Several generations of Russian-speaking writers passed through him
The SEIP Foundation has just reported the death of Sergei Aleksandrovich Filatov, the former head of Boris Yeltsin’s administration, defender of the White House during the days of the State Emergency Committee, permanent organizer of the Youth Forums writers from Russia, the CIS countries and abroad — the same “Lipok” from which, like Gogol’s “Overcoat”, emerged several generations of Russian (and more broadly, Russian-speaking) writers. Sergei Shargunov, Alexey Ivanov, Zakhar Prilepin, Roman Senchin, German Sadulayev and dozens of other writers owe their fame to one degree or another to Sergei Filatov.
Sergei Filatov
“After a serious and long illness at the age of 88,” reads the mournful wording on the website. The last time I saw Sergei Filatov was at the recent “Big Book” ceremony. He looked like an elderly man, but it was difficult to guess that he was sick, and even more so that the disease was coming. Weak — yes, his handshake was not “steel”, but old age is not the same as it is shown to us in the last part of “Terminator” with the elderly Schwarzenegger. I repeat — he looked like a physically weakened man with kind eyes, like Korney Chukovsky, and a light face, like Soviet film actors of the 50s and 60s.
I shook hands and, leaning towards my ear, thanked Sergei Aleksandrovich for the fact that now, as a journalist for MK, I am standing here, in a building overlooking Red Square, and not sitting in the basement of a nine-story building in Donetsk. The young writer Rodion Marinichev, by the way, wrote on social networks, mourning Filatov, like hundreds of other authors, that in the summer it was at the “Big Book” ceremony that he shook hands and said “thank you” to a person whose death is now very difficult to believe.
Apparently, for all of us, such an expression of gratitude was a ritual with zero degree of posturing.
In February 2021, when Yeltsin would have turned 90 years old, Sergei Aleksandrovich told me for almost two hours about the first president of Russia — he spoke with warmth and precisely love for the former “boss,” and not with working respect for him. I don’t know what the actual relationship was between the head of state and Filatov, but in the book of memoirs “Presidential Marathon” Yeltsin only mentions him a few times, and in passing. Although Filatov headed the administration for more than three years — far from the easiest years of Yeltsin’s rule.
Russian literature can be divided indefinitely into “soilers” and “liberals”, into “Z-poets” and their opponents, but in these hours, grief for Filatov is capable of, if not reconciling, then at least for a few memorial days, forcing everyone to shut up and listen to the voice of conscience within oneself. Which, if it commands “not to live by a lie,” then also in this “non-truth” calls not to seek benefits.
Filatov showed by his example how to cope with this task. He considered it his duty to be not with the strong, but with the right.
During the preparation of one of the writers' forums, an odious prose writer from the south-east of Ukraine was not invited to “Lipki”. A master from the patriotic camp, who received his work for evaluation, was outraged by the author’s political position. Sergei Filatov corrected the “two” to a “five”, called the young man to the Forum, and explained at the opening that a work can be talentedly written or mediocre, that the manuscript is talented, that’s why he is here (apparently, I’m conveying the words very inaccurately). True, a year later, a young man from the Ukrainian south caused a scandal because of the arrival of a poetess from the then unrecognized DPR to Lipki. I reminded him that he himself was “chopped” in exactly the same way, but my words did not change the stubborn desire of this young writer to throw stones at the girl from Donetsk.
And then — this time — Filatov personally stood up for her.
We recall that in 1991 Sergei Filatov was appointed secretary of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR, and at the end of the same year he was elected first deputy chairman of the Supreme Council of Russia, and was a permanent member of the Security Council under the president. In 1993-1996, he headed the Yeltsin Administration and the working commission to finalize the draft of the new Constitution, which was adopted at the end of 1993 in a popular referendum. Filatov acted as a member of the board of trustees of the national prize «Big Book», the Pushkin Lyceum Prize, under his leadership the Lipki were held since 2001, which even the pandemic could not prevent; in 2023 it was reported that the Forum would be larger will not take place, but they soon announced the start of accepting new applications.
The official farewell to Filatov will take place on Tuesday, August 29, at the Central Clinical Hospital No. 1 of the Office of the President of Russia on the street. Marshala Timoshenko, 25.