[01:29:40 - 06:10:00] Yura's Broad Worldview and His Unique Leadership Style

Good. Then can I ask you a little bit about, uh, what, what you do now in life, what, what you used to do? Don't start with that. Very personal. Don't start with that. Start, we said, we established contact, right? We talked wonderfully yesterday, and we had a wonderful conversation about, uh, what, who, how is interested. Therefore, I would rather start asking, why are you interested in this topic? Why suddenly from distant England, uh, you, uh, became, and you paid attention to events that happened there, uh, already like more than 20 years ago, already in a different dimension, already almost 22 years will pass since all this happened, and you suddenly pay attention to it, you reach out to people who can testify about that time, and you, uh, are interested in, as it were, an absolutely Russian hero, an absolutely Russian person, who has no merits before England. He has merits before the world, but he has no merits before this island. He was, he went to America about 50 times, because he was a goodwill ambassador from the UN, he gave lectures at universities, in American ones. That is, he understood Anglo-Saxon culture, he understood what it was, what people were like. He was very friendly with Bill Clinton. As strange as it may sound now. Perhaps it will be heard, and, uh, he very funnily told how, uh, this family interacted with each other, how Clinton played the saxophone, how they drank and talked about everything in the world, because it suddenly turned out that, hmm, he was not yet president then, Clinton. And it was an academic campus, hmm, it turned out that suddenly, uh, this line of the 'sixties generation,' because Yura was very much a 'sixties generation' person. And, probably, perhaps, the most interesting thing is, uh, a conversation about how, uh, one power replaced another power. What do I mean? Hmm, how Putin's power, a very totalitarian power. And when they say that Putin wants to build the Soviet Union, he does not want to build the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet Union, uh, when we talk about it in the sixties, seventies, eighties, as a rule, right, about the time in which Putin also lived. Well, Yury Shchekochikhin was in the same time. Uh-huh. And this is a different type of power. Yura had power. It was the power of friendship. It was the power of influence over other people, it was the power of creating a team that worked for the common good. Uh-huh. And so if there was such a time machine that transported us either to the past or to the future, it seems to me that if Yura, uh, was born in Europe, in the 18th or 19th century, he would have been a pastor. He knew how to listen to people and lead people for the common good, in which he believed. Despite the fact that he was an absolute statist. He held state posts, but his good for the state was, first of all, good for the individual. So that every person would be well. And this is the question, how one power, and the power that gathered around itself both the intelligentsia, and science, and the military. At Yura's house, military, intelligence officers, fans of the Spartak sports team, very different writers, poets, and very different ages gathered, from the youngest to, uh, well, let's say, the generation that was old enough to be Yura's, well, not fathers, let's say young grandfathers. And he maintained that. This is a type of power, it is a type, uh, of that power that everyone expects. Just and generous. This, as it were, human generosity, is also power, because generosity evokes gratitude.