  We show that a growth of the proton-proton total cross section with energy
can be entirely attributed to the purely perturbative mechanism. The infrared
regularization at rather short distances, $R_c\simeq 0.3$ fm, allows to extend
the BFKL technique from deep inelastic to hadron-hadron scattering. With the
account of the absorption corrections our results are in agreement with the LHC
data on $\sigma_{tot}^{pp}$.
