There, the answer to all questions is simple: the outfit is out of turn. Well, nevertheless, the world does not stand still, the army has not been like this for a long time! This topic has hit me again. And what is most paradoxical, in an unexpected way. I open Facebook in the morning and see there:
Well, you’re smart, you understand everything, right?
It turns out that the city of Moscow admitted its helplessness and inability to cope with what was being dealt with normally and without shouting in other regions, and they decided in the old fashioned way, as in the dear souls of some leaders, in the thirties. Build, oblige and force everyone. Thanks to the shooting for refusing medical examination, they don’t impose it, otherwise that will be their fate;)
From the material I was surprised to learn that “Moscow decided to choose its own path!”
You know, this whole story wildly reminded me of a picture from 15 years ago, when in front of my eyes, a freckled nerd, my parents burned him for truancy, despite the fact that he brought home only A’s.
As far as you understand, this guy recognized neither himself nor any of his friends as extreme, but his parents! I think it’s not worth explaining what the reasoning was. Everyone has a person nearby who uses the formula: “The best defense is an attack.” That's roughly what happened here. As a result, Moscow appointed ordinary people as extremists. Well, at least for now he’s actively trying.
For those who are frankly too lazy to follow the link and figure out what’s what, I’ll tell you: the Ministry of Health set Moscow on fire with the addition of medical examinations! It’s just that someone in Moscow suddenly decided to assign expensive procedures to people who did not receive services! For what? And for Statistics!
You know, it’s nice at some symposium to boast of beautiful statistics that the city has 10 percent more people served than its neighbors. This means the system works better. What if the system doesn't work better? Right! Let's attribute it;) It was about this very activity that surprised Muscovites found employees of administrative offices, about which they wrote to the Ministry of Health, which in turn initiated an inspection. Here's another link for you.
The medical examination itself is extremely useful and important; I only recently completed it completely. No wonder it is so common in many countries. It certainly increases the chances of the average Russian citizen to live to age 80 by about half! And up to 90-95 tripled. You don’t need to be a statistic or read smart books to talk to grandmothers in the yard and find out that many of them suffer greatly from chronic diseases. Diseases that could be cured in the early stages, but not 20 years after the onset of the disease.
So the question arises: why don’t the Moscow authorities, instead of a repressive health care system, take a course of education and act as advised by the same Ministry of Health? It will make sense very quickly, you'll see! But forcing a person to undergo medical examination for the sake of a policy is not an option, and it will not work. Those who have not been treated for years and will not go there for the sake of refilling. Inflating your own figures at the expense of state employees, pensioners and children is simply low!
And you yourself, when was the last time you underwent a full examination or at least a routine medical examination?
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“Of the two men in dark, he is a librarian, and I am just a journalist,” Konstantin Milchin said at the meeting. Russian publisher and publicist, program director of the International Moscow Open Book Festival, member of the expert council of the International Fair of Intellectual Literature "Non/fiction", one of the co-founders of the Moscow bookstore "Phalanster" Boris Kupriyanov and representative of a famous dynasty of book publishers, editor of the culture department of the magazine "Russian Reporter" » Konstantin Milchin came to Irkutsk as part of the social project “Biblio Space”. The meetings were organized as part of the Year of Literature by Oleg Deripaska's Volnoye Delo Foundation, the En+ company with the support of the EuroSibEnergo group of companies and Irkutskenergo OJSC, as well as the editorial board of the social project "Good Light Library".
In this project, the Vostsibkniga publishing house organizes meetings with experts in the field of book publishing and library science. Boris Kupriyanov and Konstantin Milchin spent several days in Irkutsk, speaking to students and teachers of ISU, at the Humanitarian Center-Library named after the Polev family and “Molchanovka”. “This is one of the best libraries in the country, believe me, I’ve seen a lot of them,” said Boris Kupriyanov after a tour of Molchanovka. He noted with regret that not a single library from the Irkutsk region managed to win the “Biblio Space” competition of Oleg Deripaska’s Volnoe Delo Foundation. “This seriously upset us, because it seems to us that there is potential in Irkutsk,” Kupriyanov said.
“Reading is still not an elitist thing”
A person who reads little does not have any special symptoms; this is not a disease. Indeed, a month or a year without a book will probably not affect income, and children will not love parents who don’t read any less. And your acquaintances would rather point out your dusty boots than be surprised that you haven't read the latest Booker winner. Then why is this really necessary?
– Why do you need a book?
Boris Kupriyanov: There are a lot of beautiful words about what reading is. I'll tell you the most important thing. Why should a person read? Slow reading, interacting with a book, working on a book is the only way to teach analytical thinking and critical thinking. This is the only way to teach life analysis. There is no other. You can live without analysis at all, with pure reflection, like an infusoria: it is pricked, it bounces back. There are no analytics in modern media anymore. There is only a flash-event, a reaction to it, which is also an event. A Boeing fell - an event, hop-hop-hop, after three weeks it is no longer an event, now we have an earthquake... If a person wants to be a full-fledged participant in life, to develop and improve intellectually, he must have some analytical and critical abilities. There is no better way than reading. You can sit in front of the river for a long time and analyze how the fish swims. But reading is faster, and easier, and at a higher level. And so - welcome, there is TV, there is rap... The question is where the person wants to end up in the future.
– Is it true that the tradition of thoughtful reading starts in the family?
- Certainly. I read stories to children, and I still do. I have a large line-up of children, the oldest is 23 years old, the youngest is 2.5 years old, and there is a son in the middle. But there is such a standard reading curve. If the family actively works with reading, then children read very seriously until the age of 9-10 years. After this, as they say, they “go crazy” and stop reading altogether. This is true all over the world. If there is some potential, they begin to read independently from the age of 13-14. I am very cruel to my son, I force him to read for an hour a day, I take away all his gadgets, I actually lock him in his room. They will soon take me to Astakhov. Well, for now he reads through force. But in fact, you need to instill the skill, make it clear why it is needed, and at the next stage the person begins to read on his own. Of course, the family situation is very important. But we cannot always guarantee that those things that were laid down in childhood will come back to haunt us 100%. Much depends on the person himself. The most important thing is that for many generations these things were not laid down in families. But reading is still not an elitist thing, but a universal one.
Konstantin Milchin: There is an American study: experts tried to understand why low-income families usually maintain their poverty status generation after generation. And in rich families, both success and wealth are often retained by the heirs for several generations. In the 1970s, they sinned on genetics, then they found out that nothing was connected with genetics. It turned out that in families where there is an opportunity to constantly study and read with children from early childhood, the child has a greater chance of continuing to live with dignity. You see, what’s the matter: I never had the option of reading or not reading. I have lived all my life in the world of books. I just think that a little person, a child, needs to find a book that he would like. You need to spend time on this. It seems to me that if a person doesn’t read, it means that they didn’t bother to find him a book in childhood that he could start with. The basis of getting used to a book is the search for the very book that was created specifically for this reader.
Boris Kupriyanov: There is another aspect. My grandmother is old-fashioned, very traditional, she worked as a librarian. And she believed that as a child at 10-11 years old I should have read Dickens. I hated him then. I started opening it only now and I understand how much value I have lost, because on duty I often visit London and walk along these streets, which are simply saturated with the spirit of Dickens. This is on the one hand, but on the other hand, several years ago I was looking for a way to tell a child about the war. A year and a half ago he read The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. This took a lot of the work off my plate of explaining what war is. What I mean is that reading sometimes greatly simplifies the life of parents.
Konstantin Milchin: My mother read “The Master and Margarita”, “Dead Souls”, including the second volume, “Moscow-Petushki”, “The Pickwick Club Papers” to me at night. Since then I grew up like this (laughs).
Librarian's Stockholm Syndrome
The debate about the modern library is fascinating... and boring. On the one hand, there are crowds of creatives who are ready to decorate the library as a Google office and force everyone to roller skate, reading the roles of “Kolobok”. On the other hand, there are prim librarians, priestesses of this “holy” place, next to whom you want to stand a little lower, lower your voice half a tone and go out... to pirate libraries on the Internet. The dream library is somewhere in the middle. And she's nowhere to be found yet. Several theses on this topic from Boris Kupriyanov allow us to take a deeper look at the problem.
In the library, a person should become familiar with reading as an intellectual, analytical practice, says Boris Kupriyanov. “We're talking about slow reading,” he said. – Not just about leisure reading, but about reading that is intellectual work. Although the leisure component remains in library regulations, basic laws, and no one, of course, has canceled it.”
“Now it’s more and more difficult to tell people about books, it’s more and more difficult to explain why they are needed,” he says. – Unfortunately, in Russia this situation is even more pronounced than in the near, and not even in the near abroad. It is clear that in China, where more libraries are built every year than are built in the rest of the world, it never occurs to anyone to wonder whether a library is needed, whether reading on paper makes sense, and so on. Unfortunately, in Russia we are faced with a strange opinion. We once spoke with Alexander Ivanovich Visly, director of the Lenin Library. He expressed the thesis that you constantly need to argue with people who say that everything is on the Internet, who come home and read books in electronic form. I voiced the opinion that when they come home, it is these people who most likely do not read at all. The fact is that the dichotomy “electronic-paper” has long been experienced in the world; no one particularly argues on this topic. We are talking about the practice of reading, about its types. The most important thing is for a person to read, but what he reads on – on clay tablets, on an iPad or on paper – is not so important.
According to Boris Kupriyanov, the library is designed to preserve not catalogues, but “that great practice that has accompanied humanity for seven thousand years” - reading. And this is precisely what is difficult. “There was a very interesting experiment in Moscow: one of the most famous head hunters in the country, Alena Vladimirskaya, conducted a survey among librarians and found out what happens to people who end up in the library,” the publisher said. – The result was simply terrible, we tried not to print or publish it anywhere. A young man, when he gets to the library, most often comes there with a mission, with the goal of changing the world - bringing culture closer to people. With good, often very romantic intentions. A year later, not a trace remains of this. 70% of people, downshifters who came to libraries often from better jobs to do cultural projects for people, leave. Of the remaining 30%, five percent choose a career story and also forget about their mission. The remaining 25% trade their mission for traditionalism and become even more conservative than those who have always worked there. This is actually “Stockholm syndrome”. According to Kupriyanov, it is time for libraries to perceive the reader as a partner. The library should become the place where examination and qualitative analysis of literature is carried out, since criticism is difficult in the country.
“The most important criterion for the professional suitability of a librarian... (now I’ll say something, and you’ll all hate me, but I run fast, if anything),” said Kupriyanov. – The most important criterion is not the ability to make high-quality bibliographic collections, but general culture, love of books and knowledge of literature. If a person knows library science by heart, but does not like books and readers, he is unsuitable for the profession. This is fundamentally important. Will you trust a pilot who hates flying? The library must go wild, literally and figuratively. Get out of your walls, offer new practices, new relationships. Forgive me, I am violating all the regulations - the library is not a leisure institution. This is a place of enlightenment. If on the path of enlightenment you come across theater, music, ballet, cinema, or the social community, nothing prevents you from working with them. If you are faced with the same things, but this does not serve the idea of enlightenment, then perhaps other cultural institutions should deal with this.
How to make your own map
Today we are in a literary ocean, where everyone moves according to his skill and knowledge. Literary criticism as a genre is in decline, and the powerful Soviet incentive to “read the forbidden” has disappeared as a fact. You can read everything, and this is the main problem. What to choose? The question is difficult. The main points of the search were outlined by Konstantin Milchin. Of course, he addressed primarily librarians, whom he urged to become experts in the market for new books for readers. But something tells us that everyone will have to answer for their own “literary card”.
“Back in the 90s, oddly enough, the press gave a fairly objective picture of new book releases,” said Milchin. – Now there are some book reviews in the media, but the “rules of boyish decency” require this to happen. Along with truly readable genres, we should also include “about books.” Reviews are becoming shorter and shorter, and this applies both to large reviews in thick journals of non-academic literary criticism, and reviews in daily and weekly magazines. In the 1990s, Andrei Semyonovich Nemzer wrote reviews on at least half a newspaper page in the Segodnya newspaper. Today in thick magazines there are a couple of pages, and in periodicals, if there is anything about books, then for a maximum of three thousand characters. This means that soon thick magazines will switch to the tweet format, and periodicals will switch to the emoticon format. This will be a very informative review, especially since there are more and more emoticons.
Where can I get information about new book releases? Konstantin Milchin suggested viewing several levels at once. The very first level is the publishing houses and writers themselves. Everyone has websites and blogs. “There is an American writer, Christopher Moore, on Facebook he posted the cover of his latest novel, translated into Russian,” Milchin said. – And it was very funny to read how his American friends and fans comment on this cover with the words: “Kharasho, drug!” There is a crazy discussion. Someone said that in Russian “Mur” is “Peace”, they objected to him: “MUR” is “Moscow police department”, no - Russian cats say “mur”. If you give readers a book by Christopher Moore, tell this story, everyone will have more fun.” Milchin advises browsing the websites and blogs of publishing houses, both large and small, to keep abreast of new book releases. If possible, also foreign ones. It is clear that the AST group, which in its best years published 800 titles per month, including books on sewing mittens, scanword puzzles and Sudoku, will issue a limited number of books for promotion. And even when looking through mailings and websites, the reader runs the risk of not seeing books that are not marked with the magic word “promotion”, but have been shipped from the warehouse to the store. But it’s still useful to be in the know. It is useful to look once every two weeks, once a month at the websites of the largest Moscow bookstores, such as “Moscow”, “Biblio-Globus”, “Moscow House of Books”, as well as online stores.
“You can make a list of the most important authors for you, look into their accounts, include them in the list of your friends on social networks,” says Milchin. – If this author is not the author of Russian women’s detective stories or Stephen King, then his books are published not once a month, but approximately once a year. But the authors post their interviews, which is also interesting. Someone, like Zakhar Prilepin, writes reviews of his colleagues and friends. It’s very interesting to create your own literary map of your relationship with a writer.
Milchin does not advise ignoring sales ratings, for example on Amazon. Moreover, it is worth looking at the sales lists of the American, German, and French Amazon. “This is incredibly interesting,” Milchin shares his experience. – I remember once, at the request of “Big City”, I compiled a rating of 30 countries of the world - what they read where. What struck me most was the Venezuelan book market; I translated using Google Translate from Spanish, which was unfamiliar to me. The text said, verbatim, how strange it is that the best-selling book in Venezuela this week was not “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The book came out 30 years ago, but it's still a perennial bestseller every day. But in that unfortunate week, the leader was a book about dancing!” A conscientious reader gets acquainted with book reviews in magazines, newspapers, on radio and television, and on the Internet, although most of them are not very encouraging. “There is also a rather strange movement of literary bloggers; from the point of view of a professional critic, they are strikebreakers,” Milchin laughs. “The fact that we have a profession, they, you see, have a hobby.”
Konstantin Milchin: “I never had the option of reading or not reading.
I have lived all my life in the world of books."
Milchin, an employee of the Russian Reporter, advised us to be especially careful when it comes to book awards. “The first thing you need to understand about book awards is that you need to follow not so much the winners as the shortlists, sometimes the longlists. “The winner of the Booker Prize is, of course, important. But the shortlist is more interesting,” the expert believes.
– What is the mechanism of the literary prize? - he reasons. – How to pay attention to a literary work? There are three things that people react to: sex, money and death. Killing a writer every time he has a book published is inhumane, and most importantly, it’s a one-time thing. But it is clear that when a writer dies, all his unsuccessful books become successful, and the curses against him are erased. It doesn’t work out with sex either, because a writer in Russia is an asexual older man. There are very few handsome men like Prilepin, although they do appear. There is money left. This act of one-time transfer of money to someone who knows why immediately attracts attention, because the question arises: “Why not to me?!” Therefore, the Nobel Prize will always be great, an amount with six zeros, and if in Swedish krona, then with seven zeros! Well, why not me? And every year, when the Nobel Prize is awarded, everyone says: “Well, it wasn’t awarded for literary merit, it was for something else... It’s because he’s persecuted, or because he’s actually a woman, not him. He is her! The first literary prize of which written evidence has been preserved is the apparently never-taken but described duel between Homer and Hesiod. They performed in front of the ancient Greek shepherds and were so beautiful that the shepherds, the smartest people in the world, could not understand who was better. But in the end Hesiod won, because he praised peaceful labor, and Homer - war. Even 2800 years ago, prizes were awarded not for literary merit, but for the fight for peace!
According to Konstantin Milchin, the Nobel Prize is biased, but this is its objectivity. “It is not awarded for a specific work by a specific author, it, taking advantage of the fame of people who give away millions, draws our attention to a trend, a trend, a literary strategy, to a country,” he says. – Three years ago, for example, a prize was awarded to the Chinese writer Mo Yan. This is a wonderful writer, but when he is awarded a prize, they pay attention to the whole Chinese literature, which we know little about. Alice Monroe, who won the award the year before, writes only about Ontario women. She was faithful throughout her life to theme, genre and locale. Look at this! Maybe if you write about your city, region in your genre all your life, they will give you a million. This is a very important story for Russia. The Russian literary map is similar to a contour map - it is all white, and there are only a few spots on it. Everyone writes about Moscow, St. Petersburg people write about St. Petersburg, there is Alexey Ivanov, who writes about Perm, there is Vasya Avchenko, who writes about Vladivostok. There is not much Irkutsk on the literary map, but I would like more. “Everyone here rushes to write about Moscow or some fictitious province.”
“When you use awards as a source of information about new products, you need to remember the features of each of the awards,” Milchin noted. The big five national awards - the Booker, the Big Book, the St. Petersburg National Bestseller, the Nose from the Prokhorov Foundation and the rather conservative Yasnaya Polyana Prize, awarded by the museum in Yasnaya Polyana - are all very different. And everyone has their own tasks. “What Russia, it seems to me, lacks are industry and genre awards,” Milchin said. – There is a children’s prize, there are very highly specialized science fiction prizes, but we don’t have a detective prize, a prize for humorous literature... The fact is that a special prize can create literature. When the Enlightener Prize of the Dynasty Foundation appeared, we did not yet have non-fiction literature. Over the 5-6 years that the prize has existed, the genre of Russian non-fiction itself has appeared along with the prize. And this is worth developing.”
In our building there lives a woman who seems to be an esotericist. Some people go to see her. Well, reception is a loud word - she retells a couple of esoteric brochures to the ignorant)))
I don’t argue that esotericism explains a lot to those who want to know the explanation of mystical events in their personal lives - esotericism is a collection of explanations and not science - like a reference bureau or Wikipedia for the ignorant
But in fact, why explain to yourself, and even from someone else’s woman for money, that you don’t know how to live every moment of your life and destiny? don’t live then. Life here, in my opinion, you just have to LIVE and not explain it to yourself every step of it.
It’s like in the joke - you don’t need to explain to the bunny how breathing happens, otherwise he will stop breathing)) you just need to breathe without thinking about how the breathing process happens
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In order to create a knowledge economy, it is not enough to build democratic institutions, fair courts and free competition, says HSE professor Mikhail Moshiashvili. In an interview with “Theories and Practices,” he talked about how the development of society depends on geography, why the industrial era has exhausted itself, and how this will allow Russia to jump from feudalism to post-capitalism.
Mikheil Moshiashvili
He worked in several banks, headed the treasury of YUKOS immediately after privatization, was a top manager at Ilim Pulp, Deutsche Bank Russia and Rosavia, as well as executive director of the Skolkovo innovation center. Currently engaged in consulting and teaching the course “Creating Growth Points in a Post-Rent Economy: Industry, Social and Personal Strategies” at the Higher School of Economics.
Why did you start working on theoretical issues of economics? You started with practice, right?
I have a managerial background. Everything I have ever done is related to the transition from state A to state B. The point of the course is to identify the supporting points of growth in a situation where income from natural and geographical resources ceases to exist or ceases to contain a premium rental component. The applied part is preceded by a large academic introduction, the purpose of which is to show the economic-anthropological evolution: how the type of person appears in the economy who is able to create the value of the knowledge economy.
Which countries have made a successful transition from raw materials to knowledge?
None.
But doesn't that stop you from hoping?
Yes, we need to dive deeper into the level of discussions in the spirit of “create institutions, good courts, free competition.” If you look closely at the map, you will find that no economy is successful that does not have a sea coast comparable to the extent of its territory.
But what about half of Europe, at least Austria?
Sea coasts or year-round navigable rivers. Two-thirds of the world's GDP is generated within 100 miles of a coastal zone, and if you add in year-round navigable river basins, that's about 90% of GDP.
Is everything okay where there is water?
Yes. And when people reduce it to institutional effects, they confuse cause with effect. Good institutions where historically the best way for the elite to make money was free trade: merchants sailed the seas or rivers, there were so many sources of income that creating good institutions was very profitable. Contrary to the claims of institutional economists, these good institutions did not emerge 100 years ago. They were already in: the collegial principle of decision-making, the principle of representation (albeit class-based) and fair courts. It is no coincidence that a law appeared there, to which we appeal now. The range of countries that we consider successful has not changed fundamentally. Except that Southeast Asia has recently joined them. And this is no exception - all successful Asia is washed by the seas.
It’s bad where there are steppes, deserts, mountains, rough terrain and very far from the sea. Or like in Latin America: there are seas all around, but the terrain inside is crossed by mountains, and the rivers are in dense tropical thickets, that is, they are unprofitable. Where there is a lively water trade, a high population density and a deep domestic market are formed. And where there are a lot of people, they have an incentive to generate value in different ways. It is important that there is not just a lot of value, but that there are many types of its generation. In Saudi Arabia there is a lot of cost, but there is only one type, and it is primitive, so there is a high power toxicity of the environment.
What does it mean?
Value is not created, but is appropriated by the right of the strong. If your economy is primitive, you don’t need to rely on good institutions, because the main resource is easiest to take by force: a person is localized, he is great, but alone. In the language of historical evolution, this is called the feudal system. Its main feature is the lack of difference between the subjectivity of an individual and a legal entity. When they say that Putin is Russia, this is a correct and sincere formulation of the question. In Saudi Arabia they honestly say that there is no state and its interests separate from the royal family. In France, too, there once was no citizenship, there was the citizenship of the king, the property of the king, his relations with vassals. The one who has the power is the bearer of dual subjectivity - the individual Louis XIV and the legal entity “state”. “The State is me” is not a literary exaggeration, but a scientific fact. An entrepreneur also does not have the subjectivity of a legal entity or an individual. He cannot say that the debts are not with him, but with his company. He will go into slavery if he cannot pay off his debts. The feudal system does not have the principle of limited liability - this is already a sign of an industrial society. Feudal society is class-based, and in relation to the lower classes you have unlimited rights, and in relation to the upper classes - unlimited obligations.
Power is a key factor in economic development and anthropology in general. A person whose formula for success is “to be stronger” and one who has a formula to “be smarter” are opposite archetypes. The first is the steppe nomads, the second is the urban archetype. For the sea nomad, the intermediate type, the formula for success is “to be richer.”
“If your economy is primitive, you don’t need to rely on good institutions, because the main resource is most easily taken by force. In the language of historical evolution, this is called the feudal system."
Explain in more detail how these archetypes arise and interact.
The most successful civilizations are a union of maritime and urban archetypes. You've probably met people who have little interest in what their neighbor has, but want to immerse themselves in their own profession and know everything in the world about it. If you tell them that a neighbor has achieved great results, he will not even react. His main marker is whether he himself has done the maximum. He competes with himself, his main motivator is not money, but curiosity. These are engineers and scientists. It could be a mechanic who knows everything about his business, as if it were an art. This is an urban archetype.
The maritime archetype is competitive and entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurship began with maritime trade. The merchant himself chooses the port of call. Therefore, the ports have always had good institutions. Remember Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice? There it is brought to the point of grotesqueness. The court is seriously considering whether to cut off a piece of meat from the merchant's chest, because he wrote in the bill of sale that he pledged this piece of meat against his promissory notes. And the court is ready to cut out a piece. Everyone is crying, but in Venice there is the rule of law, and if one of the merchants suddenly finds out that in Venice there is the rule of contract, then the court will lose its source of income. And only when a girl disguised as a solicitor comes along and finds legal arguments not to fulfill the requirements of this agreement, everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
When there are both marine and urban archetypes, then while one earns, the second studies, teaches and invents. This is how civilizations of a phenomenal scale are born. All former Renaissance republics have their own identity. Italians are still Florentines, Venetians, Romans. The combination of the maritime archetype with the urban one is so strong that it gives birth to a self-sufficient civilization. Therefore, we still do not understand who Odessa residents are. This is a phenomenon that cannot be classified.
Hans Holbein the Younger, “Portrait of the Merchant Georg Guisse”, fragment. 1532
Renaissance cities are a combination of the maritime archetype and the urban one. The Renaissance took place in the city-republics. There is no such thing as an extended Renaissance state. The point on the map is the source of modernity, and the extended space gravitates towards the archaic. The proto-state of the Renaissance is a polis, a university city. did not appear with Steve Jobs. It was in the Renaissance that the concept of man as a food competitor broke down and man emerged as a source of value. Previously, man was viewed as a vessel of sin. In the Renaissance, the idea arose (not secular, strictly in the bosom of religion) that man is the pinnacle of creation, and everything else was created for his sake, and he is responsible for everything created for him. Note that civilizations are only as successful as they directly embraced the Renaissance. The Russian intelligentsia archetypally inherits the Renaissance because the type of existence of knowledge in the pre-industrial era is abstract knowledge, intended for the Enlightenment. It is not intended for industrial development - knowledge becomes applied only in industrial production. There the engineer meets with the worker.
Do you mean not the engineering intelligentsia, but some more aristocratic and older one?
Engineering intelligence is an unstable concept. One of my main tenets is that industrial production only happens where there is a maritime archetype. Because there cannot be competitive mass production far from the sea.
The first reason is low population density: the steppe nomad moves in search of food, and all steppe civilizations roam gigantic expanses. I entered university when geography was still a major subject for economists. In the early 90s, the standards were hastily revised and it was canceled because geography is not a central subject in either the States or Europe. Only they didn’t think about why geography is so important to us. America has a relatively low population density, but the system of navigable rivers in the States is longer than all other navigable rivers in the world combined. They can afford low population density. One of the biggest misconceptions of economists is that the depth of the Russian market is equated with population size. The market is the space within which the delivery of goods remains profitable. If you produce something in Stuttgart, your market limit is in France and Switzerland. The population density is high, and the logistics gap is tiny. In Russia, market fragmentation is very deep. It makes sense to talk about the market of Central Russia as the densest - it is approximately 32 million people. There are also five markets with a capacity of up to 10 million people, even 7 million. This is a center around St. Petersburg, a center in the Northern Volga region, a center in the Southern Volga region. 50–60% of the population lives in regions with a market capacity of hundreds of thousands of people. These settlements are so remote from others that if you produce something there, it is impossible to deliver it anywhere. In Europe, a city of 5 thousand people cannot have a market capacity of less than tens of millions of people. In Russia, if 100 thousand people live in a city, with a high probability this is its maximum market capacity. This is actually existence in a subsistence economy. Therefore, we have a problem with both cost and quality. For most of Russian history, production was formed by the zero price of labor - serfdom, the Gulag. The revenue part is also generated artificially - by government orders. Non-resource production in Russia has always been limited to the defense industry, steel industry and infrastructure projects. This is everything that cannot be replaced by imports. There was the Trans-Siberian Railway, now there are bridges, stadiums, Sochi. The model of Peter's industrialization coincides with Stalin's in three factors: serf labor, Western technologies and government orders.
Europe has three daughters: North American, Latin American and, in the broad sense of the word, Russian civilization. At the same time, the only real steppe nomads in it are Horde Russia, Muscovy. I do not accept the adequacy of national political boundaries as legitimate units of scientific analysis. I believe that the north of Russia still has signs of a maritime archetype and is similar to the Renaissance republics, dating back to Novgorod times. And the Urals, Siberia and the Far East, with their Old Believer heredity, are communities of the European type. Despite the remote geographical location, the horizontal solidarity of individuals there is stronger than their loyalty to the vertical. And what we are accustomed to calling Russia in the narrow sense of the word is only Horde Muscovy, which has very bizarre relations with the south. The center and south are the basis of authoritarian-totalitarian practices. The south was the Khazar Khaganate, it was the Cumans, the Pechenegs, then the Horde. And first the Horde subjugated Muscovy, and then vice versa. The symbiosis of the center and south gives a very high population density, but since power toxicity comes from there, it suppresses all other principles in Russia. But that doesn't mean they don't exist.
According to estimates of many Russian ethnographers of the 19th century, the Old Believer population made up a third of the population of Russia. Try to subtract national minorities - and you get Russians, including Little Russians, Belarusians, and Cossacks. Subtract a third from there and give an allowance of five percent for the population of the North. And you will see that archaic and modern in Russia exist in approximately equal proportions. And until now, any public opinion poll shows that about a third of the population adheres to strong liberal views. Of course, there is the fact that not everyone is ready to admit this, but any in-depth study gives approximately the same result. Answers to questions about private property and the rule of law are a marker of the liberal views of a third of the population. In this regard, the first elections to the State Duma in the 90s are indicative. If you sum up the votes for Russia’s Choice, Yabloko, Travkin’s Democratic Party, Shakhrai’s party (this is plus or minus all democratic parties), you get 40% in total. Of course, there was a different information field. But with a relatively free choice, you get this layout.
“The gap between the demands of the urban archetype and the social reality of the nomad gives rise to the phenomenon of office plankton, which formalizes feudal relations as if they were capitalist”
Does it still outweigh the archaic?
You can't jump straight to the end of the story. At this level you see 30–40% of the modernist community, at least with a demand for modernity. In Russia and Latin America, the nomad has merged with the urban archetype, there is the intelligentsia and everything around it. And the nomad reproduces feudal social relations.
The capitalist system comes when there is mass industrial production, which by definition we cannot have. There is no force that could establish capitalism in Russia. And the urban archetype wants to live in Europe, and all institutions must be European. Feudal relations should look like relations between independent economic entities, law should be like in Europe, and at the same time the essence of legal relations should be exactly like in Saudi Arabia. You cannot start any business without the approval of the royal family. Only there they tell you this openly, but here they don’t. The gap between the demands of the urban archetype and the social reality of the nomad gives rise to the phenomenon of office plankton. He frames feudal relations as if they were capitalist. exists as an institutional culture, not as a reality, because the intelligentsia would like to see it. But our ideas are not equal to reality, so doublethink is the norm both here and in Latin America. Hence the class of auditors, lawyers, independent directors from the best houses in London, because we want to be treated as the best houses in London.
How can we explain the decline of the Mediterranean from a geographic point of view?
The Mediterranean is too good a place, everyone wants to go there. From the maps of the conquests of all empires over the past 2 thousand years, it is clear that the main goal is to enclose the Mediterranean Sea within their possessions. This was the case with the Roman Empire, and four Islamic caliphates fought for one. And those who are not on the Mediterranean Sea tried to close the entrances there. This is why Gibraltar is a British territory.
This explains why Christian civilization is generally successful and Islamic civilization is not. They were marking time on the same patch, and Islamic civilization was much more progressive. But European civilization had a place to retreat from the Mediterranean Sea: the north is favorable, there are seas, deep-water rivers, fertile lands. Where should Islamic civilization retreat? Or to Africa, to the deserts and plateaus, where there is nothing to eat, or, what is more reasonable, to strive to the east, where at least the Tigris and Euphrates are there. Islamic civilization has become archaic and formed terrible ideological forms. If the same process had happened to Christian civilization, the fires of the Inquisition would have blazed there and ISIS would have been Christian. It's a matter of living conditions. In identical conditions with Christians, Islam does not prevent anyone from developing. Indonesia and Malaysia are more like Taiwan than Afghanistan, which are Muslim countries.
Why did China become successful so recently?
It would seem that there should be a maritime archetype in China, but it is not everywhere there, because the west of China is a typical steppe nomad: the depth of the coast is narrow, and the country goes deep into the mainland. The main economic growth occurs along the coastline. Why did this happen after the war? Historically, Japan dominated the seas in Asia, including the eastern coast of China. Japan created power toxicity and tried to suppress everyone. Before World War II, Japan was the most belligerent country; it felt like the England of Asia. And it was limited first by the British, then by the Dutch, then by the Americans. As soon as Japan's power factor was transferred to American control, the toxicity of power disappeared and the region unfrozen.
In the case of China, I also look at cognitive features. All have gigantic archetypal consequences over thousands of years. Rice requires simple monotonous and mass labor of many millions, which ensures a high birth rate and a huge bias towards men: girls were discarded. This predetermined the cognitive characteristics of the archetype: a person who works hard and primitively has no access to knowledge. He can produce a mass product with maximum synchronicity. The most successful Asian countries are completely switching to English: Singapore, where the majority of Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea. Samsung does not allow speaking Korean. The language factor switches rice heredity. But in Japan it is very difficult with the dissemination of knowledge. All their technologies are an endless improvement in the properties of the product. Why are they creating artificial intelligence? It is not difficult to describe, it does not require neurobiological research. It is very difficult to imitate the European human brain because it reproduces new concepts at an incredible speed. And the hieroglyphic brain is easy to describe, it can be... Japanese technologies are perfect at first glance, but they are practically not replicated anywhere.
Emperor Jiajing on a barge. 1538 / Wikimedia Commons
What is the reason for the success of the UAE in the Islamic world? Is it a matter of position?
This is what I call a settled steppe nomad. The amount of food compared to the eaters is very large. When the elite is full and realizes that there will always be enough food for them, they begin to reinvest. Primitive assets, construction, and the financial sector are growing in the Emirates. These are not renaissance industries: they do not create distinctive value that can be monetized, they do not improve a person's skills, they do not complicate his competencies. If the urban archetype did not exist in the first place, it will not appear. So the Emirates tried to create their own “Skolkovo” - Masdar. All American professors were asked to stupidly multiply their salary by X amount and sign a three-year contract. And three years later, almost all of them left. An ecosystem is needed, and even the most outstanding scientist cannot afford to be cut off from the environment of knowledge dissemination for a long time. The value of importing human capital is to combine it with local capital, and this is not the case in the Emirates. They perceive scientists as a commodity that can be bought or sold.
At the same time, it is wrong to assume that there are dumber or smarter archetypes. Yes, an unevolved steppe nomad is a very primitive creature. There is a calm archetype - urban, because it arose in good feeding areas. The remaining archetypes undergo evolution, and the longer the evolution, the stronger, more effective and fruitful it is. If a steppe nomad has reached a level where knowledge becomes the main value for him, he becomes stronger than everyone else, but it is more difficult for him to go through this evolution.
In the States, the maritime archetype dominates, with the market well connected by rivers. The best way to earn money is entrepreneurship. Therefore, all classical economic theories are about the States. Even in relation to continental Europe, they work to a limited extent. There are different markers of success, a different type of human growth. The sea nomad is good at selling. Its cognitive feature is that it constantly changes impressions and serves as an intercultural communicator, through which cultural transfer occurs. Even in Silicon Valley, he will head an interdisciplinary center.
The steppe nomad is a completely different entity. He always watches, because there may also be little food in the new place. He has the strongest cognitive abilities, but he will never be able to produce a quality product. He is a multi-skilled worker: he must be able to deliver a baby and shoe a horse. Any large high-tech corporation will tell you that if you need to do something unique, breakthrough and in one copy, then it should be entrusted to a Russian, if it is serial, it should be entrusted to anyone but a Russian. There is no stronger archetype for the knowledge economy than the steppe nomad, but their institutions are very bad, because there was no capitalism, there was no industrial production and there never will be. With the help of science and education, the steppe nomad needs to immediately move from feudalism to the knowledge economy.
How can you practically apply what you teach to your students?
There are postulates of economic theory that the knowledge economy completely cancels. For example, the concept of “risk-return”. In knowledge, an error creates additional value, but in business, it’s the other way around. It is no easier for a businessman to have contributed to progress. In the knowledge economy, the scientist's view wins because the industrial age has exhausted itself. The industrial era is characterized by high capital intensity; creating production is the bottleneck. The knowledge economy is not capital intensive. A gadget that costs $300 today can do more than gadgets that cost $10,000 15 years ago. That is why companies that seemed eternal ceased to exist: Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola. In the knowledge economy, there is no guarantee that the next brain won't come up with something better. No brand can be taken for granted. An individual is more important than a legal entity: the person is more important, not his place of work. Therefore, the scientist’s approach to a technological error wins: investment in knowledge is not a form of earning profit, but a form of creating a public good. In a knowledge economy, cost can fall and value can rise, meaning you can get more value for less money. The economic theory of industrial society floats because fundamental categories float in it.
How to develop a formula for the success of a particular country? It is not institutions that create growth, but the type of growth that creates institutions. As knowledge grows, so does its value, and the factor of power loses its attractiveness. The only type of breakthrough reforms in Russia are in the field of education, university technology ecosystems and the role of cities. The ratio of archaic and modern in Russia is in no way worse than in the States, as the latest elections showed. and Clinton are two archaics, and modernity in the person of Sanders quickly left the race. Not because he is in the minority, but because he is doing well. And the fight was between financial capital (Clinton) and mass production, which are doing poorly. All that remained was to find out who had it worse.
“When there are both marine and urban archetypes, then while one earns, the second studies, teaches and invents. This is how civilizations of a phenomenal scale are born.”
Russia needs a tool for transition to a post-industrial state. Institutions will emerge when the bulk of value moves into university ecosystems. And they appear in city-states. The university should become the main city-forming enterprise. The knowledge economy allows you to monetize an intellectual product directly, without production and delivery. In the knowledge economy, it is not the one who produces the product who earns, but the one who invents and develops it. You can also order production in Asia, it’s inexpensive. But you can jump straight from feudalism to post-capitalism only if you have an urban archetype. That is, in the Middle East this is impossible (at least in the foreseeable future) due to the lack of a supporting archetype, but in Russia - yes.
Moreover, everyone can define their own archetype and choose their personal path to success. If you like to delve into one object and find out all its details, then you are an urban archetype, go deeper into the profession. You are a sea nomad if you know how to sell well, if you can turn any invention or item into a product that will look good, if you can assemble a team, relying on its competencies and not suppressing them. Do business. And we have the overwhelming majority of steppe nomads. When you are interested in everything and nothing in particular, when you cannot concentrate, when ideas arise to transform something global, and the next day you cannot remember what you came up with, you will achieve something only if you change a number of activities. A steppe nomad needs to be able to compare several objects - then he understands everything about everything.
How quickly time flies... A quarter of a century ago, director Karen Shakhnazarov made one such wonderful film - “Winter Evening in Gagra”, it’s called. The film was unlucky. The same age as perestroika, acceleration and glasnost, at first he seemed to remain in their thick shadow, and then - then such things began to happen in the country that we all no longer had time for films.
The plot of the film has something in common with the plot of Chaplin's Footlights. A tap dancer popular in the 50s, who once knew success and even fame, is quietly living out his days against the backdrop of new pop “stars”, forgotten by everyone and almost even buried in absentia - just as the very art for which he gave his whole life...
The main role in the film was played by the great Evgeny Evstigneev. Anyone who has seen “Winter Evening in Gagra” will probably remember that touching and slightly sad episode where Estigneev recalls one of the famous and beloved songs in the 50s. Shall we listen?..
“- Alexey Ivanovich, but not this!.. Not this vulgarity... Why do we need this?.. - What are you talking about, a great song! You played it yourself... - Well, you never know I played... When was this... - And I liked the song too! A great song!.."
Ah, these naive, “vulgar” and artless songs of our 50s! How needed they were just then, how in demand! The country was slowly coming back to life after the terrible war years, and people wanted to laugh, love, fool around - an instinctive reaction to recent tears, deaths and horror. It was an interesting time, the second half of the 50s, unique! Invisibly, but quite perceptibly, something joyful, something alive and human clashed - and something wrong, something deadening, something unnatural.
There, at the top, Stalin's inheritance was fiercely divided. It was no longer possible to live as we had lived before—probably everyone felt this. Burning out “infection” with a revolutionary hot iron has already become, for many reasons, indecent. And how can you burn it out if it crawled out of all the cracks, like green grass through cracks in old asphalt.
And the people, our ordinary Soviet people - they gradually shook off their numbness, feeling like people, not cogs, enthusiastically plunging into the joy of simple human feelings. They unbearably wanted to believe that “man is friend, comrade and brother to man.” They laughed and believed in the best...
The stage was then filled with coupletists. For the unforgettable Arkady Velurov from Mikhail Kozakov’s film “Pokrovsky Gates” - and those same 50s are shown there! - it was truly a golden time. “Satire fearlessly fights for humanism and the cause of peace”, - without any fear, Arkady Velurov sang his couplets to the words of the poet Soev:
Arkady Velurov is, of course, a fictional character. But, let’s say, coupletists Pavel Rudakov and Veniamin Nechaev, whose duet was very popular in those years, actually existed. They were well known in our country, and their fearless satire invariably lifted the mood and caused laughter. Usually Veniamin Nechaev began the verse, and Pavel Rudakov put an uncompromising and witty point in it. Here's how it was, let's listen:
Yes, there was a time... "One hundred million tons of TNT"- this is the famous “Kuzka’s Mother”, or “Tsar Bomba”, one of the leading creators of which was Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov...
Between us: I just listened to the couplets “with Pal Vasilich together” and thought that even now many of us still remember them and even, perhaps, consider them classics of the genre. In fact, listen to at least a piece of a modern, very recent performance:
Yes... Rudakov and Nechaev came to the stage from army amateur performances. Demobilization found them in the Far East, and in the first post-war years they performed far, far from the capital's venues - they performed their satirical couplets, participated in various kinds of skits, and announced the performances of other artists. And in 1948 they already began performing in Leningrad, where the all-Union fame of these popular coupletists began.
When I first heard that one of the most popular songs of the 50s - “Mishka” - was written (to the words of journalist Georgy Titov) by verse singer Veniamin Nechaev, and the song was performed by his partner in the fearless satirical duet Pal Vasilich Rudakov... well, I didn’t I believed my ears. The fact is that Rudakov and Nechaev sang about anything in their verses, but here lyrical songs was never in their repertoire. Something is not right here, I thought...
It is believed that the song “Mishka” was written in March 1947: half a century later, this became an occasion to celebrate its anniversary, on which “almost all the Mishas who are at all well-known in the country have gathered”. And the Ogonyok magazine then even dedicated a special note to this significant event, which, in particular, said the following:
At the beginning of March, the song “Mishka, Mishka, where is your smile?” celebrated its 50th anniversary. In 1947, the premiere of this song failed. Even the charm of the first performers Veniamin Nechaev and Pavel Rudakov did not save her from the epithet “vulgarity”...
“The anniversary of the song coincided with the birthday of Mikhail Gorbachev”, - Ogonyok magazine further notes melancholy (the birthday boy was also present there - obviously, as “Misha, somewhat famous in the fatherland”).
In the anniversary solemn speech, jazzman Kozlov [he is, however, Alexey, not Misha - V.A.] solemnly described the hero of the day as “the limit of redneckness in the Soviet Union”.
But what is this... Vulgarity, and once again vulgarity, and scoop, and redneck... Intrigued, we urgently listen to “the limit of redneck in the scoop”!.. Pavel Rudakov, classic recording from 1956:
The picture on the right is one of the many unofficial postcards that flooded the country during those years. Lord, I myself vaguely remember a similar postcard: a very grown-up aunt, a stout-looking uncle, it seems there were doves there too... and, it seems, there was also a locomotive with a star. The inscription on that postcard is etched in my memory forever: “My dear friend, don’t be sad about me, I’ll come back to you!”... However, we are talking about songs today, right?..
Well, let’s shrug our shoulders and talk about “Mishka” - the song is just like a song, there’s nothing particularly terrible about it. If “in the Soviet Union” this was “the limit of redneckness,” then not in the Soviet Union, now, that is, every first song is general chaos...
The only thing that is a little puzzling is that Pal Vasilich Rudakov appears here in the female role: “I made an awkward joke with you.”, he sings without blinking an eye. However... if you dig a little on the Internet, you can easily find out: this song was performed by Rudakov and Nechaev as part of some kind of pop performance - and then the “female role” is quite understandable.
And so... Mishka is like Mishka: he walks around “inflated” because he is terribly “vindictive”, but still he is quite “cute” and even “beloved”. The frivolous and capricious girl clearly regrets her awkward joke and calls on the touchy Mishka to return, but at the same time she slightly pouts her lips and stomps her foot: what can I do if you are so vindictive...
In February 2001, the widow of Georgy (Yuri) Titov told reporters from the Trud newspaper the following story about how her husband wrote the lyrics to the famous song:
... Listening to this song, everyone believed that Mishka was a man. But that's not true. Mishka was a woman named Mikaela, whom Titov called “Mishka” during their intimacy. To talk about this most popular song, you will have to look into the “pre-marital” biography of my dear husband. And it was like this...
It’s not getting any easier hour by hour!.. “Cornet, are you a woman?!.” We had already come to terms with the fact that Pavel Rudakov - perhaps forcedly - uttered words on behalf of a certain playful girl... after all, he is an artist. But now it turns out that that frivolous girl also confessed her love... not even to the young man Mishka, but to the singer Mikaela?..
It doesn’t get any easier hour by hour... We read further with interest:
... When the war ended, he did not immediately return to Moscow, but remained in the Far East, where he worked in an ensemble for some time. There he wrote his famous song. He dedicated it, at the time of another disagreement with Michaela, to her, the singer of the ensemble, who was its first performer.
The song quickly gained popularity. And when guests from Moscow heard it - the duet Bunchikov and Nechaev, famous in those years, they recorded it and then, already in Moscow, began to perform it. And off we go...
Now everything has been clarified. The first paragraph of the memoirs is completely refuted: the singer Mikaela is that same playful girl. And Mishka is still not a woman, but a man who only took as his name the affectionate nickname of his dear Michaela... Well, the version is accepted (we note, however, that the above-mentioned Vladimir Nechaev, who sang in a duet with Vladimir Bunchikov, is not at all Veniamin Nechaev, with whom Pavel Rudakov performed “Mishka” and sang satirical couplets; but this is so, in parentheses) ...
In general, no one ever saw any crime in the fact that Pal Vasilich Rudakov sang the text on behalf of the girl: he did not hide it. Rather, it even gave the song the necessary ironic shade: in essence, Rudakov and Nechaev and here they performed satirical couplets— about female frivolity. And even now, the text of “Mishka” is not adapted in any way based on gender: it is not difficult to find modern recordings by Margarita Suvorova, Evgeny Dyatlov, and many other performers - invariably with the same text.
Right?.. No, not like that. Now we will see that you and I are naive people and have no experience. And Seva Novgorodtsev, who, as we well know, “sometimes makes mistakes, but never lies,” will convince us of this, of course. True, “Mishka” became an example for him not so much of “blueness” (that goes without saying), but of the general soviet “innocence of morals” of those years - say, in England in the early 60s, such “blueness” would have been angrily rejected by the experienced society there . We listen to a fragment from the radio program “Rock Crops” (January 1994). The last verse of “Mishka” will be performed by Seva Novgorodtsev:
Fragment from the BBC radio program “Rock Crops” (01/14/1994).
“Bear” sounds performed (a cappella) by Seva Novgorodtsev
Undoubtedly, Pavel Vasilich Rudakov, had he lived until 1994, would have been very flattered that a foreign musical authority called him a “famous pop tenor” - the very word tenor suggests that Pavel Rudakov was a singer, but he still was not a singer . It is possible, however, that Seva Novgorodtsev also confused Rudakov with Bunchikov. Happens…
Apparently, this notorious “Bear” sunk deep into the heart of a loyal subject of the English Queen (“I swore on the Bible that I would be faithful to the queen, and I will be faithful”). 15 years later, answering questions from Konstantin Amelyushkin, a representative of the Lithuanian publication Delfi.lt, Seva Novgorodtsev again remembered “Mishka” and shared the following thoughts with readers:
I remember the story of how after the war, in the early 50s, when everything was run by Soviet intellectuals who spoke eloquently about the liberating role of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio and similar things, one day a gap appeared in this Soviet wall. The song “Mishka, Mishka, where is your smile” appeared.
The intelligentsia was completely horrified by this vulgarity, but the people sang it with gusto. Finally, he got his hands on something that was his own, native, and not imposed from above. And this “Mishkin” culture took off, because it turned out that the people existed latently, but had no right to vote...
In their complete horror from the vulgarity of “Mishka,” our suffering intelligentsia found itself in the pleasant company of official Soviet propaganda. “Capable entertainers P. Rudakov and V. Nechaev, creating absolutely uncontrollably, reached the vulgar song “Mishka” and verses of very bad taste”, - this phrase from the Neva magazine is dated 1958.
And since, as we now know from Seva Novgorodtsev, the intellectuals were in charge of everything then, vulgar songs like “Mishka” were not recorded and released in Moscow and, rather, due to the oversight of our main intellectuals. The main flow of records with such “vulgarity” that is “native” to our people came from Leningrad, where censorship restrictions on the part of intellectuals were not so strict. These records were produced, in semi-handicraft conditions, by the Leningrad artel of disabled people, which had different names over the years and which we now conventionally call the “Plastmass” artel.
The leaders of the artel, roughly speaking, made money—at the same time satisfying the huge demand of the Soviet people for “vulgarity.” And Shulzhenko, and Bunchikov with Nechaev, and Bernes, and Isabella Yuryeva, and Gleb Romanov, and Tarapunka with Shtepsel, and even Arkady Raikin and Leonid Utesov - they all went through the modest studio of the "Plastmass" artel. Such now-forgotten pop performers as Alexandra Kovalenko, Nikolai Nikitsky, Kapitolina Lazarenko, Tamara Kravtsova recorded here. Such now widely known performers, such as Edita Piekha, also became popular here.
The demand was huge, the circulation of records was also huge: records from the matrices of the “Plastmass” artel were stamped not only in Leningrad, but also in Lvov or, for example, in Kaunas - however, the demand for them still exceeded the artel’s capabilities. And then the recordings of popular songs - already simply in makeshift conditions - were copied onto the so-called “edges”: on old X-rays and on defective photographic film. The result was very short-lived flexible records, which were then sold, as they say, under the counter and at exorbitant prices. Below you see a fragment of one of these homemade records - just with the song “Mishka” performed by Pavel Rudakov, transcribed from an artel gramophone record.
Yes, the intellectuals who ran everything among us monitored the “innocence of morals” very strictly. Now it’s hard to believe, but even the world-famous “Moscow Nights” did not immediately find its way to listeners: the lyrics of the song contained absurdities and philistinism of such a kind that the popular Mark Bernes simply refused to sing this song. Vasily Solovyov-Sedoy and Mikhail Matusovsky, the authors of “Moscow Evenings,” quite sincerely began to consider this song their creative failure.
The third author of the song can rightfully be considered the then young artist and singer Vladimir Troshin. It was he who managed to perform “Moscow Nights” in such a way that the song instantly became a hit. No, a hit is an understatement. “Moscow Evenings” performed by Troshin became a real symbol of the second half of the 50s. It was difficult then to find a person among us who had never heard this song, who had never sung along with Troshin in a low voice:
Not even a rustle can be heard in the garden, Everything here is frozen until the morning. If only you knew how dear Moscow evenings are to me. The river moves and does not move, All of lunar silver. The song is heard and not heard on these quiet evenings...
The photo you see was taken in the summer of 1957. A couple in love at the battlements of the Kremlin wall... For the first time in many, many years, the Kremlin was open: open not only to Soviet people, but even to foreigners. Then, in the summer of 1957, a completely unimaginable event took place in Moscow: the World Festival of Youth and Students. Tens of thousands of young people from all over the world and two thousand journalists came to Moscow. For two weeks in Moscow, which still remembered the times of Stalin, there was absolutely uncontrolled and massive communication between Soviet people and foreigners. Songs, dances, laughter, arguments and just conversations - day and night, wherever necessary and about what. We met and recognized them and did not recognize ourselves. And what’s surprising is that many people of the most diverse convictions, then devout communists and future dissidents, now remember that in that crazy situation they for the first time felt real pride in their huge country, in its great culture and in its people - open to goodness, sincere and generous...
We didn’t produce that many films in those years, and each new film was watched by the whole country, as if all together. The film “Carnival Night” was extremely popular: in 1956 alone, fifty million viewers watched it. Simple songs from “Carnival Night” sounded everywhere: “...Too five?.. To five. But five minutes isn’t much!..”)- how meaningful these words seemed. And “Five Minutes”, and “Good Mood”, and a song about a boy in love - they were sung in the movie by an unknown VGIK student Lyudmila Gurchenko, who instantly became a “star”:
If someone was abandoned by a friend in misfortune, And this act penetrated your heart - Remember how many good people there are: We have much more of them, remember about them! And a smile, without a doubt, will suddenly touch your eyes. And a good mood will never leave you!..
Song "Good Mood" from the movie "Carnival Night".
In the film, this song is performed by a very young Lyudmila Gurchenko.
Everyone instantly fell in love with Lyudmila Gurchenko; her “wasp” waist aroused both envy and admiration. And few people paid attention to the name of the director of “Carnival Night” - some kind of Eldar Ryazanov. “Hussar Ballad”, “Beware of the Car”, “Irony of Fate”, “Office Romance”, “Garage”, “Station for Two” and “Cruel Romance” - none of this has ever happened before. All this was yet to come...
The unique atmosphere of that amazing time - the late 50s - was created not only by “Moscow Nights”, “Five Minutes” and “Good Mood”, not only by the official “Anthem of Democratic Youth” (“Children of different nations, we live the dream of peace...”) or, for example, the then most popular song “If only the boys of the whole Earth...”. Not only “Make a date as soon as possible”, “They call me ugly”, “Lonely accordion” (“Everything froze again until dawn…”) and many other wonderful Russian songs - not at all. After all, even before the festival, the country was overwhelmed by an unprecedented flow of foreign melodies, which - with Russian lyrics and performed by popular singers - very quickly became widely known and loved.
Although your land is far away and I don’t know the language, but you visited my country and left this song for me. I hear: Hey, mambo!..
Like this. They lived hard, they lived poorly: just think - only ten or twelve years have passed since the terrible war ended. They cried and laughed to tears, loved and did petty dirty tricks, lost friends and found enemies, raised children, worked hard - everything is like everyone else. They didn't complain. They believed in themselves, in their country. They believed in a better future. They believed - and this is perhaps the happiest and most remarkable feature of the late 50s.
We welcomed representatives of “progressive humanity” with open arms and open hearts. They discovered French cinema - Gerard Philippe, Rene Clair, Simone Signoret... They could not resist, and did not try to resist, the superhuman charm of Yves Montand - film actor, chansonnier, public figure and, as everyone said, a great friend of our country.
Montana’s popularity was so great in our country that it was even reflected in Boris Mokrousov’s song “When a Distant Friend Sings,” soulfully performed by Mark Bernes:
The thoughtful voice of Montana sounds on a short wave, and branches of chestnuts, Parisian chestnuts, looked into my window. When a distant friend sings, It becomes warmer and more joyful around, And long distances are shortened, When a good friend sings!..
You have now listened to a wonderful roll call of two charming voices. The song that Yves Montand sings here at the very beginning is written to the melody of “Lonely Harmony” by Boris Mokrousov - but this, however, is where all its similarities with “Lonely Harmony” end. The French text, “Le joli mai”, is not at all a translation from Russian... however, like the text of another song, “Ami Lointain”, it is not Montand’s answer to his “distant friend” Bernes.
But no one listened to any of our French lyrics - it was enough that our melody sounded, and it seemed that everyone was singing about the same thing and that they loved us just as we loved ourselves. It was impossible to get tickets for the “Ivan Montana” concerts, and many still remember the comic song of those years, which was sung to the tune of “Distant Friend”:
The thoughtful voice of Montana sounds in the Luzhniki Palace. Both dad and mom want to see Montana, but they just can’t. When Montand sings in Moscow, the student's pocket becomes empty, And food costs are reduced, When Ivan Montand sings!..
It must be said that in those years, the end of the 50s and the very beginning of the 60s, not only Soviet people with amazement, love and hope discovered the “rest of the world” that had previously been tightly closed, but they, too, “people of good will” , experienced sincere sympathy for the Soviet Union, discovering the “Russian miracle” with no less amazement. It seemed to many then: here it is, a real alternative to the deadening lack of spirituality of the world of consumption!.. It seemed...
Let's listen to another “foreign” song from those years. Alexandra Kovalenko (by the way, the mother of People's Artist of Russia Alina Pokrovskaya) was a soloist in the Utesov orchestra in the mid-50s. Unnoticed by leaving for Leningrad, she recorded a considerable number of records at the studio of the Plastmass artel - about fifty. Her performance from the records included, for example, such hits of those years as “Make an appointment as soon as possible,” “Five minutes” and “Good mood” (from the movie “Carnival Night”). In the end, Utesov was tired of such an active side activity of the soloist of his orchestra, and in 1958 he fired her.
Johnny, you don’t know me, You don’t make appointments for me, How many times have you met me, But you didn’t notice me in the crowd, You weren’t friendly with me. In the whole world I am the only one who knows how much you need me, because I need you!..
The fashionable song “Johnny” is performed by Alexandra Kovalenko.
Gramophone record 1542 of the Leningrad artel "Plastmass" (1956)
But there are practically no artel records of Kapitolina Lazarenko, “our Capa,” although her name was extremely famous at one time. In 1953, Leonid Utesov, who then had to look for a replacement for his daughter Edith (of course, only as a soloist), personally invited Capitolina to his orchestra. Much later, in an interview, Kapitolina Lazarenko recalled:
I remember I performed at the Central House of Artists, and Leonid Osipovich Utesov was present at the concert. I came backstage upset because I sang poorly. And suddenly I hear a voice with a husky voice: “Where is Kapochka Lazarenko?” - “She’s over there, sitting behind the screen.” And I’m just crying - I’m so terribly upset. He came up and affectionately touched his shoulder: “Baby, how well you sang. Come work for me”...
The fate of this singer was amazing. She was well known and appreciated at the very, very top - both under Stalin and under Khrushchev. In her own words, under Khrushchev she “traveled all over the world.” She, like no other pop singer of ours, was well known overseas - her successful performances in New York continued for more than a month.
Let's now listen to her performance of one of the hits of the 50s - Eddie Rosner's song "Maybe." This song even has its own legend. They say that in 1956, when Kapitolina Lazarenko toured in Poland, the Poles liked this perky song so much that it was in her honor that they named their perfume “Być może”, which became popular in our country (and in Poland, it seems, this perfume are still in demand).
Maybe he's ugly - maybe! Maybe too silent - maybe. They say they have the wrong manners - maybe, maybe... There are better gentlemen - maybe. But I love this, and I don’t see anything wrong with it - I loved it! I fell in love, and I don’t need another!..
“Maybe” (performed by Olga Kravchenko) is matrix 1572 of the “Plastmass” artel, “Bear” by Rudakov and Nechaev (either a lyrical song or satirical couplets) is matrix 1571, “Satirical ditties” by Rudakov and Nechaev is matrix 1570 , “About Handles” by Rudakov and Nechaev - matrix 1569, “Anything Happens” by Rudakov and Nechaev - matrix 1568:
Mom is at work, and she asked Dad to take a walk with her son. Either it was taken, nipples and panties, He checked about five times. And finally - well done! — Our father is walking in the garden with a stroller. And the son doesn’t sleep, he screams sobbing, Because his dad has forgotten him at home!..
Well, sheer vulgarity, once again vulgarity, scoop and redneck...
“The intelligentsia was completely horrified by this vulgarity, but the people sang it with rapture... And this “Mishkin” culture took off, because it turned out that the people existed latently, but did not have the right to any voice”...
And this vulgar culture went, and went, and went!.. Our poor people finally seized upon something of their own, primordial, dear, vulgar!.. One word - “Mishkin” culture!..
Mishka, Mishka, where is your savings book, Full of chervonets and rubles? The most ridiculous mistake, Mishka, is that you are leaving with her!..
By the way, about the song “Bear”. Looking at the list above and comparing the numbers, you probably thought that “Mishka” on that artel record was paired with the song “Maybe”?.. If so, then you were mistaken. On the other side of the record, performed by the same "famous pop tenors" Rudakov and Nechaev, their song sounded like this:
Someone ordered half a liter and drained it at the counter, Then he walked home with an unsteady gait... If someone approached the house and rested his forehead on the handle - This means that he reached, As they say, the handle!..
Perhaps it was enough to turn over that record and see what it had on the back side— and then many of the complaints about “Mishka” would disappear by themselves?.. Rudakov and Nechaev also sang about the fact that sometimes it is useful to look at things “from the other side.” How many years have passed, but I still remember this signature Rudakov equanimity:
“...He turned out to be a lady - on the other side!”. Eh!.. Got carried away...
... A few months ago, a letter from our reader named Alexandra, who lives in a distant Trans-Baikal city, arrived in the mail of the Solar Wind magazine:
If you are talking about the songs of our time, then maybe you will be interested in my thoughts about the songs with which we lived. While searching online for “A Few Blue Lines,” I listened to so many painfully familiar songs, each of which is a step in life’s journey. And I came to the conclusion that our generation of the 50s is the happiest in terms of songs. We were born to war songs, when on short May nights fire beat in cramped stoves, and this same warm light shone not only in the windows, but also in people’s hearts. Having tried on a blue scarf, we clumsily stomped along to a random waltz, and the boys, perched on stools (like Huck), sang with inspiration, what brave guys they are...
We grew up listening to the amazing lyrical songs of the 50s. We all lived in the neighborhood then, walked in the city garden, where a brass band played, sat on the porch on those quiet evenings and, warmed by an Orenburg down scarf, dreamed of how the apple trees we planted would bloom on Mars, and declared our love... to Cuba. And all of us were led by my school path, during wonderful school years, where my first unforgettable teacher - with gray locks above our notebooks...
We graduated from school, having written a few blue farewell lines to each other and firmly believing that the sea was calling us into the foggy distance and that somewhere in this world the girls from geological exploration were waiting for us in the untrodden taiga. And Marchuk played the guitar for us so invitingly, and who among us did not imagine ourselves as rock climbers to the chords of Vizbor and Vysotsky!.. In the quiet streets of Riga we walked along sleeping houses, sacredly believing that we must wait for the soldier and that love in the world is stronger than all separations ...
Well, you must agree: aren’t we a happy generation?..
For a long time and unsuccessfully, Alexandra searched for the old song of her youth: and its lyrics have been around for decades, since the prom! - was carefully kept on a piece of notebook paper, and she knew its authors - Modest Tabachnikov and Mikhail Tanich, but she had never found any recording of this song anywhere...
...I sang this fable to you, Everyone understood it the way they did it themselves. So why explain to you again what love is.
Look at these faces, at these eyes. They contain both fatigue and, perhaps, wariness. But there is love in them, there is faith in them, there is hope in them. They are still alive, and everything is still ahead of them. This is us…
“So why explain to you again what love is”...
Valentin Antonov, March-April 2011
Soviet Union in the 50s: pictures
