Reflections on the unknown Russian soul.

It is pointless to argue about the mysterious Russian soul. Someone believes in this myth, someone does not. I don't think such a description of the inner essence of a Russian person is romantic. Any nation would have earned a serious psychotrauma, having passed such permanent shocks and cataclysms. This psychotrauma seems to foreigners to be the very mystery. But there is no mystery here. Anxiety, uncertainty about the future and the future of our children are soldered into all of us like a firmware. This injury was transmitted to the offspring with the mother's milk from generation to generation.

Russians seem to foreigners to be distrustful, gloomy and tense. Let's say that the entire humanity of the planet has to work and, in a certain sense, strain. Life is arranged like this. But, for Russians, the tension is expressed in another way. This is a constant internal expectation of collapse, the expectation of internal or external shocks. If we recall the history of the Russian state, and these lands in principle, then all this is not without reason.

Also, the harsh climate imposes its imprint on the character and inner attitude of a person. In the Russian climate zone, bananas and coconuts do not grow all year round, which you can always feed on. And the warm season is short for farming and harvesting food for 6-8 months of cold and darkness. Our ancestors knew that the family did not have time to work hard in the spring and summer period, so it may not survive the long winter. Nature does not make allowances. The aspiration of Russians to communality is possible from here. It is difficult to survive in a harsh climate without mutual assistance .

My great-grandparents were repressed and exiled to Siberia. There were many such families then . People were transported in cold wagons for the transportation of grain. They were landed with small belongings and children, in late autumn, almost in the taiga. It is difficult to say why this happened. The times were troubled ( the 20s of the twentieth century). Urban residents who were not adapted to the Siberian conditions would have died quickly enough if not for the Old Believers. The village of these hardworking and harsh people turned out to be not far from the landing place of the unfortunate migrants. The Old Believers helped people in trouble to survive the winter. They let families into their homes, shared poor provisions. Later, they helped to build huts for immigrants. The townspeople were taught how to survive in the harsh taiga conditions. My grandmother was born already in Siberia. She said that her parents, until the last day, spoke with great gratitude about the people who saved their lives.

There are different people living in the Russian expanses. And not everyone, perhaps, would have acted as nobly as the taiga Old Believers. Perhaps my ancestors were lucky. They, in serious life situations, came across good, kind people on the way.

The inner core of the Russian person manifests itself in extreme situations. Well, extreme periods in our history happen all the time. Wars, revolutions, troubled times, famines, all sorts of political troubles. Almost every generation has experienced something of the above. Therefore, every next generation, on a subconscious level, is waiting for something bad. And, as a rule, the expectation does not fail. Sometimes, I think about the vicissitudes of life of my relatives. How could my great-grandmother have imagined that her quite comfortable life as a well-off citizen would end with the beginning of the revolution. And then she and her family, almost without the necessary things, will find themselves in the Siberian taiga. Or a grandmother who was already born and raised in harsh conditions, could she have known in advance that a terrible war would begin. All her brothers will die in it. And her life itself will be thrown into Central Asia by the end of the war. And she will still have to travel a lot around the country. My parents, too, could not even think in a terrible dream that the mighty Soviet Union would fall apart like a house of cards. Perestroika will begin, the plundering of our country, the complete scrapping of the social foundations of the state. And, what can my generation expect? What are the next shocks?

Any ethnic group is formed by its history and the living conditions in which people live. Russian Russian character, Russian soul...There is nothing mysterious about them. This is just a cruel deep psychotrauma of an entire nation, passed down from generation to generation. What was passed on to me will probably be passed on to posterity.

 Such are the sad arguments about the not mysterious Russian soul...