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Perestroika will be whatever we will be. If we are halfway, we'll have semi- perestroika. If we rebuild with rotting lumber from former labor camps, perestroika will collapse. If we all pull the blankets toward ourselves, perestroika will freeze. What is done in the name of protecting one's cushy armchair isn't ideology, it's cushiology. Between the pro-perestroikers and the anti-perestroikers, unfortunately, there is a large group I call the "oikers." They're the ones who whine constantly about the lack of sugar and other things but do not lift a finger to stop those who want to kill perestroika. It is time people understood that there are not two separate perestroikas -- one material and one political. Without defending democracy, there's no point in demanding democracy.
"Patience will crack a rock," the old folk saying goes. Three hundred years under the Tatars and 300 years under the Romanovs developed both heroic patience, which erupted into popular revolts, and servile patience, or priterpelost. Russia was the last European country to free its serfs, and plunged into socialism directly from sovereign feudalism, almost completely bypassing the experience of bourgeois democracy. The bedbugs of feudalism and servility moved inside wooden trunks from village huts into communal apartments. Many bosses behaved like "Red feudal lords," taking away not only the peasants' land but their passports too -- and that really smacked of serfdom. Stalin's forced collectivization was a crude mockery of the slogans "Land to the Peasants" and "All Power to the Soviets."
Tolerance gradually developed for many things -- repression, arbitrary taxation, forced signatures, the Iron Curtain, the humiliation of scientists, composers, writers. The best people were pruned away. It was like a nightmare in which a gang determined to kill all the Thoroughbred horses wandered through the stables at night with axes. Horses as a breed survived, but many of them turned out to be horses with the psychology of mice. We need to do much more to be able to restore our human breed, which has suffered such losses. We must not allow ourselves to tolerate our own patience. Priterpelost is the main obstacle to perestroika.
Priterpelost is capitulation before "infinite humiliations." First we humiliate ourselves to get an apartment. We humiliate ourselves hunting in the jungles of commerce for wallpaper, faucets, toilet bowls, latches. The sight of a Yugoslav lamp fixture or a Rumanian sofa bed brings fireworks to our eyes. When a child is born, we humiliate ourselves to obtain day care and kindergartens, finding nipples, crawlers, disposable diapers, carriages, sleds, playpens. We humiliate ourselves in stores, beauty parlors, tailor shops, dry cleaners, car-repair garages, restaurants, hotels, box offices and Aeroflot counters, repair shops for TVs, refrigerators and sewing machines -- stepping on our pride, moving from wheedling to arguing and back to wheedling. We spend all our time trying to get something. It's humiliating that we still can't feed ourselves, having to buy bread and butter and meat and fruit and vegetables abroad.