Vulnerable future

Everything that I say now, inadequately daily reality, is absolutely everything. A friend from Europe sends me a video of the Swedish pop artist, friends from Ukraine send hellish videos from the liberated Kherson, the torture cameras of the “Russian world”. I look at both versions. Since February 24, I am not busy with cultural issues, I am completely busy with the survival of my Ukrainian and Russian friends, close friends and comrades, no matter how different their fate. Where and how to attach them in Europe. How to help them if they remain in Ukraine and Russia, how to make their life safer and more tolerant. I just have hands and mind does not have enough thought about the future, including my personal one. I don’t care where I live, I think about the people who were victims of war. How can I help them.

Our life and our future are no longer dependent on our will and representations. From social and cultural institutions. They are destroyed by illegal changes in the Russian Constitution, the invasion of Ukraine, the actual introduction of martial law in the country, military censorship and violent mobilization. The future of the population, from the peasants of Belgorod and Siberia to the hipsters of Peter and Vladivostok, so far depends on the Kremlin, but no longer depends on the unspoken agreements of the authorities with the “deepest people”: ensuring safety and cash pillows for state employees in exchange for political loyalty. It was an unspoken consensus after the terrorist attacks of the beginning of the zero (whoever attributes them to Chechen radicals or FSB officers). The city middle class of both capitals tried to protest against the irremovability of power (see Case Bolotnaya), but this led to the first wave of political repression, and then to a political reaction in its entire amount.

Studies (for example, Natalia Zubarevich) show that 40 percent of the population of Russia live behind the poverty line. This is no longer an agreement, but direct violence against the inhabitants of the country, which are considered as a biological resource for "military geopolitics" and are blamed by propaganda. But excuses and even compassion for those who went to war and reproduce Russian violence in Ukraine, I cannot imagine. No “Russian poverty” can explain the murders of civilians, the rape of Ukrainians and Ukrainians, the defeat of their houses, shooting from tanks in peaceful huts in towns where Russian troops entered (I am in touch with witnesses). Violation of the rules of warfare, cynicism of the practice of this war. Something went wrong as the real and future employees of universities and publishers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, employees of architectural clusters of Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk, directors of Voronezh and philologists of Samara. The authorities very quickly used the levers of illegal violence, which, it turns out, were not excluded from social tissue.

Our future turned out to be hostage by the Kremlin Elders ( Maria Stepanova wrote about this long before the new round of military escalation). These people unleashed the war in Ukraine for the sake of their mental phantoms, backed up by the Orthodox heresy, which contradicts the main commandments of Christianity. Now we are not dependent on Averintsev and Pasternak, but on Dugin and Prigozhin, Kadyrov and the military, Simonyan and other propagandists. Our thirty -year work in the field of education was easy to destroy. As thinking units, we are forced to return to the past - in the sense of understanding the viciousness of Russian messianism and the Black -Hundred esotericism of the early twentieth century. This is where the source of that part of Russian culture that allowed war crimes in Ukraine, to give orders about their capabilities, and not Pushkin and Brodsky. Secondary and Nazi-oriented Russian philosophy, repeating the back of German reactionaries of the old times in universities, was successful in the Zakremlin circles, there is many evidence about this. It turned out that to close the free universities that European practices offered nothing. Or drive out of these institutions of teachers with an anti -war position. And this is a question for the construction of Russian culture and society after 1991. Their actors ask each other: why most cultural institutions could not withstand the tests on February 24? Because for the most part they depended on the state. Because the law and order did not become the basis for the work of cultural and social institutions - here the case of the “memorial” is the most egregious. Because the courts are accountable to the Kremlin administration. Attempts by independent theaters and publishers to continue their humanitarian policy, of course, touch me and delight me, like the stoic position of the humanities who do not leave Russia in “dark times”. But we must be aware that we live in conditions of military censorship, which closed and will close all the sources of independent thought for the sake of explaining the “special operation” and justifying the aggression of the local quasifascist regime against Ukraine.

The future of the humanitarian community is also connected with the criticism of Ukrainians unpleasant to us. Why do Western Slavists after February 24 allow themselves to make anti-war projects with the participation of citizens of the aggressor country and citizens of Ukraine, which is subjected to direct genocide from Russia? This is a question that needs to be carefully and sequentially understanding. My version is that for the deconstruction of this plot you need to turn to the history of the Cold War, studying the "image of the enemy" in American and then German universities. To understand the hypothetical opponent, you must discover his cultural codes, this explains the attention to the “Russian”, or rather, the Soviet plot. The Soviet Empire and post -Soviet Russia were the main, if not an enemy, then the “other” in the post -war confrontation, starting from 45 years. Ukraine was part of this space in the eyes of researchers. Of course, in the light of modern military-political realities, this approach should be revised in favor of Ukrainian culture independent of Moscow.

As for not a group of intellectuals, but of the Russian “deep people”, which sends his sons to the Ukrainian front, mothers and wives whose public the Internet is overwhelmed. Yes, I am shocked by the passivity of the hinterland, the willingness to send my men to the faithful death, although I know various personal stories of hatred for power, collected in my mind for 20 years of work by a field reporter in small cities and villages. As Julia Vishnevetskaya, the director of the documentary project of Radio Liberty “Signs of Life”, I can no longer listen to how a good person turns into a monster. I can no longer sympathize with the heroes of the cinema that I shoot.

These plots already have many acquittals and versions from Russian intellectuals: they say, we did not know how the people live in fact, which makes him go to war - poverty and loans. Does morality and conscience do not force me to abandon mobilization? Or can the deep people have these categories, only humility to the authorities, stupidity, greed in obtaining an inheritance from dead sons? How can the elders send their children to certain death? My belief: as soon as the government changes and television rhetoric replaces, the motherland-death will immediately turn into a homeland, protesting against the war and voting for life. Only in Russia should you live for a long time and remember what the war in Afghanistan led to.

As for Russian architects and builders, this is my favorite layer of citizens for understanding reality. They received huge preferences from the beginning of the zero, unlike doctors and teachers, engineers and university teachers. This layer, even sending its sons to safe countries, will cling to state orders and thus indirectly support the “special operation” - Business as Usual . They think the future at a short distance. Like most of the "unknown" middle class in large cities of Russia, they hope to normalize and return to pre -war business and civilian structure. But this is unlikely to be possible. And partly resembles the work of the Titanic mechanics engineers, while he is still floating.

The future now, let's say directly, is associated with the work of the Armed Forces and American supplies of weapons to Ukraine, with the closure of the sky above it. With the recognition of Russia's defeat in the person of its leaders - and their person in the future of the International Tribunal. We will deal with our personal life projects after. Every day it is more important to deal with the present.