The pandemic in Moscow is noticeably declining, almost every day there are some new elements of the old life. Then you will walk through the newly opened park, losing your head from colors, smells, sensations. You will take to the dry cleaning the things that have been waiting for her since March. You will see opened small shops, workshops for the repair of clothes and shoes. The city comes to life after two months of troubled sleep, in which every day there were only new nightmares, deaths, pain and human tragedies.
During these months, it was fashionable to speculate whether we will become different after self-isolation. And, perhaps, you can already summarize the cautious results.
There is a theory of “four Russia” of a famous scientist, professor of Moscow State University Natalia Zubarevich. Its essence is that in one state the Russian Federation there are actually four different Russia: Russia of large cities, Russia of industrial centers, Russia of villages and small towns and Russia of national republics. These four Russia existed at the entrance to the pandemic. But now, at the exit from self-isolation, there is a feeling that three other parallel to Russia, again united by common statehood, come out of it.
Russia first is Russia of many officials and businessmen from their environment. They practically did not lose anything for quarantine, they issued special passes to themselves and their entourage. It was their children who arranged street racing on luxury cars in Moscow at night at the very peak of the epidemic. It was their wives who posted on Instagram photos with impeccable, obviously not home-made styling, salon manicure in expensive interiors, where it’s obviously they themselves do not rub the floor.
These officials and businessmen remained the same as they were. They never learned (with rare exceptions) to find human intonations and explain to citizens that the meaning of their life now is in love for people and saving people, and not in reports to superiors. They remained bronze statues in officious interiors, producing an absolutely eerie impression on frightened people sitting at home on shabby sofas.
They themselves did not comply with the norms they were talking about, wandering everywhere with their retinue, without masks and gloves and not observing any distance. Then, these same people were indignant at why citizens are becoming massively covert dissidents.
They, like annoying flies, dismissed journalists and human rights activists, reporting that they were all right. And at this time, people called journalists and human rights activists, begged to help them in the ambulance, which they had been waiting for hours. Doctors dictated to charitable foundations lists of missing personal protective equipment.
They assured that people do not live in poverty and live on savings. And at this time cries for help multiplied: “Buy our family food, we beg. Nothing for the children. ”
This first Russia will not change in any way. It will remain the same, infinitely far from the Russians. Rich, successful, but alien to the most important thing - love.
Second Russia - this is the very Russia that screamed for help. Which went crazy with horror in the news. Which every day worried about loved ones. Ordinary people, who in the last turn can be blamed for the fact that they are somehow not like that, because they believed the programs, where quite eminent people talk about the chiping plot, about the danger of 5G towers, and other nonsense, which - which is generally logical in pandemic situation - was enough during these months.
People who are ready to do any work at all, just to not accept free help and keep pride. They refute any manuals on the “slavish consciousness of Russians” and “genetic fear of officials” when it comes to hospitalizing an elderly mother with a stroke, helping a sick child, and the nearest hospital is redesigned for cove. Yes, even substitute in difficult times the shoulder of a neighbor who was prescribed full quarantine.
This Russia, of course, has changed. She has become bolder, she is learning more and more successfully to demand from the state what is supposed to be. She remembered in the face of everyone who tried to answer human misfortune with dry replies. She will not forget anything.
But there is a third Russia. This Russia is everywhere: at Three stations with the homeless. She hugs them and bandages ulcerated legs. She is in small trucks leaving the doors of the charity fund in the Pskov region. In a warehouse of a large corporation, completely converted into a charity hangar. In the offices of small non-profit organizations that themselves do not understand how to make ends meet, but all have temporarily reassigned themselves to the help of doctors. In chats, where a variety of people have gathered and where each message begins with "Dear volunteers, today I need help ...". At online concerts, which allowed you to listen for free - so that only people locked in apartments will feel a little easier. In luxury hotels, converted into housing for doctors. In bags of feed that are being taken to homeless animals, they are also ill and hungry. In the fan communities, where they decided not only to help the families of football veterans, but also to help the legends of the fan movement. By the way, in bureaucratic and deputy offices, we also met this very third Russia: there were deputies who temporarily threw their badges and crusts into a drawer and brought humanitarian aid to doctors and other needy people. There were also responsive officials who called and talked about people's problems at the most inopportune night time and they instantly became involved in the life of third Russia.
This very third Russia temporarily lost its estates and regalia. Residents of the prosperous center of Moscow and residents of the most remote villages rushed to help other people. Social distance in this Russia - in the true meaning of the term "social distance" - is temporarily canceled.
On airs or video calls these children roam children, cats and dogs: now is not up to glamor and gloss. Instead of photos of glamorous breakfasts - endless white “cosmonaut costume”, boxes from warehouses. At best - a photo from the car.
What will happen next with this very third Russia is not yet clear. Of course, the majority will return at the first opportunity to ordinary, "peaceful" life, and enthusiasts, as they gave all of themselves to people, will continue to give. Someone, of course, will try to extract political bonuses from volunteer history - without this, nowhere. But at the same time, a unique experience when people united on their own, simply around those figures, structures, Internet groups that often proved to be more effective in the field than any officialdom or social security system, would be difficult to forget this experience.
It will be difficult to stand with your head bowed to the same official who is reporting to you, remembering how the department of this official in the city of N simply forgot to pay the due to veterans and stopped answering phone calls. And veterans at that moment were running out of food. It will also be difficult for office clerks to return to the manager’s ordinary world, where days pass between Tinder and the “couch troops” forums, because here it was, real life. It will probably be difficult to return to the good old glamorous circles for those who remembered what it feels like to be alive and not be a “daddy” or “daughter”, but an ordinary person who is judged by deeds, not by hours or earrings.
But it is precisely on the viability of this third Russia that the answer to the question depends on what will ultimately be with the Motherland and with us.
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.