And this was the case everywhere Putin's army left.
Many Ukrainians explained this phenomenon by a simple lack of culture and concluded that the aggressor nation was inherently inferior. But it seems to me that this is not the point at all. After all, they do not defile their villages, from where they were called to war, they do not defile in their neighbor's house, and even if they kill this neighbor while drunk, they do not crown the matter by relieving themselves in his saucepan.
The conquerors secretly, viscerally sense their great mission: the destruction of civilization.
At school we diligently studied Maxim Gorky's essay "V. I. Lenin". There is a fragment that noticeably falls out of the general sweet narrative:
"I remember the following fact with disgust: in 19, in St. Petersburg, there was a congress of the "village poor". Several thousand peasants came from the northern provinces of Russia, and hundreds of them were placed in the Winter Palace of the Romanovs. When the congress ended and these people left, it turned out that they had not only soiled all the bathtubs in the palace, but also a huge number of valuable Sevres, Saxon and Eastern vases, using them as chamber pots. This was done beyond the force of need - the palace toilets were in order, the plumbing worked. No, this hooliganism was an expression of the desire to spoil, to discredit beautiful things. During two revolutions and the war, I have observed hundreds of times this dark, vengeful desire of people to break, distort, ridicule, discredit the beautiful." Philosopher Mikhail Epstein (Atlanta, Georgia) devoted space to this amazing passion in his work "Russian Anti-World". Having quoted Gorky, he argues with the author: a Russian person shits in a vase not because he is alien to the sense of beauty, and certainly not because he feels disgust for beauty. The homespun person in Russia, Epstein believes, is still firmly connected to the earth. "Feces are the substance of the earth", and "a person returns to it what was digested in him, the dead part of himself." But why does he, this person, return what was digested in him, not to the earth, but to porcelain services and down feather beds? An interesting question. Recently, in Germany, after many years of silence, eyewitness accounts of the Soviet occupation of 1945 have begun to appear. Almost every such publication notes a custom that surprised the Germans - to cover everything with a layer of their excrement.
But okay, let's not trust the Germans (what if they are Russophobes). Let's honor our compatriots. Here is a frank entry by Yuri Nagibin from his front-line diary:
"We moved into a two-story house today. Torn wires are hanging in the rooms, broken furniture, a ficus tree that has dried out to the point that when touched, it crumbled, books on the floor - on medicine, engineering, the Hutte reference book, etc. And shit is everywhere, even on the table, the stove, the windowsill, in the shade of a hanging lamp. At first, I did not understand this passion of people to shit in abandoned places - houses, gardens, yards. Then I tried it myself and found amazing pleasure in it."
Nikolai Nikulin (art historian at the State Hermitage Museum), who left wonderful memoirs about the last period of World War II, describes an incident when he, as a young commander in Germany, tried to explain to his subordinates that it was not good to defecate in occupied German houses:
"In the city of Allenstein, we were quartered in a house abandoned by the residents. From one room, we had to pull out the corpse of an old woman lying in a pool of blood. All the furniture and things were in place. The cleanliness and abundance of all kinds of appliances were striking. The kitchen was shining with tiles... Opening the door, I found Guard Corporal Kukushkin, doing his business in a Sevres dish...
"What are you doing, you bastard," I yelled.
"What?" Kukushkin said meekly.
I was furious, and Kukushkin was perplexed. He pulled on his breeches and calmly went to sleep. I spent the rest of the night feverishly thinking about what to undertake. And I thought of it – but I couldn’t think of anything more idiotic. In the morning, when everyone woke up, I ordered the team to line up. Apparently, there was something on my face that surprised everyone. Usually, I never practiced official line-ups, inspections, etc., which were prescribed by the army regulations. There was a war going on, and we sneezed at all such nonsense. And then suddenly – “At attention! Attention!”… Everyone obeys, although there are many in the line of people of higher rank than me. I order Kukushkin to come forward and give a fiery speech. It seems that I have never been so eloquent or spoken so inspiredly in my life. I appealed to conscience, spoke about the Beautiful, about Man, about the Highest Values. My voice rang out and shimmered with the most expressive modulations. And what happened? I suddenly noticed that the entire line was smiling from ear to ear and looking at me affectionately. I finished by expressing contempt and censure to Guard Corporal Kukushkin and dismissed everyone. I did everything I could. In two hours the entire Sevres service and all the dishes in general were soiled. They even managed to soil the bookcases. Since then I have no longer fought for Justice or for the Highest Values."
Meanwhile, if these soldiers had possessed the gift of eloquence, they could have read the young officer their lecture - about their highest values, about their sense of justice.
"The Russian World" lays its larvae wherever it goes
Polish writer Stanislav Lem tried to explain the littering of houses in Europe during the triumphal march of the Soviet soldier-liberator in 1945:
"With this they took revenge not only on the Germans for what the Germans had done in the USSR, but also took revenge on the whole world outside their prison with the most vile of all possible revenge: after all, they shit on everything - no animals demonstrate such, so to speak, EXCREMENTAL cruelty, which the "Russians" demonstrated, clogging and filling with their excrement the destroyed salons, hospital rooms, bidets, toilets, shitting on books, carpets, altars; in this shitting of the whole world, which they could now (what joy!) kick, crush, shit on..."
Among the numerous synonyms of the word "defecate" ("to go to the toilet", "to shit", "to shit", "to relieve oneself") we find something unexpected in the dictionaries: "to lay down a larva". In our context, this is a surprisingly accurate definition. You couldn't say it better. The "Russian world" lays down a larva wherever it goes. What will grow out of it?
This is not just revenge on those who lived more freely, richer, more intelligently. This is a message that describes the future of the occupied territories.
We clearly see that if the "Russian world" lingers where it came, life will degrade, laws will be replaced by concepts, the economy will be simplified to a medieval level, garbage dumps will grow in place of blooming gardens, and art and culture will die. We can clearly see this in the example of the once flourishing resorts of Abkhazia, in the example of well-kept Donetsk and Mariupol, which have been turned into bandit enclaves or even destroyed. The conquerors latently, viscerally feel their great mission: the destruction of civilization. Any. Not just European. This is not a relationship between winner and loser (as happens in wars), this is a message to the surrounding world, which contains a symbol of the future. To emphasize that we are dealing with opposing ourselves not to European civilization, but to any civilization in principle, I will give an example from another work that we studied in school. Leo Tolstoy in "Hadji Murat" describes a Chechen village from which Russian soldiers had just left:
"Having returned to his aul, Sado found his saklya destroyed: the roof had collapsed, and the door and the pillars of the gallery were burned, and the inside was fouled... The grown-up children did not play, but looked at their elders with frightened eyes. The fountain was fouled, obviously on purpose, so that it was impossible to take water from it. The mosque was also fouled, and the mullah and his mutalims cleaned it.
The old owners gathered in the square and, squatting, discussed their situation. No one spoke of hatred for the Russians.
The feeling that all the Chechens, young and old, experienced was stronger than hatred.
It was not hatred, but a lack of recognition of these Russian dogs as people and such disgust, loathing and bewilderment at the absurd cruelty of these creatures that the desire their extermination, like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders and wolves, was as natural a feeling as the feeling of self-preservation…"
The natural feeling of self-preservation should have told the peoples where the "Russian world" had come with weapons in hand: stop it! The coming "Russian world" speaks clearly and with the utmost persuasiveness. But it is easier to close your eyes, plug your ears and nose, right?
Andrey Malgin
Edited by the publishing house "Freedom of Speech"
