Syndicate: mailradek no. 4

[Oleg Kireev <radek@glasnet.ru>]

Moscow-based magazine "Radek", dedicated to theory, art and politics
continues the project "mailradek in english". The information about the
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								text no. 58
				14.09.1998
	Last week the Duma - or i'd better say, its Communist majority - convinced
Yeltsin into rejecting Chernomyrdin as a prime minister candidature,
abandoning the economic program of overcoming the crisis, and thus abolished
the governance of unlimited presidential power, which we have had since 1991.	
	This became a reason for the journalist (especially American) to joyfully
grasp one of the most vulgar terms ever used by them again - that one about
"the Communists are getting the power back". For them it means the end of
all the reforms (nobody explains what these "reforms" are, otherwise they
would have to agree that it's just a full list of all the governments'
solutions since the beginning of the perestroika, that contradict each other
and are tactical, not strategical) and nearly Stalin's repressions. We face
the most naive and anti-historical view on the situation, for which to solve
the historical problem is to call it by some well-known name. "And what if
we find out that Yeltsin is not a democrate and Zyuganov is not a communist?"1.
	"The Communists" won't ever be like they were in 1910s and 1920s. The
well-off sons of the Soviet elite who carry on cabinet intrigues, hoping to
catch a golden fish, who know absolutely nothing about Marx and declaim
nationalist speeches to lure the electorate, have nothing to do with those
declassed radical terrorists of the beginning of the century, who had
decades of desperate struggle and thousands of deaths past them. The
cultural creations of the October revolution - the constructivism and
particularly social realism - affect us by their absolute insanity from the
point of view of the modern conscience. They represent a totally different
discourse of thinking, their authors are like martians. That what they were
doing is amazing and cannot be ever recreated.
	That's why the american journalists shouldn't be afraid themselves and
shouldn't scare the people. (Although from the point of view of the
economical stabilization a "communist" president would be even more
prosperous than a "democratic" one, because he wouldn't waste that much time
on the struggle with parliament, and he would even pay attention to the
state affairs an hour or another a week.) It's obvious for us that these
people in grey jackets won't suggest anything worthy except a new kind of
the previous liberal ideology and soft pseudo-socialistic programs in
economy. Something interesting can only happen after the intervention of
non-parliamental forces.
	Our attitute to their "victory" is: this can be an interesting thing to
observe, but we should stop this spectacle.
					
1 G.Chieza, "La Stampa" Moscow staff, "Farewell to Russia!", ц╜.1997, p.72
								Oleg Kireev
project: Anatoly Osmolovsky and Oleg Kireev
translation: Alexey Kovalev
realization: mailradek in english