Has anyone become interested in our youth?

The book of retired FSB General Yevgeny Savostyanov “I Closed the CPSU” since the beginning of the year has been ranked second in the “Leader of Sales” section in the House of Books on Novy Arbat.

This fact seems to me indicative, remarkable. But about him – at the end of the article.

Yevgeny Savostyanov is one of the prominent figures of the legendary times of perestroika and glasnost, the era of the first democratic reforms in Russia. Moreover, he was not so much a public politician as a generator of ideas, an organizer. Few people know that in 1989 the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR did not allow the candidacy of Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, nominated for people’s deputies by 55 collectives, to be elected at the general meeting of the Academy. Then Savost’yanov, a research fellow at the Institute for Problems of Comprehensive Development of the Subsoil, suggested sending to the general meeting of the Academy of Sciences not voiceless electors, actually appointed by the nomenklatura, but electors with instructions from the staff. And he read out the prepared text of the order. The idea instantly took possession of the masses, spread to other institutions, and a group that later became the “Club of Voters of the Academy of Sciences” was doing the same. Thus, the resistance of the nomenklatura was crushed – all 12 candidates from the democracy became people’s deputies of the USSR.heskogo block. Their names are Andrei Sakharov, Vitaly Ginzburg, Roald Sagdeev, Pavel Bunich, Gennady Lisichkin, Nikolai Petrakov, Nikolai Shmelev, Sergei Averintsev, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Yuri Karyakin, Alexander Maksimovich Yakovlev, Georgy Arbatov.

Savostyanov was the head of the election headquarters of Academician Sakharov.

Then, at the founding conference of the Interregional Association of Democratic Organizations, he came up with the idea of ​​an all-Union action for the abolition of the 6th article of the USSR Constitution, which determines the omnipotence of the Communist Party in the country. And he came up with a poster – the crossed out number “6” – with which people went to rallies.

In the title photo, a column of demonstrators is moving towards Manezhnaya Square, where on February 4, 1990, a rally was held that gathered 300,000 people.

In March 1990, the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR abolished Article 6 of the Constitution.

And so it happened that a year and a half later it was Evgeny Savostyanov, by that time the general director of the department of the mayor of Moscow, who put the last point in the very existence of the CPSU – in the literal, physical sense, closed the Central Committee of the Communist Party. On the second day after the failure of the coup organized by the top communist nomenklatura, on August 23, 1991, he entered the famous building on Staraya Square and announced:

“Attention attention! Says the civil defense radio center of the complex of buildings of the Central Committee of the CPSU!

Yevgeny Savostyanov, General Director of the Moscow Mayor’s Department, at the microphone.

In accordance with the decision of the President of the USSR, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and on the basis of the order of the Mayor of Moscow Gavriil Kharitonovich Popov, today, August 23, 1991, work in the buildings of the Central Committee of the CPSU is stopped from 4 p.m.

All those in the buildings must leave them no later than 16 hours. Persons remaining in the building after this time will be arrested.”

Then there was an unexpected job for an intellectual, a democratic oppositionist, as head of the Department of the State Security Committee – the Federal Counterintelligence Service for Moscow and the Moscow Region, then – the position of deputy head of presidential administration Boris Yeltsin, attempts to unite the democratic movement, to resist the onset of bureaucratic revenge, which was launched by the former democrat Yeltsin.

Hopes for the future, alas, did not come true.

Savostyanov spoke about this on May 22, 2004 at a meeting dedicated to the 15th anniversary of the First Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR.

“Whatever happens in the future, all of us will surely be able to say:“ These were the best years of our lives.

They were the best, because previously hidden hopes for changes for the better, for freedom, for getting rid of communist obscurantism, from total lies suddenly, in a matter of months, became a reality …

They were the best, because in those months they believed us, listened to us, hundreds, thousands and millions of people followed us – the true heroes of the peaceful revolution of liberation …

Today is probably the most appropriate occasion to admit that our mistakes, our moral weakness, self-interest, careerism, indifference to other people’s troubles, and sometimes even ordinary cowardice – all this gave rise to the collapse, if not of the democratic idea, then of the democratic movement.

We could take power in earnest and for a long time, we could use it to a much greater advantage for the people, we could now be citizens of a great, worthy and free country. They could, but they couldn’t. And we have only ourselves to blame. We can only hope that mistakes can be corrected in our lifetime.”

Evgeny Savostyanov’s book was published by the publishing house “Sinbad“, in the series”90s: Personalities in history“.

This is not just an encyclopedia of Soviet and Russian life at the turn of the era, but an encyclopedia of the democratic movement in Russia at that time. Many pages in it are devoted to life in the USSR. The author knows her from all sides – not only as an engineer, a researcher at an academic institute, but also as the most ordinary Soviet hard worker. He was a GROZ – a longwall miner in a coal mine in Kazakhstan, worked at a giant magnesite quarry in the Chelyabinsk region, at the construction of the Inguri hydroelectric power station in Armenia, on Taimyr, in the gold mines of Chukotka, and saw a lot more. Before us in the book is the life of a vast country, in some ways bright, peculiar, paradoxical, in some ways dull, with the dictate of ideological slogans and schemes, and the general semi-skeptical attitude of the population towards them. For example, in the complete absence of information independent of the authorities, some people listened with their ears to the broadcasts of Western radio stations. “There is a custom in Rus’ – to listen to the BBC at night.” Transmissions were mercilessly jammed – special jamming towers were installed throughout the country. But…

“Listening was the easier, the farther from the major industrial centers you were. In 1972, he enlisted to wash gold in Chukotka. One of the first vivid impressions of the life of the mine: a father and son are sitting and having lunch in the dining room, and the radio set on their table is broadcasting the Voice of America. Later, in the local radio room, I read the order on the regional communications center. The order stated that the radio operator of some village included the transmission of the same Voice of America in the local radio network, pointed out the inadmissibility of such actions, and generously handed out penalties. Apparently, only the fact that there was nowhere to send them further than Chukotka saved the perpetrators from big troubles.

Such was life.

And here I will return to a private kind of fact: Yevgeny Savostyanov’s book “I Closed the CPSU” takes second place in the “Leader of Sales” section in the House of Books on Novy Arbat. Why does this strike me as remarkable? Yes, the name is loud, even outrageous (although everything is true), attracting attention. But, on the other hand, what, excuse me, is the CPSU? Who remembers her, except for us elders? When the current 30-year-olds were born, she was gone. Even the turbulent years of perestroika and glasnost, the victories of democracy, are already shrouded in a veil of oblivion for many. And what can we say about more distant Soviet times.

About ten years ago I began, for various reasons, to write about the absolute lack of interest in the recent, and for young people, in the distant past. The fact that if we were eagerly interested, looked for information in forbidden and closed sources, and in published books read between the lines information about life in Tsarist Russia, about the 20s, 30s and 50s of the Soviet Union, then the current young Russians deeply violet everything that really was in the USSR. Although this is a special era. Atlantis sunk into the abyss. By and large, historically, this is an incredible (or probable, natural?) experiment set on us, our fathers and grandfathers. Isn’t it interesting? Absolutely. And the seemingly recent bright period of democratic transformations, struggles and hopes, too. But only 38 years have passed since the beginning of perestroika and glasnost.

But here’s the fact – the high rating of Yevgeny Savostyanov’s book “I Closed the CPSU”. Can we assume that something is changing in the public mind? And our youth becomes interesting to someone? Of course, this is not about “our youth”, but about what happened in the history of the country, about understanding, which is always necessary for the present and future.

Sergei Baimukhametov.