Vitalik works in our video production department. He was born in 1997. A smart, well-read guy.
So last week, we were getting ready to record something. I was clipping on a microphone and, while discussing the schedule for the following week, I said: I still can’t believe November 7 is a workday.
To which Vitalik, very surprised, asked me: what holiday was on the 7th that made it a day off?
Somewhere inside me, little Alexei Navalny — a Little Octobrist and Young Pioneer (Soviet children’s youth organizations), grandson of Grandpa Lenin — fainted and went into convulsions.
Every time I hear “November 7,” a voice in my head automatically recites: November 7 is a red-letter day on the calendar; look out your window: everything outside is red.
And that’s despite the fact that there were never any fervent communists in my family. The attitude toward holidays like that was fairly ironic. But still: school, assemblies, demonstrations, television.
It really seemed as if it had been hammered into our heads and stamped into our cultural code so deeply that several more generations would keep repeating it after us and would definitely know that November 7 was the main holiday.
A huge portrait of Andropov. So that would be 1984, I guess? And those demonstrations kept going at least until 1989.
That means two-thirds of the Russian Federation’s living citizens marched in them with red ribbons, on orders from regional party committees, district party committees, and trade union committees.
And yet here we are: Vitalik knows nothing about it. Nobody cares. Nobody pays any attention. It’s as if there had never been decades of annual ceremonial demonstrations.
And I myself am not experiencing any grand emotional upheaval over it. Sure, it’s strange that the whole country has dropped something it was worshipping not so long ago, but fine. It came and went. All my feelings have to do not with the loss of the holiday, but with how different the new young people are from me and people like me.
That matters. Propaganda does not devour people forever or permanently rewire their minds. As soon as it stops intensifying and no longer gets constant reinforcement, give it a couple of years and that’s it.
And Putin, with all his nonsense about stability, spirituality, “traditional values,” and sovereign democracy, will evaporate from people’s minds in no time. The USSR at least had some kind of ideological foundation; these people have money in Swiss bank accounts instead.
All this trash really does hold the country’s development back. Just as our people’s development was held back by the lying, hypocritical nomenklatura of the CPSU, now it is being held back by the thieves from United Russia (though of course they all came out of the CPSU anyway). That’s why we are poorer than we could have been and lag behind even in areas where we could have been leading everyone.
But overall, we should look to the future with optimism. No Kiselyovs or Solovyovs (pro-Kremlin TV propagandists) will be able to prevent the emergence of new Vitaliks.
P.S. At the same time, let me repeat: I consider the state’s ignoring the 100th anniversary of the Revolution to be a crime. It is a great and terrible date. The Revolution determined the development of our people for 100 years. In many ways, it determined the development of humanity for 100 years. Of course, we should be discussing it and reflecting on it. We should be opening the archives and giving historians a lot of money to research that period, and to produce books and scholarly works about it.
Putin and the current authorities are like Ivans who do not remember their kin (a Russian expression for people cut off from their roots). They do not care about the history of their own people. They have pulled out the bits that interest them, and that’s enough for them. I spoke about this in detail in my latest broadcast.