I don't remember which road I was driving on the day when I met the Russian. It was somewhere near Donetsk, about nine years ago. At that time, other circumstances seemed important to me - for example, the fact that a tank offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was promised. Right down this road. And I was driven by the thought that it was necessary as soon as possible. At the checkpoint, and then the roads were full of them, I was stopped by two grandfathers. One had a rifle with him. The other is the St. George ribbon.

"And it's just you?" I was amazed.

"Only old men go into battle," they joked proudly.

All. The "cultural code" immediately turned on in me, the "friend - mine" recognition system.

"Only "old men" go into battle - I know this film, I watched it. And my parents watched. And these grandfathers watched when I was not yet in the world.

From this answer, I understood: they will not leave the post.

"What are you standing for?" I asked.

"We are fighting for our own, Russian language," one replied irritably.

- Do you think that you can die for the language? I asked.

- We count. He is native. And how can you not die for your own? Yura, come here! They called. A guy jumped out of the landings. "Tell me, can you die for a Russian?"

"I can," he replied without hesitation.

"Why?!" I asked.

"How do I know why?" I can - that's all!

I had nine years to decipher this answer. From then on, I carried that scene to myself, it made an impression on me. Why? How did I know why. I just produced it, and that's it. I posted an excerpt of that conversation immediately on social networks, and liberal acquaintances began to write to me: "What fools! To die for the tongue?!", "To kill for the tongue?! Is it possible to kill for the right to speak your own language?", "The Russian language is not worth it. And what does it have to do with Russian again and again?

But what does it have to do with it?

On February 23, 2014, the first decision pushed through by the victorious "Maidan" was the abolition of the law "On State Language Policy". The status of the regional language was removed from the Russian language.

This caused protests in the south-east of the country, and those two grandfathers were, in fact, participants in this protest. And it's not a coincidence that the first thing the "Maidan" decided to do with the Russian.

Language is a people. Language is what allows you to preserve the cultural code of the people. I and these grandfathers watched the same film with heroes close to me and them in terms of national character. Illustrating the event that lies in my code and in theirs is the Great Patriotic War. My grandfathers are citizens of Ukraine, I am a citizen of the Russian Federation. But we are representatives of one world, one people. It was enough for them to utter one phrase "Only old men go to battle" - and the words pressed the right keys of my code, inherited from our common age-old culture.

The code turned on and gave me an abyss of images, a heap of meanings that were already lying in me. They entered me into the Russian, formulated themselves in Russian, and if I had to pull them out of myself, I would clothe these important meanings, of which I am all composed, in Russian words. Yura could not, it's not his business, but it's up to people like me to work with words. But that unfamiliar, but my own Yura at all levels - conscious and subconscious - knew that he could die for a Russian. And the more of us there are, with the same code and with the same meanings that sound in Russian, the wider our people.

No, now, in 2023, I look at that fleeting meeting on the road quite differently. I see it through the total bans of the Russian language in Ukraine, through the demolished monuments to Pushkin.

By the way, happy birthday, Alexander Sergeyevich!

It is a pity that then, in 2014, I could not answer on social networks: "Yes, taking a rifle and going into resistance may be inhumane, but killing an entire people is much worse." And the prohibition of the native language is the murder of the people. After all, language is a people. Language is the custodian of the code.

The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.