СЕРГЕЙ ШНУРОВ: ПИРОЖОК НИ С ЧЕМ. "Временно доступен", 14.06.2009 (Дибров, Губин)

I was, of course, deeply impressed by Shnurov's appearance on Channel One in May 2026, singing a duet with Leshchenko, "And Lenin is so young, and young October lies ahead." It was all very moving: young fighters will rise, believe us, fathers. The mummified Russian nightingale, the eternally useful bird Leshchenko—and the former Shnur, modestly dressed, with a hairstyle in the style of a responsible Komsomol worker of the 1930s, against a backdrop of October stars. A relay race of generations. Shnur, admittedly, had sung "And Lenin is so young" before; a recording from 2014 is easy to find online, but back then it was still just banter. With the band "Leningrad," in a dashing style and dashing clothes. Shnur was the epitome of Russian banter: a dashing cynicism that covered a complete lack of any views, convictions, or ideas after the collapse of the USSR, but with the advent of money. That's why he became a favorite of the office crowd: a class that was completely new to Russia, poorly grounded in reality, and henpecked. Dibrov, introducing Shnur on air in 2009, quite rightly invoked Akakiy Akakievich, a typical little man who silently endured all the abuse from the office, but in the afterlife (at a concert, on a Friday night) yanked the hated general's coat off and screamed into the distance: "Everything's fucked up, fuck you, fuck you!" But it's one thing to sympathize, understanding everything and having convictions, and another to be exactly like the person you sympathize with. Only with a much larger—a general's—income. And Shnur's transition from banter to seriousness in the fifth year of the war is, I'm afraid, entirely natural. Shnur didn't break: there was nothing to break. In more than two years of hosting "Completely Seriously," I've seen my share of idols turn out to be worthless. Tretyak. Rastorguev. Menshikov (but he's an actor, where the main thing is to perform, not to be, so there's no disdain for him). And it seems Shnurov is one of those same worthless idiots. He held on as long as he could, but the war era broke him in half, and since he's a public figure, he eats it all up publicly, slurping and greedily. But judge for yourself: that's the kind of guy he was in June 2009.