Plaster Ghosts

Lavrenty Palych, don't you seem to become a fixture?

"Today children have a holiday: Lavrenty Palych Beria has come to visit us today." This comes from the thirties. Or from modern times, the author comes from the Cherginets Writer's Union, who knows. Anyway, Lavrenty Palych Beria is still here. He is also in brains of those who dangle bright pioneer prospects before children's eyes.

It would seem that only yesterday my son and I went through the agitation to join Little Octobrists - and now it turns out that two years passed and now we face stiff Soviet pioneers of the past - plaster ghosts, tin zombies persistently trying to drag modern Belarusian children into their dead world.

I thought that at least propaganda methods would be adapted to conditions of the modern world. For instance, to launch the channel about a dashing life of pioneers and get a million subscribers on YouTube. Or a computer game, something like "Call of duty: pioneer heroes." Or call all this stuff scouts and say children that all of America is the member of the organization including Ilona Mask and rap stars. But they don't. They keep practicing the same old methods which Lavrenty Palych surely would have approved.

Children today are tempted by pioneering: they are told that in the Soviet Union all those who were not a pioneer were considered losers. And the pioneer organization exists only in Belarus, Russia and North Korea, that is it is unique. And if you are a patriot of your country, you simply have to join pioneers. And that those who become the member of it will do good things. Other will behave like bad boys.

I call my friend, the teacher of a college: "Children are said like it!" My friend sums it up: "This is crap. They say what is ordered. According to print screens, or something of this kind."

Really... It looks like pizza delivery, of course. You call to order 2 "Margaritas" and you stay on the line for 10 minutes and they offer you to get involved in a sale "order 10 pizzas and get a ketchup for free." Ladies in the delivery service may not want to tell about ketchup a hundred times a day, but they have to act "according to print screens", that is, according to the instructions prescribed by the authorities." Pioneers are the same pizza for the regime. The chow down. The more freshly prepared pioneers will be delivered to the state table, the more chances that they will grow obedient, join the BRYU and, like the Atlanteans will have a decrepit marasmic regime on their shoulders. Good guys will not abandon an old man, especially if he put caramel in their pockets and promise a mythical inheritance.

"You have not even faced the Belarusian Republican Youth Union! my friend continued. - Students are not provided with a dormitory unless they become members of the BRYU. Blackmail is not the only lever of pressure. A student once tried to "talk her way out of it". She said she came from the family with many children and had no money to pay fees. And she was at once offered financial assistance to be able to pay fees."

Everything is clear, the BRYU collects money from one people, gives it to others and is in fact something like a big secret business hidden under the red-green flag. Anyway, all these contributions and statements are just a brilliant screen of smoke to let them hustle. But pioneers and Little Octobrists surely make no sense. Or just chemically entertainment for those who went gaga: pioneers, Little Octobrists, "stars", bonfires, solemn promises. The last cast-iron Lenin monuments are being demolished all over the world, the centenary of the revolution is not celebrated anywhere but in Belarus. We have everything preserved like it has been formalin-fixed. Or rather naphthalene-fixed.

In addition, we played Zarnitsa-2017 together with the Russians this September which threw the whole world off balance. Lavrenty Palych, don't you seem to become a fixture?

Iryna Khalip for Charter97.org