His empire was in the forest – Picture of the Day – Kommersant

Today, Komsomolskaya Pravda editor-in-chief Vladimir Sungorkin is buried at the Troekurovsky cemetery. Kommersant’s special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov recalls him.

He always stood up for his own people to the death, anyone will confirm this. Pull it out first, then sort it out. He had someone to protect, he had a whole empire, he created it with his own hands.

But I’m not talking about the newspaper now wanted to say. Everyone will write and say about different things, but I, maybe, about the main thing. His real empire was in the forest. This empire still had to be reached. Drive home in the Tver region, transfer to a small all-terrain vehicle open to all winds with frantic cross-country ability – and go completely off-road through forests, meadows and fields, when branches and stems whip in the face, and glasses do not help, but you do not slow down, and swamps – where there is no end to anything.

There is absolutely no one there but you, and there cannot be, and there, suddenly resting against a hut, or something, built by him and looking in these inhuman places like a true miracle … How can he find it here, after all they climbed into the most ancient wilderness … And there is no Internet … And resting on this hut, you understand that here is the holy of holies, the capital of his real empire.

Here the moose can come right at you, staring at you with its crazy late-spring bloody eye. And he has one remedy against moose and wild boars – to walk through the forest with a receiver at full volume, and this is the KP radio, of course …

Maybe he was looking in these open spaces for what he left in the Far East – his soul. And found.

And here, in the hut, when all the baskets are filled with either morels, or already chanterelles and white ones, one day the same phrase sounds, which either he uttered with all his heart, or another comrade, no longer remember: “In the forest they don’t have us take. The city can.”

The point is not that it’s better not to even think about who they are, because no one has an understanding until the end, but that it’s true: in the city they can, but not in the forest, they won’t take it.

And they took it after all on the way out.

In the forest, on the river, in the meadow, you would never take it.