Simon Kordonsky: the national idea in Russia is the identification of the enemy. Simon of Kordon is a resource state. - That is, interaction with the new structure ...

Biography:

Sociologist, professor at the Higher School of Economics, member of the Council on Science, Technology and Education under the President of the Russian Federation, former senior assistant of the Referent of the President of the Russian Federation (April 2004 - October 2005); Director General of the Center for the Study of Civil Society Institutions; "was born on September 7, 1944 in Altai; graduated from Tomsk State University, candidate of philosophical sciences; sociologist, biochemist; from the beginning of the 80s he took part in the activities of an informal association of scientists who conducted seminars on economic problems at the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences ; from 1987 to 1995 - a regular contributor to the journal "Century of the XX and the World", was a member of the editorial board of the journal; since 1988 he worked at the Postfactum agency (head - G. Pavlovsky), 1992-1993 - agency expert " Post factum"; in 1992 he took part in the creation of the Institute of the National Model of the Economy; since 1996 - the head of the Eastern Center for Modern Documentation, also - an expert of the Effective Policy Foundation (FEP); since 1998 - director of the Center for the Study of Civil Society Institutions (TSIGO ); an expert of a number of international, state and commercial organizations; in July 2000 he was appointed head of the Expert Department of the President of the Russian Federation; after the reorganization of the Administration resident on April 1, 2004 was appointed senior assistant to the President of the Russian Federation, in October 2005 he was relieved of this position due to his retirement (Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of October 18, 2005); member of the Board of Trustees of the National Personnel Reserve Foundation; author of a number of published works, including Markets of Power: Administrative Markets of the USSR and Russia (2000), Cycles of Activity and Ideal Objects (2001).

Simon Gdalevich was born in 1944 in Altai. In 1974 he graduated from Tomsk State University. Until the 1970s actively engaged in scientific activities.

S.G. Kordonsky gained the greatest fame in professional circles in the 1990s, in particular, at that time he actively collaborated with a group of experts who formed the reform strategy (the group included, among others, E.T. Gaidar, A. B. Chubais, V. A. Naishul, etc.). Since 1993, he has been the general director of the Center for Civil Society and Private Property Problems.

S.G. Kordonsky is the creator (together with V.A. Naishul) of a promising scientific direction that describes the specifics of the structure of power in Russia - the "theory of the administrative market." Author of a number of publications devoted to the analysis of various aspects of public administration, in particular, the book "Markets of Power: Administrative Markets of the USSR and Russia", which received wide resonance in the expert and political circles of the country, which is devoted to the real political market in Russia.

In 2000, S.G. Kordonsky was appointed head of the Expert Department of the President of the Russian Federation, from 2003 to 2005 he worked as a senior assistant to the President of the Russian Federation. Currently, he is a member of the Council for Science, Technology and Education under the President of the Russian Federation.

S.G. Kordonsky is a professor, head of the department of local self-government at the State University - Higher School of Economics, and an expert in a number of commercial, state and international organizations. Regularly publishes scientific publications and analytical articles in the central media.

Since July 2006, he has been chairing the Expert Council of the Imageland Public Relation agency. Mission of Imageland PR agency.

Imageland Public Relations Agency, An Affiliate of Edelman sees its mission in promoting the integration of modern civilized standards of professionalism, efficiency and morality with the traditionally powerful, creative potential of Russian specialists in the field of public relations.

The agency considers one of the main tasks of its activity to be the integration of international and Russian experience in the field of public relations, bringing to Russia the best examples of effective Western technological approaches and bringing the talent, creativity and high adaptability of Russian professionals to a worthy international level.

Acting State Councilor of the Russian Federation, 1st class.

By the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of September 7, 2004, he was awarded the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, I degree.

Professional interests

Study of the structure of administrative scales;

Use of scattered information processing technologies for socio-economic analysis

Main works:

About 100 publications, including 30 scientific and three books:

1 Administrative markets of the USSR and Russia. M. 2000.

1. Cycles of activity and ideal objects. M.2001.

2. Crystal and jelly. M. 2002.

3. Markets of Power: Administrative Markets of the USSR and Russia (2000);

4. "Cycles of activity and ideal objects" (2001)

5. "State, civil society and corruption"

6. "The social reality of modern Russia"

Simon Gdalevich Kordonsky(September 7, Gorno-Altaisk, Altai Territory) - Russian scientific and public figure.

He took part in organizing an informal association of scientists who conducted seminars on economic problems at the CEMI of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was an active participant in seminars and working groups on the formation of a strategy for market and liberal reforms in Russia. General Director of the Center for Problems of Civil Society and Private Property since 1993. Head of the Expert Department of the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation in 2000-2004. Senior referent of the President of the Russian Federation in 2004-2005. Acting State Councilor of the Russian Federation, 1st class.

S. Kordonsky is one of the creators of the direction called "the theory of the administrative market." He introduced the concept of "fan matrices" into scientific circulation. According to Kordonsky, in Russia "cycles of weakening - strengthening of statehood have replaced the usual economic cycles."

The Western press quotes him as saying:

• "the function of an orphanage in Russia is to prepare marginalized members of society for the career of professional thieves and robbers"
• “People in Russia are resource recipients, not citizens”
• “foreign for Russians symbolizes life in paradise and that Russians do not want to become citizens, but simply live in paradise”

Monographs

• "Markets of power (administrative markets of the USSR and Russia)" (ISBN 5-942-82359-6),
• "Activity Cycles and Ideal Objects" (ISBN 5-921-80004-X),
• "The estate structure of post-Soviet Russia" (ISBN 978-5-939-47025-4),
• "Russia. Local Federation” (ISBN 978-5-973-90192-9) and others.

Notes

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I have had many different lives. I also worked in the presidential administration - from 2000 to 2005, first as the head of the expert department, then as a senior assistant to the president. I don’t want to talk about this included observation of the authorities yet, but it was very difficult. Although without this experience, I would hardly have been able to write the “Class Structure of Post-Soviet Russia”.

To speak not from abstract ideas, but “from life”, from social reality, from experience, including personal experience, is style. Simon Kordonsky, as if on purpose, went through all the layers of this very “social reality”, now and then resting on its paradoxes and oddities. He was expelled from Tomsk University several times, he wandered around Soviet Siberia without a residence permit and work, wrote dissertations to order and repaired apartments. They say that Yegor Ligachev himself (in the 80s, a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, who was in charge of ideology. - “RR”) ordered “not to take this Jew to work.” Kordonsky joined Tatyana Zaslavskaya, the strongest school of field sociology in the USSR, studied both alcoholism in the countryside and the party structure in the localities, lectured on “how life works,” even to KGB officers.

Thanks to sociological seminars for perestroika, he was already well acquainted with the circle of future reformers - Chubais, Gaidar, Aven and others, he saw how the transition to capitalism was being prepared, how "due to the betrayal of a number of top party leaders" the GKChP suddenly became a farce, and not Chinese or the Chilean version.

Kordonsky took part in the hasty drafting of the first liberal laws, but refused to join Gaidar's government. But then for five years he ended up in the administration of President Putin, from where, however, he managed to leave of his own free will. With a bunch of observations and questions.

In 2002, the law “On the system of public service of the Russian Federation” appeared, he says. - Then the law "About the state civil service". According to the law - and contrary to the Constitution - categories of people with a special status were created. Something swirled in my head: I did not understand why this was. I asked questions to serious people, collected seminars, scientists - to no avail. Retelling of Western theories. And then it came together in my head: these laws on the civil service system are the creation of a new social structure.

About the Kremlin and estates

Estates are groups created by the state to solve their problems. There is an external threat, which means that there must be people who will neutralize it, the military. There is an internal threat, which means internal troops and the police. There is a space threat - there must be space troops. There is a natural threat - there is the Rospotrebnadzor service. Estates are not professions, there can be people of different professions. Estates exist in any social system. This is preclass stuff. Classes arise in the market in a natural way, and estates are created by the state.

If the class structure is in power, a mechanism for coordinating interests between classes appears. It's called democracy. Parliament appears as its design. Democracy has a very practical function: to harmonize the interests of the rich and the poor. And in the estate system, the mechanism for coordinating interests is the cathedral. The congresses of the CPSU were cathedrals: representatives of all estates met once every four or five years and coordinated their interests. - What's the difference?

The difference is what's interesting. If there is a market, there are classes. Relations between classes need to be regulated. There are laws regulating these relations. The judiciary appears. And in the estate system, all this is superfluous. There is no market, but there is a distribution system. There is some person upstairs, he is called the president, the secretary general or the monarch - it does not matter. He is the supreme arbiter. After all, all the people to whom resources are distributed consider themselves offended. There are two types of complaints in our country: they took a lot and gave little. And all complaints are directed upward, to the supreme arbiter. They write to him and wait for him to decide there. And the arbitrator must bring justice, punish those who take not according to their rank, and give resources to those from whom they took a lot or who were given little. Now the resources are power, finance, raw materials and information. The state concentrates these resources at home and distributes them among the social groups that it has created.

Why are these groups needed?

Orderliness. For the authorities it is very important who you deal with. A person with two convictions comes to you, who holds a position in the executive branch of a subject of the Federation. Who is he? How should the authorities behave with him? The introduction of civil service laws coincided with the expulsion of those convicted from the system of power. Everyone who had a criminal record was expelled. Divided: there is an estate of marginals, limited in rights - that's where the judge belongs. And in power is another class, there should not be judged. There should not be a combination of these statuses.

Social stratification emerged in the 1990s. Teachers, doctors, the military - these were the Soviet estates, deprived of the flow of Soviet resources. And they ended up at the very bottom of the distribution hierarchy. Classes of rich and poor began to form. Class differences between the poor disappeared. Protest movements began - strikes, hunger strikes. It was necessary to put things in order. And what is the order? It is to feed, to provide the deprived with the resources they deserve. To do this, it was necessary to shrink the market - to withdraw resources from the market, so that they could then be distributed in favor of the orphans and the poor. We have been living in this process for the last decade.

The contraction of the market began with the "Khodorkovsky case": the transfer of all resource flows to the budget and their distribution in favor of both the surviving Soviet groups - state employees and pensioners - and new groups. And in order to distribute, you need to know to whom: teachers are entitled to so much, doctors - so much, FSB members - so much. The estate social structure in our state is needed precisely in order to ensure a fair distribution. It didn't exist, it had to be recreated. And the law "On public service" appeared. And subsequent class laws.

And all these classes now run into each other. What are the prosecutor's office and the Investigative Committee butting heads against? Share a resource. The gaming business, for example, was recently divided. Like they shared it. Inter-class wars are going on. The prosecutors with the judges, all lined up against the cops: the cops were protecting the business - and let's move them. And here it is, the Law on Police. Everyone has their own interests in the resource field, everyone needs an increasing flow of resources. And any decrease in the amount of resources creates a shortage, conflicts and a desire for redistribution. This is where the fight against corruption and its victims come in - those who are unfortunate, who were appointed scapegoats when the order in the distribution of resources changed.

But the class system in Russia has not yet fully developed: there is a form, but class self-consciousness has not appeared. After all, there must be class meetings, and class ethics, and class court. The system has not been brought to the end - and the classes have not completely collapsed, and the estates have not been completed.

About money and the market

We don't have any money. We have financial resources. Everywhere it is written that budget money - outside the framework of state investment programs - cannot be invested, they are written off at the end of the year. It's not money. You can't weld on them. To be able to make money on them, you need to take financial resources offshore: when you cross the border, they become money. And then they can be invested. Therefore, financial resources are taken offshore, where they are converted into money, which - already laundered - is invested within the country.

We don't have entrepreneurs either, but there are merchants who take risks in the administrative market in relations with the budget. These are completely different risks than in the market. Entrepreneurs have a risk - that you will go bankrupt if the goods are not bought. And here is the risk - that you will be imprisoned and everything will be taken away if you do not share. Entrepreneurs are not hierarchical, they can only be rich and poor. And merchants have a hierarchy: there are merchants of the first guild - members of the RSPP, there is a second guild - "Business Russia", and there are merchants of the third guild - members of "Opora". This is a purely estate division inherited from imperial traditions. Merchants, unlike entrepreneurs, work with the budget. They compete for government contracts.

All commerce is on a budget. Why does such garbage come with the 94th law - on public procurement? Because everything depends on it. All big business, to one degree or another, serves the state through the budget. There is also a small business, a survival business. But find entrepreneurs in any rural municipal district who do not depend on the district budget. You won't find. Everyone has been rooted out. This is the administrative market: status is converted into money. Power is exchanged for money. You convert status into financial resources, financial resources into money, and money into status again: you buy a place in power. And through the status you get access to the resource.

About corruption

This is a very interesting procedure, which is called corruption, but which is not corruption. The fact is that our estates are not hierarchized according to the law. It is not clear who is more important: law enforcement officers or civil civil servants, for example. And the form of hierarchization is the payment of estate rent. As a result, a hierarchy is built up: which estates pay which and how they take it. Until recently, prosecutors had a very high status, everyone paid them. And now they've been dropped. Why is a traffic cop paid? Not because the driver violated something there. But because, by paying cash to a traffic cop, you demonstrate the subordinate position of the class of car owners to the class of people with a striped wand. Without talking, they usually pay.

Now there is a rebellion in relations between drivers and members of the ruling classes, and this is also a phenomenon of class relations: the so-called “blue buckets” are rebelling against those to whom they are forced to pay, and against those who have special class rights to move - numbers and flashing lights.

So why is this corruption not corruption?

Relations in a class society are called corruption. And we have other relations, inter-class. Estate rent is the glue that binds different estates together: they have no other bond except for the mutual exchange of rent. This is not always done informally. For example, there is a licensing procedure. Here the programmer writes the program. He wrote - in order to sell it, he must license it in a company associated with the FSB. The cost of licensing is sometimes higher than the cost of the program itself. This is also a form of collecting estate rent. Procedures for licensing, accreditation, permits, approvals… You still have to pay for it.

Now in what is called corruption, very interesting processes are taking place. Look, in a normal market, the regulator is the bank interest rate, the price of money. And our resource system is regulated by the rollback rate. After all, if you have to pay for money, then you have to pay for resources, that is, part of them is rolled back in favor of the one who distributes the resources. The rollback rate is an analog of bank interest in a resource economy. There will be no rollback - the system will not spin. And the rollback rate is regulated by repressions against those who take it out of rank. Everyone is well aware of this. But the problem is that, unlike the bank interest rate, now these repressions do not have a “single emission center”. Therefore, the rollback rate is growing, and the economy is stagnating. The rule of the estate system - take it by rank. And now a lot of people do not take it according to their rank.

Is it necessary to fight such corruption?

It is very dangerous! This is not corruption, this is a form of communication of the social system. Extremely dangerous! Do you remember the Uzbek case of 86–87? They began, as now, to fight corruption - since then there has been a war there: the Gdlyany-Ivanovs have broken the social structure, a mess has begun, which continues to this day.

About estates

What is the door in your apartment? Metallic? Are the castles good? Here you lock the door and find yourself in a closed space - it is yours, personal. The estate is not a place, it is a social space, closed, fenced. All these dachas are the construction of estates. You will notice how they are built. Fence first. Then the house as a self-sustaining system: an autonomous generator, autonomous sewerage, water from its own well. Our country is a system of nested estates. What is the head of the regional administration? This is a landowner, planted by the supreme power, as under the king. Its function is to ensure that subjects vote correctly.

But it's not his property.

So in tsarist times it was not his. And this is not an imperial landowner, but a post-Soviet one. The imperial landowner was directly dependent on the emperor. And now we have a system of nested estates: the president appoints the governor, the governor actually appoints the heads of municipalities, who in turn appoint their vassals. And each was-sal acts as a landowner in relation to a lower vassal.

About power

Is the system you describe stable?

As long as there is a flow of distributed resources. The flow decreases - shortage begins. It holds the system together up to a certain limit, but when the limit is passed, it breaks down. This is how the Soviet Union collapsed. If prices had been released two years earlier, the USSR would probably have survived - there were enough resources, but the pricing system was non-equilibrium: meat on the market cost eight rubles, and in the store - two rubles. If they had made eight rubles, there would have been no shortage of meat. Once a resource is brought to market, a market price and equilibrium are established. In the USSR, they kept to the last, so Gaidar had to let go of prices. Although all the documents were prepared by the Central Committee in 1989.

What are we in short supply now?

And where did she go?

Dissolved. Find a person who will solve any problem. He's not around. They will rip it off like sticky, but they will not solve the problem. They'll put it up too. There is a market for imitation of power.

And who are they listening to?

But no one. Based on their own interests. You see, there is “in reality” and there is “in fact”. In reality, all places in power are occupied, but in reality there is no power. Everyone is looking for someone to give. It is not clear who to contact to solve the problem. Everyone asks: who has the power now? And she is not. Deficit.

Is it possible to “release the price of power”?

It means free elections. And there is no one to participate in the elections, because there are no people.

This is usually done by political parties.

We don't have political parties. There are class imitations. In Russia, the free market for power is the collapse of the state. Where will Chechnya go, what do you think? Or the Far East regions?

Was there a power deficit in the Soviet Union?

As long as the CPSU existed, there seemed to be no shortage of power: everyone could get their piece of power as a result of bargaining.

Why is it not so now?

CPSU is not. They were expelled from United Russia - so what? And under the CPSU, exclusion from the party is social death. In the USSR, it was clear how to make a career: he joined the Komsomol, then the army, came from the army as a member of the party, entered the university, got into the party committee of the university, from there to the district committee, from there to economic work. And from there, how lucky: either to the party hierarchy, or to the control one - to the prosecutor's office, the committee of people's control. And on this ladder it was possible to climb to the very top. And now there are no such elevators. People are locked in the bottom. There are corporate structures like Rosneft or St. Petersburg, but there is no dynamics in them. Have you noticed how many years people have been in power? There is no inter-class elevator. And how the deputies are now toiling! Someone was lucky - he went to the Federation Council. Someone went down to the regional level. And where are the rest? There is no interclass mobility. People are locked in their cages.

And when will the power deficit disappear?

Maybe he will disappear with the presidential elections. But if Putin does not go for repression, he will not make up for the power deficit. He will need to demonstrate power. And this can only be repressive in relation to their own circle. Otherwise, they will not believe him. Putin has a problem: the team he formed has collapsed, people have their own businesses. And all the rest look into their pockets, and Putin is just a resource for them. And it seems to me that now he simply has no one to rely on. Remember, a few years ago, the owner of the metallurgical plant did not come to Putin for some meeting on metallurgy. Putin says: “Oh, he got sick? Send doctors to him." And doctors with epaulettes went to him. The man got out. It was power, it was a rollback rate regulated by repressions.

And where does power come from?

She appears on her own. Such is the metaphysical substance. Like material, but like and not material. Passed from hand to hand. And no - there is nothing to transfer. Here, Putin formally transferred power to Medvedev, but it is not there: in fact, he did not transfer anything, a dummy. And where to get - it is not clear. Power is the consolidation of conflicting aspirations, and now there is no field for consolidation. All closed in the estates and guard them, so that, God forbid, not to lose.

About rallies

This is an ordinary Russian rebellion, only in an unusual environment. Remember, we have state employees, pensioners protested against the monetization of benefits? People were offended by the fact that a status resource was being taken away from them, converting it into rubles. Today's protesters have an instinctive reaction: people are offended that they are not respected. They thought they had an electoral resource, but they, as it seems to them, have been shown a fig. And the government is now thinking how to compensate for this violation of social justice.

So the injustice is allowed. Here the government is trying to restore justice. But he doesn't know how.

But why now?

So there is a lack of power. Well, what "tandem"? There cannot be two supreme resource managers in one resource state. Due to the lack of power, controllability is lost. And in order to restore controllability, the authorities are now forced to let go of the reins. The resource of information was monopolized, now it is being demonopolized.

There was panic. It took ten years for United Russia to be created as a political mechanism. No matter how bad he was, he ensured the legislative process, stupid laws were adopted, but somehow everything was organized. And now, as a result of competition in power and the deficit that accompanies competition, the political mechanism has broken down. United Russia does not have a constitutional majority, and many regional legislative assemblies do not even have a simple majority. And now it will be necessary to pass a bunch of laws. And they really wanted to avoid this situation.

Maybe the result will be politics?

And there are no groups whose interests could be represented. Here are those who came to the square? They have nothing in common except resentment. A political party is an institution of a class society. The parties represent the interests of the rich and the poor. And we do not have rich and poor, we have a completely different social structure. And the representation is carried out in a completely different way. This Duma is entrusted with parliamentary functions, which in principle it cannot perform. It is not yet a class council, but it is not a parliament either.

But I do not think that this turbulence is critical. The economy is normal, oil prices are high. There is something to plug the holes. There is absolute calmness in the regions. Now the government will be forced to negotiate, because it is necessary to ensure turnout for the presidential elections.

About the intelligentsia

In the Russian world that has now arisen, there is logic, but there is no place for the intelligentsia. Have you noticed how furious all our intellectuals are? They are redundant in this system. The mass mood to leave is a symptom of the fact that neither journalists, nor writers, nor filmmakers are needed. Everything can be imported. Who is reading you? The same as you. And in the Union, everyone read the Literary Gazette. And everyone knew the Taganka Theater. And everyone watched The Irony of Fate. And now this “space of intelligence” does not exist.

The intelligentsia are representatives of all classes who use their professional knowledge to reflect on the situation and fix injustice. And the intelligentsia addresses this reflection of its own to the authorities, drawing its attention to those who are deprived in the distribution of resources. This triad “the people - the authorities - the intelligentsia” is a diagnostic sign of a class society: the authorities take care of the people, the people are grateful to the authorities for their care, and the intelligentsia is rooting for the people and draws the attention of the authorities to their troubles.

Now, it seems to me, the triad is being destroyed. First of all, because the intelligentsia does not want and cannot recognize the class structure and develop appropriate class ideologies. As a result, the concept of social time, which integrates estates into the integrity of the social structure, is destroyed. We as a state now have no foreseeable future, only a reproduction of the present. The new estates have dismantled resources and assume that this will continue forever. And eternity does not imply reflection.

The intelligentsia exists only in a triad with the authorities and the people. If there is no power, then there is no intelligentsia, no people. The people are an intellectual construct. The intelligentsia exists because it is rooting for the people, because the authorities offend them. And in the absence of power, the place of the intelligentsia disappears and the people break up into individual real people with their own problems.

True, our government is very intelligent: powerful people perceive the country as an object for transformation, and not as a real organism. A continuous triumph of the abstract scheme over life.

About the role of personality in history

What? The role of personality in history? There is no such role. Not alone, so others. A situation arises - a person appears. The environment highlights it, pushes it out. Little depends on individual people. Especially in our system. Only another Pugachev may appear.

And now it might show up?

Now there is no basis for Pugachevism. Nevertheless, in places, all with some kind of streams. Except for the intelligentsia. In the country, in general, everything is normal - a natural process is underway: no matter what the authorities do, real owners and a market corresponding to them are formed below. There is a solvable problem of legalization of this market. And then, quite possibly, we will be able to move to a more or less normal economy without major upheavals. The market is not created, it is formed. And now, under this umbrella - oil, gas - a real economy is being formed, which is different in different regions. It should be so, it is a natural process.

Here people on Bolotnaya say: let's do it "as it is." But if big upheavals begin, it is quite possible that this natural process will once again stop. But in fact, “how is it” can only happen if you do nothing. Like Primakov. It seems that he did nothing, and the consequences of the default were removed very quickly. How? And hell knows. The system itself is lined up.

And how will things develop if nothing is done?

We will exist. Well, the instructions of the President and the Prime Minister are not carried out, well, no one listens to them, they write something at the top, and below everything happens by itself - and God forbid that it be so. Only by itself. If you do not interfere, everything will settle down by itself.

Do your students go to rallies?

I don't know of anyone who would go.

Are they intelligentsia?

They are trying to be her. I have a final lecture on the intelligentsia in my third year. The usual question: do you consider yourself an intellectual? I say yes, of course. The usual complaint at the end of the course is about me and me: I broke the picture of the world. They ask: what do we do with this knowledge now?

And what do you answer?

I say: these are your problems.

Are you, a sociologist, interested in contemporary Russian literature?

I read more out of habit and duty, not out of interest. I have a feeling that today, both on paper and on the net, not prose is published, but anecdotes. There are caustic and interesting anecdotes - such, for example, is the untimely deceased Dmitry Gorchev or Evgeny Shestakov, long life to him. Well, and authors on a smaller scale, such as Pelevin, which causes some disgust in me. Or Sorokin, whose texts are simply nauseating. And in the interval between Shestakov and Sorokin, relatively speaking, there are other authors.

I know that you follow modern fantasy and mysticism. What is this interest based on?

Such literature does not interest me in any way as a reader, it is more of a research interest. These publications reproduce a set of ideas about existence, about development, about history, which is bought by the general reader - if, of course, we consider circulations of 10,000 copies to be mass. These colorful books are being sold and bought, which means that what is written in them somehow fits into the picture of the world of buyers and readers. It is quite easy to assess the range of readers' interests - a few years ago, my students and I measured it with tape measures. In large bookstores, the length of the stand usually correlates directly with the interests of readers: the higher the interest, the longer the shelf. We measured the length of the stands and then looked at what is meant by what is called history in this store, for example. Shelves with history are the longest, tens of meters. Then we randomly selected books and looked through them. It turned out that the vast majority of these books can hardly be considered historical. There are no traces of working with archives in them, the reference apparatus is primitive, if it exists at all. That is, what is called history is a kind of mythology, sets of speculations with historical time and historical characters, judging by what is sold in bookstores.

Or take medicine. Usually this is a couple of shelves in total, two or three meters. We look at what the seller and the buyer understand by medicine. It turns out that actually there are several medical books for one and a half hundred, and the rest is self-medication, all kinds of mysticism, esotericism and so on.

I have watched the evolution of these genres since the late 1980s. At first, pure types dominated the market. If it's a thriller, then it's a thriller, and if it's mystic, then it's mystic. Then, in the mid-1990s, the genres seem to have started to merge. Action + mysticism, fantasy + science fiction, everyday drama + mysticism and so on. Now a significant part of book production is a kind of integral genre, which organically - from the point of view of readers - combines thriller, spy novel, action movie, mysticism, history, fantasy. These books have nothing to do with what I used to consider literature.

From them I try to extract ideas about the picture of the world that the authors are guided by, or rather, which the authors project onto the readers. In them, as a rule, we are talking about either a beautiful past, which becomes the future by the will of the authors, or a future in which various kinds of fellows live. There are many options. The real exists in these books as something disgusting, unworthy. The described social structure is feudal, monarchical power. Orthodox faith. Then there are two poles: either Russia conquers the world, space and all kinds of spaces, competing in them with aliens, the British and others; or Russia has already been conquered - and the remaining population is waging war against the conquerors. Berkem Al Atomi and Victor Strogalshchikov laid the foundation for this genre. And this picture has been changing for several years only in details, but is blurred by all sorts of bullish-Chkhartishvili.

Yes, from my point of view, the dominant pictures of the world are reflected very clearly. Maybe unspoken.
That is, it turns out, feudalism, monarchism, Christianity, the desire for dominance, war.

Russia wins in these stories?

When he wins, when he loses, more often he just fights. Victory is most often achieved through the appearance of a messiah who comes from outside or is born among the belligerents. And the messiah, of course, puts things in order.

There are many realities. Actually, each person has his own reality, and not one. We are talking about mental realities that latently determine the behavior of people. And sometimes not latently, as in the case of volunteers in the Donbass and Syria. The former Soviet people have a very distorted idea of ​​social time. During the Soviet period, the past, present and future were artificially separated. There were no links between them. There was a great - but bad - past, not a very good present and a bright future. Well, and, accordingly, people were divided into groups focused on the past, present and future. Fundamentalists focused on the past, which they wanted to make the future. They gave rise to the literature that was published by the Young Guard and Sovremennik. Future-oriented people - progressives - also formed their own literature, the Strugatsky brothers were their most prominent representatives. And only the Soviet people, focused on the present, did not give rise to anything significant in literature, from my point of view.

In the 1990s, literature and social practice were dominated by progressives, various reformers who hoped that the invisible hand of the market would do its job, and they would warm their hands on the fire in which Soviet values ​​were burned. And now there are progressives, these are people who do not care about the past, they have a bad attitude towards the present, and their dreams lead them to a brighter future. They talk about artificial intelligence, blockchain, robots and more. They have their own literature, usually popularizing and naive science fiction, in the style of the 1970s of the last century.

But fundamentalists dominate the mental field today. Both the authorities and the people are focused on searching in the past for the point when the country went awry and went the wrong way, and efforts are directed towards returning to this point and going the right way. For them, the present is the actualization of the past. Note that educated people argue about what happened in the 18th century, under Alexander II, under Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, as if the time of these figures is still outside the window. People differ drastically only in their assessments of what the present/past was like, good or bad.

And it seems to me that we cannot in any way (I mean the country as a whole) connect the past, present and future in some kind of sequence. They have existed for decades separately from each other: the present is bad - everyone, without exception, believes that the past is somewhere beautiful, somewhere disgusting, and the future is either a reproduction of the good past, or what Sakharov called convergence, that is, the merging of political systems on the path of technological development.

I would also like to dwell on the unique Russian institute of literary classics. As far as I know, there is no such institution anywhere else. Our classics are something unchanging, eternal, existing outside of time and reproduced by domestic state institutions, educational ones, for example, as role models. Loss in time, which I spoke about above, is reproduced, among other things, by the institute of the classics. "Tear of a Child", "Mumu", ideal constructs of Turgenev, gloomy images of Dostoevsky and so on. The present is interpreted in classical images, and thus the fragmentation of historical time is fixed in the pictures of the world of compatriots. Therefore, the devaluation of literary classics seems to me a very good thing.

We experience the past as the present - but are there any sources, including literary ones, that can be relied upon as reliable?

Rather, there are authors. For example, Modest Kolerov. This is a historian, he was at one time the head of the State Archives and did a brilliant job on the documents of the Beria archive. From these documents, a completely different picture emerges of the same repressions and everything else. I do not remember exactly, but the minister, in my opinion, of energy (it was the end of the 1940s - the beginning of the 1950s) demanded that the security agencies provide him with 50,000 prisoners. The law enforcement agencies resisted, saying that there were no thorns, no grub, no place for the prisoners to live. Through the secretariat of the Central Committee, the decision was pushed through and another 50 thousand people were imprisoned, and there are a huge number of such documents. That is, the engine of repression was not the party and the then security forces, but departments that needed slave labor. This realization changes the picture of what happened in the 1930s and beyond. And Kolerov has a lot of such works. He works with archives, extracts documents from them and, interpreting them minimally, composes very interesting texts. Oleg Leibovich works in Perm, whose book "In the City of M" is entirely built on archival documents and describes the life and customs of both workers and the nomenklatura in the 1940-1950s. There are other real explorers.

In addition, there are - albeit few - excellent prose writers and poets. I am grateful to the creator of the almanac Alexander Babushkin, whose life's work is the collection and presentation of texts by such authors as Amiram Grigorov, Vladimir Strochkov, Miroslav Nemirov, Vladimir Lilipin, Alexander Safonov, Miroslav Bakulin.

That is, in historical assessments, we should rely primarily on documents?

Of course. We don't have anything else, I guess. But we are guided by memories. It is known what memories are, but few people work with documents. When there was a declassification commission, they were mostly foreigners who worked with them. Among their works, the series "History of Stalinism" stands out, more than seventy volumes have already been published. A documentary study of what was in the country in the 1920s-1950s. I think that our history, written history, is mostly fiction. The image of the Gulag is largely shaped by Solzhenitsyn's speculative constructions, for example. Well, what is Pushkin as a historian? Fictionist. The image of Peter the Great, which has developed now, has its source - mainly - the novel by Alexei Tolstoy. There are very few real historians working with documents. And those historians that have become public have become publicists.

What do we know about today? How to study it, according to what documents?

Maybe there are no sources, because what is happening in our country now outside and outside the state is not documented. What is being documented is according to Rosstat and according to departmental and sectoral reporting. Moreover, the data of Rosstat and departments often differ quite significantly, and everything else remains only in people.

These documents create a special state world, in which it is clearly known what exists in the state and how the existing one functions. In this case, the existence of the non-existent is often postulated, while the actual being is neglected. For example, it is believed that we have unemployment, but in life we ​​know that there is no market unemployment, but there is self-employment, which is not recorded by either Rosstat or relevant departments. Resources are allocated to combat unemployment, on the development of which the relevant ministries and their subordinate institutions and organizations live well. When the president says that he trusts Rosstat data, this means that Rosstat sets the state ontology. What is not in Rosstat does not exist. And, accordingly, the state can act only in this ontology.

Thus, an official reality is created.

This is the official reality, but there are other realities. In order to describe them, we simply do not have concepts. There are no concepts, because borrowed concepts are used to describe reality. For example, some office like the World Bank starts to research local self-government in the Russian Federation and releases reports from which it follows that we have it. But it is not the same as required by the bank's regulations. It is clear to us that what the World Bank means by local self-government simply does not exist in our country.

Are your colleagues trying to somehow analyze what is happening outside the official level?

To describe our realities, it is necessary to introduce our own - not imported - conceptual apparatus. At first it causes rejection, but then people get used to it and start using it. This happened with the concepts of "estate structure", "administrative market", "administrative currency", "self-employment", "ownerless property" and many others. But people who are ready to abandon the pursuit of science, understood as a reinterpretation of imported concepts and schemes, are now at most half a hundred people in the whole country. And considering that the Soviet uniformity has disappeared and now not only the regions, but even the municipal districts are very different from each other, we can only speak with certainty about what we see in a particular area or settlement. Anapa is not like Kaliningrad. At all. Vladivostok is not like Murmansk, although it seems that everywhere there are ports, everywhere there is local self-government in our sense of the word, but there is no local self-government in the terminology of the World Bank.

The conceptual space of the social sciences is littered with terms that have no referents in everyday life. For example, there is the concept of "small and medium business", for the support of which the state allocates very significant resources. But in our country there is no such business, but there are crafts of various sizes. To describe the crafts, a conceptual apparatus is needed, which does not yet exist. Describing fisheries in terms of small and medium-sized businesses is meaningless, but it greatly contributes to the successful development of resources by organizations and people supporting small and medium-sized businesses.

Yes, of course, not enough for the general. We give grants to people who come up with their ideas. And if the idea from our point of view deserves attention, then we try to provide it with funding. We are looking for people with ideas, but it doesn't always work out. There are very few such people.

Among these projects, were there any thanks to which you learned something new about Russia?

Yes, of course, for example, the project "Garages" by Alexander Pavlov and Sergey Seleev, which has grown into a study of crafts. Or what Yulia Krasheninnikova has dug up on healthcare, and what she is doing as part of the study of expert activity. Or a project on the ownerless property of Olga Molyarenko. For us, this is new knowledge. But not all projects are so successful.

Where are you now catching fresh ideas?

At one time, literature played a big role, there were thick magazines, everyone read, waited. Now there is so much garbage that, perhaps, worthwhile things pass by. It sometimes happens on Facebook, but for a long time I don’t remember fresh thoughts. Fresh texts - yes, come across, but with old thoughts. We now have an interesting situation where people first learn to write, then they learn to read, and they start thinking at the end of their lives. If they start.

There are social networks where you can write whatever you want. They used to write on fences, now VKontakte. So they write, not really thinking about what they write and about what. After all, literature exists only in the space of criticism. The triad "writer-reader-critic" is inseparable. Criticism is a form of extracting ideas from texts of various kinds. Criticism disappeared in the 1990s, at least I don't see it. And after the disappearance of criticism, literature also disappeared.

No ideas?

There may be ideas, but they all remain in the temporal paradigm that we talked about: what a wonderful past it was or what a terrible past it was, how bad it is to live in the present. How did we ever read? A fresh issue of Novy Mir appeared, for example. There, the first thing they looked at was the “Criticism” section, right? And according to criticism, we were guided by what makes sense to read. Praise in the "New World" - you need to read. Scolded in "Our Contemporary" - must be read.

Now, it seems to me, the institution of authorship has also changed a lot. After the first published books, a promising author is offered big money for scripts for television series. He naturally agrees and ceases to be a writer. Several people in my memory for a year or two and turned ugly. For example, Dmitry Yankovsky, the author of a wonderful urban fantasy. Now he writes books immediately like scripts for television series, but how he started! Or Alexander Bushkov, a man with great potential. Now he writes serially, the plan gives two books a year. The very organization of our information space simply kills skill.

In this situation, one can only develop immunity to the reading material that bookstores are now inundated with and electronic libraries are full of. I regularly look at entries in some electronic libraries, and two genres dominate there. The first is a fantasy-mystery-historical action movie under one cover. The second genre is women's novels in large numbers. And they also have fantasy mysticism, but instead of an action movie, love with details. I did not imagine until recently that women's prose is written in such volumes.

As for immunity: the authors of pre-perestroika rather than perestroika are close to me. There was Yuri Kazakov, a brilliant writer, who died of alcoholism. Or Konstantin Vorobyov, "The Scream" is, in my opinion, the best text about the war. Or Mozhaev, "Men and Women". But these and many other authors have gone into social oblivion, they are remembered only by old people like me. They do not fit into this post-modern field, where everything in one bottle is mixed and flavored with shit.

What, then, should the interested reader do besides growing immunity?

Search. On the one hand, it is difficult, since there is a lot of garbage, and on the other hand, it is simple, because everything is on the network. I cannot say that there is nothing. There is, for example, Yevgeny Dobrenko, the author of the book Political Economy of Socialist Realism. He has several very decent jobs, he lives somewhere in the States, he left a long time ago, but he is a researcher, works with archives. Dobrenko shows how what has become the modern public field was formed. He takes socialist symbols very seriously and shows how these symbols were turned into practices. The same social competition, the implementation of the plan. Usually such meaningful books are published by the publishing house of the New Literary Review.

Or, relatively recently, a six-volume collection of works by Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky came out. Amazing texts. He died in 1950, his prose was hardly published during his lifetime. Amazing language that breaks reality. He was an editor at a small publishing house. If you remember, then, of course, there are many writing people who are interesting to me.

But this is all the past, and the present is only guesswork?

As for the present, I don't know. The real is not contained in literary texts, but in account books, departmental reports, in personal texts on the net, and how to extract it from there is a separate conversation.

Russian history can never become history itself. It has been politically relevant for many years. And indeed, despite the fact that the epochs of change are once again turning into epochs of stagnation, and the state is either disintegrating or gathering again, Saltykov-Shchedrin remains a modern writer, Marquis de Custine's travel notes are read like reports, Chaadaev's letters are politically relevant. The texts of the speeches of some modern publicists could well belong to the fiery revolutionaries of the 20s of the XX century or the reactionaries of the time of Nicholas I.

Generations are changing, and in each of them the senile feeling of the “rut of history” is adjacent to the infantile desire to build another “bright future”. The times of the next “strengthening of statehood” bring with them a thirst for change, which, in turn, is replaced by a thirst for stability (including protection from theft, banditry and the arbitrariness of petty bosses), which occurs during times of state depression: thaws, perestroika, revolutions. There are fundamental works that describe the cycles of our history, but they do not make it clearer what these phenomena are and why there is no such pronounced cyclicality in the histories of other states.

Citizens in the era of stagnation live with memories - sometimes their own, and more often strangers - about real life: anxious youth and great achievements, exploits on the battle fronts and great construction sites of socialism, the struggle for freedom and against anti-people regimes and other crap. And in the era of depression, they try to live a life other than their own, becoming like the types known to them from always relevant history: imperial aristocrats or politicians, Decembrists or populists, landowners or clergymen, Chekists and White Guards, nobles, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Cadets, dissidents, heroes of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, farmers or peasants. They play the old roles known to them in the retelling of intelligent social scientists, dreaming of returning to the past, which, not without their efforts, sometimes becomes the present.

Outside observers identify Russian phenomena with some stretch. Seeing in our everyday life various differences, such as archetypes of national character, signs of anarchy and democracy, totalitarianism and autocracy, a developed economy and non-commodity management, they build theories that are understandable only to themselves. Observers are confident that they know what was and is "really". Only "real" for everyone.

Russian phenomena are indeed somewhat reminiscent of book prototypes, but they are not identical to them, differing in Russian specifics. Observers see what they expect to see, but what they see turns out to be not canonical, not what it should be. Disappointment sometimes turns out to be so great that quite balanced people behave not quite adequately, probably believing that Russia is to blame for not fitting into their ideas about it. Let me remind you of the statement of a well-known perestroika publicist - a reaction to the success of the Liberal Democratic Party in the parliamentary elections: "Russia, you have gone crazy."

The same observers, especially their reflective part, most often represent the history of the country as a sequence of events in linear time - from the Time of Troubles to autocracy, from autocracy to revolutions, from revolutions to stagnation, from stagnation to perestroika, etc. Periodic succession of dictatorships-prosperities by crises-perestroika is on the periphery of their attention, and reproductions of the past in the present are noted rather as incidents. Observers are aimed at a bright future, perceiving the repetition of the past as a punishment from God and the result of the fact that the same mercenary politicians are again at the head of the state, which they once were.

Modern Russia, from the point of view of such future-oriented citizens, is an ordinary country that once built socialism, and is now being modernized and becoming like other countries. This, in their opinion, is a country with an already market economy, the degree of state intervention in which is still high. If it is reduced, then everything will be the same as in other countries. Various deviations from the normative picture are explained by the fact that the country's leadership is not very economically competent and allows soviet forms of government. If this guide is learned, then everything will be more than normal, and the rate of economic growth - the main indicator that the apologists of modernization are guided by - will become the same as in modern China. And Russia will look even more like the US.

Reformist speculation is an essential component of the prosperity-depression cycles. The Russian worldview is not self-sufficient and for hundreds of years it was built mostly on cross-country comparisons. The slogan "catch up and overtake" in different versions determined and continues to determine the actions of the authorities and the thinking of the elite. Reformers in different historical times set the task of making Russia like Holland, Germany, Sweden, France, Portugal, Argentina, Poland, Chile, etc. On this path, they were pursued and pursued by catastrophic failures, as a result of which the existence of citizens remains survival in cataclysms.

Peter's reforms, the liberation of the peasants, collectivization, industrialization, privatization, nationalization and monetization of benefits. The loser complex haunts progress-conscious observers. They want all the best and brightest: a strong and respected state, true democracy, civil society, market economy. And as a result of the implementation of their recommendations by the authorities, the result is - most often - worldwide distrust, coupled with a well-founded fear of the Russian bear, helpless autocracy, Soviet power and civil war, the fight against terrorism and sovereign democracy, an anecdotal political system, enemies of the people and harmful civil society organizations, widespread theft and corruption. The blame for this, according to observers, always turns out to be the authorities, who have not implemented their brilliant projects and concepts in the right way.

Russia is unique, like any other country. Its uniqueness, in my opinion, lies in the fact that almost any business that its citizens start, based on the best intentions, turns into its opposite. As they say in the people accustomed to this, everything goes through the ass. Or, in the words of a well-known strong business executive, politician and diplomat: "We thought it was better, it turned out as always."

Why? I tried to indirectly answer this question by proposing hypertrophied administrative-market mechanisms as Russian specifics. But in the synchronous theory of the administrative market, it is impossible to explain why the titanic efforts of the authorities to strengthen the state ultimately lead to some form of totalitarianism, and not lesser efforts to democratize the weakening of the state, sometimes its collapse. An attempt to explain, based on the ethnic determinants of the socio-economic structure of Russia and its history, was made by O. Bessonova. There are other ways and attempts at explanations, but for the most part they are variants of "conspiracy theory" that are not interesting.

The gap between what is observed and how it is explained is striking. The phenomena of our life have little in common with what should be, based on generally accepted theoretical schemes. This is largely why the argumentation in the usual intellectual discourse is built as a contrast between what is (terrifying, wrong) and what should be according to the theory professed by the debater. But at the same time, even the simplest ideologically and politically unaccented descriptions of domestic realities are still rare. Moreover, substantive knowledge of what is happening in the country evokes reactions like “this cannot be, because it should not be” and “there is no need to know this, because it will disappear in the course of reforms.” Instead of research, the thoughtless application of imported theories is replicated, suggesting, in exact accordance with progressive stereotypes, that Russia is the same country as those in which the methods were created.