Oleg Kireev on Tue, 16 Feb 1999 08:37:32 +0300 (WSU) |
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Syndicate: mailradek no. 11 |
The "mailradek" project is still on the run, although the group which has been previously editing it, is changed. The information about the project is available on the Website (in Russian): http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Coffeehouse/1457. Everybody who doesn't receive it can send a "subscribe english mailradek" e-mail to radek@glasnet.ru, and we'll include him into the mailing list. Our address is: Russia 117333 Moscow, Vavilova 48-237, tel./fax:(095)137 71 31. text no. 67 28.12.1998 - 14.01.1999 Suddenly, at the beginning of Perestroika, Moscow intelligentsia started to make the money. At first, it was possible to make the crazy amounts of them illegally - with computer technologies, for example; then it became possible to do via pretty legal channels. People from the capitals in their 40s were the first who started making business careers, then the ones of my age followed who are a little over 20. In a period of few years one could be a friend not simple of "Pasha", "Masha" or "Sasha", but of a prestigious journal contributor, a club founder and an advanced TV program hostess. The public space opened and new relations have been constructed. It has engendered a new kind of snobbism, not a sectarian one - of the intelligentsia kitchen gatherings, but of a capitalist and liberal snobbism of societal ranks. Many regarded it to be "like in the West", and some even believed that to be positive fact. Nonetheless, during Perestroika our great liberals were astonishing us firstly by their shyness; practically none of them did manage to express her/his liberal ideas even in a moment of polemic discussions. Leiderman with his "every honest man must vote for Gaidar" was the only one to be so courageous. Still Novodvorskaya was spitted on for her radicalism most of all by those who were not ready to speak out the same thing by themselves openly. They understood their liberal freedoms as a chance to stop speaking out and doing something. Even those like Gaidar who, with liberal phrases, were cynically covering mercenary interests deserve at least some understanding. But now it's over! All that connected social space and familiar relations, has disappeared. You don't look for familiar faces on the TV anymore; one finds there only persons from the cynical "profi" caste (and completely degraded nothingnesses like "quatchi" or Shenderovich). Similar to the "old Soviet times" one won't shake a hand of anyone from the central newspaper today. We shall ask them: how much did you earn at the end of 1998? What? More than 100 bucks? ("But where were you before the 1917?") Have you been so idealistically naive or simply corrupted? All they've done during these ten years of the meaningless freedom, will soon seem to be more miserable and pathetic than the achievements of those whom they so much despised (the activists / intellectuals of the 60s). Oleg Kireev translation: Irina Aristarkhova