Miloserdov wrote a great column. A really great one. You could practically break it down into quotations. The ugly “sovok” (a derogatory term for the Soviet mentality), cursed many times over even during the USSR and ultimately helping bring it down, is flourishing in the non-systemic opposition. An opposition nomenklatura has emerged — “twice-over dissenters,” honorary human rights activists, and so on. This is the worst thing that could have happened. “Sovoks” love titles and presidiums, sincerely believing that everyone else loves them too. These Soviet-style “generals of the opposition,” Ogurtsovs and Co., have invented epaulettes and briefcases for themselves — a National Assembly, to which they decided to appoint themselves, along with those flattered by phantasmagorical titles like “former deputy on an unregistered State Duma party list.” Who elects this Assembly? Whose votes do these people represent? Even that pig-faced State Duma deputy from “Yedra” (slang for United Russia) does at least have real votes behind him. To a considerable extent, they are the votes of the indifferent. But for the most part they are still the votes of people who have not forgotten that not so long ago their salary was the equivalent of just $10. The pig-face deserves no credit for that, of course. But what do you want to offer these people? Perhaps the heroic life of builders of the greatest empire from sea to sea, space and lasers, thousands of T-90 tanks whose turbine roar makes Poland and the Czech Republic tremble, a predatory golden coat of arms atop hundred-meter marble columns on the shores of oceans where our marines have landed? Or perhaps — a cleverly constructed, muscular nation-state, a respectable member of the EU, Ordnung, polite and efficient police, political correctness, and small business? *No, my dear friends, no. What you want to offer them is yourselves in place of the pig-faces. *http://www.apn.ru/opinions/article19891.htm I’m not saying this because I strongly dislike the National Assembly. The idea itself isn’t so bad. And the column really is very good. If you haven’t read it, do.
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