RUSSIAN WORLD The day of eternal and universal Russia

On June 12, Den Rossii, “Russia Day”, the first national holiday of the post-Soviet era, was celebrated with large demonstrations of collective joy in streets and squares, guljanja or “walks” between concerts, games and fireworks. , “from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka”, except in the Belgorod region, on the border with Ukraine, where fighting rages on both sides of the border. To make the Moscow sky more serene, since the time of Mayor Yurij Luzhkov, special substances have been shot high to disperse the clouds, although this year the maneuver was only partially successful, with a sunny morning and heavy downpours in the afternoon.

In reality the party had already been established before the collapse of the USSR, on June 12, 1990, when the “Declaration of Sovereignty” of the Russian Soviet Republic RSFSR was approved – headed at that time by the local secretary of the party, Boris Yeltsin, who was elected president the following year on the same date – and only in December 1991 did the Soviet Union end. It is then a date that remembers the turbulent and dramatic times of the collapse of the empire, with Gorbachev’s desperate attempt to transform it into a Union of independent States. Before Russia, the Baltic countries, Azerbaijan and Georgia, and in May Ukraine, had declared themselves as such. In fact, the name of the anniversary remained “Russian Independence Day” for a long time, and only in 2002 was it definitively freed from the concept of “independence”, which colonized countries usually attribute to themselves when they liberate themselves. of foreign domination, while it is quite grotesque for a colonizing country when it loses its colonies.

In order not to completely lose the already worn-out Soviet link, shortly before the fall of the USSR, on December 8, 1991, the “Commonwealth of Independent States” was created, a nostalgic structure that still exists (at least on paper) and that brought together nine of the fifteen former republics of the Union, except the Baltic countries and Turkmenistan, which remained as an “external partner”, as Ashgabat usually does in any type of alliance or cooperation. Therefore, June 12 has remained, in fact, the celebration of the fall of the Soviet Union, the “most tragic event in all of contemporary history” in the words of Vladimir Putin, and at the same time the pride of Russia. , which goes from Republic to State and Federation, dragging with it all the contradictions inherited from the decades of “salvific” communism, and which today push it to create a new world order, placing itself once again at the center of history by dint of bombs and atomic threats.

To avoid getting entangled with vague interpretations about the origin of the holiday, while presenting the Heroes of Russia decorations to veterans of war and labor, Putin considered it convenient to make reference to Prince Rjurik, the Varangian mythological leader who, According to ancient chronicles, the history of Rus’ would have begun in Novgorod in the year 862, that is, even before the founding of kyiv and when the baptism of Vladimir was still a century away. Former President Dmitry Medvedev, elated not only by the occasion, triumphantly showed a new “interactive” geographical map of Russia that includes the entire territory of Ukraine, whose name has been replaced by the name Malorossija, the Little Russia of centuries past. Russian bloggers and independent media, for their part, organized a marathon in support of political prisoners, titled “You are not alone”, a tradition that has been consolidated in recent years of return to totalitarianism. Around 30 million rubles were raised, less than the 40 million last year, since anyone who donated money from Russia today would automatically be persecuted and arrested, so the collection was limited to exiles who fled the dictatorship.

To support Putin’s proclamations, the inhabitants of Novgorod gathered early in the morning to sing the national anthem on the shores of nearby Lake Ilmen, precisely where Prince Ryurik lived in what was called ‘Menskaya Rus’, the first name of the nascent State that the Varangians initially called Gardariki, the region of the Gard, the “inhabited centers”. That is the origin of the name of the first capital Nov-Gorod, the “new city”, Nea-Polis. The decision to reread Russian history from its earliest roots has been strongly supported by Putin, who in recent times has increasingly turned to “the ancestors” so as not to be drowned by Soviet and Tsarist stereotypes, going back to the origins. from all over Europe. And, more generally, to demonstrate that true Russian patriotism is an energy of universal reach that transcends all times, all borders and all latitudes. The ancestors of the great North are projected into the current global South, the civilization of the medieval West merges with that of the contemporary East, Russia is the true Mother Earth from which all peoples must extract the vital lymph.

After two hours of solemn lesson of the president on ancient and universal history, on behalf of all military and labor laureates, scientists and even “human rights defenders”, the director of the Kurchatovsky Institute, the hero of physics Mikhail Kovalchuk, He thanked Putin: “Thank you Vladimir Vladimirovich, without you none of this would have been possible,” almost as if he himself had come down from the Scandinavian empyrean to create Russia in the time of Charlemagne. Julia Belekhova, founder of the Committee of Families of Fighters for the Fatherland, spoke on behalf of the women, the militant response to the “Mothers and Wives for Homecoming” who want to return to embrace their loved ones chained to the Ukrainian front. At least those who are still alive. All the merit of Belekhova, awarded as a humanitarian activist, lies in the daily publication on the VKontakte social network of videos of soldiers celebrating the conquest of a few kilometers of Ukrainian territory. As explained, Julia “talks to the president every day” to confide in him the deep patriotic feelings of the women of Russia.

As sociologist Igor Ejdman comments, these solemn award ceremonies serve to “offer a pendant to all sisters” (razdat vsem sestram po sergam), a Russian saying that expresses the satisfaction of all social categories, showing their loyalty to the established power, whatever its status or occupation, a typical custom of Soviet times. The winners are also carefully chosen on an individual level (Putin is extremely distrustful in this sense) to show a broad overview of an “immaculate” people, immune to any type of “external influence”, the infection that only Russians are capable of curing. to other towns. Otherwise, the celebrations that took place across the country seemed rather repetitive and unnecessarily emphatic. After all, it is difficult to overcome the super-patriotic fanaticism of the singer Shaman and his song Ja russkij, which by now has become another national anthem. The population is tired of war and always fears new mobilizations, and references to the Rurikid dynasty or pompous awards ceremonies do little to raise people’s spirits.

The Russian holiday that dates back to mythological times is also a way to revitalize an increasingly faded and depressing image of the “Federation” as a result of the contradictions of the ’90s, which recalls the date of June 12. If the Rus’ returns to the primitive “Route from the Varangians to the Greeks” through which the Scandinavian tribes were united with the Eastern Slavs, then this memory should make it clear that the Russians cannot live in any other way than incorporating the other peoples and the vastest territories, projecting itself into the eternal and universal dimension of Eurasia and the “Russian World”, and all the separatist impulses of the Finns and people of the north, of the Caucasians and the Asians, are silenced and summarized in a new epic of conquest and bribery, of purifying meeting. President Putin greeted Patriarch Kirill, recalling that Russia and the Church are two overlapping concepts: one does not exist without the other, and even the “true faith” can only be expressed in the vision of a higher, state-federal entity. cosmic. Russia is Orthodoxy incarnate.

As Viktoria Artemeva observes in Novaja Gazeta Evropa, the Federation is just “the ghost of a country that does not exist and has never existed,” described as “an unfinished love story, typical of the most banal romantic novels.” The man, the powerful one, looks for the woman, Russia, stating that he cannot live without her, then he rejects her and gets her back several times, but he fears that upon her return she will knock him off the throne, so he represses her and her. encloses in the deepest darkness. “Federalism” is an intolerable concept for the current power of the Kremlin, which celebrates the origins of its lineage to avoid looking into the eyes of its descendants and accepting that no man or no people is capable of writing the entire history of the world alone. world.

“RUSSIAN WORLD” IS THE ASIANEWS NEWSLETTER DEDICATED TO RUSSIA.

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