatening when he was amusing himself with fishing, he threw away his fishing rod and the kingdom with the words “We fell for the bait of someone who did not learn to catch catfish.” He had barely uttered these words when he immediately fled with fear, being more successful in flight than in combat..."
And this is about the same thing, well known to the reader, Yaroslav Vladimirovich the Wise! He fought with his brother Mstislav, in 1026 he divided the state with him, in 1030 he united it again and reigned in Kyiv until his death in 1054. Under Yaroslav, “Russian Truth” was compiled, under him the medieval Russian state reached the peak of its power... Yaroslav (Christian name Yuri) founded the Russian city of Yuriev (present-day Tartu) in the Baltic States, married his daughters to the kings of Europe, who rejoiced at this honor...
And this proud figure of Russian history is portrayed by Polish chroniclers as a pathetic idiot and a coward.
Nah!
* * *
FOR US, this long-standing pseudo-historical fuss is interesting because it well illustrates from what distant times the enemies and haters of Russia tried to instill in Russians a sense of civilizational and human inferiority.
Alas, in old Russia this issue often took place, starting with the fact that at the Russian court and among the Russian nobility in the 19th century, the everyday language was often not Russian, but French, or more precisely, “a mixture of French and Nizhny Novgorod.” But Soviet Russia put an end to these anti-Russian provocations quickly and decisively. And already at the turn of the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, Mayakovsky, “the greatest poet of our proletarian era,” as Stalin rightly called him, wrote with open mockery in “Poems about the Soviet Passport”:
To some passports - a smile at the mouth,
To others - a careless attitude...
For example, they take passports with respect
With double English "left"
Looking out through the eyes of a kind uncle,
Without ceasing to bow, they take it,
It's like they're taking tips.
American passport...
About the Polish passport it was said this way:
They look at Polish like a goat on a poster,
Eyes bulge out in Polish
In the stupid police elephantiasis:
“Where do they come from and what is this?
Geographical news?...
One of the descendants of fellow citizens of Yaroslav the Wise quite adequately assessed the “weight” of the passports of the descendants of Boleslav the Brave’s subjects in Europe in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century. But the Soviet people developed a completely legitimate pride in their renewing Motherland. It’s just a pity that “dear comrades, descendants” of Mayakovsky himself, ninety years after writing the proud “Poems about the Soviet Passport”, they are leading to the fact that in the last stanza above, the word “Polish” can well be replaced with “Russian”.
However, wait and see! Russians harness for a long time, but drive quickly, because what Russian doesn’t like to drive fast!
Russia, in fact, “harnessed” almost the entire first decade after the end of the Civil War; it quickly “got” only in the second Soviet decade. In the meantime, we had to somehow hold on.
On December 30, 1920, at the First All-Union Congress of Soviets, a single state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was formed. A new and most encouraging stage in Russian history was beginning. And, as has always been the case in this story, Russian pride struggled with “racial” clumsiness, and even direct betrayal of the interests of Russia. However, now Russian sovereign pride had strong defenders and supporters. Here's an example...
On November 13, 1922, Stalin writes a letter to Lenin (copy to Kamenev-Rosenfeld):
“...Today Kamenev told me<…>about the need to approve an agreement with French merchants on the organization of a mixed company for the sale of our platinum, and we must provide at least 60 pounds (960 kilograms, almost a ton. - S.K.) of platinum, and we ourselves refuse to enter the foreign market with our platinum. Since there are no elements of “mixedness” in this draft agreement (the platinum is all ours, the French don’t have any platinum, they are just commission agents,<…>Moreover, one must assume that since platinum is an almost monopoly product, they, the French, will try to sell a minimum of platinum in order to please American platinum sellers and give them the opportunity to sell American platinum at exorbitant prices), but on the contrary, the entire agreement is a complete mockery of Russia , I suggested that Comrade Kamenev call all the supporters of the agreement and have a substantive conversation with them, advising him to cancel the agreement on the “mixed” society, offering the French a certain percentage of the total amount of platinum sold for a commission ... "
This was that new - not only Russian, but also Soviet pride, which made it possible to look at the “bourgeois” as bourgeois - that is, with the understanding that the bourgeois does not and cannot have honor and conscience in his soul, but only profit . And the profit from the sale of Russian (now Soviet) goods will not hurt us!
The path to gaining such pride was difficult for us - the country lay in desolation. To understand how difficult it was for Soviet Russia to rise from devastation, it is enough to get acquainted with the data that Stalin cited on December 3, 1927 in the Political Report of the Central Committee at the XV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
According to the State Planning Committee, in 1925/26 the consolidated budget (single state budget plus local budgets) was equal to 72.4% of the pre-war level (5024 million rubles). In 1924/25, the gross output of industry was 63.7% and of agriculture - 87.3% of the pre-war level (that is, in 1913). Railway freight turnover in 1924/25 was 63.1% of the pre-war volume. The total turnover of foreign trade decreased by 1924/25 to 27% of the 1913 level.
These figures contained an extremely compressed but accurate picture of the economic situation of the USSR by the mid-20s. Successes in the moral and cultural transformation of Russia were already more than visible and significant, but in material terms life was meager, half-starved.
However, successes in the economy were becoming more and more clear every year!.. Thus, the consolidated budget for 1927/28 was planned at more than 7 billion rubles - 110–112% of the pre-war one. Already in 1926/27, agricultural output amounted to 108.9% of the pre-war level, and industrial output - 100.9% of the 1913 level. Railway freight turnover in 1926/27 increased to 99.1% of the pre-war level, and in 1927/28 it was expected to grow even more - to 111.6%. And even the volume of foreign trade, which the West stupidly blocked, in 1927/28 was planned at 37.9% of the 1913 level.
At the same time, Stalin named one of the reasons for the slow pace of development of foreign trade as the fact that “we cannot trade according to the bourgeois formula: ‘we ourselves are undernourished, but we will export’...”.
And Stalin, as he always did, spoke the truth. In 1926/27, the USSR exported 2 million 178 thousand tons of grain, and a year later - only 344 thousand, and 248 thousand tons even had to be imported. The reason was not the crop failures, but the fact that in the years following the end of the Civil War, the peasants were able - if we recall the words of Wells - to “make things more comfortable.” And now the village did not want to give grain to the state “cheaply”. A peasant's plot is not a flooded mine, not a factory without fuel and raw materials, not a blown-up railway station. The peasant under Soviet rule, without a tsar and a landowner, lived well: he sowed, plowed and, by the grace of God, had bread from the field and milk from the barn for food for himself and his children - at the very least. And the city - arrange it as you like!
The kulaks simply sabotaged government supplies and, having inventories, waited for market prices to rise, usually threefold (!). The city was malnourished, and they speculated on grain.
In the 10s, the average resident of the Russian Empire consumed one teaspoon of sugar per day. The peasant did not see sugar at all. In a report to the Fifth Congress of Authorized United Noble Societies in 1909, its author V. Gurko said:
“The export of grain occurs not from wealth, but from need, and occurs at the expense of the population’s nutrition. Our people, as you know, are forced vegetarians, that is, they almost never see meat.”
Even earlier, on the eve of the 20th century, Professor A. N. Engelhardt in his book “From the Village” asked a completely reasonable question:
“Why should a Russian peasant have only what is necessary to somehow lose his soul? Why shouldn’t he, like an American, eat ham, lamb, and apple pies even on holidays? No, it turns out that black rye bread is enough for a Russian peasant, and even with cedar, a bell, a fire and all sorts of rubbish ... "
In peacetime, tsarist Russia exported a lot of grain from the hungry belly of the peasant, and not from large-scale commodity production. When the First World War began, this weakness of Russian agriculture became evident very quickly. And not the Bolsheviks, but the tsarist government, on November 29, 1916, first introduced the concept of “forced food appropriation” by issuing a decree “On the appropriation of grain grain and fodder.”
The reason was clear! That man who, malnourished, fed Europe and at the same time - after all - also fed himself and his family, now had to feed himself at the expense of the state. But there was not the required number of large bread producers in Russia. All this was quite definitely shown by the well-known economist Professor Kondratiev in Tsarist Russia - in his book “The Bread Market and Its Regulation during War and Revolution.”
Let's say, Kondratiev cited data on the norms of per capita consumption of cereals (by the way, they are also fed to livestock, receiving meat and milk) in different countries for the years 1908–1912... Belgium consumed 20.1 pounds of wheat and rye, France - 16.4; Germany - 15.3; Russia - 14.8 and Austria-Hungary - 13.1 pounds. And from these figures Kondratiev drew an obvious conclusion:
“Noting the presence of a surplus of grain to cover their internal needs, we must simultaneously emphasize that the standards of grain consumption per capita in Russia are relatively low...
We see that the consumption rate in Russia is the lowest after Austria-Hungary. Therefore, we can say that the surplus of grain in Russia, the marketability of this grain and the development of their export are based, in general, on the relatively low consumption standards of the broad masses of the population...”
So, the tsar’s grain exports depended on the peasant’s malnutrition, without any benefit for the latter, but with great benefit for the former. There would have been no patches on Ivan and Marya’s backside, and their august ruler would not have been able to provide his and the Grand Dukes’ mistress, the ballerina “Malechka” Kshesinskaya, with either a palace or diamond sets.
The Soviet government gave the peasant land and food! In the second half of the 20s, with the restoration of pre-revolutionary grain production, it was exported four to five times less than before.
As a legacy from centuries of tsarism, the average peasant was left with a horizon that did not extend beyond the outskirts of his village. In the circumstances of those years, this threatened not just the preservation of backwardness, but the death of the country. Russia simply would not be able to develop or defend itself.
* * *
AT THE TURN OF THE 1920s and 1930s, Russia stood on the eve of the epic of industrialization, the drama of collectivization and the triumphs of the turbulent cultural revolution. It was necessary to simultaneously create a new economy and a new person. And one was impossible without the other.
New relationships were quickly formed in the country, affecting everyone - from top to bottom and from top to bottom. This was manifested “in a big way” - in public reports of the country’s leadership on what was done and planned in the form of materials of party congresses and conferences, materials of industry all-Union conferences, etc. It also manifested itself in supposedly “little things”, which in fact became a serious and exciting sign new. So, on July 25, 1929, Stalin left an entry in the logbook of the cruiser Chervona Ukraine:
“I was on the cruiser Chervona Ukraine.” Attended an amateur evening.
General impression: wonderful people, brave, cultured comrades, ready to do anything for the sake of our common cause.
It's a pleasure to deal with such comrades. It’s nice to fight enemies in the ranks of such fighters...”
This entry was immediately published in the newspaper of the Black Sea Fleet “Red Chernomorets”.
On April 3, 1930, Stalin in Pravda greeted the first graduates of the Industrial Academy:
“The development of new personnel for socialist industry from people of the working class and working people in general, capable of managing enterprises both socio-politically and production-technically, is the primary task of the moment.
Without fulfilling this task, it is impossible to transform the USSR from a backward country to an advanced country, from an agricultural country to an industrial country, to a country of electrification and metal, to a country of cars and tractors...
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The first graduation of the Industrial Academy is its first arrow, fired into the camp of our enemies, into the camp of industrial routine and backwardness...”
And on June 18, 1930, Pravda published Stalin’s greeting to the workers of the Stalingrad Traktorostroy:
“Greetings and congratulations on the victory to the workers and management staff of the first Red Banner tractor giant in the USSR. The 50 thousand tractors that you must give to the country every year are 50 thousand shells that are exploding the old bourgeois world and paving the way for a new, socialist way of life in the countryside...”
Never and nowhere before had the Supreme Power found such words for those over whom it towered. However, in the Land of the emerging Soviet Good, the government did not rise above the people, but was at arm's length from them - only after the assassination of Kirov, Stalin was forced to limit his movements and refuse to walk freely on the streets of Moscow. But a daily stream of different people passed through his Kremlin office. This was the living connection between Power and the Masses.
And when and where before was the Supreme Power so frank with the people? At the time of the severe crisis of capitalism and the formation of Roosevelt’s “New Deal” - in the 30s - the president undertook something like radio conversations with the people. These were his famous “Fireside Conversations”... But here the bourgeois president, in critical conditions for the “golden elite”, simply took - to the extent possible for him - the example of the Bolsheviks, who made a business conversation with the people one of the principles of their policy.
However, the Bolsheviks could not pursue any other policy - otherwise they would not be Bolsheviks!
On February 4, 1931, at the first All-Union Conference of Socialist Industry Workers, Stalin uttered his famous words:
“We are 50–100 years behind advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do this or we will be crushed.”
He spoke about this at the 16th Congress of the CPSU(b).
The XVI Congress is 1930, it is a congress of “a comprehensive offensive of socialism along the entire front.” A third of the 20th century minus a hundred years is a third of the 19th century. Almost the Napoleonic era... Maybe Stalin went overboard here? Alas, this was exactly the case: even at the peak of its development, tsarist Russia was catastrophically behind the leading industrial powers in all parameters of development - qualitative and quantitative, even in absolute numbers. Not to mention per capita figures. Some industrial indicators in Russia in 1913 were at the level of indicators of the mid-19th century, even for the relatively backward Austria-Hungary. For example, in Austria already in the 40s of the 19th century there were more industrial workers than in the Russian Empire in its “peak” year of 1913.
Gurko, well known to the reader, reported to the noble commissioners:
“All countries, without exception, are several dozen times ahead of us. The annual productivity of one resident in Russia in 1904 was only 58 rubles, while in the United States it reached 346 rubles fifteen years earlier.”
Like this!
In 1913, Russia ranked first in the world only in peat production and was in second place in the world in production (but not consumption!) of beet sugar, grains and flax.
Russia occupied second place in Europe in oil production - foreigners were always eager for Russian oil and contributed in every possible way to the development of our oil industry. For all other positions, as a rule, it ranks fifth in the world, fourth in Europe. We were in fifth place in Europe in coal production, in seventh place in electricity production, and did not produce electric steel, steam locomotives, cars, tractors, or combine harvesters at all.
At the beginning of the 20th century, expenditures on public education per capita in Russia were twelve times less than in England, the length of railways per capita was almost fifteen times less than in the USA. Moreover, Russian railways, unlike European ones, were entirely single-track, and two of the three locomotives were built before 1880, that is, they could not provide either decent traction force or ground speed.
And in ten years the USSR had to go the distance of a century!
In ten years!