Tagil Is Coming

Lukashenka set fire to the fuse, but did not even understand it.

"August should be sipped slowly, like a pear liqueur" — I think every second person has recently posted this quote of Ray Bradbury on social media. Let's sip, of course, it's a sin not to enjoy the August viscosity. But we seem to have much more serious tasks and even challenges. Moreover, August is coming to an end, and the massive neighborhood vacation continues.

The Russians are coming to us. Daily, uncontrollably, in huge crowds. There are no borders; planes, trains, buses travel at any time of the day, covid restrictions have been lifted, Mir cards are accepted in every stall. And all this luxury blooms in a situation where Europe is practically closed to the Russians, and even if now, during the war, one of them manages to sneak in there unnoticed, the former pleasure is still gone and will never return. It used to be on all sorts of Riviera that they turned a blind eye to Tagil entertainment, because those tourists paid generously, without counting, and sometimes left bigger tips than the bill itself. And now the cards of Russian banks do not work, they do not open accounts for Russians in European banks, and even those that existed before, from the well-fed pre-war times, are blocked. They do not let Russians settle in hotels, do not rent private apartments to them, and in general, Europeans hoist Ukrainian flags on every second house, which brings monstrous mental suffering to Russian tourists.

And here, it turns out, quite near and without any borders, there's a wonderful miracle, a marvelous paradise. There's a McDonald's, imagine that. There are Mango and Zara stores, without restrictions. There are banks where any Russian can open an account and order Visa or MasterCard that have left their homeland. In Russia, they are meaningless anyway, but who knows — what if tomorrow the Europeans get tired of being principled, as it has already happened, and they will slowly begin to open borders in anticipation of Russian wallets? And in general, what a wonderful nostalgic feeling — plastic in your pocket. In a word, all joys of life now inaccessible to Russians are concentrated in Belarus. Moreover, there are casinos on almost every corner, and girls who sing Ukrainian songs on Zybitskaya are thrown behind bars, so there is no threat to personal safety. It seems to the Belarusian authorities that everything has turned out perfectly: money is flowing into the budget like a river, the banking sector has revived and even started up, hotels are not idle, the roulette wheel is spinning around the clock. An economic miracle is a miracle that happens contrary to the laws of logic. And this miracle is helped by either war, or sanctions, or a nuclear explosion.

But Lukashenka and his faithful comrades did not understand that they set fire to the fuse with their own hands. Russian tourists come to Belarus and behave as if they were in Russia. Parking on lawns. They try to pay in Russian rubles in stores and refuse to understand why they suddenly don’t accept their native ruble with an eagle in Minsk. They get into fights in bars and karaoke and are not very worried when they get into a jail: everything is in their native Russian language, which means that it will be possible to agree on something.

Well, here the cord started blazing. I'll explain: in the same way that Putin became the main "Ukrainizer", because of whom even those who spent their whole lives in Ukraine speaking Russian or Surzhyk began to speak Ukrainian, Belarusians will soon speak Belarusian thanks to the invasion of Russian trade and banking tourists. They will speak in protest. They will politely shrug their shoulders at every "how to get into the casino": sorry, I don’t understand you. Sellers and cashiers will also quickly learn to say with an expression of incomprehension on their faces: please explain what attracted your attention in our store, in pure Belarusian. Belarusians are well aware that the "Russian world" does not always come in tanks, more often it creeps in from television screens in the form of Malakhov or from the station in the guise of a peaceful tourist. And Belarusians will resist bloodlessly, calmly, with dignity. Simply switching to a language that has been destroyed for many years by the very creeping "Russian world". And then — without any flags, marches, candles in the windows — the regime will completely imperceptibly receive a united, concentrated society that speaks a language foreign to it. A society that knows how to drive the enemy away with a movement of the hand, an ironic look, a word and, most importantly, the power of contempt.

Lukashenka will never be able to cope with this society. Because they will speak different languages. And also because Lukashenka for Belarusians is exactly like this tourist, jumping naked from the balcony shouting "Tagil!" Moreover, this is what he really is in his own eyes.

Iryna Khalip, exclusively for Charter97.org

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