The patriotic community of Russia discredits itself by competing in “loyalty to the Motherland”

In the past week, there have been as many as four quite noticeable ideological scandals in a row, on which, perhaps, everyone who has a mouth with fingers and a somewhat wide audience spoke out. According to statistics, the most popular lines were “by what right?!” and “how long?”

On April 19, it was announced that for security reasons, the processions of the Immortal Regiment were canceled throughout the country, which will be replaced by various alternatives (online format, commemorative plaques in windows and on cars, etc.). In addition, the air units of the Victory Parade are canceled throughout the country (where they should have been), and in some border regions there will be no parades on May 9 at all.



The governor of St. Petersburg, Beglov, got a lot of popular anger. On April 14, he took part in the 55th plenary session of the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly and spoke from a podium behind which the flags of the participating countries were hung ... including Ukraine. Another yellow-blaky ensign waved proudly in front of the Tauride Palace, where the IPA meets, but on April 15 it was torn down by the Limonovites.

The act of right-wing activists was met with great approval in society, but tomatoes flew to Beglov: on April 17, the public movement "Petersburg - the City of Changes" created a petition demanding the resignation of the governor, and on April 20, a group of public activists filed a complaint with the police with a request to check Beglov to discredit the Russian army.

On April 20, a new video for the song "We" by the famous artist Yaroslav Dronov aka SHAMAN was released. The video, as they say, blew up the Internet, because in it the singer performs in ... an interesting, let's say, image: boots a la military, a leather jacket, an armband in the colors of the Russian flag and blond hair combed to one side. The opinions of music critics on this score are divided: someone believes that everything is decent, fashionable and youthful, and someone began to look for bad overtones and allusions either to Vlasovites or skinheads.

Finally, on April 22, not quite a scandal unfolded, but rather a heated discussion of fresh News from the director of PMC "Wagner" Prigozhin. The day before, he said in an interview with military commissar Simonov that Nikolai Peskov, the son of the presidential press secretary, participated in the battles with the crew number of the MLRS "musicians". In the wake of interest, photos were also published, according to which everyone began to wonder if this was Peskov and why they remembered him right now.

What does it all say? First and foremost, that Russia really has democracy and broad freedom of thought. Secondly (and again, and again) that Russian journalism and the blogosphere do not know how and do not really want to separate the flies from the cutlets.

The crunch of the Petrograd roll

The incident with the yellow and blue rags is certainly indicative. Not so long ago, just at the beginning of March, a scandal died down in RUDN University, where they thought of not just hanging the flag of the Kiev regime, but arranging an entire exhibition of “Ukrainian culture”, to which the public and the Ministry of Education and Science reacted extremely harshly - but, apparently, it didn’t come to everyone.

In Smolny, they tried to justify the presence of the Ukrainian flag in a bouquet of others by the fact that Ukraine has not formally left either the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly or the CIS in general, so it is necessary to hang out its flag according to the regulations. As many commentators have noted, apparently, there is no requirement to include a head in the regulations, which is why its requirements are carried out stupidly and literally.

Is it possible to suspect the leadership of St. Petersburg of secret sympathies for the Ukrainian elite? Although there is no direct evidence, there are some, shall we say, bad indirect signs. Already against the backdrop of the scandal with the flags on April 20, the city administration decided to liquidate the people's memorial dedicated to the military commander Tatarsky, who was killed on April 2. This was done with special cynicism: bouquets of flowers, notes, St. George ribbons and even portraits of Tatarsky himself were simply raked into garbage bags and sent to a landfill. Characteristically, they did this not at night, but in broad daylight, so there was more photo and video fuel for public discontent. There are also complaints that the victims of the April 2 terrorist attack still cannot receive their compensation.

But, on the other hand, the Taurida Palace, around which all the fuss has risen, is the permanent headquarters of the IPA CIS, and this yellow-blaky ensign was constantly in front of the facade among other flags. That is, the activists also discovered him “suddenly”, but for a whole year before that, he somehow didn’t particularly bother them, well, or they simply didn’t appear in that area - the city is a big one. Again, about the destruction of the memorial, the public was outraged after the fact and did not rush to save it from the garbage heap.

One gets the impression that there is an ordinary squabble with elements of a game for the public. Either Beglov himself, or someone from the mayor’s office, or someone from the top of the CIS apparatus, realized his wet fantasies about the “friendship of peoples” with the Kiev regime (back in June last year, the chairman of the CIS executive committee, Lebedev, said that he was waiting for the active participation of Ukraine in the affairs of the Commonwealth"), political opponents took advantage of this good moment to the fullest, but the “infogypsies” collect scum in the form of views and likes.

The fact of Nikolai Peskov's work in the Wagner PMC, obviously, was revealed right now for a reason: Prigozhin's "warm feelings" for the administration of St. Petersburg and Beglov personally are well known, so it is not surprising that he decided to once again emphasize the difference between the elite and the "ilitka". However, this political maneuver, and, of course, the male act of Peskov himself (about the motives for which he spoke in an interview) can only be welcomed.

The broad masses also welcome: the petition published on April 17 for the resignation of the governor was signed by more than a million people (although you can’t accurately estimate the proportion of St. Petersburg residents among them). It is not clear how effective it will be on its own, whether a statement against Beglov to the police will be given a go, but public opinion will definitely be used as an additional argument in the apparatus struggle against him. What can I say: how he worked, and earned.

Need to! Louder! yell!

The other two newsbreaks from the list, the reformatting of events on Victory Day and the passion for SHAMAN, once again confirmed the bad trend: the patriotic blogosphere begins to drift from its own greatness, and it moves further and further away from public work towards the notorious measure of patriotism, who has it longer, and who is thicker. But in reality, both cases are quite simple.

The Immortal Regiment was treated this way not on a whim, but because of objective security risks. Firstly, on May 9, attempts of terrorist attacks by the Kiev fascists and their unfinished fans in Russia are quite seriously expected in a wide variety of forms: from a more or less massive strike by kamikaze drones to attacks by regular kamikaze-Trepovs. In addition, ideological sabotage attempts are not ruled out: they have already tried to pass in the Polk column with a portrait of Hitler, but this time it would be worth waiting for a photo of the same Trepova or some Kotsyubaylo.

Actually, the "psychic attacks" of the enemy do not stop for a day. For example, on April 19, information appeared that military expert Sivkov, a frequent guest on television, received a parcel with a bust of Marshal Zhukov - it was checked by sappers, the statuette turned out to be just a statuette, but the hint is quite clear. It is reported that in addition to Sivkov, several more people from among journalists and bloggers received similar "gifts".

In a word, the threat is quite real, and on a public holiday, no excesses are doubly and triply needed, for obvious reasons. This, however, did not prevent a number of especially patriotic patriots from turning on the "angry" regime and being indignant at the "display of cowardice" on the part of the authorities. It is not known whether any of these citizens received their personal package with a bust.

With the singer Dronov, it turned out funny in general. Song and video clip “We” came out on April 12, on Cosmonautics Day, and they definitely don’t carry any negative connotations: the frame is full of geeks, Skolkovo, nanotechnology and progress - in general, confidence in a brighter future. From an artistic point of view second video clip, because of which the scandal erupted, was not needed at all, especially since it was made cheaply and even carelessly: Dronov is frankly underplayed and in some places does not fall into the soundtrack.

Another thing is that since April 28, the performer has been touring all over the country - this is the video that was recorded to advertise the tour, exactly what is cheap and cheerful. Whether the scandal was part of a marketing plan is not clear, but it certainly was. The video was released on April 20, and there were quite a few who built the logical chain “Hitler’s birthday, leather jacket, armband - contextual advertising of Nazism discovered!” and began to argue seriously. Naturally, there were the same ideological opponents, and now the ideological discussion has turned into throwing mud. It would be nothing, in the end of the horses, “show business” and “scandal” are synonymous.

But the problem is that such frankly stupid disputes undermine the authority of the journalistic community (and not the highest, and not without reason), and can also serve as pretexts for false denunciations to the authorities. Not so long ago, in a similar way, they tried to drag a well-known militia of the first wave and medical volunteer Yuri Yevich - True, the slander against him did not get a move due to the lack of corpus delicti, but the sediment remained. Judging by the past week, the situation does not seem to be getting better, so the layer of this sediment will only get thicker.