Punishing the innocent rewarding the innocent quote. The innocent are rewarded, the innocent are punished. The system as a whole has degraded in the 21st century, the state of society, culture, and civilization as a whole has deteriorated, and this is simply a statistical fact

Encouraging public participation Developing countries often do not fully recognize or harness the power of civil society to improve governance. The population should be involved in resolving issues through the creation, for example, of standing committees (with which

Rewarding the innocent

- as indispensable attribute of military life as the punishment of the innocent. If they gave me my thirteenth salary, I would be offended. When the order was read on February 23, everyone laughed:

– Of all types of incentives, you have “removal of a previously imposed penalty.”

Having personnel subordinate to you means putting an end to your future career. During a drill review, the chief of staff walks around looking for something to complain about. To the soldier:

- Show me your overcoat number!

He turns away the hem of his overcoat - it’s clear that it’s not his. Who will they ask? And it all started with the fact that the chief of staff of the regiment was the responsible duty officer. At night, the REZM members got so drunk that the orderly vomited on the board with the documentation. Moreover, they went to the first company and fucked one in the ass. I reported, and the chief of staff:

- Keep quiet, otherwise you’ll incur a commission.

So he took revenge. Fortunately, there are plenty of reasons. The MAZ would not start, the battery was stolen or dead. The soldier did not have the strength to move his hand, so he climbed onto the bumper and pressed with his foot. Incorrect compression: he had a broken leg, and the company commander, me, had incomplete service compliance. Two soldiers made a homemade gun and one fired chopped nails at a colleague...

Most of all I was afraid that they would knock me out power cable. On guard, how to light a cigarette: insert two nails into a socket, put a piece of paper with grated graphite from pencils on them. It lights up. One of them had a wet cigarette... I’ve never even seen lips like that on blacks.

The awards in the regiment were timed to coincide with November 7, the next anniversary of the great October Revolution. Penalties were lifted from crew commanders in such cases. The chief of food received valuable gifts in the form of a commander's watch. It was not difficult for him to earn an encouragement: all he had to do was take a red fish to the head of the political department. He once complained to me:

- I have this watch up to my elbow.

One major, a member of the order commission, told me about the procedure for submitting for awards. Subsequently, he drank himself and crashed. This happened due to an obvious oversight of the authorities, who dispatched people to catch him. So he would come out of the drinking binge, come to the service and serve further. Well, if I was shaking a little, who at headquarters would notice? And so he woke up, heard the doors being broken down, and got scared. Where to escape? I thought of it - for the canopy over the entrance. He performed this operation several times, but this time he was unlucky - he fell through. He hit his head on a sprinkler pipe and died three days later.

An investigation has begun. It turned out that he didn’t have a single penalty; his description says: “morally clean.” Those sent turn on each other: who knocked, who broke the doors is not clear. Only Colonel Umansky is joyful:

- Okay, I didn’t go, although they sent me too.

Without the major, things at headquarters stalled for some time. Everyone there is an engineer, and he has a secondary education, the only one who understood the paperwork. The chairman of the commission, Kuznetsky, the head of the political department, used to dictate to the deceased:

– Write: “At the end of the year, for successful launches and for successes in the BiPP... the Order of Lenin - to Mikhail Ivanovich Kuznetsky, the Order of the October Revolution - to Ivan Ivanovich Umansky (his relative - Author) and the Red Star - to everyone not involved. The commanders of the combat crews received nothing but penalties—the Order of the “Holy Ebukentius”—received. I nominated myself for the medal “For Military Merit” twice. It ended with this performance being torn up before my eyes and punishment announced. The first medal, I don’t remember for what, was received by Kobelev, the head of the third team. He has barrels of alcohol; if he had managed it more competently, he would have received the Order of the Red Star. He got away with everything, even when he caved in the floor in the barracks on the second floor (he thought of putting it in concrete). It’s good - during the day, no one was knocked down.

I was nominated for the second medal for conducting an exemplary lesson. I committed the “theft of the century” - I stole the remote control from a nearby shooting range. The commander, as in the movies, said:

– Consider that you already have a medal.

What is it! Well-wishers cawed.

Once again I came across a phrase about punishing those responsible for malfunctions of space technology - this time in an article about Phobos-Grunt by the Green Cat:

According to the conclusion of the state commission, the accident occurred “due to an underestimation of the factor of outer space by the developers and creators of the interplanetary station.” The Lavochkin NGO employees responsible for the miscalculation were brought to administrative responsibility.

A similar phrase occurs quite often, usually in articles published based on the results of an analysis of the causes of a particular accident. It also happens that the topic of punishing the perpetrators comes up in online discussions of the same accidents, often in the context that, they say, the switchman was punished again, but they should have had someone higher, preferably the most important person.

Unfortunately, this phrase only shows how crooked the development and/or production process is. And if “armchair analysts” can be forgiven for not understanding such, in general, obvious things, then the developers themselves, their management and those who call the tune should be ashamed.

Let's say the assembler forgot the pliers in the third stage tank and they were sucked into the engine somewhere over China. As a result, a school of fish in a non-navigable area was scared to death Pacific Ocean and a $200 million satellite was lost. What should you do with a forgetful collector in this case?

Let's say they reprimanded him, but for the first time that was all. When assembling the next stage, a screwdriver disappears, and the assembler, without attracting the attention of his colleagues, quietly tries to find it. Drawing attention to the disappearance is no longer an option for him - last time he was almost fired. In the end, not finding the loss, he decides to hope for chance. You look and it blows through - it’s not a fact that the screwdriver rolled into the rocket.

Or, let’s say, the developers didn’t think about common mode failure, they placed both backup computers next to each other, and they were hit by a particle of cosmic radiation. Another frightened school of fish and Yaroslavna’s cry to the entire Internet about ruined polymers. The state commission establishes the root cause of the accident and the comrades who signed the results of the critical design review go to their bunks as embezzlers of public funds. Their followers clearly learn the lesson that showing it in official documents is fraught with danger. As a result, design review turns from a way to find and correct errors into a political game “we shouldn’t be here.”

So what should you do in such a situation? Well, first of all, you need to remember that the goal of the entire development process is for the rockets to fly like clockwork and the spacecraft to do their job. You can talk about corruption as much as you like, but even the most corrupt officials sometimes need to show results. In other words, even they benefit from having the equipment they build fly as expected.

Secondly, since the goal is to make the equipment fly, you need to build the process so that unintentional errors do not lead to fatal consequences. If an assembler is likely to forget a tool, then the process must be modified to prevent this from happening. For example, keep records of instruments like in an operating room. Or use drawers with designated areas for tools that make missing items obvious. If the analysis of possible failures misses fairly obvious scenarios, then you need to change the process to make it more effective: introduce lists of the most frequent failures, introduce cross-checking with specialists from different disciplines, change brainstorming strategies.

Third, any accident should be viewed as an opportunity to learn something new, like testing a product in combat conditions. Analysis of the causes of an accident allows not only to find and eliminate specific problem, but also to correct the development process itself so as to eliminate a whole class of similar problems in the future.

And finally, correcting the development process cannot in any way be expressed in “punishing the guilty.” It just doesn't work. In a situation of intentional sabotage, it goes without saying, but the causes of most accidents are not sabotage, but banal human errors not caught as a result of checks. The process can be corrected through improved procedures, better quality control, and a host of other ways. Moreover, people who made a mistake will be the most active supporters of change, and not victims of the bureaucratic machine. For example, the Schiaparelli accident report explicitly states that the developers actively assisted in the analysis of the causes of the accident. This is only possible if the developers know that the goal is to solve the problem, and not “find someone to blame.”

If they tell you that someone doesn’t know how to deal with the economy, don’t believe it. Everyone has known everything for a long time. The necessary economic measures have been voiced a hundred times and have long been understood by those who can understand at least something.

There are no disputes or alternatives about them: why argue with the obvious? Another thing is that the problem is at a higher level: too many people don’t know what to do with life...

Not with the economy, but with life in general, you know? Undecided - what is life, what is it for, what is its meaning? Is its meaning in service, or, on the contrary, in the slogan “kill everyone, take everything away”?

Either we need a great power, or let it fall apart - as long as my dacha on the Spanish seaside is not touched by the Spanish authorities...

Either I need economic growth or let everything turn into a desert, as long as my Swiss bank account is not sealed...

Those who have decided for themselves that they need a country, the economic success of the country and the progress of society do not have any questions about economics. Questions only come from those who have not decided in their attitude, have not decided for themselves which country they see their children as citizens of...

The tragedy of our society began when the centripetal forces that make it unified began to weaken, and, on the contrary, the centrifugal forces that pull people to flee from society into animal holes became stronger.

“The whole world will feel bad - but I will feel good” - this is the main slogan of the “perestroika” leaders, who pushed the locomotive of human history and development down the drain.

It is necessary to separate in the analysis the zoological motives of behavior of government functionaries from degenerative motives. It's close, but they're different things. What are zoological motives? I answer:

If you take the general indicators of the USSR in 1989 and compare them with any general indicators of our time, you will see both relative and absolute failure.

The system as a whole has degraded in the 21st century, the state of society, culture, and civilization as a whole has deteriorated, and this is simply a statistical fact.

There’s nothing to talk about here at all, you know?! One can argue who is more to blame - but one cannot deny the fact from, by the way, varnished and softened statistics, which were compiled by the enemies of the USSR, and which they tried to sugarcoat where there was even the slightest opportunity.

Why did government functionaries need to take good system and ruin it? The motive for their action lies in zoological motivation. Together with the acquisition of power (i.e., the ability to distribute - power lies in the distribution of material wealth, the instrument of which is violence) - they have a chance. This was a chance to dramatically improve my personal financial situation. Well, yours - and your loved ones.

And they gave in to temptation and did it. They personally became 100, 1000, 10,000 times richer than they were. According to the Lomonosov-Lavoisier law, i.e. conservation of matter and energy, if it arrived in one place, it left in another. The overall drop in the real standard of living was 2 or more times (in Russia 2, in Moldova 6, in Armenia 5, etc.). This is the result of zoological motivation.

It’s as if there were four passengers traveling in four cabins, and the strongest of them would drive them all into one cabin, and take three for himself: for the bedroom, dining room and reception room... Of course, it’s not bad when you have other rooms besides the bedroom; and, of course, it’s bad when you had your own room - and it was taken away... This is not about that.

In our example, some passengers were compacted, while others were expanded in area. But the ship goes under its own power, where it went, and it does not sink, does not die in the fog, etc.

Zoological motivation, with all its moral reprehensibility, changes shares, but does not change course.

Let's say, the People's Republic of China: billionaires have appeared for a long time, the Parliament of the People's Republic of China is a meeting of dollar millionaires, but the course has remained the same and the country, as a whole, is developing. The predators took their toll, but did not break the ship’s chassis, rudders and propellers...

Well, there is also a degenerative motivation - when not only the cabins were redistributed, but the captain also started drinking, the watch crew was made up of drug addicts, and the pilot was a schizophrenic, etc.

The tragedy of Greater Russia (USSR) is that zoological and degenerative motivations are intertwined. On the one hand, as the highest and eternal values ​​withered away, the zoological instinct of dominance in males, the motive of alpha leadership in a pack of animals, manifested itself more and more sharply with a musky smell.

On the other hand, the internal conspiracy of ambitious and greedy grabbers was closely intertwined with foreign saboteurs, who “organically complemented” the collapse of social justice with the collapse of great power and statism.

As a result, by 1993, a system was finally formed in which the power was divided between animals and spies. Some needed to dominate, others needed to kill their geopolitical enemy.

At a certain moment, dominance came into conflict with destruction (the conflict between the privatizers-siloviki and the privatizers-liberals). If everything is destroyed and turned into ashes, then what will the alpha male dominate over?!

This is how a new political regime was formed, in which the motives of domination supplanted the motives of sabotage, and in which a certain REMISSION of the mind grew out of the need to dominate. Let's not overestimate it, but we shouldn't underestimate it either. This kind of remission of the mind in power is our only chance of survival!

The trouble is that the dominance of alpha males, zoological in origin, lion-wolf, has come into conflict not only with spies of foreign states. It also came into conflict with the complexity of highly organized communities.

A beast can only control a pack of animals. He cannot control the society of nuclear power plants and spaceports, and it is clear why: he is an animal, he has a brain without frontal lobes!

When V. Putin began looking for development personnel in Yeltsin’s rotting place, he was faced with a personnel problem that was insoluble in this system. Animals demand recognition of charisma, and not of a logical-rational apparatus. They want only them, the alpha males, to be in charge, as well as their children, nephews and mistresses, appointed at their discretion.

Where production is extremely primitive, it works. But if you complicate the management task a little - and the personnel of Erefia, inglorious bastards of Yeltsinism, everything is guaranteed to be filled up immediately.

It was the zoological motivations of the management corps that determined the raw material orientation of the economy of the Russian Federation and the CIS, because the more primitive the production, the less special qualities are required from its boss. An idiot wouldn’t build airplanes, but driving round timber or crude oil through a pipe he didn’t lay could be a complete idiot.

Any attempt to move from raw materials - well, at least to the production of furs, a traditional Siberian product - fails outright.

The inglorious bastards of Yeltsinism do not want to leave first place - and do not know how to do anything. But deelcinization, which is needed like air, is not. On the contrary, even...

The system is uncontrollable. She only learned to imitate following the leader's instructions. But she doesn't know how to follow the leader's orders REALLY.

Having received the decree, the system immediately begins simulate vigorous activity, over and over again launching a wave of campaigning and deception.

But she cannot go further than simulating her performance. Maybe he even wants to. But he can't. The anatomy is not the same.

To change something, you need to change the principle of appointment. Which one is in effect now? You know better than me:

Connections - purpose - loyalty.

The fool, through connections, was put in the boss’s chair, he sits there, blowing bubbles with his lips, but swearing allegiance. He will be punished if he stops taking oaths of allegiance. Well, so what? The system does not tolerate rebellion. Work too.

This system is the embodied dream of late Soviet parasites, corrupted by school Darwinism and Western cinema: “in order for us to have everything, we would not have to pay anything for it, and we would not have to do anything.”

What should the appointment system be like? Everyone also knows:

Assignment - execution - promotion.
Order - failure to fulfill - demotion.

Yeltsinism, the father of parasites all over the world, removed this scheme. He removed the initial moment that led officials to heart attacks and strokes: the order. Because demonstrating loyalty to the first person is not an assignment.

An order - when you were told to build 100 houses or deliver 100 tons of coal by May 1st. And then they came and considered it with the most primitive, arithmetic calculation: oh, your mother, the houses were not completed on time! Well, naturally, the boss has a heart attack, and his businesslike deputy has a chance to sit in his place and prove that he can handle it more dexterously...

Now let’s think together: what kind of orders with counting sticks could there be in Yeltsin’s market model of the economy? There are NO set growth rates AT ALL! The minister or governor did not build 100 houses by the deadline - is he to blame? No, it's a crisis...

They formally not to blame, because a market economy with booms and busts is unpredictable. They actually not guilty: if you punish a person for not digging a hole and don’t give him a shovel, then this is arbitrariness and stupidity. How was he supposed to dig the hole if you didn’t give him the necessary equipment?

A much clearer example: Nabiullina lost the ruble more than twice. The failure is such that there is a howl all around! Nabiullina is probably personally to blame for something. But let’s not waste time on trifles: after all, we understand that it’s not in everything.

The current system does not provide any of the heads of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation with the necessary tools to maintain the stability of the ruble. Even if you put Glazyev himself (peace be upon him!) here, he won’t be able to do it alone...

In order for a specific assignment (and not a stupid demonstration of loyalty and sycophancy) to be specifically carried out, three things are needed (I already wrote about this):

- Provide a tool (what they do)
- Provide a construct (what it is made from)
- Provide quodoment (encouragement, meaning of doing).

If I need an apartment, and they give me a brick with cement and a trowel, but they don’t give me a plot of land, I won’t have an apartment.

If I need an apartment and they give me a plot of land - but don’t give me bricks and a trowel - I won’t have an apartment.

If they give me everything - but they don’t promise me an apartment in a built building - I won’t have an apartment either.

This “I-K-Q” scheme works in any business. Including in the affairs of the head of the Central Bank.

Because YOU CANNOT MANAGE A PROCESS THAT IS NOT REALLY UNDER YOUR CONTROL.

You can give orders to those whom you have the right to shoot, flog, deprive of bonuses, lunch, etc. But you cannot order those who are independent of you. The Minister of Construction cannot give orders to private independent construction firms, the head of the Central Bank cannot give orders to foreign currency speculators, etc.

To do any business, you need to receive equipment from society, the country, the people: what to do, from what, and for what.

It was precisely this link between staffing and responsibility that Yeltsinism broke. A classic of Yeltsinism appeared - the widespread “punishment of the innocent and rewarding of the innocent.”

Every failure, like every success, became an accident, a lottery. They assigned you to metallurgy - and then suddenly there was a boom, and you got an order on your chest! And what do you have to do with it? I just came on the rise...

Or vice versa: a crisis, a recession, you were scolded, removed from your position, even imprisoned, perhaps in an ecstasy of severity... And for what? What could you really do with metallurgy if you didn’t have tools, structures and quodoments?!

We still consider the ministers of the economic bloc, under whom world oil prices rose, to be professionals. And they criticize the ministers under whom world prices fell. But in fact, these are the same people, they were just lucky or unlucky...

If we all decided to die, then what is there to advise? Dying is a simple science, anyone can cope with it. Falling means you won't take off. To fall, you don’t need to study aerodynamics, and you can handle it this way...

If we decide to live and survive, then we need de-elcinization. The first thing in de-elcinization is to concentrate the necessary resources and strict liability in the hands of the person appointed as the responsible executor.

You can fall without it; You can't grow.

If the responsible person does not fulfill a reasonable instruction, he is removed from office. And so - as many times as the case will fail. Until such a “person” is discovered who is able to organize the work and do what is entrusted with trusted tools.

It’s not just the state that’s on this. This is what life is all about. You won't hire a tailor who doesn't know how to sew. You won't go to a canteen again and again - where they don't know how to cook. You will not pay for repairs to someone who contracted but did not do the repairs.

This is so axiomatic that before YELTSIN AND PRIVATIZATION it was never discussed or questioned anywhere. If a person does not do the assigned task, then:

1. Either he is missing something
2. Either he does not know how, is not capable of doing the job.

If you don’t have enough, find out what it is and give it. If you didn’t give, don’t demand. And if there is enough of everything, but the job is not done, then it’s in the neck. Well, how can this be refuted?

Meanwhile, the whole essence of Yeltsinism is irresponsibility, nurtured on “market” uncertainty.

A person is assigned to eat sweetly in one sinecure or another. He doesn’t know the work assigned, doesn’t understand - and doesn’t care... P because there is no assigned work!

He is not given the task of increasing, improving, deepening, expanding... He is given the task of bending to the “invisible hand of the market.”

That is, the task set to the authorities by Yeltsin is to have fun, enjoy life, and when the pressure comes, complain about the next crisis.

Punishing the innocent and rewarding the innocent...

If we follow the popular theory that human life is the same striped naval vest, in which successes alternate with the same period of troubles, then for Andrei, after the romantic celebration of Navy Day, a dark period came. He was written off from the ship. Despite requests, persuasion and demands, they wrote it off completely. On the same day, investigators from the military prosecutor's office again showed up to him and began to thoroughly question him for the details of that ill-fated trip to sea. The conversation took place in the resident’s room, which had been vacated by doctors specifically for this reason. Judging by the direction of the questions, prosecutors were more interested in the actions of two officials during the accident. Specifically, the commander and division commander.

– Tell me, why did the commander give the command so late to use freon in the seventh compartment? – One of the investigators clearly admired his erudition.

- Firstly, I was in the first compartment at that time and did not have complete information about what was happening at the central post. Secondly, I believe that the use of a volumetric fire extinguishing system was timely and effective. Thirdly…

“You didn’t understand me,” the investigator interrupted him politely but firmly. – I’ll clarify my question: do you confirm that, with the connivance of the division commander, the commander delayed for an unforgivably long time in supplying the emergency compartment with liquid chemicals, as a result of which the fire spread to the adjacent sixth compartment?

Andrei was once again convinced that they were trying to “appoint” Batya and the commander of the nuclear-powered vessel to take the blame for the accident, and for this they were trying to obtain the necessary testimony from other crew members.

– The commander acted in accordance with the ship’s regulations and RBZh-PL (Manual for combating survivability on submarines. - AVT.). Sorry, but I have nothing more to add on this matter,” Andrey clearly substantiated his position.

The investigators' faces changed. Now no longer jokingly familiar, as at the beginning of the conversation, one of them made an unexpected assumption:

- It seems to me that you are not telling me something... Why? Perhaps you have a personal interest here? Explain to us why on the list of ten sailors nominated for awards there are nine who died in a boat accident and you are the only one alive today. For what merits did the commander introduce you to the order? You say yourself that you were in another compartment at the time of the accident.

After his words, Andrey broke out in a sweat. It instantly flashed through my head: “This bastard is obviously sure that I’m deliberately shielding the commander and Father. And for this “shielding,” according to the “insightful” servant of Themis, I was introduced to the order.” Having calmed down a little and catching the slightly mocking look of the investigator, saying that I see right through you, guy, Andrei rose from the table and said as calmly as possible:

“Comrade officers, the fact that you work in the prosecutor’s office does not give you the right to insult me.” I consider your question undignified and humiliating, since I don’t know how it is in your prosecutor’s office, but it’s not customary to beg for awards in the submarine. In tsarist times, I would have gladly challenged you to a duel for insulting you, and with no less pleasure I would have simply shot you. Therefore, I ask you to apologize, or I will officially refuse to answer your questions.

Andrey’s interlocutors were taken aback. No one had ever spoken to them like that before. One of them smiled in confusion, and the other began to shout indignantly:

– We are carrying out investigative actions!.. You are obliged to assist the prosecutor’s office!..

Without waiting for an apology, Andrei silently left the staff room. In the evening of the same day, Cherkesov called him to his office and warned him: when leaving the hospital department, the investigators were indignant and promised to take appropriate measures against the obstinate submariner.

“Well, to hell with them,” Andrei responded, “there won’t be seven deaths, but one can’t be avoided!” No longer serving on a submarine anyway!

“Don’t get angry,” Cherkesov advised, having correctly determined the condition of his patient. “Tomorrow they will come to present you with the order, and the day after tomorrow I will discharge you.” So get ready...

...Order. Andrei, to be honest, did not believe that he would ever receive it, but Dad, like a real officer, kept his word and managed to push through this award in the Moscow corridors of power. Andrei did not know that the division commander, in order to achieve his goal, resorted to military stratagem and initially reported to the top: the submariner was in critical condition and is unlikely to survive. Since the dead were always treated better in the country than the living, the half-dead submariner at that time was not removed from the list presented. When Andrei came out of his coma and things started to improve, Dad quietly advertised this joyful fact until they reported from Moscow: “The President signed a decree on the award.” Now one could consider that the job was done, since no one would dare to contradict the head of state.

Life itself taught me small tricks. In Brezhnev's times, orders and medals were awarded mainly according to the order. For example, a notice was sent to the fleet from the awards department of the Ministry of Defense, which stated: for such and such another holiday, so many people can be nominated for awards and medals. Next, the order was “split up” and sent out to flotillas, squadrons, divisions, brigades, etc. Situations often arose in which the commander of a formation, for example, was faced with the dilemma of which of his subordinates to submit to the “assigned” to his military unit alone Order "For Service to the Motherland in the Armed Forces" and three medals "For Military Merit". A deformed and turned upside down system of awarding orders and medals, in which, instead of rewarding a worthy and proven officer, on the contrary, they were looking for a specific award the right person, ultimately led to a paradox: orders and medals often ended up en masse somewhere in command structures. There are cases when, having received such an order, another dishonest military leader simply believed that the award should belong to him and no one else.

In the nineties of the last century, another loophole appeared for money-grubbers of this kind - Chechnya. Andrei heard himself how at one of the meetings the commander of the flotilla, answering the question of the commander of the nuclear-powered ship, why the proposal for awarding officers and midshipmen following the difficult ocean autonomy came back unrealized, said something like: all awards go to Chechnya.

If something extraordinary happened and it was impossible to do without awards, often everything happened in strict accordance with the description of such situations by the unforgettable and highly respected Valentin Savich Pikul in the fleet: hype, confusion, searching for those responsible, punishing the innocent, rewarding the innocent...

...Andrei received his order in an ordinary way. The head of one of the naval departments, who had been sent to the hospital on occasion, came into the room, accompanied by some lower ranks, shook Andrei’s hand, handed him a scarlet box, chaotically thanked him for his service, wished him a quick recovery and immediately hurried out. His retinue followed him.

After his quick departure, Andrei began to look at the award with interest. In a scarlet box on a red moire ribbon with white stripes along the edges lay a silver cross with embossed rays and rounded ends. This was the Order of Courage, which, according to the statute, was awarded for dedication, courage and bravery shown in saving people, protecting public order, in the fight against crime, during natural disasters, fires, catastrophes and other emergency circumstances, as well as for courageous and decisive actions committed in the performance of military, civil or official duty in conditions involving a risk to life.

A few minutes later, an excited Lenochka jumped into the room.

- Andryusha, dear, congratulations! I am so proud of you!

Kissing him gently on the cheek, the young woman squeezed the man's hand meaningfully, as if she was going to tell him that she loved him.

There were no more congratulations during the day. Only the doctor Cherkesov invited Andrei to his office in the evening, took an open bottle from the safe and, pouring vodka for him and himself, demanded that he put his silver cross into the glass.

- Well, congratulations, so that it won’t be your last. Let's drink to this. As the bottle emptied, Cherkesov became more and more talkative and even told his favorite medical joke.

– The patient is lying on the operating table. Lo and behold, an anesthesiologist comes in, a drunken idiot! He stumbles, falls on the patient, hiccups loudly. The patient got scared and asked: “Doctor, you’re drunk, how will you administer anesthesia before the operation?”

And he replies: “Am I drunk? You haven’t seen the surgeons who will cut you!”

Cherkesov broke into a satisfied smile, demonstrating with his hand, for greater clarity, how the surgeons would cut into pieces the body of the poor patient. This little clownery lasted about a minute and was supposed to distract Andrei from his dark thoughts. Then, after hesitating a little, Cherkesov announced seriously:

- You will be discharged tomorrow. Man, I see you are world-class. If I ever come in handy, call me. Life, you know, is such a complicated thing! There is no way to exist alone. For example, let's take me. I can perform complex operations, but I couldn’t save my father. He died in a car accident. The doctor was from God, also a neurosurgeon. Then we crashed together. That means I’m lying on the road in full consciousness: my jaw is twisted - I can’t speak, my arms and leg are completely broken. I see that an ambulance has arrived and the doctors are trying to save my dad. I see that they are doing everything wrong, my father won’t last long with such resuscitation, but I can’t do anything. It’s impossible to stand up, shout, or extend a hand. So I watched my dad leave for the next world. All he could do was cry from doom. I’ll say, without bragging, if my arms hadn’t been broken then, I would have saved my father. How can I drink, I saved you! Therefore, Andryukha, decent people need to stick to each other. Otherwise all this trash will poison our lives. In life, joy and sorrow, truth and falsehood, justice and lies go side by side. For example, you accomplished a feat on your boat, and the investigators are harassing you, asking you: what were your motives at that moment? It's a shame! And the one who was cowardly, who chickened out, or, moreover, who himself had a hand in this accident, is, quite possibly, considered a hero...

...Military doctor Cherkesov looked into the water. It so happened that at the same time, in the south of the huge country, the Verkhnedonskaya farm was walking, solemnly and magnificently celebrating a similar award - the Order of Courage of the heroically deceased fellow countryman Vasily Veretenko.

Even in the afternoon, in a solemn atmosphere at the rally, in the presence of numerous television crews and correspondents who had come from the city on this occasion, the military commissar of the regional military commissariat, Major General Gnatyuk, presented Fyodor Denisovich and Maria Grigorievna Veretenko with the Order of a heroically deceased son. By the end of the day, a mournful and extraordinary event for Verkhnedonsky turned into a noisy feast at the local Palace of Culture, where everyone tried to say a few words and tell what a wonderful guy their Vasily was. Now no one remembered that before his service Vaska was known as a brawler and a drunkard, who regularly spoiled farm girls and stole rabbits from his neighbors. War veterans, proudly rattling their medals, declared that they could go into reconnaissance with Vasily, and young people should certainly follow their example famous fellow countryman. The old teacher became emotional and remembered how in the third grade Vasily made a birdhouse with his own hands. Valka Dontsova and Tanka Evstratova, in drunken voices, constantly sobbing, vying with each other to tell how patiently and faithfully they waited for Vasily’s return after serving in the navy. Everyone nodded their heads in agreement, although the whole village knew: Valka was considered the first b... in the area, and Tanka, it was unclear from whom, was in the third month of pregnancy. There were many pompous toasts, and the head of the village council announced that starting from the next school year, the school where Vasily studied would be given his blessed name, a bust of the hero would be installed in the park, and a memorial plaque would be attached to the hut. Those gathered were delighted with this news, and there were already proposals to rename the Verkhnedonskaya farm itself to Veretenovsky.

And no one knew that it was through the fault of the “hero” that a fire broke out on the nuclear-powered ship, as a result of which nine innocent young guys burned alive...