Non-Aesthetic Regime

We'll win anyway.

Almost forty years ago, Andrei Sinyavsky wrote an article "Dissidence as a personal experience". In 1985 it was published by the emigrant magazine "Syntaxis". Sinyavsky wrote about his dissident ironically, without any pathetic. However, this cheerful and vivid biography included a demonstrative trial, six years of imprisonment and emigration. The article included very important words: "And since politics and the social structure of society are not my specialties, I can say in the form of a joke that I had mostly aesthetic disagreements with the Soviet regime".

These words of Sinyavsky I remembered on Wednesday evening during the concert of Mashina Vremeni (Time Machine band) in Minsk. There are more than two and a half thousand people in the hall. This is not political action, but just a rock concert. Everybody chants "Turn!" instead of slogans, and we have mobile phone flashlights instead of flags. Still, it feels like these are our people, our company. Those who have aesthetic disagreements with the existing power.

We are united not only by the desire for change and hatred for the regime. We are united by good taste and complete rejection of collective farm and condom aesthetics. I believe that if on Wednesday, there had been, for example, Rolling Stones or Krama or Okean Elzy on that stage instead of Mashina Vremeni, the audience would have been the same. This is not only because the rock is the music that free people listen to, but also because it is our style and our aesthetics.

We can be right or left, supporters of peace talks with the authorities or revolutionaries, party members or their complete opponents. But good music, books, history, Kalinowski, the flag unite us. We won't go to Leps concert, won't watch vulgar Russian TV shows, won't combine red and green, won't go on vacation in Crimea. These are our aesthetic, not political principles.

Their aesthetics are Leps and Stas Mikhailov, evening TV shows, weird hairstyles. Numerous banquets with crystal, requests like "Ivan Petrovich, help my nephew to make it to an embassy"), rejection of science, a joy to have other people's fates in their hands. And, of course, the ability to sincerely enjoy the arrest of a neighbour or a boss.

We can go to them for interrogations. We can endlessly knock on their doorsteps to get some three hundred and thirty-third paper to get a trifle. We can write complaints and statements, make appointments, and queue in front of their offices. But all this in the period from 9 to 18. We don't have a chance of being in the same place after office hours. Fortunately, we never go there. Fortunately, they never come here.

By the way, Andrei Sinyavsky became a dissident not because the USSR is an empire evil. He was an ordinary Soviet boy, but during his student years, the country took another cultural clean-up and destruction of modernism. But Sinyavsky loved modernism, so he became a dissident, then a convict, and an immigrant. The reason was the aesthetic disagreements with the Soviet authorities.

We have not just aesthetic disagreements with the regime, but irreconcilable contradictions. Only food, power and television gum unite those whose efforts keep the regime together. Creativity, love and rock unite us. We will win anyway. Where will we go from the submarine? A yellow one.

Iryna Khalip, especially for Charter97.org

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