Отзывы

Игорь, меня не оставляет ощущение того, как хорошо подходит Вашей книге ее название. Вы ведь на протяжении всего описанного времени (по крайней мере в изложенной версии) как раз таким агентом и были: некоторым чужаком, попавшим в «иностранную» среду. Внешне неотличимый от окружающих, Вы проницательно анализируете их обычаи, привычки, нравы, почти слившись с объектом изучения, но всегда сохраняя некоторую долю отстраненности – необходимое условие для критического анализа.
Ну посудите сами: «идеалист-утопист» в мореходке и на корабле, «приймак» в богемной среде. После этого откровенный чужак в партийной номенклатуре института. Затем — создание фонда, знакомство с Томом Крузом – и тут Вы уже иностранный (российский) агент, исследующий Америку. И, наконец, официально признанный «иностранный агент» в России. По части этого титула — помнится, были такие слова как «диссидент» и «антисоветчик» – своего рода знак качества — слова, означающие способность трезво логически мыслить, сохранять порядочность, честно делать то, что считаешь необходимым, полезным и правильным. Новые времена – новые титулы. 😊

Спасибо автору за превосходные воспоминания об Одесском мире, живет ли он здесь сейчас? Желаю ему почитать Л.Троцкого, прожившего 8 лет в Одессе, «Моя жизнь» и «История русской революции». Там расписана закономерность всего происходившего 100 лет назад. Может это немного приблизит его к ответам на мучившие вопросы («И никто не спросил, зачем? Никто не докопался до ответа? Ведь знаменитое «революция пожирает своих детей» — это не ответ!») о мире, в котором он жил и формировался.

EXCERPT OF GLASNOST CHAPTER

1986, Moscow
Meanwhile, glasnost in the arts was progressing. One of these writers was fortunate to spend a few weeks with a prolific writer and filmmaker, Igor Kokarev, perhaps one of the best film analysts, who wrote a definitive study of U.S. films in America. A very cultural and entrepreneurial man, Igor introduced me to his family. His father-in-law was a member of the Central Committee, a famous Soviet composer representing the cultural elite with others in that body. In visits to Russia, organized by Igor in 1990, he was extremely helpful with introducing me to the glasnost cultural wave in painting and the arts but above all films. The cultural dimension was indispensable – something I witnessed before the 1968 Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.
Throughout the month of October, 1989, and again in January 1990, with the help of Igor, this slim, bespectacled and prematurely white-haired man, and his artful young blonde assistant, Julia Korsunskaya, I reviewed dozens of glasnost films and books for a Miami Beach, Moscow film festival. Moreover, Julia was instrumental introducing me to the treasures of Zagorsk. A typical Russian intellectual he always appeared at meetings with his tall, beautiful, English speaking assistant, Julia Korsunskaja. Igor explained that the material we were reviewing had been taken from the censors by Yakovlev and his foremen of perestroika crew. Much later he told me, that, “In those years there was more Russian interest in the forbidden articles of Brezhnev´s era than in pornography.”
Thanks to Gorbachev’s forbearance and the help of Yakovlev and other enlightened advisors, the Soviet public, after six decades, finally got to read Yevgeni Zamyatin’s My [We] in their native language, and to learn about the struggle of its hero, D-503, against the baldheaded benefactor. The novel represented a discrete warning against Bolshevism that was not lost on the reader. Glasnost-hungry readers could eventually ponder the destiny of Russian intellectuals like Doctor Yuri Zhivago throughout the civil war, immortalized by Nobel Prize winning author, Boris Pasternak. They could also admire the erotic prose of Lolita, by Russian exiled writer Vladimir Nabokov, and glory in the works of condemned Russian poets like Anna Akhmatova. Her “Poem Without Hero,” had caused her expulsion by Stalin from the Soviet Writers Union in 1946.
In literature and film, the themes of the various works being produced were having a tremendous impact on the Soviet masses in the large cities as well as in the republics. Among the most powerful novels in circulation was Anatoly Rybakov’s 1967 Deti Arbata [Children of Arbat], whose powerful expose of the Stalinist system also implied that Stalin had ordered the assassination of his Politburo colleague, Sergei Kirov, then still unproven.
Like other controversial anti-Stalinist novels and films, it had actually been produced two decades earlier but denied public exposure. As Kokarev explained, this was because it´s well known author was what might be called brutally frank about the purpose of his book. “I want to drive a stake through his [Stalin’s] heart, so that he can never rise again. I want to help kill once and for all the system he created!” .
As Chernyaev’ pointed out, Yegor Ligachev, still then the number two man of the Communist Party, stood behind some of the most crucial decisions to hinder the cultural renaissance taking place in Russia, But when Gorbachev spoke at the June 1987 Politburo meeting dealing with glasnost, he was still as ambivalent as ever. He not only failed to unmask totalitarianism, but stood up to defend it! His then impeccably loyal assistant, Chernyaev, faithfully recorded the very different policy he promulgated, while discussing the criterion for Soviet publication of controversial art and literature:
There can be only one criterion; everything that strengthened socialism [in the
Soviet parlance, Leninism] will be given due attention and consideration. But when someone’s trying to slip us capitalism, bourgeois ideology instead of socialism – that’s a different matter. That won’t be permitted.

Film Commissar: “Smacking of Anti-Semitism”
Igor introduced me to this particular movie as we were selecting movies for a May 1990 Moscow film festival scheduled to be performed in Miami Beach and organized by Igor and this author together with Andrei Kortunov, head of a department at Moscow´s Institute of the U.S.A and Canada.
Watching the film he whispered in my ear about the fight for the movie, Komissar and the tremendous changes in the USSR. The film, directed by Aleksander Askol´dov, had been banned for two decades. “I won’t permit it,” declared Ligachev after he watched it. Thereafter, Askol’dov himself was hounded, expelled from the Party, Left without a job and falsely told that all copies of the movie had been destroyed.
Perhaps it did not help Askol’dov that the original idea of the movie, came from a beautiful short story written by the prominent Jewish, Ukrainian writer, Vassil Grossman. The film dealt with a Red cavalry pregnant commissar during the Feb.-March, 1929 Russo-Polish war, who rooms with a Jewish family. Her dilemma becomes the need to choose between staying with them and caring for her new born baby or going off alone with her Red Army comrades. The only apparent “unholy” crime of the protagonist is her discovering the gentle side of Jewish village life. Yet, Ligachev fought the release of this jewel of Russian cinematography fang and claw. 

During the early stages of Gorbachev´s perestroika, a group of influential Soviet writers had written to him, requesting the release of the outstanding film. Chernyaev was sympathetic. “I suspected that writer was hounded because he was Jewish,” he told Gorbachev. Yet while Gorbachev himself was “positive,” he did not get involved, and even Yakovlev, maintained he couldn’t overturn the decision of the Moscow City Party Committee or the Party Control Commission.
By the spring of 1988, however, the film was re-discovered by the Filmmakers Union of the Professional l Club of the Moscow Film Festival [PROC], and listed for a free screening. Once again, the permission had to be obtained, and the Filmmakers Union´s famous film director, Elem Kulikov, went to the Politburo to obtain it. Meanwhile, the screening hall became packed with media, international guests and Muscovites all waiting to hear if they could see the film and in a growing fury. When Yakovlev learned that the screening had been announced and the audience gathered he quickly gave his permission. At the press conference after the screening, Askol´dov spoke “and the hundreds of people sitting around on the floor burst into tears.”
Komissar was also a smash hit at the Miami film festival.
Repentance!
Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze produced Repentance in his native republic, perhaps the most renowned anti-Stalinist film. I told Kokarev, “This movie is a must,” when we saw it together. So it was. Grotesque and powerful, Repentance concerned a tyrant named Varlam, a Stalin-like, provincial mayor, who promises to build a paradise on earth for his people, but who ruthlessly destroys many innocent lives. When Varlam’s son defends the mayor’s cruel policies to his own son, the boy shoots himself in despair.
If there was one film whose theme expressed the quintessence of the Soviet renewal, it was this one. This film in particular, evoked similar books and films from the Prague Spring era in the late 1960’s. Unsurprisingly, Ligachev also opposed sending” Repentance to the Cannes Film Festival. Yet his very efforts to immobilize his country’s cultural renaissance created an intellectual backlash. Chernyaev, Yakovlev and other enlightened members of Gorbachev’s leadership rallied to help Abuladze and other progressive Soviet artists, at first discretely, and then overtly. Thereafter, despite Ligachev’s objections, Repentance went to Cannes and won an award.

In Search of a Hearing Aid for Democracy

What does a hearing aid have to do with democracy? My Russian friend Igor Kokarev stopped by a a few days ago and told me a story that explained the connection.

I was introduced to Igor in the early 2000’s at a backyard barbecue in West LA. Igor was on a research tour of the United States working to deepen his understanding of how “intentional” communities in America organized themselves. He came to the subject as a student of American film, having served as the second in command at the Soviet-American Film Initiative while still a member of the Communist Party. In that role, he organized many filmmaker exchanges both in Moscow and the US which piqued his curiosity about democracy. He admits that American political traditions confounded and fascinated him at first, but film and filmmakers ignited something powerful in him and fortified his eventual pursuit of democracy-advancement and community development efforts.

He came to my office because he’s conducting interviews for the next edition of his book “Confessions of a Foreign Agent” that recounts his pioneering efforts at introducing civil society into Russian culture on the heels of perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980’s and early 90’s. We talked about the creation of Citizen Foundation, the organization Igor founded as a vehicle for engaging average Russians, newly liberated from communism, in understanding the theory and practice of community development.

Casting about post-perestroika for ways to help his countrymen and women grasp the precepts of democracy, Igor began convening public meetings. He discovered that a lot of people in the groups he spoke to had hearing trouble, probably the result of abysmally poor Soviet health care. By happenstance, he got to know the owners of a hearing aid manufacturing company and tried working through them to equip people with hearing aids so they could participate fully in the vibrant discussions about what the future held for Russia at the time. The effort fizzled, but not before Igor had developed a better understanding of what kinds of ideas and practices people needed to understand democracy. Igor’s Citizen Foundation emerged as a small but mighty training institute that acquainted a generation of young people with how grassroots democracy can take root in communities.

Charmed by Igor’s hearing aid story, I was struck by the brilliance of the metaphor. If citizen participation and public debate lie at the core of civil society, then listening to – and fully hearing – the views of other people represents the sine qua non of a democratic system of government. Igor’s lovely though faltering initial step embraced the brilliant insight that if democracy had a chance of taking hold in Russia, then everyone first needed to hear one another clearly. We like to think about citizenship as acting in a particular way, but we often forget that action in the absence of listening to the words and experience of others can lead to short-sighted results, suspicion and even chaos.

As the initial wave of perestroika-driven democratic fervor aged in Russia, the country’s new leader, one Valdimir Putin, began labeling people like Igor running ventures such as Citizen Foundation (which was funded by American foundations) as “foreign agents.” As Putin consolidated ever-greater autocratic power and began silencing enemies, Igor inevitably felt the pinch and the threat to both his training and organizing efforts as well as his personal and family well-being,

Igor has since voluntarily exiled himself in America because the current Russian leader – oh, by the way, still Vladimir Putin some 20 years later and counting – regards listening to anyone but his own ex-KGB cronies, sycophants, billionaire oligarch buddies and narrow nationalist base as an existential threat to the country. And now we in America seem at the threshold of embarking down a similar path.

I buy that we’ve stopped listening to one another, maybe even stuck our fingers in our ears and started shouting la-la-la like petulant children. No question that a barrier to clear understanding across our many seemingly intractable disagreements separates us as a nation. The channels on one side of the political divide are as unplugged from those on the other as Liberty’s light yanked from her power source. Aware of the lasting dangers that can come of wandering too long in a wilderness of shouting without listening, it will be those souls brave enough, intrepid enough — Igor enough — to grope about and find a hearing aid who are our best chance for surviving these dire days, and then thriving beyond them.

Когда хочется, по названию пьесы Жуховицкого, «Остановиться-оглянуться» — почти наверняка окажется, что согреют душу и подпитают энергией на предстоящие годы воспоминания. Встречи. Города. Люди.
Игорь Кокарев — одессит. Одесса — это не место проживания, а образ мышления.
Ростропович-Коган-Плисецкая-Спиваков… (далее везде!) — подобный круг повседневного и будничного общения не нуждается в расшифровках и поименных сносках.
Игорь Кокарев не был диссидентом в ранней юности. Но интеллигент и шестидесятник — если и не абсолютные синонимы, то все же, наверное, достаточно связанные между собой понятия.
Можно — и он тому живое подтверждение! — общаться с владельцами высоких кабинетов, но остаться при этом интеллигентом-шестидесятником, а значит, перво-наперво — Человеком. Даже при том, что, понятно, как у каждого из нас, так и у него не исключены свои «скелеты в шкафу».
Для меня и многих моих коллег и друзей он — Гуру. Гуру в киноведении и Гуру в кинобизнесе.
А книга жизни Игоря Евгеньевича оказалась (уж да простят мне ревнители аскетизма в оценках) и впрямь сродни эренбурговским хроникам «Люди. Годы. Жизнь». Автобиография Кокарева стала голографическим сколом Времени. Именно Времени, а не просто эпохи: тут сплелись сразу несколько эпох, и потому успешного ВГИКовца, чьими однокашниками по прошлым годам были моряки, заносило то в ЦК КПСС, то в арбатовский Институт США и Канады, то еще куда… и доходило даже до нашлепывания картинок на футболки: это ведь тоже бизнес, как-никак, и куда ж денешься!
Для кого-то за океаном «загадочная русская душа» — это бородатый сибирский алкаш с медведем на веревке. Для кого-то — бесшабашный путиноидальный отморозок-«крымнашевец».
К счастью, остается истинная культура. Культура Пушкина и Толстого. Культура Чайковского и Шаляпина. И культура тех, для кого духовность только что названных титанов стала непременной составляющей впитанного с младенчества материнского молока. Кокарев — из их числа.
Спасибо Вам, Игорь Евгеньевич!

Эта книга в общественной своей части очень важна для понимания свинской сущности постсоветской и, следовательно, нынешней власти (и пусть свиньи на меня не обижаются).

Власть продолжает оставаться глухой — пока не чует явного для себя кошта и административно-политических преимуществ, манипулятивной — в части выставления общественников в качестве своего знамени, без реального их участия в вопросах управления сферой общественного развития, паразитической — постоянно пользующейся добровольческими и экспертными ресурсами III сектора и злоупотребляющей ими, высокомерной — считающей общественность каким-то любительским приложением к её великим управленческим качествам.
Ну и, конечно, жуликоватой, регулярно подгребающей поближе к себе общественные и бюджетные ресурсы — вне зависимости от того, даёт ли это какой-то социальный эффект или же только греет близкородственные и дружеские карманы..

До тех пор, пока это будет оставаться, взаимодействие с этой властью будет приводить к новым разочарованиям. И в этом смысле «Исповедь…» — очень важный пример описания точечного (в личном и организационном плане) опыта со столичной привластной камарильей. Каждому, берущемуся за взаимодействие с органами российской власти, наверное — любого уровня, важно иметь ввиду этот опыт. И она была важна для меня, в этот момент жизни, для переосмысления и своих собственных попыток и их результатов.
Спасибо.

Нодар Хананшвили, к.ю.н.
Вице-президент фонда «Нет наркомании и алкоголизму»,
Вице-президент Национальной Ассоциации благотворительных организаций,
Член Общественного совета г. Москвы

Первый раз я держал в руках книгу Игоря Кокарева о соседских сообществах где-то в первой половине двухтысячных. На ее основе у меня сложился образ человека, который занимается всю жизнь местным самоуправлением. Поэтому испытал настоящий шок, читая «Исповедь…», потому что редко кому выпадает судьба поработать в столь разных сферах и постоянно (!) с выдающимися удивительными людьми.
Подкупает «летящая» легкость слога «Исповеди…», которая, надеюсь, не исчезнет при переводе на другие языки.
Рекомендую всем к прочтению, потому что хотя и пунктиром, но очень емко , в этих «тире» и умолчаниях между ними, показана жизнь как в СССР периода застоя, так и в перестроечный период, «лихие», но живые 90-е, и уныло стабильные двухтысячные.
Павел Меньшуткин, Экс-глава Пинежского района Архангельской области, бывший советник министра сельского хозяйства Архангельской области

Я прочитал книгу Игоря Кокарев, как говорится, на одном дыхании, не отрываясь, настолько увлекательно описывает автор и свои яркую юность, и вою бурную зрелость, плотно переплетенную практически со всеми значимыми событиями, произошедшими в России за последние полвека. Я по-хорошему позавидовал ему — какую удивительную интересную жизнь человек сумел себе придумать и осуществить!

Владимир Алеников, писатель, кинорежиссер