How we coped with 2023

Dear readers!

In gratitude for your support, we previously periodically wrote letters to you, talking about how things are going and sharing our thoughts. This year we decided to make this newsletter regular. Once a month we send you a letter from one of the three founders of The Bell - Elizabeth Ossetian, Irina Malkova or Peter Mironenko. This newsletter is personal - in it we share what we are thinking about and what we are experiencing. We will be glad if you answer us. The usual world has long collapsed, and communication, support and dialogue have acquired even greater value.

No matter how we want to choose kind words and remember the good in the past 2023, it does not work. This, unfortunately, was the year of normalization of the war with Ukraine, repression and totalitarian sentiments in Russia, the year of the beginning of the new war in the Middle East and other gloomy events, which I did not want to represent. It was difficult to emotionally cope with this, because journalists could not but dive into the news.

But there were things that personally helped us. Firstly, we did not lose the point of what we are doing, and we feel that we have preserved a very important contact with the audience (we hope, it is). Secondly, they managed to do something sensible in a year, which I want to remind you about today.

In the editorial office of The Bell, instead of summing up the New Year, we were engaged in stories that, it seems to us, is best illustrated by what happened to the country, its economy and business landscape over the two years of the war.

• Here, for example, an investigation about Armen Sargsyan, the owner of a biography, according to which you can study the history of the Russian midday business. In the past year, he burst into the new Russian business elite-and all due to the fact that he managed to “choose” assets that foreign investors running from Russia dropped.
• Here we show the graphs how the militarization of the Russian economy looks like - a process that seems irreversible in the second year of the war and threatens big problems in the future.
• But the story about VK-before the war it was an IT company with social networks, a game business, a taxi and food delivery, and now-the same “Channel One”, only in a number.

In the project “This Ossetian”, several interviews were published over the same year, which clearly fit into the paradigm - the past, present and future.

• Andrei Zorin , a doctor of philological sciences, literary critic and historian, professor at the University of Oxford, a former teacher of the Russian State Humanitarian University and the author of the historical program in Shaninka, was responsible for the conversation about the past of Russia.
• About the present, in which “the entire muscles of the nation is aimed at closing your eyes”, we spoke with a political scientist, and now the ino -agent Ekaterina Shulman .
• And about the future - with the entrepreneurs of the Libermans brothers, who are sure that the money earned should not be invested in real estate and shares, but in people. And this is the only way in the future can this world be made better.

Again, you get some joyless picture, you say. Everything is so, there is nothing to cover. But it is better we will work without pink glasses - and about how great Russia has adapted to sanctions and war, let the president and government tell.

But we promised that this newsletter would be not only about professional, but also about personal. Therefore, back to the fact that this year, in the absence of good news and forecasts, we supported ourselves.

“Lisa: “ My outlet became memoirs and historical books: this year these were “other shores”, the autobiography of Vladimir Nabokov from 1920 to 1940, and “Days. 1920”, a book of memoirs of the publisher and ideologist of the White Movement of Vasily Shulgin, in which the First World War and two Revolutions and the Civil War fit. Of course, I have enough common sense not to compare myself with Nabokov or Shulgin, but in moments of despondency it is useful for me to remember that people have already passed through many of my problems.

The third book, which I would add to my list, is the recently laid out by Boris Akunin on his “My calendar” website. Unfortunately, he will not go out on paper in Russia due to the author’s recognition as an extremist and terrorist, but no one prevents you from reading the electronic version. I would call the “my calendar” an unobtrusive daily motivator of an intelligent person - in contrast to the rather annoying and meaningless “achieveers” from Instagram, from which you feel more inferiority than a charge of vigor.

I will lie, if I don’t add to the list of books that running in my hands helps me - this is a routine that I can no longer refuse, as well as a daily piece of life when I belong only to myself. I recommend everyone to try! "

Petya: “It turned out that this spring I managed to live at once in three centers of Russian emigration, and spend two more days in two days. For two months I changed 21 apartment, and this is not an exaggeration - I recorded. I do not advise anyone to repeat this experience. But it turned out that now in every country to which a person from Russia can bring, I have friends. In general, Russian emigrants (I really do not like the word "retains") - a more close -knit community than it seems in srachs in social networks. "

Ira: “I suddenly helped me out a new language. Not to say that I have already advanced very much, but the hassle skill to learn the new, as it turned out, helps to shake and structure thoughts in everything else, adapt to a greatly changed life.

But with reading this year there was a strange thing. I often ask friends and relatives to bring from Moscow a book in Russian for a teenager’s son. I suddenly realized that the last six months - this is my reading. Children, if they are loved and care about them, feel that the world around us is kind and fair. And this correct children's world is in books and to the end of Yanush Korczak, who is devoted to his students, and my peer -haired Norwegian Maria Parr. We are very missing such a world now. ”

And all your support helps us a lot. And not only the donates - your letters give a lot of effort, and with some readers we have already started a correspondence. Thank you!

Happy New Year, dear readers and friends. We wish you love, good and, of course, peace in him.

We are with you.