Some people from the "Living City" asked me whether I would sign an appeal calling for citizens to come to a protest against the Gazprom tower on the Okhta. Of course, I said, I’d sign it, and I’d also come to the protest – as we know, a revolution is a festival of workers and the oppressed.

I came to the protest. I was amazed to see so many upstanding people. However, I was extremely surprised at the line-up of the speakers. One of them was the poet Kushner, who recently praised Valentina Matvienko in an ode at the opening of the house of the union of writers, and even historian Lev Lurie, who was a regular feature on the governor’s television channel for five years! Although there was no reason to be surprised. Gratitude is the elite quality of people of the higher sort, and it is not found in gangs. In gangs, there is just one law – betray your accomplice before he betrays you… Yes, evidently there were some winds blowing against the tower that were unknown to us mortals, if even the court servants suddenly came out to protest. It probably means that it’s all over for the Okhta center.

But like any spawn of the devil, this accursed tower cannot simply disappear from the consciousness of Petersburg. It is still capable of muddying the waters. There has been a split on the tower between cultural workers: some appeal to the president and citizens, voicing their hostility towards the "400 meters of shamelessness", while others, on the other hand, desire to see this symbol of effective management in their lifetimes. And in the army of tower opponents, there is the writer Tatyana Moskvina (that’s me), and in the brigade of supporters, there is the figure-skating trainer Tamara Moskvina – in other words, we’ve got Moskvina versus Moskvina!

With this PR technology, we will have to find a different Grebenshchikov, a different Basilashvili and a different Bitov, so that we can completely confuse citizens and make them believe that, so to speak, for every one of your Moskvinas who disagrees, we will find our own Moskvina who does.

But I have no desire to fight Tamara Moskviona – a decent and respected person. I don’t know why she signed someone else’s wretched text which describes the delights of the Gazprom tower. But I can guess. For the same reason that the talented Tovstonogov once put on awful plays about Lenin, great actors read Brezhnev’s "Small Land" on television, and outstanding composers wrote cantatas and oratorios praising the party etc. The government also has some levers of influence on cultural figures. But time has passed. What is left of that government and those figures?

Only what was done with soul and conscience. And all the plays, oratorios, films and books that were made to order have been forgotten. And everything that is done not by conscience, but by order, out of selfishness, fear and conformism – all this swiftly makes a person forgotten. And often, this forgetting often takes away the good things that the person did.

I am not writing this, of course, for the sleeping conscience of Tatyana Bulanova, who now talks about cultural events on television, remembering with difficulty what the editors have written for her. And not for Alexander Nevzorov, who has been called a journalist by inertia for 20 years, when he long ago become a professional fan of banknotes.

There are these people and people like them, who if they flew to the moon for good tomorrow, our culture would not lose anything, But among the people who signed the letter approving the Gazprom tower, there are real authorities, who are of a respectable age.

I hope that they are healthy, and they will not have to go to have a tomograph inspection – a device that scans the state of the brain. For in this case, they would discover that there are only three such devices in the city, and thousands lining up to use them. God forbid, they might not to think: does a city with three tomographs really need a useless tower 400 meters high? And what’s "Gazprom’s money" – isn’t it our money received from exploiting the common national wealth, which was taken away from the nation, very quietly, charmingly and completely by "effective managers"? On the Internet, the people who signed the letter in favor of the tower are called some truly awful names. Why did they bring people’s minds, and especially the young, to such a state? Why were they so incompetent, in the PR department, that they could not explain even the few positive sides of the policy, and instead arouse deep-seated, undying hatred?

For it is not the tower itself that arouses this hatred, but the system of an unjust life, where there is not even a "corner of justice". Here cash collectors rob their own banks, millionaires kill people for nothing, and museum guards steal the exhibits – why should I go on about this, don’t you know yourself?

And the tiny "cultural layer" of this life, the teaspoon of "cream" that we managed to save – they want to throw this away, splitting the intelligentsia, and dirtying people’s reputations with their devilish hands. Will I be able to go calmly to Boris Eifman’s theater, if and when it opens? No. Now that Eifman has signed the letter in favor of the tower, I will no longer think of him as a talented creative person, but as a puppet of the imposters who are destroying Petersburg. I don’t want this to be the way things are, but I won’t be able to think otherwise.

But let’s put our hope in time, that erases everything… Perhaps the "split over the tower" will be a lesson for cultural workers, and will teach them to take care of their reputation, and not given into the promises of people who are not their friends, but their worst enemies. Perhaps the schizophrenic situation in the conscience of Petersburg, where Moskvina is against Moskvina, will die down and disappear. Perhaps, as the song goes, "the sad times will pass, and we will embrace once more"!

But this will not happen before the idea of the revolting tower – a monument to theft that is unprecedented in world history! – finally fades away from the tragic shores of the Neva.