The published quadriga is a summary of the first four chapters of the Gray Holes of History books, which will appear on the shelves - if the publishers decide to do it.

Part one.  HISTORY OF LIES        

Everyone remembers that when Ivan the Terrible retired to Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, for the sake of a joke, he put on the throne of the State the Russian service prince Simeon Bekbulatovich, a kind of jester, not a fool for fools. Well, as soon as he returned, he stopped scoffing, took the throne back, drove Bekbulatovich off it and began to rage. And now the question is: is it true or not true that this same Simeon Bekbulatovich was nominated as not a joke, but a completely serious and very strong candidate for the royal throne as a competitor to Boris Godunov, and this Bekbulatovich had a real chance of being elected Tsar of Russia?

• What nonsense - an enlightened reader will say with a shrug. - See what they think. A jester to the throne, and even chosen like the Russian president - to the Autocrats? Do not fool us with nonsense, mister author.
• Nonsense so nonsense. Sorry, as they say, that disturbed. Another question. Is it true or not true that Prince Pozharsky, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Kuzma Minin at the head of the people's militia in order to drive the filthy Poles out of the Kremlin forever, to perpetuate his feat in the Russian Federation a national holiday was announced, put forward not Mikhail Romanov as a candidate for the Russian throne, but Swede, crown prince of the Swedish throne? And not just put forward, but he, a Swedish offspring, was the first candidate in the first round of the election of the sovereign of Russia, because he was supported not by some Seven Boyars, but by the people's militia, a real and powerful force! ?
• But what about the author of the book, what's his name, Yuri Magarshak, or what? - mad?!?! – no doubt will answer even the most polite and intelligent reader. - It's not only that a lie is such an anti-patriotic blasphemy, for which, when the hour strikes, it will not seem enough to anyone.

• Wait, good people, don't shout. First let me ask the third question, say the word. Is it true or not true that the holy prince Alexander Yaroslavovich Nevsky, at the head of a mixed Russian-Tatar army, descended on his native Novgorod, where, with cruelty that struck even the Tatars (who, after all, are also different, Tatars, by the way, in Russia then they called not those who under the Bolsheviks, they were recorded as Tatars in their passports, and collectively everyone who went with the Mongols to punish Russian cities, and they were not necessarily animals, many went against their will under the threat of ruining their own cities and brutal death) killed many Russian people just because Novgorodians (whom he went to smash at the orders of the Horde, thus becoming in the eyes of the people a real Tatar and even worse than a Tatar, because he was not a stranger but his own,
• Well, you are there, how are you there - he will say, after reading the previous paragraph, even the most patient, most liberal reader - You need to know when to stop. You are there, would stop your anti-patriotic fabrications. Otherwise, you yourself know - we are literate people, we know what, against whom and where.

The fact of the matter is that this is not fiction, ladies and gentlemen, but the purest truth. So it really was. The answer to all these three important questions in Russian history is positive. As well as many others who have equally non-obvious and incredible, and even more: completely unthinkable answers, which, having read the course of school history and passed the exams in accordance with the requirements of the program, it was impossible to suspect even the most decisive heresy and with the strongest hangover. And do you know why it happened? Because the whole history of the world is distorted. But the history of the Russian State is something special. Almost everything that we were taught in schools is completely different from how it actually happened. Because Russian history is essentially a history of lies. That is, to study why those or those lied, and also why they lied So and not otherwise - this in itself, of course, is also a subject of history, as well as psychology, sociology and social psychiatry. And if someday - which I strongly hope - a multi-volume collection HISTORY OF LIES IN HISTORY comes out, I will definitely subscribe to it. As, no doubt, do many of our highly esteemed readers. And if the History of Lies in History in one wonderful day of God becomes an independent discipline that will help humanity in general and the peoples inhabiting the Russian land, in particular, to learn the truth about themselves, a more charitable deed cannot be imagined. But I also mean something else: that the canonical story that we imbibe with the milk of our Motherland is false to such an extent that there is almost not a single true place in it. And this is not surprising. Judge for yourself: were there many rulers in Rus', and even more so in the Soviet Union, who wouldn't lie about the present? All these Lenins-Stalins-Anna Leopoldovna-Trotsky-Vasily Dark-Brezhnev-Nikolai the First-Chernenki-Ivan Kalita-Catherine the Great-Khrushchev-Nikolai the Second, and at their behest the commissars, favorites, close boyars and the Politburo and others like them? So is it possible that the one who lies about what is happening today did not lie with tripled enthusiasm about what happened in ancient times? After all, it is much easier to lie about the past than about what is an eyesore before your eyes. Because the dead will not object or cry out like the shadow of Hamlet. And, by the way, what is there to prove when there is nothing easier than to prove. Get the history books of your native country, published under Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin before the war, Stalin during the war, Stalin after the war, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin. And compare them. If you see a discrepancy, then you lied. And in almost every line, at least two of these textbooks said radically opposite things, let's do this. Let's mark all the discrepancies with some eye-pleasing color. That is, if at least two textbooks write about the same event in different ways, we mark it. Both. I assure you that as a result of this measure it will turn out that all the textbooks will be covered in whole or almost in full. And this means that in all these lines of history there was a lie. Will there be many blank spots in the History of the Russian State, marked by such a scientifically based method? I have done this decisive (as physicists would say) experiment and report: very little. There are practically no white spots of history that would remain unshakable - and therefore have a chance to be true - in just one past, twentieth century. And if, in addition to domestic ones, you buy textbooks published in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, the Czech Republic or today's Ukraine, telling about the same events, and compare their interpretations with ours, then there will not be a single blank space left. This I tell you responsibly.

But does this mean that the entire world history is false at each, as a physicist would say, point of space-time, that there is no objective history at all? Don't think. Differences between neighboring countries in assessing the same events are a well-known and understandable thing both at the psychological and national patriotic levels. As well as the attempts of politicians of all countries to use the past for their current goals and interests. But still there are textbooks of European history. Translated into all major European languages. The content of which remains unchanged in the Czech Republic and Austria, France and Germany, Sweden and Finland, Ireland and England. And this means that civilized countries still somehow come to a common opinion about the past. That the situation is not so hopeless. Do you know why countries that have been at war for centuries come to a common opinion about the past that separated them? Because they understood that if they want to exist with each other without bloodletting, but vice versa: peacefully and productively cooperating, then it is necessary to somehow agree on what each of us, sinners, individually and collectively represents and represented on this Earth. Who did what and why. Such is the primitive idea. But very, as they would say in our fatherland, catholic and fateful. That is, history as a science that has a solid outline, and does not consist of mirages changing with the accession of each new ruler, still exists somewhere. So, it can exist with us. Only here, after all, there is such a thing: if we ourselves do not want to know the truth about ourselves, if - even worse - we do not even believe in the possibility of the existence of the truth about our own past (which is the highest conviction is increasingly expressed not only by political technologists, for whom the theatricalization of life is a profession, but also by professional historians), if in each case of discovering a blatant contradiction or lie let us yell: don't touch, it's sacred! - no world history will help us. And no world experience.

Doctors say that there is a holy lie. I mean medicine. Don't know. In Europe and North America, for example, there are no holy medical lies, just as there are no holy lies at all. They have no holy lies in nature. And it was invented, I think, in our blessed Fatherland, so that a person who has nothing to lose does not begin to behave antisocially. For example, in the Khrushchev, Brezhnev or Nikolaev times, he would not say what he thinks. Give interviews to foreign correspondents, go out to Red Square with protests, or else - God forbid - as in 905, take to the streets with firearms. So it's better for a person to lie about his individual future. So that, until he lies in the coffin, he behaves appropriately. Didn't mess around.

But let's leave medicine. Let's turn to another area where lies, one might say,

above the roof. To history. And we ask ourselves: is there

THE HOLY LIE OF HISTORY ?

And in general, can a lie be holy, if not on the whole earth, then at least in the domestic, Russian nature? The answer to this question is not obvious to everyone. There is a great temptation to answer it positively. And more than that: consider a positive answer as truly patriotic - as opposed to all the other, less fateful answers. Well, of course, there are holy lies about ourselves! The proof of which is at least one thing is that wherever you look - it, the holy lie of our History, is a dime a dozen, as they say, milk rivers and jelly banks. If Alexander Nevsky and his comrades Tatar-Mongolians betrayed their dear Lord Veliky Novgorod to fire, whip and chopping block, and this truth does not fit into the canonical idea of ​​the Holy Fighter for the Russian People, then so much the worse for the truth. If the Panfilov heroes died to the last man (as the Pravda newspaper wrote about their feat), then let those who survived blame their own heroism. The holy lie is above some events and some destinies, the witnesses of which, moreover, lie in the damp earth almost without exception and skeletons cannot say anything against the falsification of their lives and what they saw with their own eyes while they were alive. .

No less widely than the holy lies propagated on all corners, the opposite phenomenon is also widespread: the reserved, or forbidden, truth. That is, one that cannot be told under any circumstances. In order not to put those in power and those holding power in a position that is inappropriate for their high rank. So that they do not appear before the people (as the Bolsheviks said) masses, but, in a modern way, the electorate in a form that is not very attractive. This is how it turns out that history is a secret. From generation to generation, from century to century. First, for fifty years, then for a hundred, Well, after a hundred, two hundred, four hundred years, the truth is rarely linked with a lie that has become canonical and holy over the years. And so much the worse for the truth.

So how does the author still think: does a holy lie about the past exist or not? Here's what I'll tell you about this, ladies and gentlemen. All good holy lies. Except for one. Nothing can be built on a lie: neither a harmonious society, nor an aircraft that is competitive on the world market, nor even a stool that is competitive on the world market. Lies are not fundamental. It doesn't have to make ends meet. No lie can be canonical indefinitely. A building built on lies will sooner or later come to ruin.

That is why I would like to try to break through the many layers of lies that history has been abundantly stuffing us with almost from the intellectual cradle. And find under them the truth about the past. Because those who lie about their country either do not believe in it, or pursue their own goals. And I, like you probably, believe not only in the present. And not only in the future. I also believe in the past. Both individually and collectively. For no country has become a power, acting by angelic methods. Everyone was good: Great Britain, and Spain, and Byzantium, and Russia, and Ancient Rome. The question is different: in order to confidently look into the future, you need to understand who you were, it's like dvadzhy two. Otherwise, non-existence will every minute poke you in the face, if not conscious, then subconscious. A quarrel with the subconscious is a difficult thing. I mean no prospects. Because it is an infection does not understand human language. And it reacts at the level of complexes and emotions that cannot be deceived. And if it clears up - and besides, at the level of not the individual, but the collective subconscious of the nation, then, as we all understand and remember well, it will not seem a little to anyone.