Russian culture is “fast”, but the Minister of culture got off easy. Dissertation Council of Moscow State University, which this week had to decide whether the law has a Minister of culture Vladimir Medinsky with a diploma of candidate of Sciences, was suddenly dissolved. Medina, a certified technologist who considers himself a supporter of positive historical myths as a source of patriotism six years ago he defended his thesis, which he describes as libel ugly comments of foreigners about Russia. 400-page work of Medina under the title “Problems of objectivity in the coverage of Russian history in the second half of the XV-XVII centuries” historians criticized as not scientific. As explained by the expert for the era, Alexei Lobin, in the work of Medina accepts or rejects the statements of the witnesses at its own discretion. According to Lobina, in reality he does not understand.
The Minister sharply denounced the slander of some European diplomats, the essence of which is that Muscovites happy drunk. Medina argues that the admission of alcohol was permitted Russian Orthodox only during important Church holidays. The fact that the mother of Ivan the terrible after the death of her husband became the mistress of Prince Sheepskin-Obolensky, as reported by the Austrian envoy Sigismund Herberstein (Sigismund von Herberstein) and other sources, Medina rejects — “because the Prince was married.” And if Herberstein illustrates his memories with the seal of the great Prince Ivan III, which depicts a muscular half-naked winner of the dragon, not the Holy in modest clothes, so this is in order to humiliate the Russian government, says Medina.
Obviously, he did not know that the great seal of Ivan was made by the Italian applied arts in the Renaissance style. Two historians who spetsializiruyutsya on pre-Petrine Russia — Vyacheslav Kozlyakov and Konstantin erusalimsky, together with the philologist Ivan Babitsky, who, unlike the Minister who can read Herberstein in written in Latin the language of the original, for several months trying to challenge the degree of candidate of Sciences Medina. Something that involved the Council now disbanded, the Ministry of education justifies a systematic structural optimization.
Meanwhile hard “optimization” corrodes the institutions which is the responsibility of Medina. Employees of conservatories, academies of arts, theatrical institutes in Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, Yekaterinburg from the end of last year did not pay a salary. We are thus talking about starvation wages in the amount of from 50 to 200 euros per month. In the Ministry it explain the transition to electronic payment system. And only at the end of the week most of the institutions seem to have the money that has already depreciated against the background of inflation. If Medina actually deserves a degree of candidate of Sciences, so this science should be the destruction of the national capital.
