Actually, I was going to write a feminist article. But the further the sex scandal around the most famous Moscow school unfolds, the more it becomes clear that this is not a story about sex. And not about gender. And not even primarily about gender. This is a story about school. About power, about trauma. About the trauma that almost everyone who spent the most vulnerable decade of their life bears within the framework set by the structure of the Soviet and post-Soviet school.

Actually, this is a common place. And it’s even somewhat awkward to repeat this commonplace. But for some reason it happens all the time. What I mean is that the true content of any statement is not in itself, not in its individual words and not in their dictionary meanings, not in the order of these words and not in punctuation marks. The true content of an utterance lies only in the context of this utterance.