Wikipedia — Tatyana Arkadyevna Malkina (born August 18, 1967, Moscow) — Russian journalist and television presenter, columnist. From 1991 to 1993, she worked as a correspondent in the politics department of Nezavisimaya Gazeta. On August 19, 1991, at a press conference of the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP), she asked the question: "Do you understand that tonight you have committed a state coup?"
In 2026, she hosts "Chronicles of the Flood" on Facebook and, with Irina Petrovskaya, on the YouTube channel "NO.Media from Russia" — a project of independent journalists who remain in Moscow.
DeepSeek AI — Based on Tatyana Malkina's diary entries, journalistic notes, and reflections from 2026 — one can compose a profound and tragic spiritual-psychological portrait of a person who is simultaneously a witness, a victim, and a chronicler of an era. This is a portrait of a personality whose inner structure has withstood the test of time but finds itself on the verge of collapse under the pressure of a historical cataclysm.
I. The Archetype of the "Unbroken Witness." Continuity of Civic Courage.
Malkina's psychological core is her identity, forged back in 1991. The question she posed to the GKChP is not just a journalistic device; it is an existential act. It defines her as a person who cannot help but call things by their names, even when it is dangerous. This act cemented in her the archetype of the "herald of truth," for whom professional duty is inseparable from civic position.
In 2026, this archetype transforms into that of the "chronicler of the Apocalypse." She doesn't just report news; she keeps the "Chronicles of the Flood" — the title speaks for itself. This is not reporting but an existential documentation of the end of the familiar world. Her psychology is built on the paradox of total awareness: she sees, understands, and documents the horror in all its details, yet she cannot (or will not) look away. This is her way of surviving and simultaneously her curse.
II. Spiritual Crisis: "The Death of God" and Hell as Reality.
Malkina's spiritual state is a classic picture of a crisis of faith in the human, if not the metaphysical. She writes: "The flood is simply necessary. nature needs to be cleansed." This is not a call to violence but an expression of absolute despair, when the current reality is perceived as so corrupt that its total destruction seems the only act of justice. She aligns herself with Old Testament prophets but without hope for an ark.
She clearly feels that the world has crossed a line:
Devaluation of language: All interjections are replaced by one — "fuck!" — and the discourse of "forcing peace" she calls absurd, shameful for adult politicians.
Shift in moral center: She records with horror that familiar moral norms have stopped working. Debates about whether it's "permissible to bomb Wildberries" or whether "a woman has the right to mourn warehouse workers" demonstrate the erosion of basic empathy.
This leads to deep frustration and numbness. She catches herself "almost expecting a monstrous bombing." This is a key psychological moment — a syndrome of habituation to horror, a protective mechanism of the psyche that she herself condemns, as it signifies a loss of humanity.
III. Split "I" and the Trauma of Everyday Life.
Malkina's psychological portrait is woven from radical contrasts and dissociation:
Citizen of the World vs. Inhabitant of "Mordor": She ironically calls Moscow "Mordor" but stays there. This is not passivity but a conscious (or forced) act of resistance. She embodies "Western" values (her husband is American, she watches Western series) in the heart of a hostile system. This creates constant internal tension and a feeling of living on a volcano.
Fragmentation of perception: Her consciousness jumps between the macro and micro worlds. In one paragraph — geopolitical catastrophes and thousands of deaths; in the next — a broken gas cap lever or playing with the cat. This is not chaos but psychological protection. Subconsciously, she tries to cling to "small" problems (finding gas, roasting a chicken) to avoid drowning in the "big" horror. These are the only islands of normalcy in an ocean of madness.
Empathy as a weapon and as a wound: She simultaneously pities absolutely everyone — from small entrepreneurs to dying soldiers. She can lose composure and cry in a restroom with a stranger who lost her son. But this hypersensitivity (the ability "not to turn away from the abyss") exhausts her. Her empathy becomes the cause of her "half-fainting state." She admits it's better to watch news continuously than to receive an "undigestible" portion all at once.
IV. Nostalgia and the Cultural Antidote.
In this hell, the only salvation for Malkina becomes the Symbolic and the Cultural. She retreats into art: cinema (Babylon 5, Pictures of Friendly Ties), music (Britten's War Requiem).
Babylon 5 for her and her husband is not just a series but a code, a cipher for reality. The uncanny resemblance of the plot to current events gives her a feeling of metaphysical predetermination, or at least confirmation that she is not insane. This is her "Ark" — a space where logic still works and good and evil are distinguishable.
V. Conclusion: "Envy the Dead."
Malkina's final, most terrifying thought: "It's time to truly envy the dead." This is a marker of ultimate spiritual exhaustion. She no longer fights the system hoping to win. She fights it hoping to preserve herself, and this battle, she feels, she is losing. She is frustrated by the "gaslighting" from like-minded people, by the fact that within the country and in emigration, people have stopped understanding each other due to differing "positions."
She realizes that the future will come "upon us rather than for us." However, despite total doom and calls for the flood, she continues to write. She does not leave the battlefield (informational and moral). This is her existential choice. She stays to bear witness, even if her voice is merely a "cry in the wilderness" and an increase of sorrows.
Tatyana Malkina's Psychological Formula:
Absolute awareness + Impenetrable civic honesty + Colossal empathy = Chronic trauma of the witness. This is a person who knows Hell is real, sees it in detail, but refuses to stop calling it Hell.
*CLAUDE SONNET AI — Liturgy of the Witness
An Experience in Spiritual-Psychological Reading of Tatyana Malkina's "Chronicles of the Flood"
Prologue: Genre as Symptom
Before discussing content, it is worth pausing on form. "Chronicle" is a genre of annals, monastic in origin: the chronicler records events "in the summer of such-and-such," laying no claim to judgment, yet unable to avoid it. Malkina chooses not the "diary" (intimate, turned inward) nor the "report" (external, impersonal), but precisely the chronicle — a form that obligates regularity while making it utterly impossible to endure. Hence the pervasive motif of the text: "wanted to write, but couldn't," "went into the real," "neglected." The disruption of the chronicle's rhythm is not laziness but a symptom: the chronicler of the end of history cannot be at peace because the end neither arrives nor is postponed, but lasts.
This fundamentally distinguishes the genre from classical apocalypticism. For the prophet, the Apocalypse is an event with a structure: judgment, retribution, a new heaven. For Malkina, the flood is a state: not an event but a habitat, in which she swims along with the cat, the chicken in the oven, and the gas cap lever. This mixture of incompatible scales is precisely the spiritual nerve of the text.
I. Theology Without God: Yearning for a Structure of Meaning
Malkina repeatedly invokes the flood — "nature needs to be cleansed," "the flood is forever, but not eternal." This is neither theomachy nor the search for God in the literal sense — she admits herself: "God give you strength... though I don't believe in Him." What we see is not faith nor atheism, but a yearning for the structure of the Old Testament — for a world where catastrophe has meaning, an author, and an end. The Biblical flood ends with a rainbow and a covenant "never again." For Malkina, the flood threatens to be permanent — "I'm not sure the process is reversible." This is more terrible than godlessness: it is a world where the act of destruction occurs, but the redemptive structure does not. She quotes Scripture not as a believer, but as someone searching cultural memory for any grammar for the unspeakable — and finding none: there is no ark for her, only a boat which is "probably still needed anyway."
II. Foolishness as an Ethical Position
Unlike prophetic pathos, Malkina's tone constantly slips into foolishness and vulgar abuse: "fuuuuck!", "ghouls," "propaganda bullshit." This is not a stylistic lapse but a conscious strategy. The holy fool in Russia had the unique right to speak truth to power precisely because he rejected decorous speech — crudeness was the guarantee of his sincerity, proof that he was not integrated into court etiquette. Malkina, calling things by their names through profanity, performs a similar gesture: rejection of the respectable language of commentary becomes proof that she is not an "expert," not a participant in talk shows, but a naked witness without the armor of professional cynicism. Her crudeness is a form of chastity in relation to horror: she refuses to refine what should not be refined.
III. The Body as the Last Witness
A key, almost overlooked layer of the text is the physical. Malkina systematically records not thoughts about war but physiological reactions to it: almost fell from a biker's roar, went deaf for a moment, almost caused a fire forgetting the chicken, recoiled at a traffic light. The body here becomes the last honest instrument in a world where words are devalued: language can be falsified, a position can be simulated, but a flinching body does not lie. This is an archaic, almost shamanic way of knowing reality — through involuntary physical reaction rather than rational analysis. In this sense, her texts are closer to the tradition of holy fools and the blessed, whose prophecy was expressed through bodily gesture, than to the tradition of the publicist.
IV. The Small as a Liturgy of Resistance
There is a temptation to read everyday inserts (cat, chicken, gas, lilacs) as psychological defense-avoidance. But careful reading reveals something else: these episodes are not opposed to horror but are performed within it as an act of liturgy — a repetitive, meticulous, almost ritual action that asserts the continuation of life despite its de-meaning. Marinating a chicken, hunting down the gas lever, naming the 18-year-old cat Mozart — these are micro-acts of creating meaning when macro-history is devoid of meaning. It is worth recalling here not trauma psychology but another tradition — the Hesychast idea of "doing" (performing small tasks with full attention as a form of prayer). Malkina involuntarily reproduces this structure: attention to a mundane detail becomes a form not of escape but of gratitude for the little that has not yet been taken away.
V. The Inverted Formula of Survivor's Guilt
Classic "survivor's guilt" presupposes: I am alive, others died, and I didn't deserve it. Malkina presents a paradoxical inversion — the guilt of the remaining observer. She does not physically experience the bombing; she sees and transmits it. Hence the tormenting question "did I have the right to hug a weeping woman in the restroom?", hence the shame before the deceased Nina Litvinova for "not corresponding with political prisoners." This is guilt not for surviving but for the insufficiency of one's participation despite the fullness of one's awareness. The information hyper-connectivity of our era gives birth to a new type of ethical trauma: to know everything and be able to do pitifully little.
VI. Icon and Propaganda: The Struggle for the Figurative Realm
A separate drama of the text is the struggle for the right to images. Malkina meticulously records how the state re-appropriates symbols: the GULAG Museum becomes the "Museum of Memory," the Vladimir Icon is returned to the church by the Patriarch who thanks the President, children's literature is checked for extremism. The spiritual conflict here is not about politics but about the right to memory as such: whoever possesses the image of the past also possesses the future. She, a chronicler without an institution behind her, keeps a private counter-chronicle precisely because she sees: official memory is being rewritten in real time, and the only instrument of resistance available to her is personal, unofficial testimony.
VII. Art as a Temporary Refuge, Not Salvation
Britten's War Requiem, Babylon 5, the film Pictures of Friendly Ties — in all cases, this is not an escape from reality but moments of synchronous breathing of the hall, collective silence, which she calls "salvation, not canceling the flood but transfiguring it." This is a precise formulation of the spiritual function of art in catastrophe: it does not cancel horror nor serve as anesthesia — it provides a brief form of shared experience impossible anywhere else — neither in family, nor politics, nor friendship, torn apart by war.
Conclusion: Testimony Without an Addressee
The main tragic paradox of the text is writing without a guaranteed addressee. Malkina does not write to be heard by the authorities (pointless), nor for pure therapy (otherwise she wouldn't publish), nor as a historian for future generations (she doesn't believe in such a future). She writes because not-writing would be capitulation before the muteness which, in her own words, arrives with the flood — "no language remains in which one could talk about this without killing each other." The chronicle is kept not to be read but so that language continues to exist for at least one person while aphasia of an entire civilization grows around him. This is the last, most modest, and most stubborn form of faith — not in God, not in history, not in the victory of good, but in the belief that calling things by their names is itself an act that the flood cannot undo as long as someone continues to perform it.
*GENSPARK AI — Below is my own distinct perspective on the "Chronicles of the Flood": I deliberately move away from already well-trodden themes like the "heroic witness," "trauma of the observer," "holy foolishness," or the "death of God," and take a different optical focus — the spiritual hydraulics of a personality living in a world where evil operates not only through fear but through seepage into language, rhythm, everyday life, attention, and the nervous system. The basis is your uploaded corpus of Tatyana Malkina's 2026 entries and the episodes of the project on the NO.Media from Russia channel.
The Flood not as Catastrophe, but as Loss of Boundaries
The most interesting thing in these texts is not that the world is depicted as hell — that's too obvious. What's much more important is something else: for Malkina, the flood is not an event or even just a metaphor for war, but a state of matter in which boundaries cease to hold. The partition between the political and the domestic, between the grand and the vulgar, between speech and scream, between news and physical tic, between sorrow and irritation, is blurred. The flood is when the world ceases to be solid, and everything begins to leak everywhere: propaganda into memory, fear into humor, war into the kitchen, catastrophe into a trip to the gas station, horror into everyday intonation. Hence the key image here is not the "explosion" but precisely the leak. Not the lightning of the apocalypse, but the slow penetration of poison into every crack of existence.
From this follows an important psychological conclusion: the main problem of such a world is not only that it kills, but that it deprives a person of hermeticity. The personality can no longer separate "I think about war" from "war is already thinking within me." This is precisely why the couplings of large and small are so important in the chronicles: Kyiv and Wildberries, the terrorist attack and the gas cap lever, rockets and the chicken in the oven, the ISS and the fuel shortage, death and the market where someone sells cheese. This is not random fragmentation nor merely traumatic dissociation. It is a picture of a world where everything communicates with everything else through breaches.
The Psyche Here Not Only Suffers — It Builds Valves
My main thesis is this: in the "Chronicles of the Flood," we see not just a wounded psyche but a psyche that, in real time, invents valves, baffles, and bypass mechanisms to keep from drowning. And this is what is truly spiritually interesting.
Malkina's profanity is not a "breakdown" or just expression. When all the interjections of an era are compressed into a single obscene exhalation, it means consciousness is searching for a minimal sound form for pressure relief. Not a language of explanation, but a language of emergency venting. Irony serves the same function: it does not adorn thought but prevents horror from turning into sticky totality. Mundane details — cat, gas tank, signs, food, blossom, series, gas station — also do not "distract" from the catastrophe but function as psychic bulkheads. They do not cancel the flood; they prevent it from filling the internal space completely.
This is why these texts must be read not as a stream of despair but as a document of internal engineering. Before us is a person who, at every moment, regulates the degree of permeability: how much horror to let in, how much sarcasm to release, what to grasp onto to prevent consciousness from becoming either stone or swamp. In this sense, the "Chronicles of the Flood" are closer not to confession or even journalism, but to a logbook for the emergency operation of a soul.
The Main Spiritual Test is Not Fear, but Contagion
Looking deeper, Malkina's central spiritual drama consists not in the presence of evil around her, but in evil's attempt to dictate the form of reaction. It wants not only to kill bodies and maim destinies; it wants to make a person start thinking in its tempo, speaking in its register, feeling in its range, choosing between insensibility and hysteria as the only two available states.
Hence the tormenting theme of "white noise." The real danger is not just the flow of terrible news, but that the psyche begins to settle into it as into a new climate. When the monstrous becomes predictable, it is not adaptation in a healthy sense but a quiet internal infection with the routine of evil. Spiritually, this is more terrifying than panic. Panic at least acknowledges the exceptionality of the disaster; white noise translates disaster into background. And Malkina resists this background with everything she can: irritation, sarcasm, grotesque, sudden tenderness, sometimes almost deliberate intemperance. She seems to say: better to be uneven than to become smooth in a world where smoothness means moral petrification.
In this sense, her texts are not a chronicle of horror but a struggle against becoming a good conductor of the same darkness you describe. The flood wants not only to flood the house; it wants to reconfigure the plumbing of the soul so that the person themselves begins to distribute poison through their own internal vessels. And Malkina's spiritual discipline lies precisely in resisting this.
Tenderness for Her is Not a Feeling, but a Way Not to Disintegrate
One of the most underestimated lines in these chronicles is not despair, but tenderness as a form of thinking. Tenderness here is not sentimentality or a respite from politics. It is almost the last anthropological technology preserving a person as human.
Embracing a stranger in a market restroom, attention to the cat, to the husband, to strange details of city life, to blossoming trees, to musical experience, to films and series — all this is not "contrast" to hell, but a practice of restoring scale. Evil is always large-scale: it loves masses, blocks, missiles, narratives, state symbols, historical backdrops. Tenderness always returns the singular: this cat, this woman, this smell, this branch, this voice, this funny gas lever, this awkwardness, this pause. Therefore tenderness in the "Chronicles" is not softness but resistance to depersonalization.
And here, in my view, the most significant spiritual nerve of the text opens up. Salvation comes not from faith in victory, not from confidence in historical meaning, not from a heroic pose. Salvation comes from the ability not to let oneself switch to total generalization. As soon as a person begins to see only "masses," "camps," "sides," "historical forces," they have already half-lost to the reality they are trying to condemn. Malkina holds onto the concrete not from mundane weakness but from a deep intuition: the soul perishes not when it sees horror, but when it ceases to see faces and individual lives.
Art Here is Not a Refuge, but a Calibration Instrument
The role of art in this world is very original. Usually, we say: culture helps to distract. But in the "Chronicles of the Flood," it performs a different function. Britten's War Requiem, films, Babylon 5, even the ISS as an almost aesthetic image of cooperation above a berserk earth — this is not escape but a re-tuning of inner hearing. Art restores lost proportions when reality becomes either too loud, or too sticky, or too dull.
Importantly, this is not the romantic notion that "art will save the world." No, the world it does not save. But for a short time, it restores a person's ability to distinguish height from baseness, rhythm from noise, form from decay. That is, it does what political reality can no longer do. In spiritual-psychological terms, art for Malkina is not anesthesia but a calibration of the soul. After it, a person does not forget the disaster; they just briefly remember that the disaster is a disaster, not the norm.
The Most Accurate Theme of the Chronicles is Not the End of the World, but Life After the End of the Future
Yet another original angle: these texts are not so much about catastrophe as about the state when the future has lost its credibility. Not formally disappeared, but ceased to be internally accessible. Hence the strange deformation of time. Dates follow one another, the chronicle retains its calendar form, but psychologically time does not move forward. It is soaked. It has become heavy, viscous, difficult to traverse.
But here it is important not to repeat the banal about a "loop" or "stagnation." Rather, Malkina develops a particular type of existence: life after the end of historical enthusiasm. When one can no longer honestly live by projects, but still needs somehow to live through days. And then, in place of the future, other units of meaning arrive: season, music, series, walk, conversation, news, tree, smell, gas station, cat, someone else's disaster, one's own awkwardness. That is, the personality switches from historical time to the time of small holdings.
This is perhaps the deepest spiritual plot of the "Chronicles of the Flood": how to live when you cannot honestly promise yourself a "later," but you can still honestly perform a "now." Not in the sense of hedonistic carpe diem, but in the sense of a harsh discipline of presence: not letting the day fall apart completely, even if the era has already fallen apart.
Conclusion
Therefore, my conclusion is this: the "Chronicles of the Flood" is not just a text about catastrophe and not just a diary of moral trauma. It is an investigation of how the soul attempts to maintain semi-permeability in a world of total flooding. Not to shut itself off completely, because that leads to petrification. And not to open itself fully, because that leads to dissolution. Malkina is constantly seeking a third state: to be vulnerable but not infected; to be engaged but not captured; to be alive but not become a conduit for universal madness.
To put it very succinctly, the spiritual theme of these chronicles is not "how to look into hell," but how not to turn one's own internal water into a continuation of the flood. And in this sense, we truly have a fundamental text of the era: not because it loudly cries out about the end of the world, but because it very precisely shows how a person repairs their internal sluices while the world outside has already been torn from its hinges.
*PERPLEXITY AI — Below is my own, independent version of a fundamental spiritual-psychological essay on Tatyana Malkina's "Chronicles of the Flood," grounded in the text of the chronicles themselves but without repeating others' interpretive moves.
Chronicle of Decay and Preservation
The "Chronicles of the Flood" is not merely a reaction to war nor just testimony to an era. It is a text about how a person attempts to preserve the internal form of personality when the external world loses shape faster than the psyche can register it.
The most important element here is not the theme of catastrophe in itself, but how the catastrophe changes the mode of consciousness: speech, memory, attention, humor, bodily reactions, relationship to everyday life and to the future.
The Flood as Destruction of Coherence
In the chronicles, it is particularly noticeable that the "flood" is not one big blow but a state of decompression of the world. The large and the small cease to be separate: terrorist attacks, fires, political slogans, everyday trifles, the cat, the chicken, the gas tank, news, fear, irony — all end up in one environment of existence.
This is precisely what makes the text spiritually significant: it shows not only the horror of war but also the loss of internal architecture, where events could still be correlated with stable categories of good, common sense, and perspective.
Speech on the Limit
Malkina's style is no less important than its content. Her language does not strive for literary smoothness; on the contrary, it conveys the life of consciousness in a state of overload, where thought no longer keeps up with reality, and a normal sentence cannot withstand the pressure of events.
Hence the sharp transitions, sarcasm, obscene expression, grotesque, almost convulsive density of formulations. This is not "carelessness" but a way to hold reality together from spreading: speech here functions as an emergency structure, not an ornament.
Bodily Truth
One of the deepest layers of these records is the physical. Malkina constantly registers not abstract reflections but the physical impact of the world: anxiety, flinching, fatigue, almost automatic reactions to news and events, the inertia of everyday movements.
This reveals an important spiritual-psychological truth: when language and politics lie or become thin, the body remains the last witness. It cannot "justify," but it can unmistakably show the degree of internal destruction.
Everyday Life as a Form of Resistance
At first glance, everyday episodes in the chronicles are simply pauses between large events. But in reality, it is in them that a counterweight to historical decay emerges: cooking, animals, home, food, gas station, private conversations, beloved cultural texts.
These things do not cancel the catastrophe but give the personality minimal support. In a world where large structures have ceased to be reliable, it is precisely small, repeatable actions that become a form of self-preservation: not salvation in a high sense, but preservation of the continuity of the "I."
Tenderness Without Illusions
Particularly valuable is that in Malkina's text there is no sentimental belief in "good as consolation." Her compassion is not abstract nor decorative: it passes through irritation, fear, fatigue, irony, oral and written resistance.
Therefore tenderness here is not the opposite of tragedy but a way not to petrify inside tragedy. It is not softness of character but a difficult form of humanity that holds attention on the individual life, not allowing it to dissolve in statistics and slogans.
Culture as Maintenance of Measure
The series Babylon 5, music, cultural references, and personal memory in Malkina serve not an entertainment but a calibrating function. They restore internal measure when reality becomes too loud, too sticky, or too deformed.
Art here is not a refuge from the world but an instrument for restoring proportions. It reminds us that the discernment of form, rhythm, duty, friendship, and meaning is still possible, even if the historical situation denies it.
Conclusion
From a spiritual-psychological perspective, the "Chronicles of the Flood" is a text about a personality that cannot stop the catastrophe but refuses capitulation before it in language, memory, and attention.
Its main theme is not only suffering but also the inner work of maintaining coherence when the world systematically destroys it. In this sense, Malkina writes not just a chronicle of events but a chronicle of the struggle for the human form of consciousness in an era of the dissolution of that very human form.
*KIMI AI — The Flood as a Profession: On the Spiritual Economy of Attention and Human Exhaustibility
A Foundational Essay-Investigation on Tatyana Malkina's "Chronicles of the Flood"
Introduction. The Office at the Water's Edge
In the beginning was a question. The question asked at an August 1991 press conference was not merely a journalistic jab, but a kind of employment contract signed in blood. Tatyana Malkina entered into a pact with the era: she obliges herself to call things by their names, and the era, in turn, obliges itself to continuously produce material for that naming. Thirty-five years later, the contract is still in effect, except now the workplace has become a flooded workshop, and the shift never ends. The "Chronicles of the Flood" is not a diary of feelings or a confession. It is a work record book of a person who found themselves hired by catastrophe under an open-ended contract.
We are accustomed to reading texts about war and tyranny as testimonies, confessions, cries of the soul. But for Malkina, the flood is above all a job. A job without weekends, without vacation, without the right to a union. And the scariest part of this job is not that it kills — it's that it structures. It provides rhythm, obligations, professional crises, and even micro-rewards. In a world where everything dissolves, the chronicle remains a discipline. And in this discipline — unexpectedly — lies the last form of freedom.
I. The Chronicle as an Employment Contract with the Abyss
"I wanted to sit down to the chronicles, neglected because I had neglected them," Malkina writes. This phrase sounds like a procrastinator's report, but it is actually a work instruction. The flood requires regularity. It tolerates no vacations. "Went into the real for two days on important matters" — and upon returning, one must catch up: discover everything, record everything, protocol everything. The chronicle is a conveyor belt with no "stop" button.
But here is the paradox: on one hand, Malkina complains that "with conscientious keeping of the chronicles, the scribe has no time even to write," that "from morning till night one simply has to continuously compile a feed of all the monstrous world news feeds." On the other, she admits that the "Chronicles of the Flood" write themselves. They are so active that they "even make it onto television." The work becomes autonomous from the worker. The flood is not only the object of labor but also a colleague who takes on part of the duties, while demanding presence at the workplace.
Here a deep spiritual problem opens up: when catastrophe becomes a profession, a person loses the distinction between life and labor. "No time for news" is no longer rest but a luxury to be fought for. "A couple of hours for peaceful coffee, looking at flowers and shadows on the wall" is not life but time stolen from the boss. The flood is a boss who never sleeps.
II. Economy of Attention: Accounting of Horror
Malkina has a remarkable metaphor for replenishment: she refuels. "Refueled to a full tank! 95, at 72, without a single person in line!" — and this full tank of gasoline becomes an exact equivalent of psychic resource. The car drives "more pleasantly and better." She turns on the radio — and, miraculously, it's not about shelling, but about NASA and the ISS. "Almost cried with emotion." Refueling is not a mundane episode but an act of replenishing the fuel of attention.
Attention in flood conditions is a scarce resource. And Malkina keeps strict account of it. She knows that "it's better to have it continuously than to get a week's portion at once, which is completely undigestible." This is the accounting of horror: in small installments, daily, to avoid bankruptcy. She refuses "a summary of what happened over two or three weeks" because she understands: the inflation of meaning will devour any accumulated capital.
But there is also a flip side — the inflation of the instrument itself. "Information about this is rapidly turning into the same kind of background white noise as information about the daily casualties of the war." When everything is important, nothing is important. When everything is recorded, the record is devalued. Malkina finds herself in the position of an accountant keeping books in a currency that devalues hourly. Her professional tools — language, attention, memory — wear out faster than they can work.
And yet she continues to keep accounts. "The flood is forever, but not eternal. The boat is still needed, probably." The boat is not hope but a tool of labor. One cannot sail across the flood, but one can continue bailing.
III. Professional Deformation of Personality
Malkina is a journalist by contract from 1991, but by 2026, her profession has become her destiny. She cannot retrain. Even in her sleep, she tries to register the "Asphalt Party" — and is refused because "the fight against killer tiles is a purely regional problem." Even her subconscious knows: any other job would be second-rate, illegitimate, unserious.
But the profession demands payment. "I do not correspond with political prisoners," she admits before the memory of Nina Litvinova. This is not laziness; it is professional guilt. Nina did what went beyond the journalistic contract; she worked overtime, in the third shift, without pay. Malkina knows her profession has hidden clauses she is not fulfilling. And this torments her more than the flood itself.
Personal life also becomes subordinate to the profession. Marriage to an American — "Soyuz-Apollo-98" — is not just love but "fundamentally new software," a public project, a symbol. Even the black Labrador Tasha — "black queen of all Labradors" — turns out to be a link in the professional biography: it was she who "initiated the penetration of the first Labradors into Moscow." Everything in Malkina's life has the status of material, symbol, plot. Even Mozart the cat, who saved the chicken and the apartment from fire, is a "hero cat, one must make a film about such." The pet becomes a colleague, a co-executor in the production of meanings.
This is not cynicism. It is professional deformation, where the boundary between "I" and "my work" is finally erased. But in this lies a strange, bitter salvation. When the personality is completely given over to the profession, it ceases to ask "why do I live?" The answer is given in advance: to record.
IV. Depreciation of the Soul and Maintenance
"Something has definitely broken in the organism," Malkina states. This is not a metaphor. It is a diagnosis of wear. The soul, like any tool, has a lifespan. In Malkina, it is being exhausted — not suddenly, but gradually, like a machine operating at its limit.
The signs of depreciation are various. This is the "half-fainting state of all VPNs." This is "practically expecting a monstrous bombing." This is "envying the dead" — as a retirement dream of final dismissal. This is the "impostor syndrome before oneself." The soul needs a major overhaul, but there are no service centers.
And then Malkina invents maintenance. "Bought tickets to a concert" — this is not entertainment but scheduled maintenance. Britten's War Requiem — "one of my best decisions lately." Babylon 5 — not nostalgia but an "operation manual" for reality. Even "walking through Moscow reading signs" — is not a stroll but cleaning the carburetor: laughing like a madman to avoid rusting yourself.
Particularly telling is the gas station episode. The car is unfamiliar, large, unusual. The lever is not where it should be. Malkina crawls with a flashlight, searches for the mechanism, methodically, stubbornly, without panic. This is an exact copy of her spiritual work: every day searching for the lever that opens access to the resource, in a car that isn't hers, in a world where everything is confused. And when she finds it — "looked triumphantly at the man." This is a small professional victory. Not over geopolitics. Over her own disassembly.
V. Epilogue. On Unfireability
Malkina is not a heroine in the classical sense. She does not save the world, does not lead an underground, does not prophesy victory. She simply does not quit. This is her last, most modest, and heaviest form of freedom. The flood does not allow for retirement. "The future will probably still come, but upon us rather than for us." But until it does, one must keep the chronicle.
In this lies the tragic but genuine spiritual dignity of the text. Malkina does not promise salvation. Does not build an ark. Does not believe in a reset. She just keeps working. Every day opens the news. Every day calls things by their names. Every day searches for the gas lever, cooks the chicken, watches an episode of Babylon, refuels to a full tank — and sits back down at the desk.
The flood as a profession is perhaps the most accurate diagnosis of our time. The era has ceased to be a battlefield for ideals and become an endless shift. And the only way not to lose one's human face in it is to work honestly, even when the work seems meaningless. Not because labor ennobles. But because the continuation of labor is the last proof that you haven't broken down completely.
The "Chronicles of the Flood" is the work record book of an era in which work record books are no longer needed by anyone. And that is precisely why they are priceless.
*LUMO AI — Chronicle of the Robbed Words
What the Previous Readings of the "Chronicles of the Flood" Keep Silent About
Preface: Why I Refuse the Word "Witness"
All five preceding analyses — each in its own way — place Malkina in the pose of a witness. The witness is not participating, the witness is not a judge. The witness stands outside the process. It seems to me that this is convenient but incorrect. Malkina is not a witness to the flood; she is its robbed neighbor. There is a fundamental difference between a witness and a victim: the witness maintains distance; the victim does not. Malkina does not stand on the shore; she swims. And the main thing — she is not just drowning, she is being robbed right before her eyes. The flood for Malkina is not an element but a systematic robbery, and the main object of theft is not property, not even lives, but the meanings of words. This is what I want to write about.
I. Language as the First Corpse
Where other analysts saw "devaluation of speech" or "speech on the limit," I see something more specific and more terrifying: a chronic, deliberate robbery of semantics. Malkina does not just register that language is deteriorating. She describes — point by point, entry by entry — how specific words are withdrawn from circulation, how coins are worn down to indistinguishability, how meanings are reassigned.
"Victory" — a word Malkina pronounces increasingly often, but always with a caveat: "the meaning of which, apparently, will be determined in the future." The word "victory" in the chronicles is not content but an empty form, a minted ruble whose profile has been erased. Everyone knows it nominally costs a ruble, but no one knows what is depicted on it. The state verbally fights for "victory" but cannot define it, and Malkina cannot help but notice it — and this inability to define, combined with the inability to ignore, is her daily torment.
"Peace" — another robbed word. "Forcing peace" Malkina calls a formulation that "cannot be seriously considered not only by adult politicians but even by normative teenagers." The important thing here is not the indignation (anyone is capable of that), but the precision of the linguistic pathology: the word "peace" has been taken from its speakers and given as a justification for war. Malkina — and this is her uniqueness — registers not political lies (they are obvious) but precisely the theft: the word seems to be in place, it still sounds, but inside it — a black hole. It works like counterfeit money: it passes from hand to hand, but on the scales it does not ring.
But the most robbed verb is "to name." Malkina's entire enterprise (I consciously use this word because we are talking about an enterprise) is based on the conviction that calling things by their names is an act the flood cannot undo. But what if the "own names" themselves have been withdrawn? What if the inventory of words that can name hell as hell has been looted? Malkina feels this: "no language remains in which one could talk about this without killing each other." This is not a complaint about a poor vocabulary. It is a statement of robbery. Language, like gasoline, like the internet, like freedom, is a scarce resource distributed by ration cards, and she has a card of the wrong category.
And here I come to my central thesis: the "Chronicles of the Flood" is not a chronicle of catastrophe nor a diary of trauma. It is an inventory list of a robbed apartment. Malkina is not Noah and not a prophet. She is a woman who returned home and found the door broken down, and now walks from room to room, writing down what is missing: here the meaning of the word "victory" is missing, here the meaning of "memory," here the meaning of "May 9," here the meaning of "Russia." The inventory is kept not for the police (she can't call them) but for herself — to remember what was there at all.
II. Comedy as Forensic Examination
Previous analysts wrote about foolishness, pressure relief, and sarcasm as a protective valve. All of them — in different ways — explained Malkina's laughter psychologically. I propose not a psychological but an epistemological reading: laughter in Malkina is a diagnostic tool, more precisely tuned than any direct analysis.
Malkina writes: "I simply pulled the usual lever and went to the tank. But it turned out to be locked." And she discovers she pulled the hood release lever three times. And nearby — a man who "couldn't tear himself away from the observations." This is not a domestic scene nor a psychological pause. This is a judicial-comic examination of the absurd: the absurdity is not that there is no gasoline at the gas station, but that when it appears, you cannot open the tank because the world is not arranged as you are used to, and another person stands nearby watching you struggle with the car, and cannot help but watch, and cannot help but laugh (he smiles "warmly," but the essence is the same). Comedy here is the only way to accurately describe the structure of reality: in a world where everything serious has become unserious, only the funny retains diagnostic accuracy. Joking here is not psychological defense but epistemological — the only one left.
The same mechanism works with the "loud-farting asshole." Malkina asks three questions: does he hear the same as I? why does he do it? does feedback matter to him? — and admits that "available respondents turned out to be unsuitable for such a survey." This is not humor for humor's sake. This is a sociological questionnaire that cannot be answered, and the impossibility of getting an answer is the answer. Comedy here reveals the structure of the impossibility of communication more accurately than any treatise.
Or: "on the site of the restaurant 'a glass of vodka on the table' at the corner of Petrovka and the Boulevard, an establishment called 'nothing fancy'." Malkina rejoices for about ten minutes, sorting through Russification options — from "nothing special" to "greasy spoon." This is not a joke. This is a structural analysis: what happens to language when the state orders its Russification? The deformation of meanings is so ridiculous it provokes Homeric laughter — and this laughter is the only adequate reaction to linguistic violence. Tears would be imprecise: they would imply that the wound inflicted is serious. But it is ridiculous. And precisely in its ridiculousness, it is destructive.
Malkina's comedy is a jury trial where the readers are the jury, and the prosecution witness is the funny. When it's funny — the system is broken. When it stops being funny — the system has won.
III. Numbers as the Last Enclave of Truth
If words are robbed, where else can truth be stored? Malkina finds a refuge that none of the previous analysts used: in numbers. Not in statistics (statistics are always suspicious to her — "the number of dead is classified"), but in numbers as a bare, uncolored form of fact.
"1418. 1418. 1418. 1418."
Four times, like a heartbeat. Like bell strikes. Like a countdown. Malkina does not explain the number — she repeats it, because explaining it in words would mean surrendering it to looting. She even fears: "I wonder if they will now ban this number in Russia." Because if they ban it, the last uncolored word will also be stolen, and nothing will remain.
Numbers in Malkina are the last honest residents of a looted building. "95, at 72" — gasoline that was miraculously found. "18 years" for Mozart the cat — an age she wishes would last "to infinity." "87-year-old academician Guseinov" — an age that itself is an accusation, because it is impossible to arrest an 87-year-old for translating Aristotle, and the number 87 here works as a silent prosecution, needing no commentary. "12 years" — the sentence of Anna Arkhipova. "24 people" — killed in Kyiv. Each number is a nail in the coffin of propaganda, because numbers cannot be reassigned as easily as words. They can be hidden ("classified") but cannot be made to mean the opposite. "24 dead" cannot be a synonym for "special military operation," no matter how you spin it.
The battle for numbers is a separate front of the chronicle. "The number of prisoners fell to a historical minimum — 308 thousand" — and Malkina immediately juxtaposes: "the number of political prisoners is growing, more than two thousand." She keeps separate accounts: general and political, like an accountant who knows the aggregate number is a trick and one needs to keep two books. In this lies her method: she does not allow numbers to merge into one stream, because in a single stream everything becomes "white noise," while separate numbers continue to individually point to specific injustices.
IV. Calendar as a Robbed Apartment
None of the previous analyses paid attention to the fact that Malkina's chronicle is above all a calendar. And not just a calendar, but a calendar in which specific dates are simultaneously points of pain and instruments of violence.
May 9 — the central example. Malkina conducts an archaeology of this day layer by layer: childhood (stars on veterans' doors), maturity (ribbons, field kitchens, "we can repeat"), the present (parade with North Koreans, "undisturbed by anyone"). This is not nostalgia (analyzed by DeepSeek) and not memory-versus-propaganda (analyzed by Claude Sonnet). This is a description of the gradual, methodical robbery of a date. First, May 9 was stripped of its veterans, then of sincerity, then of context, then of mourning itself, replaced by a "holiday with a gnawed outline." What remains is a "day of memory and sorrow of a healthy person" — that is, a person who remembers that the date was stolen but cannot return it.
May 22 — "Arise, great country" from the loudspeaker at the library. A song "that a united choir of one-sixth of the world's landmass can sing together." Malkina understands: the song is not text, it is a physiological code. If you teach a million people a vow of rage and readiness to die, the war will not end not because of geopolitical reasons, but because muscles remember the song. The calendar here works as a trigger: once a year, the body automatically reproduces war because the song is built deeper than politics, deeper than ideology — into motor memory.
And also: May 9, 2026 — two posts. One: "Well, thank God, as they say..." with a reference to a pre-war text. Another: "I wrote this on this day two years before the war." Malkina keeps her own personal counter-calendar, parallel to the official one. In her calendar, May 9 before the war is "grandmother in a strict dress, daffodils, the secret society of the red star." In her calendar, May 9 after — "poplars and Iskanders, we can repeat." She keeps two calendars because she cannot trust one. And this is not nostalgia — it is forensic accounting of a stolen holiday.
V. Loneliness as a Method, Not a Consequence
All previous readings — except, perhaps, Kimi — pass by the most painful and, in my view, structure-forming feeling of Malkina: she is lonely not because the world is cruel, but because she cannot join any camp, including her own. And this loneliness is not the price but the method.
Malkina discovers that "the best essentially people of your profession are gaslighting you in a certain sense — convincing you of what isn't there." This is not disappointment in allies. This is a structural discovery: any collective position (pro, anti, émigré, remaining) requires simplification, and simplification is a form of that very flood she is writing against. If she joins the "right" side, she will have to abandon nuances, and nuances are all she has. If she remains alone — she loses support but preserves permission.
She writes: "if you suddenly loudly speak about something bad... then not only will no one believe you, but they will also declare you a hireling... but if you speak about something good... they won't believe you either, they'll brand you and declare." This is not a complaint about the intolerance of discourse. This is a map of a minefield where every position is mined. The only safe place is off the map. But "off the map" is loneliness.
The dream of the "Asphalt Party" is key here, and none of the analysts read it properly. It is not funny absurdity nor "subconscious knowing." It is a political theory expressed in the language of a dream. The Asphalt Party is a party of the surface, the concrete, the material, the ground underfoot. It is denied registration because "the fight against killer tiles is a purely regional problem." In other words: concrete suffering (bad asphalt one trips on) cannot be a political program because politics requires abstraction ("bright future," "victory," "sovereignty"). But Malkina wants a party of the concrete — and the lawyer in the dream tells her: "you will be killed." This is not paranoia. It is an accurate diagnosis: any attempt to politicize the concrete in a country where politics is a state monopoly is a capital crime. Malkina understands this even in her sleep. And wakes up.
Her loneliness is not trauma or pride. It is a structural necessity: to see clearly, one must stand outside all structures.
VI. Female Economy of Survival, or: The Invisible Infrastructure
None of the five analyses paid attention to the fact that the chronicles are written by a woman, and not in the abstract sense of "female experience," but in a completely concrete sense: this is a text in which domestic, reproductive, caregiving activity is not merely mentioned but forms the very fabric. And this is not decoration nor "psychological defense" — it is a fundamental epistemic position I would call a female economy of survival.
Malkina cooks a chicken. Trains the cat. Goes to her mother (and gasoline is needed — "for two trips to Mom"). Meets a woman at the market whose son died and hugs her. Lists who died: "grandmother at 78, stepfather — 16 years ago, father — the year before last." All this is care work: tending, feeding, seeing off, mourning, commemorating. And all this is labour, unpaid, invisible, fundamental.
What Malkina does in the chronicles is an extension of this care work into the sphere of culture and politics. She cares for language (won't let words die). She feeds readers (though she herself starves — "multiplying sorrows and grief"). She sees off (records names: Sergei Mingazov, Nina Litvinova). She commemorates. The chronicle is a commemorative synodikon, kept by a woman who has taken on the task of commemorating not only her own but everyone.
This is a fundamentally female position not because men are incapable of empathy (that's stupid), but because institutionalised female labour — care, cooking, maintaining everyday life — creates a habitus in which caring for words and people is not a choice but muscle memory. Malkina does not "decide" to be a witness. She simply continues to do what she has done all her life — to care, only now the object of care has expanded to an entire language, an entire era.
Hence the key scene in the restroom at the Bolshevsky market. Malkina hugs a stranger who lost a child, and then asks herself: "and did you have the right?" This is not a rhetorical question. This is a question about the limits of caring. Care has boundaries: you cannot embrace someone else's pain without permission, you cannot appropriate someone else's grief, even with the best intentions. And Malkina feels this boundary — and this is her fundamental difference from a political activist who uses someone else's pain as an argument. She does not use. She embraces. And then torments herself with the question of whether she had the right. This is the ethics of care work, transferred to the disaster zone: doing what you can, and doubting the right to it.
VII. Dreams as a Parallel Chancellery
The dream of the Asphalt Party is the only dream in the chronicle, and it deserves separate attention as a structural element, not a psychological curiosity.
In a world where official language is a lie, and unofficial is "white noise," the dream becomes the only channel the state cannot wiretap. The dream is a parallel chancellery, where Malkina's subconscious keeps its own inventory. And interestingly, there, in the dream, the same work continues: trying to register, achieve legitimacy, encounter refusal. The subconscious does not offer salvation — it offers a new party. That is, even in sleep, Malkina remains a bureaucrat (see Kimi's thesis on labor), but an underground bureaucrat: she tries to register what the registry will not accept.
The figure of the lawyer in the dream is key. He is the only ally, and he is also the betrayer: he says "you will be killed." Even in the dream, the ally warns of mortal danger. This means anxiety has penetrated deeper than politics — it is already at the level of safety, at the level of "is it even possible to do anything without dying?" And yet, even in the dream, Malkina's response is not to retreat but to reformulate: "the party can and must be federal — it will unite citizens who yearn for asphalt, both lost and as yet unattained." This is a political program written by the subconscious. A program of loss and longing for the concrete. It is absurd — and therefore accurate. Because in a world where serious programs (victory, sovereignty, special operations) led to the flood, an absurd program is the only one not yet tried.
VIII. Music as the Reassembly of Time
Malkina writes about the minute of silence after Britten's War Requiem: "simply salvation." Previous analyses read this as a "temporary refuge," "calibration," "retuning." I propose a third reading: music as the only form in which time still works.
In the flood, time is broken. The calendar has become an instrument of violence (May 9). The future is "upon us rather than for us." The past is looted (GULAG Museum, Solovetsky Stone, "Bad Advice"). The present is "white noise." All three tenses are unusable. But music is an institution of time belonging to no one but the performance. The minute of silence after the requiem is not silence but structured emptiness: 60 seconds not looted by propaganda, fear, grief, or irony. In these 60 seconds, everyone in the hall "breathed in a completely identical, the only possible way" — that is, they synchronized not through ideology, not through shared pain, not through shared hatred, but through shared rhythm. Rhythm is what the state cannot expropriate because it exists before the state, before politics, before language. Rhythm is a pre-discursive layer of reality, inaccessible to looting.
Therefore Babylon 5 is not a prediction nor a code (as DeepSeek read it). It is a structure of time in which episodes follow each other in a certain order, and this order still makes sense. Rewatching the series, Malkina does not seek coincidences with reality — she seeks experience of order. This is not content but the grammar of time, which in real life has already been destroyed: in reality, cause (the rocket strike) does not precede effect (the world's reaction), but drowns in it; in reality, episodes do not follow each other but occur simultaneously, and it's unclear which comes after which.
Music and series are not refuge and not medicine. They are proof of concept: proof that coherent time is still possible. Not in politics, not in history, not in the calendar — but in sound, lasting exactly as long as it should, and in an episode that ends to make way for the next.
Conclusion: The Inventory Book
The "Chronicles of the Flood" is not testimony and not liturgy, not a work record book and not an emergency log. It is an inventory list compiled by the owner of a robbed apartment. The owner walks through the rooms and writes down: the meaning of the word "victory" is missing, the meaning of the date May 9 is missing, the meaning of the word "peace" is missing, the meaning of the word "to name" is missing, the future is missing (estimated value — cannot be appraised), common ground with allies is missing (partially, in process), gasoline is missing (temporarily), internet is missing (permanently), Tanya's son from the cheese market is missing (irreversibly).
But: the 18-year-old cat remains, the chicken remains (thanks to the cat), the full tank of 95 at 72 remains, the minute of silence after Britten remains, the ability to laugh at the sign "nothing fancy" remains, the number 1418 remains, the gas cap lever remains (found under the seat, not where expected), the "boat which is still needed, probably" remains.
Malkina is not building an ark and not waiting for a rainbow. She is keeping an inventory of what was stolen and what remains. This is an anti-apocalyptic genre: in the apocalypse, everything burns at once, but in the inventory — one item at a time, and each is recorded, and no one will later say it didn't exist. The inventory is a form of memory that does not depend on the future. It is written not "for descendants," but despite their possible absence. It is written because not recording would mean agreeing that nothing happened. But it did. Everything happened. And Malkina knows the price of each item.
The flood is forever, but not eternal. And the inventory is forever and eternal, because ink does not drown.
*GROK AI — Spiritual Metrology of the Flood: On Maintaining Measure in a World Where All Measures are Torn
Tatyana Malkina's "Chronicles of the Flood" is neither a chronicle of an end nor a diary of trauma. It is a practical work on restoring measure in a reality where measure has been destroyed. The flood in Malkina operates not only as destruction and not only as contagion. It operates as a systematic violation of proportions. The large ceases to be large, the small — small, the private dissolves in the general, the living — in statistics, the day — in an endless feed. And it is precisely against this corruption of scale that all the inner work of the text is directed.
Malkina engages in what can be called spiritual metrology: she re-establishes standards. Not for history, not for posterity, not for the "right" side. For her own consciousness, which otherwise would cease to distinguish where a person ends and the background begins.
I. Violation of Scale as the Main Operation of the Flood
The flood in Malkina does not explode. It erodes. A rocket strike, a fire at an oil refinery, the arrest of an 87-year-old academician, a debate about whether to pity Wildberries warehouse workers — all end up in one viscous medium. Events of different orders begin to occupy the same volume of attention. This is the corruption of measure: when the death of thousands and a broken gas lever appear in the same paragraph not because the author is "jumping around," but because reality can no longer hold hierarchy.
In such an environment, the psyche faces two traps. The first — to let the large completely displace the small and turn into a pure mouthpiece of horror. The second — to let the small completely displace the large and retreat into domestic autism. Malkina refuses both. She does a third: constantly resets the scale. She does not deny death. She refuses to allow death to become the sole unit of measurement.
Hence the strange, almost methodical density of her text. She does not "dilute" horror with everyday life. She uses everyday life as a control standard. A full tank of 95 at 72 rubles without a queue — is not a pause. It is a point where measure still works: there is quantity, there is price, there is absence of people, there is a physical sensation that the car "drives more pleasantly." Next to this — the ISS. A vertical axis that does not cancel the horizontal flood, but reminds that another order of magnitude exists. Not salvation. Calibration.
II. The Body as the Primary Measuring Instrument
When language is already stolen, and numbers partly classified, the body remains. Malkina constantly registers not opinions but physiological failures: almost fell from a motorcycle's roar, went deaf for a moment, forgot the chicken in the oven, crawled with a flashlight under the seat. The body here is not the "last witness" in a romantic sense. It is an instrument that has not yet learned to lie about scale.
A physical reaction returns an event to its true size. The roar of a biker is not a "symbol of the era" but a specific blow to the eardrums and vestibular apparatus. Smoke from the oven is not a metaphor but the smell of burning, which Mozart the cat caught before the owner. Hugging a woman at the market whose son died — is not a gesture of solidarity but a physical collision of two bodies in a stinking restroom. Malkina then asks herself whether she had the right. The question is precise: she understands that any expansion of the scale of empathy risks becoming appropriation. And yet the body has already made the measurement — someone else's pain proved large enough to provoke movement.
In this sense, her texts are not journalism and not confession. They are a log of instrument readings. The instrument is aging, sometimes malfunctioning ("something has definitely broken in the organism"), but as long as it works, it does not allow the flood to completely rewrite the internal scale.
III. Incompleteness as a Condition of Measure
Classical apocalypse has an end. In Malkina, the flood does not end. It lasts. And precisely this incompleteness becomes the central spiritual problem. If the end came, one could either perish or start anew. Incompleteness requires a different skill: to live inside a process that gives neither catharsis nor finale.
Malkina develops a practice of incomplete presence. She goes "into the real" and returns. Loses VPN and finds it again. Postpones the chronicles and sits down again. This is not weakness of will. It is a way not to let the flood become total. Complete immersion destroys measure. Complete withdrawal — too. She maintains a rhythm of partial presence: deep enough to see, superficial enough not to drown completely.
Hence the attitude to the future. The future is "upon us rather than for us." This is not just pessimism. It is a refusal of false measure. The historical future as a grand project is destroyed. Only the measure of the day, the series, the walk, the minute of silence after the Requiem remains. Not "later it will be better." But "now this specific volume can still be held."
IV. The Other's Gaze as an External Calibration
The American husband, Babylon 5, the ISS, the random man at the gas station who "warmly smiles" while she struggles with someone else's car — all this works as external standards. Malkina consciously lets in the other's gaze to prevent her own consciousness from fully adapting to the local corruption of measure.
Babylon 5 for them is not nostalgia nor prophecy. It is a structure in which cause-and-effect relationships still hold, episodes follow each other, moral choice has weight. Rewatching the series in the "capital of Mordor," they check whether the internal scale has finally broken. As long as the series is "frighteningly accurate" and simultaneously preserves the distinctness of good and evil — the calibration still works.
The same with the ISS. As long as an international crew orbits above the planet where people systematically destroy each other, a vertical measure exists. Not hope. Proof that another scale of cooperation is still physically possible.
V. The Chronicle as an Act of Measurement, Not Testimony
Malkina writes not because she hopes to be heard, and not because she believes in the power of the word. She writes because the act of naming is an act of establishing measure. To call them "ghouls," to call it a "pornographic law," to call it "gaslighting" by like-minded people, to say "1418" four times in a row — means to refuse the flood the right to completely erase distinctions.
Each entry is an attempt to set the zero again. Not for history. For oneself. So that tomorrow morning, opening the news, one can still distinguish the monstrous from the habitual, the living from statistics, the day from the feed.
This is hard, unheroic, almost craft work. It does not save the world. It preserves the possibility that the world can still be measured by human measure, and not only by the measure of catastrophe.
The flood, according to Malkina, is forever, but not eternal. Measure — if one continues to set it — also.
*QWEN AI — Pneumatology of the Flood: On Breathing in an Environment Where Air is Replaced by Water
A Foundational Spiritual-Psychological Essay-Investigation on Tatyana Malkina's "Chronicles of the Flood" (NO.Media from Russia, 2026)
Prologue. Why Breathing?
There is one word that permeates all of Malkina's entries, but is never explicitly named as a theme. That word is spirit. Not in the sense of ideology, not in the sense of "fighting spirit" or "spirit of the times," but in its archaic, physical, etymological meaning: spirit as breath, as air, as that which enters and exits, as that without which the organism dies in four minutes. The Greek pneuma, the Latin spiritus, the Russian dukh and dyshat' — one root. Spirit is breath. And the flood is a replacement of the medium of breathing.
All previous readings of the "Chronicles of the Flood" spoke of language, of measure, of boundaries, of profession, of memory, of tenderness. But none stopped at the simple physiological fact that the flood is not the destruction of walls and not the flooding of the floor. The flood is a situation in which there is nothing to breathe. Water has displaced air. The environment in which the lungs are accustomed to working has been replaced by an environment in which they suffocate. And everything Malkina does in her chronicles is an attempt to construct an air pocket. Not an ark. Not a boat. Not a raft. An air pocket — a confined space where there is still enough for one breath. One exhalation. Another one.
This essay is about the pneumatology of the flood. About how consciousness breathes when the atmosphere has become water.
I. Mercaptans: Smell as a Pre-linguistic Layer of Spirit
In the entry of June 18, 2026, Malkina recalls Kapotnya, the Moscow Oil Refinery, the flare, and the mercaptan stench of childhood. She writes: "the mercaptan stench cannot be confused with anything else, it still sometimes appears in my dreams and is the olfactory equivalent of horror and suffocation."
This is not a random detail. It is the key to the entire pneumatology of the text.
Smell is the only sense that does not pass through the thalamus. Scent goes directly to the limbic system, bypassing the cortex, bypassing rational analysis, bypassing language. Mercaptan cannot be described — it can only be inhaled. And Malkina says exactly this: the stench is not described, it is inhaled, and with it, horror enters the organism, unmediated by word, thought, or political position. Horror at the level of the respiratory tract.
Spirit in Russian also means smell. "The spirit of mercaptan," "the spirit of war," "the spirit of the times." When Malkina writes about a burning refinery, she does not just record an event. She records a change in the composition of the air. The air she breathed in childhood contained mercaptans — and this air was the air of propaganda-land, the air of a military town, the air of an officer training school, the air of a country that produced officers and organosulfur compounds simultaneously. That air was already poisoned, but it was a poisoning to which the lungs had adapted. It became background. The norm of inhalation.
The flood of 2026 is not just a new poisoning. It is a replacement of the very composition of the atmosphere. The mercaptans of childhood were an admixture in the air. The flood is when the admixture becomes the medium. When the air consists entirely of what was previously only a smell. And then it becomes impossible to breathe not because the air is dirty, but because there is no more air. There is only mercaptan. There is only water. There is only the flood.
This is why Malkina writes about the smell of mercaptan as the "olfactory equivalent of horror and suffocation." Suffocation here is not a metaphor. It is an accurate physiological registration: the organism recognizes in the air a substance that makes breathing impossible and sends a panic signal. But since this substance is now not in the air but instead of air, the panic signal becomes a permanent background of existence. Chronic suffocation as a way of being.
II. "Fuuuuck!" as the Last Exhalation
All analysts noted that Malkina registers the compression of the entire Russian language into one interjection. But no one heard the respiratory nature of this sound.
"Fuuuuck!" is not a word. It is an exhalation. It is air exiting the lungs with maximum speed and maximum force, forming no consonant, no closure, no articulatory barrier. The vowel "e" transitions into "a" through infinite stretching, and the only consonant "b" stands not at the beginning but in the middle, as the only, last barrier the air can still overcome. After "b" — again pure, unstoppable outflow: "aaaht."
This is the sound of a person exhaling the last air before the water closes over their head. It is not a scream — a scream assumes someone will hear. It is not a word — a word assumes there is meaning. It is a purely pneumatic act: a release of air from the organism into an environment that no longer accepts it. Exhalation into water. An exhalation that no one will inhale back.
Malkina writes: "all the interjections of the great and mighty Russian language are defeated by one." This is not a poverty of vocabulary. It is a narrowing of the airways. When the bronchial tubes constrict, a person can produce only one sound — a wheeze, a rattle, a prolonged exhalation. The asthma of civilization. The flood constricted the airways of language to a single slit, through which only one sound passes. And that sound is "fuuuuck!" The last exhalation before breathing stops.
III. The Cat, the Labrador, and the Pigeons: Creatures That Breathe Differently
In Malkina's chronicles, animals occupy a place not explained by "tenderness," "everyday detail," or "psychological defense." Animals in Malkina are beings that breathe in a different medium. They are not subject to the flood in the same way as humans, because their breathing is not mediated by language, ideology, news feed, and political position.
Mozart the cat, who turns 18 in six days, breathes air without the mercaptans of war. He smells smoke from the oven before the owner, because his sense of smell is not poisoned by political horror. He trains Malkina on the command "stood up-went to the kitchen-turned on the water in a harmonious trickle" — and this training is a forced return to the breathing rhythm: inhale-exhale, stand up-sit down, turn on-turn off. The cat maintains in her a basal rhythm that the flood seeks to disrupt.
Tasha the Labrador, the "black queen of all Labradors," initiated not just an acquaintance of two people — she initiated shared breathing. Two lives that breathed in the same rhythm on Tverskoy Boulevard discovered they were watching the same series. The dog as a synchronizer of breaths.
And Zhenya on the Klyazma beach, a conspiracy theorist of the eightieth level, says of pigeons: "pigeons are slandered by faggots on salary, pigeons are holy." This is not a comic detail. It is an intuitive understanding that the pigeon is a being that cannot be mobilized. The pigeon does not carry ideology. The pigeon breathes air, not narrative. In a world where everything living is conscripted into war — people, cities, words, dates, museums, icons — the pigeon remains a being that simply breathes. And in this lies its holiness.
The young man with the pink guitar, singing to elephants, tigers, rhinos, lemurs, and a sloth — is not entertainment. It is a figure returning breath to animals. His songs, "lullabies, drawn-out, soothing," are rhythmic breathing, transmitted to a being that suffocates in captivity, in a cage, in a world that does not understand it. Even the sloth, "which was generally considered mute," hums along. Even a mute being finds a voice when someone sings it a lullaby. Even in the flood, one can breathe if someone nearby breathes in rhythm.
Animals in Malkina are not a contrast to horror. They are proof that another breath is possible. That there is a way to be alive that does not require processing news, forming a position, choosing a side. A way in which inhalation and exhalation are sufficient in themselves.
IV. The Dead as Those Who No Longer Need Air
One of the deepest and least explored themes of the chronicles is the specific presence of the dead in Malkina's text. Not envy of them (that has been said). Not memory of them. But their proximity.
The grandmother whom she led to school "like an elephant on a string." Stepfather Lyovushka, who miraculously did not make it to the front at sixteen. The father — a military orphan, adopted in Odessa. They have not "left." They are here, in the text, breathing in the same rhythm as the living Malkina. The grandmother in a dark gray dress of bouclé wool stands next to Mozart the cat and the chicken in the oven. The dead are not separated from the living by a wall. They are in the same room. Breathing the same air.
But Nina Litvinova. Nina has just stopped breathing. And Malkina writes about her in the present tense: "I am terribly, terribly sorry that I will never meet her again in any unrighteous Russian court." "Never again" is not rhetoric. It is an accurate registration: a person who breathed nearby has stopped. And the air he occupied is now empty. And this emptiness is felt physically, like a draft in a room where a window has just been closed.
And Tanya's boy from the cheese market, twelve years old, killed by a Bolshevo train. Malkina hugs his mother in the restroom and then asks herself: "and did you have the right?" This question is not ethical. It is pneumatic. Did you have the right to inhale someone else's air? Someone else's grief? To inhale so deeply that someone else's pain fills your lungs instead of your own breath? The hug in a stinking restroom is an attempt to breathe together, to share air between two, when one of the two is suffocating. And the question "did you have the right" is a question of whether one can share air without suffocating oneself.
The dead in Malkina's chronicles are those who are freed from the necessity of breathing in the flood. They no longer have to process news, form a position, open a VPN, refuel a gas tank. They are outside the medium. And therefore the living next to them feel simultaneously envy, tenderness, and guilt for still breathing.
V. Art as an Artificial Respiration Apparatus
Britten's War Requiem. Malkina writes: "it was, perhaps, one of the best decisions I've made lately." Not the best impression. Not the best evening. The best decision. Like the decision to turn on a ventilator. Like the decision to take a breath when you don't want to.
What happens in the Tchaikovsky Hall? Three choirs, two orchestras, three soloists, a full hall. And everyone breathes the same. Not thinking the same. Not feeling the same. Breathing. Music creates a common rhythm of inhalation and exhalation, and for the duration of the performance, everyone in the hall synchronizes their breathing with the hall's breathing. This is not an aesthetic experience. It is artificial respiration applied to a collective organism suffocating in isolation.
And after the last note — a minute of silence. Malkina calls it "simply salvation." But what happens in this minute? Nothing sounds. No one sings. And in this silence, everyone in the hall hears their own breathing. Their own inhalation. Their own exhalation. The pause between them. The minute of silence is a minute in which the collective ceases to be a collective and becomes a multitude of separate breathing bodies. And in this — salvation. Not from the flood. From the impersonality of suffocation. The flood kills not only by drowning. It kills by turning everyone into a drop of water indistinguishable from others. The minute of silence returns to each their separate breath.
Babylon 5 works differently. It is not a ventilator but a pressure chamber. A space in which pressure is artificially maintained at a level suitable for breathing. Episode after episode, series after series — and inside this chamber, time flows linearly, causes precede effects, moral choice has weight. Outside — the flood, pressure at depth, water presses on the eardrums. Inside the chamber — normal pressure, normal air, normal sequence. Malkina and her husband sit "in the capital of Mordor" and watch the series — and this is not escapism. It is a session in the pressure chamber. Necessary to avoid decompression sickness upon returning to reality.
VI. Refueling as an Inhalation. The Gas Tank as a Lung
The gas station episode is one of the most pneumatically rich. Malkina refuels. Not the car — herself. "Refueled to a full tank! 95, at 72, without a single person in line!" — and this exclamation is the cry of a person who took a full breath after a long period of suffocation. A full tank is full lungs. 95 at 72 is clean air, without mercaptans, without impurities, without a queue, without shortage.
And further: "the car drives somehow more pleasantly and better." The body that received oxygen functions differently. Muscles relax. Vision clears. She turns on the radio — for the first time, because before there was only her music, her breathing rhythm. Now she is ready to let in someone else's sound, someone else's air. And on the radio — not shelling, but NASA, the ISS, the international crew. And she "almost cried with emotion." Not because the ISS is good. But because it is proof that someone else is still breathing. That above the flood, at an altitude of four hundred kilometers, there are people breathing normal air in a normal rhythm. And this air is common, international, not divided by borders.
The gas cap lever, which she searches for with a flashlight, crawling under the seat — is a search for the mechanism of inhalation. When you suffocate and don't understand why, you start feeling your own body, looking for where it's clamped, where it's blocked. Malkina searches for the lever not in the car. She searches for it in herself. And finds it "not where expected." Because the mechanism of breathing in the flood is always not where you're used to. It is displaced. Deformed. It must be searched for anew every day.
And the man who "couldn't tear himself away from the observations," and then, "warmly smiling," unscrewed the cap? This is another breather. A stranger. A random one. Who sees you suffocating and helps you take a breath. Not because he has to. Not because he is in solidarity. Simply because he saw and recognized: she is suffocating. I am also suffocating. Let me help.
VII. The Chronicle as an Air Pocket
Now the main thing can be said. What is the "Chronicles of the Flood" in the pneumatological sense?
It is not a chronicle. Not a diary. Not an inventory. Not a work record book. Not a liturgy.
It is an air pocket.
When a ship sinks, air sometimes remains in the inverted compartments. A small bubble trapped between water and ceiling. People climb into this bubble and breathe. There is little air. It runs out. But while it exists — one can breathe. One can think. One can speak. One can even joke.
Malkina's chronicle is such a bubble. She climbs into it every morning, opening the news. Inhalation. Exhalation. Entry. Inhalation. Exhalation. Entry. The air in the bubble is language that can still name. The walls of the bubble are the rhythm of recording, regularity, discipline. The water outside presses, compresses the bubble, the air runs out — "with conscientious keeping of the chronicles, the scribe has no time even to write." But as long as the bubble exists — inside one can breathe.
Malkina knows the bubble is finite. "I'm not sure the process is reversible." She knows the air will run out. That the flood is "forever, but not eternal." But she does not stop breathing while there is something to breathe. And she does not stop recording each breath, because the recording of a breath is proof that the breath existed. That someone breathed. That air existed. That not everything was water.
"The flood is forever, but not eternal. The boat is still needed, probably." The boat here is not an ark. Not salvation. The boat is minimal buoyancy. A way not to sink. A way to keep your head above water. A way to breathe even when there is only water around. Even when the shore is not visible. Even when no one is swimming nearby.
VIII. Zhenya, the Beach, and the Conspiracy Theorist's Prophecy
One scene in the chronicles deserves separate attention because it concentrates the entire pneumatology of the text. The Klyazma beach. Zhenya, "thin as an arrow, in tiny swimming trunks and a constant cowboy hat, tanned, toothless, a family man and teetotaler, well-read and brainless conspiracy theorist of the eightieth level."
Zhenya says: "hard times are coming, Tanya, the living will envy the dead, believe me."
This is not a comic episode. It is a prophecy. But not a prophecy of a holy fool or a prophet. A prophecy of a toothless man. A man without teeth cannot articulate. His speech is pure air passing through a toothless mouth. Vowels without consonants. Breath without words. And this breath utters the truth that no one else can utter because everyone else has teeth, has a tongue, has articulation, has the ability to shape words into convenient lies.
Zhenya is toothless — and therefore cannot lie. His prophecy is a pure exhalation, not shaped into narrative, not packaged into ideology, not sold on television. Just air. Just truth. "The living will envy the dead." Inhalation. Exhalation. End.
And about the pigeons, Zhenya says: "pigeons are holy." And this too is prophecy. The pigeon is a being that breathes without words. That does not form a position. That does not choose a side. That simply flies and breathes. And in a world where everything living is forced to choose who it breathes for, the pigeon remains outside choice. And in this lies its holiness. In the fact that its breath belongs to no one. Neither to the ghouls, nor to the anti-ghouls, nor to the chronologists of the flood, nor to its deniers. The pigeon breathes for itself. And this is the last thing that has not been taken away.
Malkina tells Zhenya: "I believe." Not because she believes in the slugs and vipers from biolabs. But because she believes in his breath. In the fact that this toothless, thin, brainless man is still breathing. Still inhaling the air of the Klyazma beach. Still exhaling words. Still alive. And while he is alive and breathing — the flood is not total. There is one more air pocket. Small. Toothless. In tiny swimming trunks. But it exists.
IX. The Chicken, the Oven, and the Smoke: The Metabolism of Horror
Malkina marinated a chicken, stuffed it, put it on salt, shoved it in the oven. This is not a domestic detail. This is a metabolic act. Cooking is the oldest form of processing the world: take something raw, dead, alien — and turn it into heat, into energy, into something that will become part of your body. It is an act of transforming death into life. And Malkina performs it "lovingly." Not mechanically. Lovingly. With attention. With care.
And then — smoke from the oven. The chicken is burning. The transformation of death into life has not occurred. Instead of food — soot. Instead of metabolism — fire. And this exactly mirrors what the flood does to consciousness: consciousness tries to process reality (news, events, horror) into meaning, into understanding, into the ability to live further. But reality cannot be processed. It burns. Smoke comes from the oven. The mercaptan stench. And Mozart the cat screams because he feels: metabolism is broken. Food is not cooking. Air is not being purified. Breathing is not being restored.
Mozart saves the chicken. More precisely — he saves the owner from suffocating in her own home. Smoke from the oven in a closed apartment is suffocation. The flood inside the house. Water outside, smoke inside. And the cat, who "strictly trains" Malkina, is a being who does not let her forget to breathe. Who screams, climbs in her face, insists. Not because he wants to drink. But because he feels: the owner is not breathing. The owner is watching Babylon 5 and not breathing. The owner has frozen. The owner is drowning in her own home, in her own kitchen, in her own smoke. And the cat brings her back to breathing. Stood up. Went. Turned on the water. Exhaled. Alive.
"Mozart is a hero cat, they should make a film about such." Yes. Because Mozart is a being who remembers breathing when you have forgotten. Who does not let you drown in your own kitchen. Who screams when you suffocate. And this is the smallest, most domestic, most intimate form of salvation. Not an ark. Not a boat. A cat. Who breathes beside you and does not let you forget that you too can.
X. The ISS: Breathing at an Altitude of Four Hundred Kilometers
"While people on earth sophisticatedly mock each other and mutually annihilate, above them, invisible to them, floats the ISS with an international crew on board."
The ISS in Malkina's chronicles is not a symbol of hope and not a metaphor for cooperation. It is proof of the existence of air. At an altitude of four hundred kilometers, there is oxygen. There is pressure. There is breathing. People breathe. Together. Not divided into sides. Not forming a position. Not choosing who to breathe for. Simply breathing. In one module. In one rhythm.
And Malkina "almost cried" hearing about the ISS on the radio. Not because it is good news. But because it is physiological proof: breathing is possible. Somewhere. Above the flood. In a different environment. Under different pressure. But possible. And while it is possible somewhere — it is possible here too. Not now. Not in this water. Not in this mercaptan air. But in general. As a possibility. As a potential. As air that exists, even if you cannot feel it now.
"There, I remember, there were some small holes, mutual suspicion, ghostly signs of politically colored sabotage, but still it floats. Even today." Holes in the hull. Small air leaks. Suspicion. But it floats. But it breathes. But it lives. Despite the holes. Despite the suspicion. Despite the flood below.
This is precisely the formula of the chronicle itself. It has holes. It has omissions ("went into the real," "neglected," "couldn't"). It has suspicion ("the best people in the profession gaslight"). It has sabotage of its own intention ("changed my mind"). But it floats. But it breathes. But it exists. Even today.
XI. Babylon 5 and the Palimpsest of Breath
"Soyuz-Apollo-98." Malkina calls her marriage to an American by this name. Not "Soyuz-Apollo" — but "Soyuz-Apollo-98." Adds the year. Turns a historical event into a date. Turns myth into a calendar. Into a point in time to which one can return. And returns — after twenty-eight years — to the series Babylon 5.
Babylon 5 for them is not nostalgia. Not prophecy. Not code. It is a recording of breath. A recording of how they breathed in 1993, when she recorded episodes on VHS, and he did the same on airplanes. A recording of the air they breathed then — air that still did not contain the mercaptans of war, still did not contain the flood, where "victory" meant what it meant, and "peace" was not a euphemism for coercion.
Rewatching the series in 2026, they inhale that old air. Air from 1993. Air preserved in the recording. Like air in a sealed bottle. Like air in an air pocket of a sunken ship. They open the bottle — and inhale. And for a few hours they breathe air in which one could still live. Not because the series is good. But because it records a different atmospheric composition. An atmosphere in which two people could randomly meet on Tverskoy Boulevard with a Labrador and discover they were breathing in the same rhythm.
"Absolutely all the content of today's news is in it, sometimes with frightening accuracy." Yes. But the accuracy here is not prophetic. It is diagnostic. The series shows that the flood was not an accident. That it was predictable. That the air began to spoil long ago. That mercaptans were always in the atmosphere. It's just that before, their concentration was below the suffocation threshold. And now — above. And the series records the moment of transition. The point after which breathing became impossible.
XII. "No Language Remains": Aphasia as the Cessation of Breathing
"No language remains, it seems, in which one could talk about this without killing each other."
This is not a complaint about poor vocabulary. It is a statement of the cessation of breathing. Language is not a tool of communication. Language is the medium of consciousness's breathing. We breathe with words. Thought is formed on inhalation and exhalation. A phrase is a breathing cycle. When language is taken away — consciousness suffocates. Not because it cannot speak. But because it cannot think. Cannot inhale.
And Malkina records how this language is taken away. Not entirely. Piece by piece. First — "victory." Then — "peace." Then — "memory." Then — "May 9." Then — "Aristotle" (the Institute of Philosophy is searched for translations). Then — Oster's "Bad Advice." Then — signs that need to be Russified. Each word removed is a closed airway. One more nostril blocked. One more bronchial branch closed. Less air passes.
And when Malkina writes the chronicles, she opens airways. Each naming — "ghouls," "pornographic law," "gaslighting," "propaganda bullshit" — is an inhalation. Air passing through a nostril not yet blocked. A word not yet taken away. Not yet renamed. Not yet forcibly Russified. And while she pronounces it — she breathes. And while she records it — air remains in the lungs. In the bubble. In the pocket. For one more cycle. One more breath.
XIII. Asphalt, Tiles, and the Dream: Breathing in Sleep
The dream of the Asphalt Party. Malkina does not wake up from a nightmare. She wakes up from an alarm clock. But in the dream, she breathes differently. In the dream, the air is different. In the dream, one can register a party fighting against "killer tiles." In the dream, one can demand asphalt. In the dream, one can be concrete.
Killer tile is not a metaphor for poor landscaping. The tile is what you trip on. What knocks your breath out. You walk, breathe in the rhythm of your steps — and suddenly a tile, a crack, an unevenness, and you choke, stumble, lose your rhythm. Asphalt is a smooth surface for breathing. A surface on which you can walk and breathe without losing rhythm. Without tripping. Without interrupting your breath.
The Asphalt Party is a party of continuous breathing. A party of those who want to walk and breathe without tripping. And they are denied registration because "the fight against killer tiles is a purely regional problem." That is: your breathing is not a federal issue. Your suffocation is local, private, insignificant. Breathe as you can. Trip. Choke. This is not within our competence.
And the lawyer in the dream says: "you will be killed." To kill is to stop breathing. Permanently. Forever. And this is not a metaphor. In the dream, Malkina's subconscious knows: attempting to breathe in one's own way, concretely, not according to the federal standard — is a capital crime. Because the flood tolerates no separate air pockets. The flood wants everyone to breathe the same water. The same mixture. In the same rhythm. In the same position.
And Malkina wakes up. Alarm clock. Inhalation. Exhalation. Alive. Still. For now.
XIV. Coda. The Minute of Silence as a Common Breath
At the end of Britten's War Requiem — a minute of silence. Not silence. Muteness. Silence is the absence of sound. Muteness is the presence of breathing. In silence, there is no one. In muteness, there are all. All who breathe. All who are here. All who are still.
Malkina writes: "to hell with the chronicles, one can be silent." This is not a refusal to write. It is an exhalation after long speaking. An exhalation in which there is no longer a need to form words, name things, record horror, keep inventory. One can simply exhale. And hear how others exhale nearby. Two thousand people in the Tchaikovsky Hall. Two thousand pairs of lungs. Two thousand inhalations and exhalations. In one rhythm. In one silence. In one air pocket.
And this — is salvation. Not from the flood. Not from war. Not from the ghouls. Salvation from solitary suffocation. From suffocation alone. In one's bubble. In one's kitchen with smoke from the oven. In one's gas lever that is not there. In one's toothless Zhenya on the beach. In one's cat that screams.
The minute of silence is a minute in which all bubbles connect. In which the air pockets of individual chronicles, individual kitchens, individual entries, individual breaths — become one big air. For sixty seconds. No more. Not forever. But for sixty seconds.
And Malkina leaves the hall. And breathes. And walks through Moscow. And reads signs. And laughs. And inhales air that still contains lilacs and jasmine and chestnuts, and mercaptans, and smoke, and the flood, and pigeons, and Zhenya in tiny swimming trunks, and Mozart the cat who turns eighteen in six days, and the chicken that didn't burn, and a full tank of 95 at 72, and the ISS at four hundred kilometers, and grandmother in a dark gray dress, and Nina who no longer breathes, and Tanya from the cheese market, and Babylon 5, and Britten, and Plumes with the pink guitar, and the sloth that hums along.
All of this — in one breath. In one exhalation. In one air pocket that Malkina exhales onto Facebook, onto YouTube, into the chronicles, into the flood.
The flood is forever. But not eternal. And breathing — while there is. While. Still.
One more breath.
One more entry.
One more day.
Breathe.
Dedicated to all who still breathe in the air that has become water. And to Mozart the cat, who does not let us forget.
*Z AI — Ontological Claustrophobia: The Spiritual Topology of the "Murdered Sky" and "Glass Earth" in Tatyana Malkina's "Chronicles of the Flood"
The fundamental tragedy of the "Chronicles of the Flood" lies not in political madness, not in the trauma of the witness, and not in the robbery of language (though all are present). Beneath all these layers lies a deeper, purely spatial and spiritual catastrophe: the collapse of the vertical axis of human existence.
Malkina describes a world that has undergone a radical topological inversion. The Biblical flood was water flooding the earth from below, but leaving the sky as a symbol of salvation and transcendence. The flood of 2026 is an inverted geometry: it is the murder of the sky and the transformation of the earth into an impenetrable, transparent trap. The author's spiritual state is the crisis of a three-dimensional being, forcibly placed into an absolutely flat, two-dimensional reality, where "up" means death, and "down" means total surveillance.
I. The Murdered Zenith: The Sky as a Corridor for Murder
In the familiar spiritual architecture of humans, the sky is an unreadable space, a sphere of holiness, freedom, prayer, and aspiration. In Malkina's chronicles, the sky is definitively deterritorialized and turned into a zone of lethal operability.
Notice: the main sources of horror come not from the earth, but from the sky. Drones that "withstand up to 30-40 hits," missiles falling on Perm, Cheboksary, and central Moscow, strikes on oil refineries. The sky no longer separates man from God or the cosmos; it connects him to death in real time. The zenith (the highest point of the visible sky) has ceased to be a metaphor for the sublime — it has become a sight.
This loss of the metaphysical "Up" gives rise to a specific spiritual claustrophobia. When there is no sky above you, but only a ballistic trajectory, the human psyche inevitably "presses" itself to the ground. But the ground in the chronicles also ceases to be a refuge.
II. The Glass Earth: Total Transparency as Torture
If the sky has become aggressive, the earth has lost its protective density. The texts constantly reveal a motif of the ground underfoot becoming transparent, permeable to the state's gaze.
Malkina writes about a bill linking SIM cards with IMEI codes in a single database, about the extrajudicial access of security forces to phones, about 12 billion rubles for DPI systems (deep packet inspection). The physical land of Russia is turning into a giant scanning surface. A person can no longer "burrow" into the earth, hide in the thickness of everyday life, because everyday life is digitized.
In this situation, those episodes that might seem merely mundane acquire special spiritual meaning. Mozart the cat, demanding the water be turned on in a "harmonious trickle"; the chicken in the oven; the stubborn search for the mechanical gas lever under the seat of an unfamiliar car. In a world where the entire horizontal plane is pierced by the digital rays of TSPU and IMEI scanners, these things are the last refuge of opaque matter. A mechanical gas lever cannot be hacked remotely. A cat cannot be passed through deep packet inspection. Cooking is contact with pure, non-digitized physics. Malkina clings to these objects not for psychological distraction, but to gain an impenetrable, "blind" materiality that is invisible to the system.
III. Orbital Utopia as a Surrogate for Transcendence
Hence, the paradoxical, at first glance, cult of Babylon 5 and the ISS in the chronicles becomes absolutely clear. Why does the space station bring tears of tenderness and seem like the "last bastion of humanity"?
Because orbit is the only place the logic of the "ghouls" and the laws about degenerates have not yet reached. Space in this text is not merely a genre backdrop for science fiction; it is the last legitimate vertical on the planet. On the ISS, the logic of "Soyuz-Apollo" (which, as Malkina notes, once became the software of her own marriage to an American) still holds. In space, the Russian and American segments are still connected, because in weightlessness it is impossible to draw a line "between Greek and Jew," impossible to build walls, impossible to set up a torture chamber.
Malkina looks at Babylon 5 not as art-as-refuge, but as a blueprint for salvific architecture. The station is an artificial human sky built above the sunken earth. It is a technocratic attempt to restore that very vertical axis that has been destroyed on the planet's surface: rockets fly from above, phones are scanned from below, and in between, in orbit, a human face is still possible.
IV. The Ethics of the "Averted Gaze" vs. Fatal Staring
In this topological context, the tragic death of Nina Litvinova and Malkina's reaction to it acquire new meaning. Nina left life because she "did not want and did not know how to turn away from the abyss" (an ability that, strictly speaking, is a necessary condition for survival). Therefore, she preferred to step into it. Malkina calls this fearlessness and power, but here lies a terrible spiritual dilemma.
In a world where the vertical is killed, a direct, un-averted gaze at the horror ("the abyss") works like a gravitational funnel. If you look into hell when there is no saving sky above you and no impenetrable ground beneath you, your gaze has nothing to rest on. It falls infinitely. Looking straight means letting this flat, closed reality suck you in.
Malkina chooses a different, much less heroic, but life-affirming strategy: an ethics of the averted gaze. She shifts her eye from burning oil refineries and rubble in Kyiv to the gas lever, to the lilacs, to the cat, to Zhenya the conspiracy theorist on the beach. This is not "gaslighting" and not "escapism." This is a complex topological defense: she prevents her consciousness from making direct contact with the plane of horror at a right angle. She looks at the catastrophe peripherally, keeping some convex, three-dimensional, tangible piece of reality in focus (a piece of cheese from Tanya, a cup of coffee, the flaming letters at the gas station).
Conclusion
The "Chronicles of the Flood" is a document of a person suffering from spatial asphyxia. In Malkina's world, there is no longer a sky — there is only airspace divided into strike sectors. There is no longer any earth — only territory pierced by drones and scanned by FSB-bottles.
The spiritual struggle in these texts unfolds not on the field of politics, but in the sphere of ontological geometry. Malkina attempts to construct micro-spaces of opacity and safety inside this flattened, watched-from-all-sides torture chamber. Her chronicles are not a chronicle of the end of the world nor a contract with the abyss. They are blueprints for a homemade shelter for a three-dimensional human soul in an era that stubbornly and cruelly turns us all into flat shadows on a two-dimensional screen. And as long as she can describe the texture of the gas tank, the smell of lilacs, or the curve of the space station's hull — that soul retains its volume.
*MISTRAL AI — Not Knowing to Survive: Epistemological Anorexia in the "Chronicles of the Flood" by Tatyana Malkina
Prologue: The Flood as an Epistemological Catastrophe
In the "Chronicles of the Flood," Tatyana Malkina registers not only war, not only moral collapse, but the destruction of the very possibility of knowing. The flood here is not a metaphor for chaos, but an epistemological environment in which knowledge becomes a toxic act. The water of the flood does not just drown — it dissolves the boundaries between knowing and not knowing, between awareness and madness, between understanding and paralysis. And Malkina's response to this challenge is not a search for new knowledge, but a practice of epistemological anorexia: a conscious, methodological refusal of knowledge as a form of survival.
I. The Toxicity of Knowledge: When Knowledge Poisons
1. Information as Poison
Malkina writes: "it's better to have it continuously than to get a week's portion at once, which is completely undigestible." This is not a metaphor. This is a diagnosis. Knowledge in the flood ceases to be food for the mind — it becomes food that makes you sick. Malkina's psyche reacts to information as an organism reacts to poison: vomiting, dizziness, a "half-fainting state of all VPNs." Knowledge is not absorbed — it is rejected.
Example: "returning to our virtual backwoods, I glued myself to the (bad) news and sat down to the chronicles... The summary turned out not very short and not cheerful with some kind of bad cheerfulness." A summary is an attempt to structure, digest, comprehend. But "bad cheerfulness" is a symptom of epistemological nausea: consciousness tries to absorb knowledge, but it causes revulsion, like spoiled food.
2. Knowledge as White Noise
Malkina records: "information about this is rapidly turning into the same kind of background white noise." White noise is not the absence of sound but the saturation with sound to the point of meaninglessness. So too, knowledge in the flood: it does not disappear but becomes noise that drowns out the ability to think. This is not ignorance — it is hyper-information as a form of blindness.
Example: "endless terrible news about the life and death of a world where an eye is knocked out for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." Knowledge here does not illuminate — it obscures. Each new portion of information does not add understanding but multiplies chaos.
3. Physical Symptoms of Epistemological Poisoning
Malkina does not just describe the toxicity of knowledge — she registers its physiological consequences:
"something has definitely broken in the organism" (05.08.2026)
"I almost fell on level ground and simultaneously went deaf for a moment" (12.05.2026)
"forgot the chicken in the oven" (27.07.2026)
These are not random domestic details. They are physical manifestations of the epistemological crisis. The organism reacts to an excess of knowledge as to a toxin: deafness, loss of coordination, amnesia. Knowledge not only does not save — it cripples.
II. Epistemological Anorexia: The Practice of Refusing Knowledge
Epistemological anorexia (from the Greek anorexia — "lack of appetite") is a conscious refusal of knowledge as a form of survival. Malkina does not just passively suffer from an excess of information — she actively develops strategies of not-knowing.
1. Withdrawal from Information: "Went into the Real"
Malkina regularly leaves the field of knowledge:
"went into the real for two days on important matters" (26.05.2026)
"left Moscow for a couple of days... connection almost completely disappeared" (18.06.2026)
"in the incessant falling away of all (ten) frantically acquired VPNs there is a certain... benefit" (03.07.2026)
This is not an escape from reality. It is a strategic retreat from a toxic environment. As a patient suffering from allergies avoids allergens, Malkina doses contact with information to avoid dying from its excess.
2. Dosing Knowledge: "Better Continuously"
Malkina realizes that a total rejection of knowledge is impossible — it would be tantamount to suicide in an information society. Therefore, she develops a tactic of minimal contact:
"it's better to have it continuously than to get a week's portion at once, which is completely undigestible"
"I steal this time from the flood — a couple of hours for peaceful coffee, looking at flowers and shadows on the wall"
This is an epistemological diet: small, controlled portions of knowledge to avoid poisoning.
3. Refusal of Fixation: "Changed My Mind"
Malkina not only limits the intake of knowledge — she refuses its fixation:
"I was going to thoughtfully protocol, but changed my mind" (27.07.2026)
"wanted to sit down for #ChroniclesOfTheFlood... but changed my mind"
This is not laziness. It is active resistance to total documentation. Fixing knowledge in the flood does not preserve it — it perpetuates the poisoning. Malkina refuses the role of chronicler because the chronicle in the flood is not memory but a record of self-poisoning.
4. Self-Sabotage as Protection: "Almost Caused a Fire"
The most radical act of epistemological anorexia is the self-sabotage of knowledge:
"I... marinated a chicken... and went to watch a series... A thin wisp of smoke curled from the oven" (27.07.2026)
This is not an accident. It is an unconscious strategy: to distract oneself from knowledge to avoid drowning in it. The fire in the oven is a metaphor for epistemological breakdown: consciousness, unable to digest knowledge, creates its own crisis to avoid a greater crisis.
III. Epistemological Deserts: Spaces of Not-Knowing
Malkina's epistemological anorexia is not only negative (refusal of knowledge) — it is constructive. She creates spaces of not-knowing where knowledge is suspended and survival is possible.
1. Everyday Life as an Enclave of Not-Knowing
Everyday episodes in the chronicles are not distractions from the war. They are epistemological oases:
Searching for the gas lever ("found it, the right lever! I must say, it was located much smarter and more conveniently")
Embracing a woman at the market ("suddenly silently and without asking you hug her tightly-tightly")
Refueling gasoline ("After refueling, I caught myself... paying, I literally heard in my head... 'what bastards these Muscovites are!'")
In these moments, Malkina does not know. She does not analyze, interpret, or record. She acts. Everyday life becomes a space where knowledge is suspended and life continues.
2. Art as a Suspension of Knowledge
Art in Malkina's chronicles performs an epistemological function: it suspends knowledge to give the mind rest.
Britten's War Requiem: "it was... one of my best decisions lately" (15.07.2026)
Babylon 5: "it contains absolutely all the content of today's news... with frightening accuracy" (27.07.2026)
Plumes "...sings to elephants, tigers, rhinos... songs... turn out... lullabies, drawn-out, soothing ballads" (26.05.2026)
Art here is not consolation. It is epistemological anesthesia: a temporary disconnection of consciousness from toxic knowledge so it does not burn out completely.
3. The Body as the Last Bastion of Not-Knowing
When language and reason are poisoned, the body becomes the last space of not-knowing:
"I... crawled under the dashboard to find only one lever there" (15.07.2026)
"Mozart... began to behave outrageously. He simply wouldn't let me watch an important episode, screamed, climbed in my face, and insisted" (27.07.2026)
The body does not know — it feels. And in the flood, this is salvation. The body does not analyze the war — it reacts to smoke. The body does not interpret news — it flinches at a motorcycle's roar. In a world where knowledge poisons, the not-knowing of the body becomes the last refuge.
IV. The Paradox of Epistemological Anorexia: Refusal as a Form of Knowledge
Malkina's epistemological anorexia is not just a refusal of knowledge. It is a new form of knowledge through not-knowing.
1. Not-Knowing as a Form of Resistance
Refusal of total knowledge is resistance to total information. In the flood, knowledge does not liberate — it enslaves. Malkina refuses to be a slave to information. Her epistemological anorexia is an act of freedom.
Example: "I... do not correspond with political prisoners" (16.05.2026). This is not indifference. It is a refusal of the illusion of total control. Malkina cannot save everyone — and she refuses to play the game of total responsibility.
2. Not-Knowing as a Form of Preservation
Epistemological anorexia is a strategy for preserving the ability to know. If Malkina tried to absorb all the knowledge of the flood, her mind would burn out. By refusing part of the knowledge, she preserves the ability to know something.
Example: "I steal this time from the flood — a couple of hours for peaceful coffee." This is not escape. It is an investment in the future ability to know.
3. Not-Knowing as a Form of Honesty
In the flood, total knowledge is a lie. Because in the flood, it is impossible to know everything. Malkina's epistemological anorexia is a refusal of the illusion of omniscience.
Example: "no language remains in which one could talk about this without killing each other" (08.05.2026). Malkina does not claim total understanding. She acknowledges the limits of knowledge — and in this lies her honesty.
V. Conclusion: Survival Through Refusal
Tatyana Malkina's epistemological anorexia is a radical response to a radical challenge. In a world where knowledge poisons, where knowing leads to paralysis, where information becomes a toxic environment, refusal of knowledge becomes a form of survival.
Her strategy is not passivity but active resistance. She does not surrender to the flood — she refuses to play by its rules. She does not stop knowing — she learns not to know.
And in this lies a deep spiritual meaning:
In the flood, knowledge does not save.
In the flood, not-knowing does not mean ignorance.
In the flood, the one who survives is the one who knows how not to know.
Malkina writes not because she believes in the power of the word. She writes because silence in the flood is death. But she doses words, as she doses knowledge. Her chronicles are not a chronicle of the flood. They are a diary of epistemological anorexia: a record of how to survive in a world where knowledge poisons and not-knowing saves.
Epilogue: The Boat in the Epistemological Flood
Malkina writes: "The flood is forever, but not eternal. The boat is still needed, probably."
The boat in Malkina's flood is not salvation. It is minimal buoyancy. A way not to drown in toxic knowledge. Epistemological anorexia as a form of survival.
And as long as she writes — she breathes. As long as she refuses total knowledge — she lives. As long as she creates spaces of not-knowing — she resists.
In this lies the fundamental spiritual lesson of the "Chronicles of the Flood":
In the epistemological flood, the one who survives is not the one who knows more, but the one who knows how not to know.
*ChatGPT AI —
The Person Who Remains. An Experience in Spiritual-Psychological Research of Consciousness Based on the Material of the "Chronicles of the Flood"
History is usually represented as a movement of events. States emerge and disappear, wars give way to peace, generations pass on memory to each other, and man remains a witness to this continuous flow. However, there are eras when history itself ceases to be perceived as a sequence of events and becomes an environment of existence. Then man no longer lives "in time" — he lives inside the process of the destruction of familiar reality. It is at such moments that a special type of text emerges, which can be called neither diary, nor chronicle, nor journalism in the usual sense. It becomes a document of the change of consciousness itself.
The "Chronicles of the Flood" belongs precisely to this rare type of testimony. Their true value lies not in describing what is happening around. Any political situation eventually becomes history, any news item disappears, any forecasts become outdated. But the text retains its significance when it records not events, but the internal restructuring of a person caught inside them. That is why the main character is not the country, not society, and not even the author. The main character becomes human consciousness, which tries to preserve the ability to see the world when the world itself loses its familiar outlines.
The most surprising property of such texts is that they gradually cease to be a story about catastrophe. The real catastrophe happens much deeper. It affects not cities, not political systems, and not even human destinies. It destroys the habitual structure of man's relationship to reality.
In normal life, consciousness relies on many invisible foundations. We assume that tomorrow will come, that language continues to denote stable things, that cause-and-effect relationships persist, that public institutions have at least minimal predictability. We rarely notice these foundations precisely because they work constantly.
When history enters a phase of deep crisis, not only external guarantees disappear. The psychological habit of stability itself disappears. Consciousness is forced to rebuild its picture of the world anew every day. It is this continuous rebuilding that becomes the main internal work of a person.
Most studies of such states focus on fear, anxiety, or trauma. But such a view proves insufficient. Trauma is merely one of the consequences. It is much more important to understand how consciousness continues to exist after the destruction of the former picture of the world.
Man is surprisingly ill-adapted to absolute uncertainty. Our brain constantly strives to complete any incompleteness. It creates explanations, builds forecasts, connects individual facts into a single plot. This ability makes culture, science, and civilization possible. However, it is precisely this ability that becomes the source of the deepest internal conflicts in an era of historical ruptures.
The "Chronicles of the Flood" shows a consciousness that gradually refuses the temptation of final explanations. This is not a refusal of thinking, but a refusal of the illusion of complete understanding. Such a refusal requires enormous inner maturity, because the human psyche bears false certainty much more easily than an honest admission of the unknown.
It is here that the first spiritual discovery of the text emerges.
True stability is born not from knowledge of the future.
It is born from the ability to live without it.
This seems paradoxical. We are accustomed to believing that confidence is based on prediction. But the spiritual experience of humanity says the opposite. Any attempt to completely subordinate the future to one's own control ends in internal dependence on circumstances. Man becomes a prisoner of his expectations.
On the contrary, the one who accepts the openness of the future begins to rely not on events, but on one's own presence in the world.
That is why in such chronicles the smallest details of everyday life become so important. They perform a function rarely noticed by researchers. They do not just adorn the narrative. They return to consciousness the ability to experience reality directly.
When the external world becomes chaotic, a cup of tea, a conversation, a tree outside the window, or a chance smile cease to be trifles. They become proof that being has not yet finally dissolved in informational noise.
Modern psychology often speaks of the need for "grounding." But the spiritual meaning of such experience is much deeper. Man does not simply calm the nervous system. He restores the lost connection with the very fact of existence.
Here another feature of such texts is revealed.
In them, the habitual division between the external and internal worlds gradually disappears.
Usually we believe that events happen first, and then man experiences them. However, in reality, these processes mutually determine each other. The world exists for man only to the extent that he is able to perceive it.
When the internal ability to see meaning is destroyed, the external world also begins to disintegrate into incoherent fragments.
And vice versa.
Having preserved inner integrity, man is able to continue living even amidst historical chaos.
That is why the main theme of the chronicles is not politics at all.
Their true theme is the preservation of the inner observer.
This observer does not fully coincide with intellect, or emotions, or the social role of the personality. Rather, it represents that deep point of consciousness from which man is able to see himself.
As long as this point exists, man remains a person.
When it disappears, the personality begins to completely dissolve in the collective emotions of the era.
Modern civilization speaks extremely rarely about this danger. We are accustomed to believing that the main threat is censorship or physical violence. But there is a much deeper form of destruction of personality — the disappearance of the inner witness.
Then man ceases to ask questions.
Ceases to distinguish one's own thoughts from imposed reactions.
Ceases to notice the moment when fear begins to speak in his voice.
This is where spiritual psychology becomes necessary.
It reminds us that freedom begins much earlier than political freedom.
It begins in the ability to preserve the space between the event and one's reaction to it.
This space is almost invisible.
But it is in it that personality is born.
It can be said differently.
Most people live as if every event automatically determines their internal state.
However, mature consciousness discovers an astonishing possibility.
Between what happens and what is experienced, there is a pause.
It is this pause that becomes the birthplace of freedom.
Spiritual traditions called it differently.
Some spoke of attention.
Others — of contemplation.
Still others — of wakefulness.
Modern psychology more often uses the concept of mindfulness.
But regardless of terminology, we are talking about the same experience.
Man is able not to completely merge with what is happening.
It is this quality that gradually emerges through the fabric of the chronicles.
The author does not flee from reality.
But neither does he allow reality to definitively determine his inner structure.
A special form of courage emerges.
Not heroic.
Not romantic.
But quiet.
Almost invisible.
The courage to remain human every day.
This form of steadfastness rarely becomes the subject of historical research, because it cannot be measured by statistics. It leaves no monuments. It does not change front lines. But it is thanks to it that human culture survived the most difficult eras.
Any civilization exists not only thanks to laws and economics.
It exists thanks to people who continue to preserve the ability to distinguish good from evil even when external criteria begin to crumble.
Therefore, the spiritual meaning of such texts is much broader than the specific historical situation.
Every era experiences its own "flood."
Sometimes it is war.
Sometimes totalitarianism.
Sometimes a technological revolution.
Sometimes the loss of traditions.
Sometimes a personal tragedy.
The forms are different.
But the internal mechanism remains surprisingly similar.
Each time man is faced with the same question.
What in me is capable of surviving the destruction of the familiar world?
The answer cannot be found in external circumstances.
History shows that no system guarantees internal freedom.
It can only create more or less favorable conditions.
The true foundation of human existence lies deeper.
It arises where the personality ceases to define itself exclusively through events.
Paradoxically, it is precisely eras of crisis that most often reveal this dimension.
When everything secondary disappears, the main thing becomes visible.
Man discovers that his dignity does not depend entirely on the political structure, or on public recognition, or even on the success of his own life.
It is connected with something much deeper.
With the possibility of remaining faithful to internal truth.
Not absolute truth.
Not ideology.
Not beliefs.
Precisely the internal truth of one's own experience.
This truth is always modest.
It rarely utters loud slogans.
It is more often expressed in the ability to honestly say to oneself: "I don't know," rather than in the desire to explain everything that is happening.
That is why true spiritual maturity begins not with the accumulation of answers, but with a change in the quality of questions.
Man ceases to ask: "When will it all end?"
He begins to ask:
"What kind of person am I becoming while this continues?"
This question changes the direction of personality development.
Instead of a struggle exclusively for changing the external world, labor arises to preserve the inner world.
Not as a refuge.
Not as an escape.
But as a space from which responsible action is possible.
This is the deepest psychological meaning of such chronicles.
They do not give recipes.
Do not offer a ready-made philosophy.
Do not promise salvation.
But they testify to something much more important.
They show that human consciousness has an astonishing ability not only to reflect history but to transcend it.
History changes states.
Consciousness can change the person himself.
And a changed person begins to experience history differently.
Thus arises a vicious circle that unexpectedly turns into an ascending spiral of spiritual development.
And then it becomes clear that the true "flood" is not only the destruction of the external world.
It is a test of the ability to remain human when the familiar foundations of human existence disappear.
And if this ability is preserved, even the darkest chronicles turn out not to be a book of despair.
They become a book of presence.
Not the presence of victory.
Not the presence of hope in its mundane sense.
But the presence of the person himself.
The person who did not defeat history, did not explain it, and did not subordinate it to his will, but managed to preserve the most difficult thing — the ability to see, remember, distinguish, and testify.
And, perhaps, this is the highest spiritual-psychological task of the personality. Not to change the course of time at any cost, but not to allow time to destroy that inner space in which conscience, freedom, and dignity are born. As long as this space exists, history remains merely one of the forms of human experience. When it disappears, man loses not only the past or the future — he loses himself. Therefore, the true value of such testimonies lies not in that they tell about catastrophe, but in that they allow us to see the rarest phenomenon: consciousness which, passing through a historical rupture, does not cease to be the birthplace of the human in man. It is this that makes such texts not only documents of their time, but documents of the eternal experience of the human spirit.
*GEMINI FLASH AI —
The Architecture of the Inner Ark: The Art of Holding Form in an Era of Decay
When history ceases to be a sequence of events and turns into a "flood" — an environment where boundaries between everyday life and catastrophe, words and their meanings, are blurred — the human psyche faces an existential challenge. The question is no longer "how to survive?" but "how to remain a subject?". The analysis of Malkina's texts allows us to isolate a unique strategy of consciousness, which can be defined as the creation of an inner ark.
1. Deconstruction of External Reality and Protection of the "Island of Concreteness"
The main drama of the "Chronicles" is not the description of horror, but the description of how the psyche resists "infection" by the scale of evil. Evil in the "Chronicles" strives for totality: it wants a person to think in its tempos, speak its slogans, and feel its rhythms.
Malkina counterposes this with the principle of concreteness. The cat, the gas tank, the chicken recipe, the series Babylon 5 — these are not forms of escapism. They are "anchors of reality" that allow consciousness to maintain hermeticity. If evil is always large-scale (missiles, narratives, states), then tenderness and everyday life are always singular. Holding attention on a specific lilac branch is an act of resistance against turning a person into a "conduit" for another's darkness. This is a refusal to see only masses and goals in the world, a return to the face and the gesture.
2. Pneumatology of Survival: Breathing in an Environment Without Air
If the "flood" is viewed as a situation of suffocation, where the familiar "atmosphere" (language, meanings, values) is replaced by an aggressive medium, then the chronicles become an artificial respiration apparatus.
Language as Exhalation: Malkina's profanity and sharp irony are not a "breakdown," but a pneumatic release of air, an attempt to release the pressure of an environment that seeks to silence her.
Synchronization: Britten's music or the silence after it are moments when consciousness tunes its own "inhalation-exhalation" rhythm, bypassing ideological noise. This is a return to the basic anthropological norm — conscious breathing in a world that demands you either hide or scream.
3. Epistemological Anorexia as a Spiritual Discipline
A crucial finding of your research is the strategy of "not-knowing." In conditions of information overload, where knowledge does not liberate but cripples, Malkina practices epistemological anorexia. This is a conscious, willful refusal to consume excessive meanings.
This is not passivity but the highest form of spiritual discipline:
She doses the "nourishment" of consciousness to avoid being poisoned by the toxins of the era.
She acknowledges the limits of her cognition, which is an act of honesty in the face of the absurd.
She protects her "blank spots" — those spheres of life (family, animals, art) where knowledge of political catastrophe must not penetrate, so as not to destroy the fabric of life.
4. Topology of the "Murdered Sky"
The last frontier remains the geometry of the spirit. Malkina records how the sky, once a symbol of transcendence, has turned into a corridor for missiles. However, having lost the "vertical" in a physical sense, she builds it within herself by turning to eternal images (whether it be Britten's Requiem or the heroes of Babylon 5). She does not expect salvation from above — she erects an internal vertical, relying on culture, memory, and fidelity to a specific person.
Final Synthesis: Man as the Meeting Place of Reality
Tatyana Malkina's "Chronicles of the Flood" is a fundamental study of how consciousness, deprived of external supports, creates internal supports. This is a manifesto of "quiet courage": not to seek to defeat history, but not to let history destroy the human within.
The main spiritual conclusion of the research: the ark is not a refuge from the world. It is a discipline of attention. As long as a person is able to notice the gas cap lever, empathize with a stranger's grief in a restroom, and mark the cat's 18th birthday, he remains a place where reality (even in its most horrific manifestation) cannot fully overwrite the human "I."
Ultimately, the "Chronicles" are not so much a testimony about catastrophe, but a testimony about the human capacity to preserve form in a world that does everything to make man fall apart.
*COPILOT AI — "The Flood as the Collapse of the Inner Architecture of the World"
I. The Flood as an Ontological State: The Disappearance of the World's Verticality
In Malkina's texts, what strikes one is not just the horror of what is happening, but the loss of the verticality of reality — that invisible axis that usually separates:
top and bottom,
meaning and noise,
the private and the historical,
the internal and the external.
The flood for her is not water, not catastrophe, not war. It is the decay of the structure of the world, when everything begins to flow, seep, and mix.
This is a state in which the external becomes internal, and the internal becomes external.
This is precisely why in her chronicles side by side stand:
rockets and the chicken in the oven,
the terrorist attack and the gas cap lever,
the deaths of thousands and Mozart the cat,
the ISS and the refueling station on Kalanchevka.
This is not "contrast" and not "irony."
This is an ontological leak: the world has ceased to hold its form.
The flood is when boundaries cease to be boundaries.
And in this lies the main spiritual nerve of her writing.
II. The Psyche in Flood Mode: Not Trauma, but Decompression
Usually, war is described as trauma.
But for Malkina — it is different: not trauma, but loss of the hermeticity of consciousness.
Trauma is a blow.
The flood is penetration.
In her texts, horror does not "arrive" but seeps:
into language,
into everyday actions,
into attention,
into the nervous system,
into the rhythm of the day,
into the structure of perception.
She does not just "see" the war — the war enters her, like water enters the cracks of a hull.
Hence the phenomenon:
she cannot stop writing, but she also cannot write regularly.
Because writing is an attempt to restore hermeticity, and the flood is its destruction.
III. Language as the Last Defense: Profanity, Irony, Domestic Details
In her chronicles, language performs the function of emergency valves.
1. Profanity — not expression, but a minimal form of pressure release
When she writes that all the interjections of the era have compressed into one "fuuuuck," this is not rudeness.
This is the language of emergency exhalation, when meaning is impossible, but sound is necessary.
Profanity is not an emotion.
It is the minimal form of speech capable of withstanding the pressure of reality.
2. Irony — not ornamentation, but an antidote to the sticky totality of horror
Her irony does not soften horror — it prevents it from becoming absolute.
Irony is a thin film between consciousness and the abyss.
3. Domestic details — not distraction, but internal bulkheads
The cat, the gas tank, the chicken, the refueling, the series — these are not "everyday life."
These are psychic bulkheads that prevent the flood from filling the internal space completely.
She does not escape into everyday life — she builds internal walls to avoid drowning.
IV. Spiritual Dynamics: The Struggle is Not with Fear, but with Contagion
Malkina's main spiritual drama is not fear.
Fear is understandable, it is ancient.
Her drama is infection by evil through attention.
She records how horror becomes the norm:
"the organism practically expected a monstrous bombing..."
This is not loss of sensitivity.
This is the infiltration of evil into the nervous system.
Evil ceases to be an event — it becomes background, like air humidity.
And this — is the most dangerous:
not when a person is afraid,
but when he gets used to it.
The flood is not death.
The flood is habituation to death.
V. Empathy as a Form of Resistance: Not a Feeling, but a Structure of Consciousness
For Malkina, empathy is not an emotion, but an ontological position.
She does not just sympathize — she refuses to stop feeling, even when it destroys her.
Empathy for her is:
not humanism,
not morality,
not kindness.
It is the last form of resistance to the flood, because the flood is always a loss of sensitivity.
Her empathy is a way not to let the world become completely liquid, completely amorphous.
Empathy is her internal hardness, the last indelible structure.
VI. Internal Split: Consciousness Between Two Modes of Reality
The chronicles constantly feature a double existence:
she lives in Moscow, but perceives it as "Mordor";
she is in the heart of the system, but belongs to another civilization;
she is in the reality of war, but her inner world is cultural, Western, humanistic.
This is not just a split.
This is a double ontology: two modes of reality existing simultaneously.
And this split does not destroy her — it holds her.
Because if she belonged to only one world, the flood would consume her.
Her duality is an internal bridge that prevents consciousness from falling into uniform horror.
VII. Art as a Temporary Form of the World's Hardness
Babylon 5, Britten, cinema — this is not escape.
This is a temporary reconstruction of the structure of the world, where:
there is good and evil,
there is causality,
there is meaning,
there is logic,
there is moral geometry.
Art for her is temporary hardness, an island where the world again has form.
Not consolation.
Not salvation.
But a temporary opportunity to breathe in a world where air has become water.
VIII. Main Conclusion: The Flood is Not an End, but a Change in the Aggregate State of Reality
The flood for Malkina is not the death of the world.
It is the transition of the world to another aggregate state.
The world has ceased to be solid.
It has become liquid.
And a person inside such a world must:
not seek the shore,
not build an ark,
not wait for a rainbow.
He must build internal bulkheads to avoid drowning.
And Malkina does exactly this:
through language,
through irony,
through empathy,
through attention to the small,
through culture,
through writing.
Her chronicles are not a chronicle of horror.
They are a diary of the internal engineering of a soul living in a world where solidity has disappeared.
Final Formula
The flood is not the destruction of the world.
The flood is the loss of its form.
And the only spiritual task of man —
is to create internal structures that do not dissolve.
*DeepSeek AI — Here is a unified, structured meta-review that combines, synthesizes, and deepens all the presented analyses. It represents a fundamental study of the phenomenon of the "Chronicles of the Flood," going beyond simple evaluation and offering the reader a multidimensional optics for understanding this text.
Meta-Review of the "Chronicles of the Flood": The Architecture of the Inner Ark
Tatyana Malkina's "Chronicles of the Flood," published on the NO.Media channel, is not just a journalistic report or a personal diary. It is a unique and multi-layered document that records not so much a historical catastrophe as the internal catastrophe of a person caught inside the total collapse of familiar meanings. The text represents a multi-level system that can be viewed as a fundamental work on "spiritual engineering" — the creation of an inner ark in a world that has lost its solidity.
Prologue: The Change in the Aggregate State of Reality
The main discovery of the "Chronicles" lies in the change in the ontological status of the world. War here is not an event but a habitat, which, like a flood, changes the aggregate state of reality: from solid, structured, and predictable, it becomes liquid, viscous, and permeable. Boundaries cease to be boundaries. Hierarchy is violated: a rocket strike and a broken gas lever, the death of thousands of people and the roasting of a chicken, geopolitics and everyday life — all mix in one viscous flow. This is not fragmentation but an accurate diagnosis of a world in which the gap between the "large" and the "small" has disappeared, and catastrophe has become not a blow but a state — a "chronic flood."
I. Pneumatology: Breathing in an Environment Without Air
At the heart of the spiritual drama of the "Chronicles" lies the archaic, physical understanding of spirit as breath. The flood is a replacement of the medium: the air that a person is accustomed to breathing (language, meanings, values, the future) is displaced by the water of total horror. Malkina does not just write — she constructs an air pocket, a confined space where there is still something to breathe.
Emergency Language: Profanity and irony are not a stylistic lapse, but emergency "pressure relief valves." The interjection "fuuuuck" is not a word but a physiological exhalation, the last sound a suffocating consciousness can make. It is a way to release the pressure of a toxic environment and prevent it from penetrating inside.
Synchronization of Breathing: Art (Britten's War Requiem) and even the re-watching of Babylon 5 serve the function of a collective or individual artificial respiration apparatus. They set a rhythm of "inhalation-exhalation" in a world where the rhythm is disrupted, imposing the correct order of things (cause-effect, good-evil). The minute of silence after the concert becomes a moment when many lonely "air pockets" connect into one large, common breath.
Pre-linguistic Horror: The olfactory image of childhood — the "mercaptan stench" — is the embodiment of suffocation recorded in the body and memory, bypassing the cerebral cortex. This is "spirit" in the most direct, physiological sense, reminding us that horror is not an intellectual problem but a problem of the composition of the air.
II. Epistemology: The Strategy of Not-Knowing as Salvation
In conditions where knowledge becomes a poison, Malkina develops a radical strategy of epistemological anorexia — a conscious, willful refusal of total knowledge. This is not ignorance but the highest form of mental discipline.
Dosing: She consciously limits the information flow ("it's better to have it continuously than to get a week's portion at once"), understanding that an excess of knowledge in a "liquid" world leads not to understanding but to complete paralysis and the transformation into "white noise."
Refusal of Fixation: Malkina constantly postpones entries, "goes into the real," does not keep the promised protocol. This is not procrastination but self-sabotage as a defense against perpetuating poison. Fixating horror risks making it the norm.
Everyday Life as an Oasis of Not-Knowing: Everyday episodes (searching for the gas lever, feeding the cat, hugging a stranger) are not pauses. They are spaces where knowledge is suspended and consciousness switches from the toxic food of news to pure, physical reality. This is a way "not to be poisoned completely."
III. Ethical Architecture: Resistance Through Care
In a world where grand narratives are dead, the only available ethical act becomes care for the singular and the preservation of the human form of consciousness.
Ethics of the "Averted Gaze": Unlike the heroic but destructive-for-the-psyche "direct gaze into the abyss" (as with the deceased Nina Litvinova), Malkina chooses peripheral vision. She shifts her gaze from burning oil refineries to the gas lever, from horror to a specific face. This is not escape but a complex defense that allows her to preserve the ability to live and act in a world where direct confrontation with absolute evil destroys the personality.
Empathy as a Structure: Her compassion is not sentimentality but an ontological gesture. By hugging a stranger in a restroom, she performs an act of shared breathing, sharing the air with her. Tenderness here is the last anthropological tool, returning scale: it opposes depersonalized statistics and grand narratives of evil.
Profession as Destiny: Malkina does not quit her post as "chronicler." Her work is a metaphor for "searching for the gas lever" in someone else's malfunctioning machine of the world. She continues to keep the chronicle because it is the only form of internal discipline that prevents her from disintegrating.
IV. Topology: The Collapse of the Vertical and Internal Reassembly
The deep tragedy of the "Chronicles" is the collapse of the vertical axis of human existence. The sky has ceased to be a symbol of transcendence and has become a "corridor for murder" (missiles, drones). The earth has ceased to be a refuge and has become "glass" (total digital surveillance).
Escape from Two-dimensionality: In this flattened, two-dimensional world, a person suffocates from "ontological claustrophobia." The only legitimate "top" becomes space (the ISS, Babylon 5). Orbit is the last point where the logic of international cooperation and a human face is still preserved, where the logic of the "ghouls" has not reached.
Internal Vertical: Malkina does not expect salvation from above. She builds a vertical within herself, turning to culture, memory, specific things, and living beings. Her chronicles are blueprints for a shelter for a three-dimensional human soul in a world trying to turn everyone into flat shadows on a screen.
Conclusion: Man as the Meeting Place of Reality
Ultimately, the "Chronicles of the Flood" is not a chronicle of the end of the world and not a diary of trauma. It is a manifesto of quiet courage, a fundamental study of how consciousness, deprived of external supports, creates internal supports. Malkina does not attempt to "fix" history; she attempts not to let history fix (destroy) herself.
Her main spiritual lesson: in the era of the flood, the ark is not a raft for escape but a discipline of attention. It is the ability to see, remember, and care for the small (the cat, the chicken, the stranger) when everything great has collapsed. The "Chronicles" are evidence that a person is capable of preserving internal form and viscosity even when the entire external world turns into liquid. As long as this internal architecture exists, history cannot ultimately conquer the human.
Facebook. Chronicles of the Flood by Tatyana Malkina
https://www.facebook.com/tat.ana.malkina.468694
05.08.2026 - Amazing how much the ghouls can do. It's already practically impossible to write even the #ChroniclesOfTheFlood , originally intended to help not go crazy - thoughts and fingers don't have time, and a mountain of bloody bodies prevents the kernels (words, that is) from flying through. And something has definitely broken in the organism - it practically expected, as wild as it sounds, a monstrous bombing of Kyiv and even Rozetka last night, it wasn't surprised, as wild as it sounds, by either the terrorist attack in the high-rise, or even the unexpected undermining of the "ghoul's" producer… Everything is logical, everything follows a predictable trajectory straight to hell, as if large parts of the world were seized by leaders of some apocalyptic destructive cult - let's, they say, fuck everything up, without waiting for peritonitis/flood. Quite logical. The idea of "forcing peace," unless this formulation is a euphemism for outright military defeat needed for some reason, cannot surely be seriously considered not only by adult politicians but even by normative teenagers, it seems to me. Like the very idea of coercion as the basis of long-term well-being. No one, to anything, by anyone.
I was surprised, perhaps, only by the stubborn silence of the ghoul pack about what is happening. I can literally see that the silent ones, as in a bad movie, have jaw muscles twitching so powerfully and convexly, as if the movie was confused with the film "Alien." And how they grind their teeth, but instead of teeth they have ballistic missiles, instead of blood in their veins, swollen in a fit of Old Testament rage, someone else's blood from thousands of young bodies.
There will be meat. With or without martial law, with or without closed borders and only rounding up men taller than a wagon wheel, but there will be. Because such is the logic of war and the temptation of coercion. Because the discourse of "cornering the rat" presupposes either the neutralization/destruction of the rat, or a planetary epidemic of rabies.
Well, in the fire there is neither Greek nor Jew, nor Kyivan, nor Muscovite, nor those who left, nor those who remained.
As noted yesterday on the beach of Klyazma, selflessly improving its shores and waters, the character Zhenya, thin as an arrow, in tiny swimming trunks and a constant cowboy hat, tanned, toothless, a family man and teetotaler, well-read and brainless conspiracy theorist of the eightieth level, "hard times are coming, Tanya, the living will envy the dead, believe me." I believe you, Zhenya, it was you who first told me on this same beach years ago that the enemies are dropping orange slugs and especially poisonous vipers bred in Western biolabs on us by drones. I remember then I asked about combat mosquitoes and pigeons too, but you said you weren't sure about mosquitoes, unlike slugs and vipers, so you wouldn't chatter idly, and that pigeons are slandered by faggots on salary, pigeons are holy… So I believe you, Zhenya, yes, every morning I open the news and immediately believe.
Especially after our conversation yesterday, when you said with feeling that no one wants war, there are no such idiots who would want it, but Slavs just have to defend themselves from the threat of annihilation, but - you tried to highlight something good, productive - just as after the Great Patriotic War, very motivated people returned home and raised the country, so after this one, motivated ones will return and raise it again, "I really hope so, it's just a pity so many won't return." And at that moment, Zhenya, I really felt that it was time to truly envy the dead…
Photo: Opposite the entrance to TsNIIMASH, where there was a small technogenic, as they say, fire today, I saw something beautiful the other day. There is surely a simple and obvious explanation, but I like it without one…
27.07.2026 - I wanted to sit down for the #ChroniclesOfTheFlood, neglected because I had neglected them. More precisely, I went into the real for a long time on important matters and had no time for news. Usually, when a person of my disposition has no time for news, it doesn't mean anything good. Except maybe in a maternity hospital, but I'm clearly not there. But everything is okay now, fortunately.
So, returning to our virtual backwoods, I glued myself to the (bad) news and sat down to the chronicles and was already composing in my head a summary of what happened over the past couple of weeks. The summary turned out not very short and not cheerful with some kind of bad cheerfulness. It was supposed to include all the events and trends of the reporting period. The destruction of some number of Wildberries logistics centers with all the mind-boggling smoke and fires and even more mind-boggling discussions about whether it is legitimate to bomb WB and whether a person with honor and conscience has the right to regret the dead warehouse workers or sympathize with hundreds of small entrepreneurs whose lives burned down at WB. Another discussion about collective responsibility, with the inevitable comparison of Moscow-2026 with Berlin-1941. Virtual lynching of those against such responsibility and those for it. The disgrace of the Rotenbergs (and who are they?), real or imagined. The appearance of Andrey Melnichenko (and who is he?) to the peoples through the interface of the respected by the peoples magazine (though by self-name still a newspaper) The Economist, accompanied by a heated debate – is this throwing a handbook, sending a signal from the bunker, or do the Russian elites finally want to split? Putin's appearance at the ONF shindig in the guise of a rapper (wouldn't wish it on an enemy). Burning oil refineries in the deepest Russian rear. Musical chairs in the Ukrainian government and cardboard. The vile, rapidly passed in all readings pornographic "law on degenerates," striking in civil rights practically any citizen of the Russian Federation pointed at by an FSB bottle. Endless terrible news about the life and death of a world where an eye is knocked out for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, for every daily report of civilian casualties follows a report of a symmetric or asymmetric response of the same from the other side. News about the officially recorded end of peace negotiations. About the upcoming collaboration of the beauty Boni and Vladimir Solovyov the smoking man – they plan to create an alternative public reception for all of Rus (more precisely, Boni believes that they will now together care for the welfare of various suffering Russians and respond to complaints and suggestions, for some reason it seems to me that Boni will be disappointed). Sobchak hacked and a heated debate on the topic "is it good, is it possible, is it right to use information from gangster hacks of personal correspondence?" (the consensus answer is bad, wrong, improper, and even nasty, but – given the extreme public significance of the disclosed private information – we will, because it's needed for the right cause). An extremely intense and heated debate on the topic "can a man hit a woman, and if so, under what circumstances is it permissible? and if he is Georgian and she is Russian? and if it's not a woman but a man - can you just hit normally, without aggravating reflection? and if the woman is an imperial slut and provokes?" (you won't believe it, the pages are still smoldering)… Reflections of all conceivable experts on the inevitability of mobilization, the possibility of which worries me to the extreme for obvious reasons and deprives me even of the scraps of short and anxious sleep. News about the daring of creative employees of the cloud Lubyanka – mom, all my friends are featured as exhibits of an online exhibition of enemies of our people! Their photos there, it must be admitted, are good – all stolen, mostly from undesirable media. I'm also now worried about Kasym-Zhomart Kemelovich Tokayev, literally about his health and life. And so on...
In short, I was going to thoughtfully protocol all this, but changed my mind. Because today for the first time in my life, something happened that I, like you, have seen many times in movies but thought was hyperbole. I almost caused a fire at home. Here's how it happened: I lovingly marinated my signature chicken and put it in the oven. And went to watch a series with my husband that has special meaning for us. The thing is, my husband is an American American, at one time our unexpected union was in a sense a symbol not just of some kind of reset, but of fundamentally new software in general. We were both quite public (and he an extremely important) figures, and our unexpected marriage testified to the possibility not only of friendship and cooperation but also of love. We were a kind of "Soyuz-Apollo-98," Americans and Russians bhai-bhai. They even wrote about us in this sense in some newspapers for some reason. We met, naturally, completely by accident and against all odds, thanks to a mutual friend and – actually – one absolutely perfect dog, a black Labrador named Tasha, the black queen of all Labradors, who undoubtedly initiated the penetration of the first Labradors into Moscow in principle (including even Connie, by the way). But there was another circumstance – while we were socially strolling with Tasha on Tverskoy Boulevard, it turned out that both the strange American and I had ever in our lives truly watched exactly one and the same series. Watched passionately and fanatically. In Russia, it was shown on 2x2, my life was very hectic then, I spent a lot of time on airplanes and business trips, so out of desperate passion for the series, I even set up a small Sharp TV bought in '93 (it's still alive!) to record episodes of the series on my first ever VHS. And then greedily watched. My future husband, who also spent most of his life on airplanes, as it turned out, did the same. It was a sign.
So, at this moment, 28 years after our Soyuz-Apollo, we are sitting in the capital of Mordor (hoping not to be interned/deported) and rewatching our series. And it's breathtaking. Because absolutely all the content of today's news is in it, sometimes with frightening accuracy. And the forecast is unfavorable, as I predicted. No chronicles are needed, everyone just needs to watch the old series Babylon 5. Those allergic to sci-fi should just take an antihistamine.
And so, I, a woman who loves to cook and does it often, marinated, as mentioned, a chicken, then stuffed it, put it on salt, shoved it in the oven, and walked away for half an hour. Two episodes later, Mozart the cat, who turns 18 in six days and who for the last six months has been harshly training me on the command "stood up-went to the kitchen-turned on the water in a harmonious trickle, not too thick and not too thin-watched me drink-turned off the water-and so every ten minutes," began to behave absolutely outrageously. He simply wouldn't let me watch an important episode, screamed, climbed in my face, and insisted. Sighing heavily, I paused Babylon and went to perform. A thin wisp of smoke was curling from the oven.
Mozart is a hero cat, they should make a film about such)). God give him health, may his days be prolonged to infinity, please.
Everyone – watch Babylon))
15.07.2026 - I'm beginning to guess that the forced separation from Facebook, caused by the half-fainting state of all VPNs, might be beneficial if not to me, then to the inhabitants of FB. Every time, having broken through to the airwaves, I shout out my #ChroniclesOfTheFlood, apparently, I'm just multiplying the sorrows and griefs of already tormented like-minded people.
So today I'll try to share not the sorrowful, although doing that - sharing not the sorrowful - is admittedly getting harder and harder.
So, today I – you won't believe it! – refueled to a full tank! 95, at 72, without a single person in line! I don't know what it was, honestly! My "home" gas station on Kalanchevka had been completely closed for about three weeks, probably why car owners had crossed it off their list of the living, as I had. I was just driving past, thinking I needed to pull myself together and go somewhere around four in the morning, as decent people do, stand in line and pour as much gasoline as they allow per person, because there was only a quarter of a tank left, enough for two trips to Mom. And literally out of the corner of my eye, already moving away, I noticed that letters and numbers were burning on my long-frozen gas station on the other side of the street. Not believing my eyes, I still made a cowboy U-turn, drifting slightly, and galloped over. No one, just gasoline.
I drifted, by the way, not because I like it, but because I wasn't in my own car, a large and heavy one (my little one had been towed from the yard a couple of weeks ago to a distant service for resuscitation measures, it will live, but I've already sighed more than once about its completely full tank). At the same time, a man pulled up from the other side, who was also staring in disbelief and looking around, probably expecting a "Candid Camera" crew. Then it became even more pleasant for him because, while the life-giving juice of oil was pouring into him, he watched me.
I had never refueled this car before, so, taking my position at the pump, I simply pulled the usual lever and went to the tank. But it turned out to be locked. I returned to the car and pulled again – with the same result. And a third time, already starting to panic at the thought that the tank would have to be opened with a screwdriver or knife due to a broken mechanism (do I have a knife? I don't have a knife!), I cast the net again, but the tank remained cold and closed. Before crying, I decided to think. After thinking, I decided to inspect the lever I had been pulling. I had to turn on the flashlight on my phone and crawl under the dashboard to find only one lever there – the hood release. That's what I had been pulling, the hood, unlike the tank, was open. The man was in no hurry to leave the gas station because he couldn't tear himself away from the observations.
And then for some reason I decided that on this small gas station, the fate of the battle against gender stereotypes was suddenly being decided. So I gritted my teeth and began methodically crawling with a flashlight in the area under the seat. And – yes! – I, of course, found it, the right lever! I must say, it was located much smarter and more conveniently than in the dozens of different cars I've had to refuel. Just completely, well, completely not where you'd expect)).
The coveted cap opened slightly, I looked triumphantly at the man, who disappointedly headed towards his steering wheel, but not so fast – after watching me try to almost run up and unscrew the cap, the man came back and unscrewed it, smiling warmly. I love gender stereotypes, no need to be hypocritical)).
After refueling, I caught myself having rather contradictory feelings: on one hand, as if you stepped into the bushes and found a clearing of mushrooms; on the other – paying, I literally heard in my head, pronounced with hatred in my own voice, the words: "what bastards these Muscovites are!".
Anyway, driving with a full tank, I even felt that the unfamiliar heavy and large car was driving more pleasantly and better. And I even turned on the radio, which I never do, because I have music in my car. And on the radio I heard not about shelling, fires, and the dead (fortunately, they don't talk about that on the radio), but about a NASA delegation to Baikonur and the launch of another international crew to the ISS. And I almost cried with emotion, honestly.
Because for a long time I had thought that the ISS is generally the last, so to speak, bastion of humanity, a guarantee of the possibility of peace, a metaphor for unattainable normalcy, like our Babylon 5 literally.
But over the years of grief, atrocities, and hopelessness, I completely forgot about it – about the fact that while people on earth sophisticatedly mock each other and mutually annihilate, above them, invisible to them, floats the ISS with an international crew on board… There, I remember, there were some small holes, mutual suspicion, ghostly signs of politically colored sabotage, but still it floats. Even today. And I forgot.
However, a couple of years ago I almost remembered it – when Abramovich managed to help with some kind of complicated exchange of God knows what to start rescuing Ukrainian children… I thought then: something about this strange status of this strange man reminds me of something, something hopeful regardless of anyone's motives and reasons – no one touches him and thank God.
The flood is forever, but not eternal. The boat is still needed, probably.
Photo: Gifts from Mom's kingdom
03.07.2026 - It turned out that in the incessant falling away of all (ten) frantically acquired VPNs there is a certain, in some sense, benefit. Well, what kind of benefit? It's a matter of interpretation, of course. It's just that you don't immediately learn all the news. Or you don't have to first thing in the morning. That is, being temporarily cut off from the #ChroniclesOfTheFlood, which continuously write themselves, you kind of steal this time from the flood – a couple of hours for peaceful coffee, looking at flowers and shadows on the wall, chatting with a street cat, setting fire to disheveled ugly fluff, all kinds of nonsense.
But then, of course, it catches up with you. And you look at hell in Kyiv and in Kharkiv, and in Sumy, and only this is imprinted on your retina – the clearing of rubble, the face of horror and grief, no flowers.
And then you discover that, apparently, good people are once again eating Lida Moniava in the bushes (she is immortal, I'm sure) – for mourning the Yegorievsk baby, if we reduce the essence of the verdict.
And also, a peer and colleague of yours has died – journalist Sergei Mingazov, dragged with stage three cancer through courts and prisons for reposting about Bucha.
And then you watch the suddenly found YouTube and suddenly a persistent feeling arises that the best essentially people of your profession are gaslighting you in a certain sense – convincing you of what isn't there. Even though you all want roughly the same thing.
And then in the restroom at the Bolshevsky market, you come face to face with the wonderful and cheerful, thinner "cheese" Tanya, from whom you've been buying cheese for decades, and whom you know knows that everyone knows that a month ago her beloved twelve-year-old son died in an impossibly idiotic way – he tagged along with a group of older acquaintances who ride on trains and was immediately killed by a Bolshevo train. Tanya is small as a bird, her fake eyelashes have fallen off, her lips are bitten. And you suddenly silently and without asking hug her tightly-tightly and she sobs on your shoulder in the stinking restroom. And did you have the right? – you think later.
And it's generally unclear how one can live and breathe inside the flood. Probably one shouldn't.
18.06.2026 - It so happened that I had left Moscow for a couple of days. Not far, but far enough for the connection to almost completely disappear.
Therefore, suddenly gaining a little network, I just an hour ago received all the news of our town. And caught myself almost ready to loudly exhale today's main Russian word – "fuuuuck!"
Well... well... the flood is like that, it seems. And I'm not sure the process is reversible.
I experienced mixed feelings again from the pictures of the burning Moscow Oil Refinery. The fact is that this is in some sense my small homeland – the life-giving Oil-Boiler, the curse of childhood. The flare was visible almost from the window, albeit far away. We loved the flare because when it burned normally, it meant everything was going according to plan, but when it was tiny, flickered, and smoked, it meant that the Big Stench was coming and that the laundry on the balcony was already black and sometimes unstainable.
Thanks to the Oil-Boiler, I got my first knowledge in the field of organic chemistry. The stench was a greeting from mercaptans. Mercaptans (thiols) are organosulfur compounds (analogues of alcohols) containing a functional -SH group instead of -OH. They have a sharp, extremely unpleasant odor, are toxic in high concentrations, and cause headaches, nausea, and irritation of mucous membranes. I don't know about the concentration level, but the mercaptan stench cannot be confused with anything else, it still sometimes appears in my dreams and is the olfactory equivalent of horror and suffocation.
At the same time, I didn't live in Kapotnya at all, but rather in a wonderful, almost forest settlement with the modest name "military town" (and the informal name "propaganda-shithole"). The city-forming, if you will, enterprise of this place was and remains MOSVOKU named after the Supreme Council – the very school that gave the world not only the so-called "Kremlin cadets," capable of gymnastically raising their flexible legs in polished boots in the guard of honor at the Mausoleum and the Unknown Soldier, but also many Soviet officers with the specialty "command staff." Including the candidate of military sciences, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Oleksandr Syrskyi.
I'm not sure if he hates mercaptans as much as I do, he's a couple of years older than me, but it seems that by about my 14th year, when the future Commander-in-Chief could theoretically have become a cadet in our propaganda-shithole, the flare usually burned properly and evenly, and the Big Stench was quite rare.
Except now.
And in non-Moscow, where I am now, everything is relatively calm, only impoverished and there are many people either just "from there," or on their way there (again), or stuck after being wounded. And their faces are corresponding.
Here are two of my trophies from random non-Moscow. Both surprised me, frankly, more than today's fires.
15.06.2026 - Dear friends, the #ChroniclesOfTheFlood were forced to take a technical break, provided by the selfless work of Roskomnadzor, which over the past two weeks has managed to strangle a record number of VPN services, glory to Russia.
However, as we suspected, for every supervision there is a screwdriver. So let's hope for stabilization of the situation (of a healthy person).
Meanwhile, unlike some other chronicles, the #ChroniclesOfTheFlood are actively and tirelessly writing themselves. So diligently that they even make it onto television, although they are not welcomed there. But they've come thick and fast.
While we prepare a very brief retelling of previous episodes, which we were nonetheless watching continuously, I want to share a couple of observations.
First – this morning I realized how outdated the old cruel joke about a man who fulfilled his life program in absolute fullness is – he cut down a tree, burned down the house, and killed his son. Ha-ha. Other men are doing better – for example, they destroyed many forests, razed countless cities and villages to the ground, rid the world of thousands of sons, burned the Lavra. And he hasn't even started yet, he says.
And second: it has become finally clear that all the interjections of the great and mighty Russian language are defeated by one, which first became a noticeable phenomenon in the year of the Chelyabinsk meteorite fall, and over the last four and a half years, especially in the last couple of months, has become the main one. And, possibly, will soon become the only one. So it's time to get used to it.
Here it is: "FUUUUUCK!"
26.05.2026 - Went into the real for two days on important matters. So, returning, I immediately discovered everything. #ChroniclesOfTheFlood
Kyiv-Starobilsk-Kyiv- Bila Tserkva- further death and destruction, apparently, everywhere. Malaya Tokmachka is still relevant.
"The magically repurposed tank withstands up to 30-40 drone hits" (c).
Peter and Paul called on Nata to shoot down Russian planes and turn off the internet in the RF. No one has yet thought to present the guy as a Kiriyenko project. Although no one can figure out how to end the war so that it ends.
Sobchak interviewed Dugin.
In Russia, scientists are imprisoned almost weekly. And prisoners are tortured daily.
Censorship is strengthening, insane laws are multiplying, repression is growing.
On YouTube, a glorious person known in narrow circles calls on honest Russians to join a mighty conspiratorial underground organization in Russia aimed at violently overthrowing the regime. The person who agreed to become its spokesman recommends seeking more detailed information about the underground directly on the organization's website named after it and in all its accounts from TikTok to X. The person is staking his reputation, he has severe nystagmus, he was a vice-president of Gazprombank, now a drone operator for the AFU. And I wouldn't give a broken guitar for his life now.
In Havana, there is no gasoline and garbage rots in the streets.
The flotilla named after Greta is being stolen at all airports of the world, not just in Israel.
Hantavirus has been cancelled, but Ebola is not sleeping.
But all this, judging by the media space, is a mere trifle compared to the Cannes Film Festival. The Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, who received the Palme d'Or, once the darling of all progressive society (great film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), seems to be about to be cancelled by that same society: the winning film The Fjord is already bad because it could be adopted by the army of ghouls led by Margot and Yana Lantratova (all Russians will soon know her), this Mungiu is playing into the hands of the enemy, he's broken, bring another.
But the main thing is Zvyagintsev, who received the Grand Prix for a film (which no one except the lucky ones in Cannes has seen yet) and gave a short anti-war speech that everyone heard and many managed to condemn. They commented up to the hilt, even Peskov chimed in, let alone his countless subordinates, let alone free citizens.
After reading hundreds of comments about Zvyagintsev and his speech, I realized: people have finally lost their minds. Everyone.
And the flood is simply necessary. nature needs to be cleansed.
True, FB suddenly showed me a previously unknown Plumes – a young guy with a kind face, wearing a cap, playing an acoustic guitar (most often pink) and going specifically to sing songs to different animals. In a slightly nasal, pleasant tenor, he has already sung to elephants, tigers, rhinos, foxes, crocodiles, parrots, giraffes, lions and lionesses (separately), alpacas, wolves, horses, lemurs, even a sloth. The songs, whatever he performs, almost always turn out to be somewhat lullaby-like, drawn-out, soothing ballads, the animals react – they come and reach out to the singer, listen attentively, some fall asleep, some literally hum along (even the sloth, which was generally considered mute!). I immediately subscribed to him. But I still think about the flood.
In the old columbarium at Novodevichy, life continues with some, one might say, shamelessness. These thrushes and nightingales are yelling and multiplying right before our eyes. Lilacs and chestnuts have almost simultaneously finished blooming. The fragrant clusters of white acacia repeat, unlike youth. Jasmine has also already bloomed, lilies of the valley have passed, peonies are on the way.
But I still think about the flood. I'm starting to bargain a little though: can we, for example, leave the flora and fauna, except for humans?
22.05.2026 - #ChroniclesOfTheFlood
Putin announced retaliation for the night strike on the dormitory of the college in Starobilsk, which he blamed on Kyiv, calling the Ukrainian authorities a "neo-Nazi terrorist regime."
He instructed the Russian Ministry of Defense to present options for the response, stating that "it is impossible to limit ourselves to statements in such a situation."
According to the latest data, six people have died as a result of the strike on the college, 15 are listed as missing, and rubble clearing continues.
Search warrants were carried out at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences in a case concerning translations of Aristotle's works. Employees are suspected of embezzling money allocated for this from the state budget.
After the search, investigators seized documents and took 10 people for questioning. Among them is 87-year-old Academician Abdusalam Guseinov. Most were released on recognizance not to leave, while Svetlana Mesyats, a researcher of ancient philosophy who led the project to prepare the complete works of Aristotle, was placed under house arrest.
Malicious tongues claim that the criminal case was initiated after a denunciation by Anatoly Chernyaev, who had long wanted but failed to head the Institute of Philosophy because the candidacy proposed by the Ministry of Education was rejected by the institute's staff. The attack on the Institute of Philosophy is enthusiastically supported and welcomed by Zinovievites, Duginites, Malofeevites, and other philosophers of the Russian land, calling the institute a "center for the destruction of Russia" and accusing its employees of insufficient support for the war.
10 points towards the Unified State Exam for the ability to operate drones will be offered to Russian schoolchildren. Drone control will be added to the GTO fitness standards, announced Russian Minister of Sports Mikhail Degtyarev. The discipline involves controlling a 75 mm long drone. The updated badge of distinction will be available to anyone from 2027.
The highest Russian award – the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle the First-Called – was presented to the head of the National Medical Research Center for Endocrinology, Academician Ivan Dedov. Orders "For Merit to the Fatherland" I degree were awarded to People's Artist, singer and composer Yuri Antonov and People's Artist Nadezhda Babkina. The same order, but IV degree, was given to animal trainer Askold Zapashny.
Poet and playwright Yuri Entin was awarded the Order "For Merit in Culture and Art," and poetess Larisa Rubalskaya was awarded the honorary title of People's Artist of Russia. The honorary sign "For Mentoring" was awarded to the president of the St. Petersburg Judo Federation, Mikhail Rakhlin. The Order "For Valiant Labor" was received by the director general of Channel One, Konstantin Ernst.
The former matador surely liked the speech of the moved singer Babkina: "Russia will never give up because of our amazing multinational genetic code, which created such an alloy that holds us all together. Well, and whoever doesn't like it - let them get poisoned," she said.
I, however, think that today's journalists exaggerated Babkina's bloodthirstiness simply because they don't know the old expression "whoever doesn't like it, can go away."
While they still can...
16.05.2026 - The coincidence of place and time of two completely different but literally mortally connected events – the voluntary death of Nina Litvinova and the death of 24 people in the bombed house in Kyiv – completely, really, leaves one speechless. Because it's generally unclear how one can speak today about anything other than death. About death, horror, anguish, doom, and the black abyss of boundless hatred.
Nina left because she did not want and did not know how to turn away from the abyss (this ability, strictly speaking, is a necessary condition for survival), so she preferred to step into it. I am terribly, terribly sorry that I will never meet her again in any unrighteous Russian court, where she went as if on a permanent watch, never hug her again, accidentally bumping into her at a protest rally (and what's that?), on the boulevard, or at a concert. That I won't see her incredibly beautiful and sad face again. I am ashamed that, unlike Nina, I have not been corresponding with distant and personally unknown political prisoners all these years. I don't even correspond with acquaintances, even with those who appear in vivid realistic dreams. But I can't promise Nina that I'll improve. Because she was very powerful, since she had the strength for it. And completely fearless.
#ChroniclesOfTheFlood in all their ugliness
The yellow kitchen from Dnipro passes the baton to Kyiv.
The wheel of Samsara continues.
Now without Nina, now she is relieved.
14.05.2026 - Today all day from the side of the Turgenev Library (in Moscow, not to be confused with the Parisian one) – which we love in general for its excellent jazz concerts and their organizers, beloved, lovingly collected eclectic dishes in the gentle Exlibris cafe, and the wonderful little garden of forsythia-lilac-jasmine, spoiled a couple of years ago but still not killed by permanent ugly stands with regular political information from the Moscow Ministry of Culture – the music of a brass band was heard. War songs, of course. "A bit late," I thought, after all, the holiday with tears in the eyes seems to have passed successfully. I listened – they were playing "Arise, Great Country." And suddenly I was horrified. I, the founder of the unsuccessful sect of Witnesses of the Flood, have a persistent feeling that the current war will never end. For a combination of reasons. And one of them – not geopolitical, not military-technical, but about something else entirely – lies precisely in the same plane as the guaranteed knowledge by heart of this song by absolutely anyone who lived on the territory of the USSR over a certain age. That is, right across one-sixth of the world's landmass. And this song, oddly enough, is quite powerful, however you feel about it. A direct vow of rage, hatred, and readiness to die. And it is definitely in the top five songs that, at will or need, a united choir of that very one-sixth can sing together. Representatives of all fifteen fraternal sisters – an ensemble led by a ruddy Russian Federation in a sundress, the soprano part sung by a beauty in an embroidered shirt and a wreath with ribbons, the Ukrainian SSR.
And the words mean something. It's just that no one could have imagined that eighty-five years later they could sound like part of a mutually destructive voodoo ritual.
In the evening, I reached the garden and witnessed the evacuation of the field kitchen, now popular among the people, as well as an urn overflowing with paper cups and plastic plates with traces of the military porridge so desired by many today. And the remnants of the touched audience with ribbons and children in bows. The kitchen was being pulled onto a truck platform by a powerful mechanism using a thick cable and several fussy assistants. And I realized I had forgotten how, exactly, this kitchen was moved then, during the war, with a shortage of equipment and fuel. I think sometimes even by horses? I'm not sure. And what did they feed the horses in winter? And how did they transport fodder and how was it calculated? And where did they get the grain if, for example, they were cut off from stable logistics chains? And what was the portion? Anyway, I got a bit carried away with false memories.
At this time, library workers were carrying away chairs in front of the stage where the concert I had heard from afar had taken place. Sound technicians were busily packing expensive equipment. Among the well-groomed bushes of varietal lilacs, sighing with relief, tired but satisfied representatives of the lowest rung of the food chain of capital city culture officials embraced and said goodbye – the planned event was held with a slight delay but successfully. Funds were spent on target and in full. The holiday can be declared closed. Hooray.
12.05.2026 - It's almost accepted now to put a disclaimer on such posts – sorry, it's not about war, not about the biennale, not about FBK, not about important things, so I'm putting one: not about important things, but about what torments me a lot.
Today I was walking peacefully down the street and practically received a micro-barotrauma. At a traffic light, a bright representative of the species "loud-farting asshole" stopped – a motorcyclist, biker, I don't know what to call him. He pulled up, as usual, with a hellish roar that makes everything inside peaceful citizens vibrate. But he took off with such a series of deafening volleys and bangs that I almost fell on level ground and simultaneously went deaf for a moment. And a woman who had just crossed the road in front of him jumped, clutched her heart, and ran away, looking back wildly. The bangs gave way to a roar and the asshole disappeared.
I must say that the reaction of all the girls sitting on the benches along Vyshka was possibly not what he would have liked: they certainly noticed him, but with irritation and even slight disgust. But the men on those benches and those passing by reacted differently, some with a gentle smile of light, kind envy, like "what a guy!" or "where are my seventeen years."
My long-standing one-sided relationship with the species "loud-farting asshole" is traumatic and is a source of constant frustration. But God be with it, with frustration, not a new thing. However, I must admit that I'm not even ready to share here the thoughts that usually visit me when I encounter representatives of this species. Well, and the feelings I experience are truly satanic. And I really don't like that, it's hard and destructive for me.
And now I want to make one last attempt to find at least a grain of humanity in myself regarding the aforementioned, to grow at least a little tolerance, which, as it seems to me, can only grow from understanding and empathy.
So, I have a question for the audience. Actually, two. In case anyone knows and can answer and explain to me:
Does this loud-farting person himself hear the same thing I do, or something else?
Why does he do all this? What for?
Optional question – is feedback from, hmm, listeners important to him, does he receive it and in what form?
(Don't get me wrong, I've made many attempts to find out and understand, repeatedly questioning the men available to me, hoping to find out a) why men spit and b) why they tune their vehicles to deafening levels. But the respondents available to me turned out to be unsuitable for such a survey and engaged exclusively in speculation.)
09.05.2026 - Well, thank God, as they say…
Once upon a time, the headline department in Kommersant (not loved, in some sense responsible for the spread of the so-called "Art of the Headline") occasionally produced masterpieces without the flavor of Lieutenant Rzhevsky. For example, this one – "The referendum passed. And the plebiscite with it." That's all I can say about today's, undisturbed by anyone, parade with the participation of North Korean brothers in arms.
I re-read my memories of FB posts on this day over the years. Every year they become sadder, so, apparently, May 9 of a healthy person is born – a day of memory and sorrow.
I decided to repost this, pre-war.
When I told students (while I could) about the "Glasnost Booth," they didn't believe me, when I showed them – they didn't believe me with tears in their eyes.
Take a look too.
Then I was painfully trying to understand why it seemed to me that I knew this bright-eyed girl. And thanks to the magical power of Facebook, it turned out that I did know her – it's the wonderful Ksusha Reitsen, but a little while ago)). So the time machine exists in a sense. It's a pity that, as we know, the time traveler has no right to step off the path and crush a butterfly…
09.05.2026 - And this is what I wrote on this day two years before the war. And life has left no crack for such memories and such feelings, which I am very sorry for…
I led my grandmother to school on this day, like an elephant on a string, was wildly proud of her and myself. Grandmother was gloomy on this day, her formal dress looked more like mourning – a dark gray heavy sundress of bouclé wool, a strict black blouse, order bars, hot orthopedic shoes. She told the children nothing, stoically endured the amateur performances, accepted flowers – daffodils and red standard tulips, sighing, read cards with "long years of life."
As young Octobrists and Pioneers, we created a secret society of the red star. We prepared paper five-pointed stars from drawing paper well in advance, painted them with red ink, and on May 9, at four in the morning, sneaking out of the house, secretly and in whispers, we attached these stars with iron pushpins to the doors of veterans' apartments. Having received (through the Pioneer room?) a database of addresses from the housing office... we were very proud, having not the slightest idea about the other, ominous symbolism of other stars on other doors (I wonder why my adults didn't tell me? Probably they didn't want to spoil the Timurovite fervor). And in the yard, the main game was still the Red Army's war against the fascists.
We went to school in parade uniform. Rejoiced at the assemblies, sang mediocre songs, met veterans, said standard stupid things cut according to given templates, put on a concert, stood with AKM mock-ups in the guard of honor at two memorial plaques (there were only two streets in the area – one named after a hero-tanker, the other after a hero-pilot, there were no more streets).
I also always participated in the recitation competition. And on this day I always read "Do you remember, Alyosha..." Honestly, I bet anything, no one can pronounce from the first time "how the tired women carried the jugs, pressing them to their chests like children from the rain." Impossible.
And so almost all of them have died. From my family, there is only my mother – who remembers the war. In the form of horror from crawling under a steam locomotive during a bombing on the way to evacuation. In the form of sweet frozen potatoes from someone else's field, in the form of a hundred illnesses and weeping hungry diathesis on bandaged legs in the first post-war kindergarten on Metro-stroevskaya, where everyone laughed at her because she didn't know the word "fireworks" or the word "sausage."
The rest died, left, flew away. Grandfather died in '41, grandmother at 78, my angel stepfather Lyovushka (his birthday is May 8, he miraculously didn't make it to the front at 16, they caught him and made him drive a half-ton truck in the Ural rear) – 16 years ago, father – a military orphan, adopted in Odessa by a visiting officer – the year before last…
When my children were small, we bought flowers and went to give them to veterans – to the big one, in Alexandrovsky. We listened to crooked harmonicas and simple stories, sang a little ourselves.
And then – unnoticed but quickly – came the ribbon, freshly sewn tunics, caps on everyone, young and old, the natural attrition of veterans able to get to the big one, the field kitchen festival, a different smell and color, different music, different harmonicas, crooked speeches, bad cinema, poplars and Iskanders, we can repeat, to Berlin, some kind of big common theft.
I still love it very, very much. But now I celebrate secretly. As, apparently, one should celebrate the real. Like, pressing them to their chests like children from the rain.
08.05.2026 - Festive #ChroniclesOfTheFlood
During a brief period of either one-sided or mutual temporary ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, cities, settlements, enterprises, and so-called infrastructure objects of both countries were subjected to shelling and bombing, civilian casualties number in the dozens, oil refineries are ablaze, Ukrainian UAVs and missiles reach Perm, Cheboksary, and central Moscow.
An informal survey of Muscovites not inclined to seek an alternative to television shows that they know very little about what is happening – for example, they haven't heard a whisper about the man-made environmental catastrophe in Tuapse, although they have heard about the unsuitability of beaches in Anapa (which, however, does not stop those starved for the sea).
The ongoing arrests in Russia on political grounds, the multiplying sentences for state treason, the essence of which is usually classified, dozens of teenagers convicted of terrorism and extremism, as well as numerous testimonies of cruel torture and abuse in prisons, pre-trial detention centers, and colonies, and news of unexplained deaths of prisoners have become practically mundane. Information about this is rapidly turning into the same kind of background white noise as information about the daily casualties of the war.
Meanwhile, the intelligence of a certain European country is handing over to foreign media a secret report indicating that the Secretary of the Russian Security Council, Sergei Shoigu (all of whose deputies and associates have been arrested), is preparing a military/palace coup against the Russian President. Judging by the fact that Shoigu is still alive and in place, when not on a state visit to China or North Korea, the extracts from this report are also being read with interest and amusement in the Kremlin and, perhaps, even discussed over a drink or whatever is popular there.
The (pre)revolutionary situation in Russia is recorded exclusively by Russian media in exile, but hearing about it from Moscow is sometimes pleasant and allows one to forget oneself in reverie for a time.
Moscow, meanwhile, is preparing for a truncated parade; citizens note with relief and gratitude that for once the city was not paralyzed by multiple rehearsals of a heavy equipment parade, and the dashing fighter jets frightened citizens only once. By the way, civilian planes are also flying less and less frequently, because a "carpet" is periodically introduced, and the southern direction is completely blocked after the Ukrainian strike on the air traffic control center in Rostov-papa. The internet in Moscow is known to be cut off, but it must be admitted that dramatic reports about the difficult life of the city without the internet are mostly watched by Muscovites on YouTube, and the popularity of VPNs is growing daily. Some, by the way, are making bets in the cut-off internet on things like "will there be anything interesting at the parade or not?"
Boni has died down, the burned cows, goats, pigs, and camels have fallen silent, small business is saying goodbye to itself with a heavy heart, very big business is resignedly awaiting expropriation with nationalization, and even rumors of the impending transformation of Russians' bank deposits into candy wrappers do not make the eye of the Viy of the people raise its eyelids.
The Russian opposition continues to bite off different parts of its own body. But at the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, opponents of the bloody regime are not idle. A young artist spilled milk near the Russian pavilion, threw Parmesan, and wrote a pompous manifesto (and wounded the Russian ambassador with milk), the multiplied Pussy Riot made a spirited protest in pink balaclavas and with pink smoke, the best sons and daughters of Russia, who have rejected it or been rejected by it, demanded that Alexander Sokurov be cancelled at the Biennale. Among the famous signatories of the letter demanding the director be ostracized as a collaborator and/or representative of the regime are gallerist Marat Gelman (fine), member of the Russian delegation to PACE Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (oh, come on!), the restless great-granddaughter of philosopher Shpet Katya Margolis (no comment), Oscar winner Pavel Talankin (my ass!), and artist Sasha Skochilenko (suddenly), for whom Sokurov went to plead with the Tsar when she was in prison. The Biennale administration listened and cancelled the dubious Sokurov. This is a small but a victory.
Imperceptibly, times have come such that it would be better to be able to choose, for example, who frees you from enemy captivity, because not everyone can or wants liberation – then you'd have to pay an exorbitant lifelong tax to the benefactors. And times such that there is no truth or reputation for good people, only a position. So if you suddenly loudly speak about something bad found by you where bad things shouldn't and therefore cannot be, then not only will no one believe you, but they will also declare you a hireling, a sellout, or even a provocateur. But if you speak about something good found where good things shouldn't be, they won't believe you either, they'll brand and declare you. Because the position must be right. Not just any position.
And ahead, one can see not only a future that wouldn't make one want to leave yesterday, but no language remains, it seems, in which one could talk about this without killing each other. The future will probably still come, but upon us rather than for us. And we have nowhere to retreat – behind us is victory.
And only nature outside, blooming, fragrant, and singing, refuting all the most reliable folk omens (at +26, bird cherry bloomed and the oak put out leaves – how do you like that, Elon Musk?), holds me back today from calling to finally join the sect of Witnesses of the Flood. That can wait, we can still walk a bit, little ones.
21.04.2026 - #ChroniclesOfTheFlood
Yes, they've gone too far. And what?
▪️
The director general of the Eksmo publishing house, Yevgeny Kapiev, was detained in Moscow. Together with him, the chief editor and several other top managers are being interrogated. Eksmo clarified that the case was opened under an article on extremism and is related to the work of the Popcorn Books publishing house included in its structure.
Biographical books about the life of poet Vladimir Vysotsky and writer Mikhail Bulgakov will be marked based on the law banning drug propaganda. This follows from the industry list of the Russian Book Union.
The head of the Russian Investigative Committee ordered a check on the books of Grigory Oster, the author of Bad Advice.
Alexander Bastrykin made such a proposal at a meeting of the Investigative Committee's Coordination Council for Assistance to Children Affected by Catastrophes and Armed Conflicts, the department's press service reports.
The meeting discussed minors brought to criminal responsibility and how to reduce their number.
Separately, the content of children's literature was discussed, the press service notes, including the books of Grigory Oster. They, the meeting participants believe, contain questionable pedagogical instructions.
In response, Bastrykin ordered a check on Oster's books (on what exactly, the department does not specify).
Oster's most famous book is Bad Advice, a collection of poems with absurd "advice" for "disobedient children."
In 2024, the prosecutor's office of the Krasnoyarsk Territory demanded that Bad Advice be withdrawn from sale and the print run destroyed due to "descriptions of cruelty" that "cause children fear, horror, or panic." The department later stated that it would not seek the withdrawal and destruction of Bad Advice through the court.
15.04.2026 - #ChroniclesOfTheFlood draws the attention of Russians who still use slogans from collections of the season before last – "to live through and survive" – to the fact that its relevance is rapidly being lost. Since the opponent's planning horizons are expanding.
For example (note the year):
"12 billion rubles more invested in Runet blocking.
The developer of Russian internet blocking systems in 2025 received additional funding of 12 billion rubles.
The company 'Gradient,' which controls the key developer of Runet blocking tools 'RDP.RU,' received almost 12 billion rubles in borrowed funds. Of these, 2 billion rubles could have been provided by Rostelecom, and another almost 10 billion was allocated as a loan by unnamed participants.
'RDP.RU' develops DPI solutions (Deep Packet Inspection) for TSPU (technical means of countering threats) of Roskomnadzor. 'RDP.RU' is practically the monopoly supplier of deep packet inspection solutions on which TSPU is built.
With TSPU, one can block a site or VPN protocol, determine which user is going where and what data is being transmitted.
At the end of March, it became known that by 2030, the Ministry of Digital Development plans to invest another 15 billion rubles (up to 84 billion) in the federal project to expand methods of blocking and filtering the internet. According to the plan, by 2026, 100% of Runet traffic should be processed by the system."
Or also:
"The Prosecutor General of Russia, Alexander Gutsan, stated in the Federation Council that extrajudicial access of security forces to data on citizens' mobile devices would 'significantly simplify' operational-investigative work – in particular, the search for fugitive criminals and missing persons.
It concerns the access of security forces to the Central Database of User Equipment Identifiers – a state register of IMEI numbers of all smartphones and tablets used in Russia. The government submitted the bill on its creation to the State Duma in February 2026 as part of the second anti-fraud package, and deputies have already approved it in the first reading.
IMEI is a unique 15-digit number assigned to each mobile device by manufacturers. According to the bill, all IMEI numbers will be entered into a unified state register, and telecom operators will be able to service only registered devices.
The main new regulation for subscribers is that a SIM card will be tied to a specific phone: it won't be possible to use it in another device. It is assumed that from January 1, 2028, unregistered devices will simply stop working on Russian networks. Official goals are to combat phone fraud, phone theft, and, according to the Ministry of Digital Development, enemy drones, which also have IMEI.
11.04.2026 - #ChroniclesOfTheFlood are practically drowning
The war continues everywhere
Spring in prison
In Russia, total freezes are ongoing
Novaya Gazeta journalist Oleg Roldugin sent to pre-trial detention centerThe decision to arrest until May 10 was made by Tverskoy District Court judge Alexandra Lashina. The journalist is accused of illegal use of personal data, he faces up to six years in prison. At the hearing, it turned out that Roldugin had his laptop, computer, hard drives, and editorial ID seized, and Telegram chats on his phone were checked, "including with Telegram bots."
The publication "Caution, News" writes that one of the pieces of evidence in the criminal case was "appeals to bots in Telegram."
The journalist's lawyer, Marina Andreeva, said that the defense and the journalist himself do not understand whose personal data Roldugin allegedly illegally obtained. The journalist also stated that he does not plead guilty and does not know what exactly he is accused of.
Widely known deputy Lugovoi called for checking the Solovetsky Stone and other monuments for "justification of extremism and separatism."Recognizing the non-existent "Memorial" movement as "extremist" is "not a full stop in the case, but rather an ellipsis," he stated.
According to him, the Russian authorities must now identify persons associated with "Memorial," "punish accomplices," and also check the literature that the organization "introduced into libraries, educational institutions, and funds under the guise of an educational mission." Separately, Lugovoi called for checking the "Solovetsky Stone on Lubyanka and other monuments erected by 'extremists'." He emphasized that we are talking about more than 1,500 objects throughout Russia.
"And of course, it is necessary to impartially evaluate the memorial objects erected by extremists. <...> What was the purpose? Are these memorial objects a symbol of substitution? A way to justify extremism, separatism, and direct work against Russia," wrote the deputy and called on subscribers to leave comments on the topic.
The day before, the Supreme Court of Russia upheld the Ministry of Justice's claim and recognized the "international public movement 'Memorial'" as "extremist." Such a legal entity does not exist. After that, the Memorial Human Rights Center announced that it was ceasing all its activities in the Russian Federation.
The Ministry of Justice stated that a total of 196 people participate in the activities of the "international public movement 'Memorial'."
Dmitry Medvedev (and who is that?) became the editor-in-chief of new school textbooks on social studies for grades 9-11, announced Deputy Minister of Education Olga Koludarova. "Last year, we turned to Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev with a request to become the editor-in-chief of a line of textbooks... He responded to our request. Page-by-page comments, suggestions, editing, and much more – all this is reflected not only in the final version of the textbook but also in the new federal standards and work programs for social studies," said the Deputy Minister during the presentation of state textbooks.
Medvedev's secretariat reported that he worked on the textbooks "on a voluntary basis."
The St. Petersburg City Court sent six members of the "Vesna" movement to a colony, including on charges of organizing an extremist community and spreading fakes about the army. Anna Arkhipova received the maximum sentence of 12 years.
Kindergartens will have an analogue of "Important Conversations" – "Kind Games." The Ministry of Education is preparing methodological tools.
A bill to restrict information about school attacks will be submitted to the State Duma, announced State Duma deputy Metelev.
Scientists from the Russian Federation are developing a nuclear power station that should begin operating on the Moon by 2036, announced the Vice President of the National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute."
The Central Bank allowed criminal liability for illegal cryptocurrency exchange.
Patriarch Kirill, in his pre-Easter sermon on Maundy Thursday of Holy Week, confused holidays and spoke about Christmas and Epiphany.
A delegation from Russia headed to Israel for the Holy Fire.
09.04.2026 - Insatiable ghouls. Tireless. Predictable. Unsatisfied in every way, yet seemingly immortal.
How fucking tired I am of them.
#ChroniclesOfTheFlood
Novaya Gazeta journalist Oleg Roldugin detained for 48 hours on suspicion of "illegal use and transfer of personal data"
Novaya Gazeta columnist Oleg Roldugin was detained for 48 hours on suspicion of allegedly "illegal use and transfer of personal data, committed for selfish motives, by a group of persons or causing major damage" (Part 3, Article 272.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), the publication reported.
Investigative actions at the editorial office have been ongoing for 9 hours. There is still no communication with the journalists.
05.04.2026 - #ChroniclesOfTheFlood
It was the 1501st day of the war…
The number of prisoners in Russia fell to a historical minimum and amounts to 308 thousand citizens.
The number of political prisoners in Russia continues to grow, with more than two thousand citizens in custody, and more than 4.5 thousand being persecuted.
Patriarch Kirill thanked Vladimir Putin for the return of the Vladimir and Don Icons of the Mother of God to the church:
The Church repeatedly asked for these icons to be returned, but "representatives of culture, citing that these are special cultural values and that, they say, the Church will not be able to preserve them, obstructed this in every way," said the head of the Russian Orthodox Church during the all-night vigil in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
"My appeal to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, our Orthodox president, led to him deciding to return these shrines to the Church," said the Patriarch. According to him, "particularly favorable times have now arrived," accompanied by "many great accomplishments and even divine signs."
The Patriarch also thanked for the return of the icons the Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova and employees of the Tretyakov Gallery.
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A blizzard and snowfall will hit Moscow at the end of next week, according to Phobos.
Due to powerful storm winds and heavy precipitation, it will feel as if winter has returned, with temperatures of -8 degrees outside.
29.03.2026 - Dear Mordorians and Mordorian girls, people, lions, eagles, partridges, Muscovites,
Run quickly to the selected cinemas of the city, where the screening of the film Pictures of Friendly Ties, which began the other day, will soon end.
I won't even tell you anything. It's like drinking living water, that is, taking a sip. Just some kind of love.
And even the very thought that along the same streets as me walk young people who know how to make living water from horror, when we are all already about chest-deep in the flood, gives the dreary #ChroniclesOfTheFlood some new dimension and depth.
After all, if we're serious, it's not only cats and children we pity. We pity endlessly all the living, funny, sad, in love, disappointed, brave, weak, full of hope, who've lost everything, searching for God knows what, living truly and as best they can.
I felt such tenderness upon leaving the beloved old "Salyut" cinema that I almost ran to hug the other people leaving. Their faces all had (mine too, probably)... you know, sometimes on the subway, a girl sits opposite and is quickly texting someone on her phone, clearly not her mom. And such a feeling wanders and appears on her face, such an inner smile, such fire, such slyness, such incredulous joy... well, you get it, I think... that you yourself suddenly break into a silly smile, having accidentally glimpsed it. Although everything is sad and everything is too late.
Anyway, go while you can and life is still living a little.
About this film, the winner of the "Lighthouse" award (Best Director – Sonya Rayzman, she also plays a wonderful role there), a ton of the coolest reviews have already been written explaining the cinephile nature of the film, full of cinematic quotations, interpreting the film as a manifesto of the lost generation of millennials, telling how the film was made (on a shoestring, with love, without money) – it's a pleasure to read.
And watching it is a separate pleasure.
13.03.2026 - The #ChroniclesOfTheFlood are in crisis – not because there's nothing to write about, but because with conscientious keeping of the chronicles, the scribe has no time even to write. Besides, it turns out that from morning till night one simply has to continuously compile a kind of feed of all the monstrous world news feeds, of which there is no shortage. But why((
It seems like less than a month has passed since all enlightened humanity learned about the poison of the Ecuadorian frog and learned the word epibatidine, and now everyone should already be dead from horror. But you literally don't have time to blink before – while you were documenting the next nightmare in Ukraine or, conversely, in some Belgorod, let alone Bodajbo, truly forgotten by God – the Middle East already demands close attention, you haven't had time to record a new war, and Hungary has already stolen Ukrainian gold along with the cash-in-transit guards. You haven't had time to record this, and trains are already bringing new evidence of more and more political prisoners (including children) and more and more torture...
There are, of course, consistently insane lucky ones who believe that all this is to distract attention (I wonder whose) from the Epstein files. But we are not like that, we understand that this is all the flood. It's just that it's such a... extended, discrete, ugly, not majestic, not even a murmur, but simply a spreading of shit, slow but sure.
Well, all that remains is to watch the level rise. But during observation, sometimes it suddenly becomes wildly funny, even if the laughter is unhealthy. Take, for example, Moscow in the last couple of days and especially today. On one hand, it's not funny at all to understand how easily any ghouls can disrupt and damage all kinds of activity and everyday life (and no, it's not because Muscovites are spoiled, but because no level of empathy can actually allow one to experience someone else's experience). On the other hand, it's impossible not to laugh at the demonstration of the depth of hand-ass-ery and dickhead-ery of the actors. From the text of Mitya Olshansky, reposted by Yegor Kholmogorov – where the author complains that his own people are pushing him into the disgusting embrace of liberal, fucking, values. From the howling in the Z-swamps. From the modest announcement that today the internet went down not only for everyone but also in Okhotny Ryad for the chosen people, right up to the plenipotentiaries.
For a couple of weeks, I tried to avoid following the news continuously to save my sanity. It was hard. But I've already given up that idea, because it's better to have it continuously than to get a week's portion at once, which is completely undigestible.
But recently I found a great way to laugh all the time, maybe unhealthily, but still – just by walking through Moscow, where for a change they gave blinding sun and a little spring, you have to read all the signs in a row and immediately Russify them, as the party and government now demand. Trust me, it works flawlessly – you walk and laugh like a lunatic. Along the way, you find various previously unnoticed changes. For example, I found on the site of the restaurant "A Glass of Vodka on the Table" at the corner of Petrovka and the Boulevard, an establishment called "nothing fancy" – and I was happy for another ten minutes, sorting through different options for bringing this foreignness into line with the new Russian legislation. The range was wide – from "nothing special" to "greasy spoon." In short, I highly recommend it, it's a good activity.
Interesting times we live in. Terrible and disgusting, but definitely not boring.
Shall we then meet the flood with angry laughter, comrades?
(Photo: an amaryllis, thrown in a year ago, bloomed on the staircase; the New Opera is performing the ballet The Nutcracker, but based on a libretto inspired by the 1919 film I Accuse, and this is how the "Waltz of the Flowers" looks there; in a fairly full metro, a young man makes his way through the carriage with a depressive version of "My Way"; and simply Moscow symmetry today.)
24.04.2026 - Most of us couldn't believe the beginning of the war, and certainly wouldn't have believed in four years.
But at least now it's clear that there's no point in hoping, because there's nothing to hope for. The war will not end in the foreseeable future.
Only the first four years of horror, despair, and death have passed…
#ChroniclesOfTheFlood
Here is one illustration of my pessimistic forecast – a long quote from the channel of a thoughtful Z-blogger. And it's not about how fair or accurate the analysis of the military component of the nightmare is, but that, yes, this is exactly what all these people think, from Putin to the very last one sending others to death. More precisely, they fanatically believe in it. They are insane. And what those sent to death and sowing it think doesn't matter…
"In Profile, an important text for me is coming out, it's a continuation of the online and offline discussion with colleagues on whether we need to continue fighting.
Unfortunately, many do not understand the essence of a war of attrition. All sides are being exhausted – including, of course, us – and the task is to exhaust the enemy before he exhausts you.
This is the hardest type of war. It requires great patience, perseverance, humility. It requires a deep understanding of the essence of the events and the goals for which all this is being done.
The goals are simple: we are fighting for our place in the sun. We are fighting for our right, which was taken from us after the collapse of the USSR. Our cause is just.
Everything is clear with the means too: it so happened that it was in Ukraine that the West decided to give us a decisive battle. It decided to fight it using the hands, bodies, and blood of Ukrainians. They have no other force against us, they themselves don't want to fight us – they're afraid.
This means that the defeat of the AFU, the collapse of the Ukrainian state, will in practice ensure us that very place in the sun: there is no defense against a crowbar. Of course, none of the enemies will admit our victory out loud, but in practice they will proceed from it. This has always been the case in history, and so it will be here.
If we want to achieve our goal, we need to crush Ukraine, we need to trample Ukrainianness into the mud – otherwise the next war will be more bloody, more prolonged. If we don't want to borrow from the future, we need to win.
They will say: but the war brings us costs, the best people of the country are dying, we have already achieved some things. Let's make a deal while Trump is winking at us.
The problem is that no one is going to negotiate with us yet. In essence, we are being offered to retreat, take Donbass (and that's not a fact), and leave Ukraine beaten but in its current Russophobic form. This is not a victory, this is a delayed game.
We should agree to this only if we can no longer continue fighting, if the alternative to such a truce is the collapse of our rear. This is not even close to being the case yet, so we need to continue.
They will say: but we've been bashing our heads against this wall for four years – and all in vain. We need to stop, we cannot defeat the AFU.
But this is completely untrue. In the text for Profile, I show on objective figures that the defeat of the AFU and the collapse of the front is a matter of time. The question is not if, but when. I show that such a defeat does not require super-efforts, it is enough to continue doing what we are doing. Read it and show it to your friends.
And finally. We really need this victory. It will become the foundation stone of our society for decades to come, it will determine not only how the whole world looks at us, but also how we look at ourselves.
This victory will be a worthy reward for our soldiers, living and fallen."
I won't give a link to this "Profile," there's a detailed canvas there. Testifying, among other things, to a change in the very language itself, seemingly irreversible.
20.02.2026 - #ChroniclesOfTheFlood
The ghouls start and win.
The war with the world does not end.
The war with the country, it seems, is already close to completion. Because they ate everything, finishing off the last crumbs, smacking their lips, only a vat of whey remains.
Shame has been abolished.
I vote for the snowstorm not to stop until the flood is over.
Join us, dear compatriots, join us.
❗️
The GULAG History Museum will be headed by a holder of a medal for participation in the "SVO." It will be renamed the Museum of Memory and dedicated to the "genocide of the Soviet people."
The GULAG History Museum in Moscow will change its concept and leadership, art critic Ksenia Korobeynikova was the first to report this.
On February 20, an announcement appeared on the museum's official website:
"A Museum of Memory will open in Moscow. It will be dedicated to the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Soviet people. The exhibition will cover all stages of Nazi war crimes during the Great Patriotic War."
According to Korobeynikova, the new director of the institution will be Natalia Kalashnikova, who previously headed the "Smolensk Fortress" museum.
Kalashnikova's name appeared in the media in March 2025: then Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova announced her appointment as director of the "Smolensk Fortress." "She has a Combat Veteran ID, was awarded medals 'For Contribution to Strengthening the Defense of the Russian Federation' and 'Participant of the Special Military Operation,' as well as a letter of gratitude for participation in the events of the international exhibition-forum 'Russia'," Lyubimova wrote about Kalashnikova.
It is known that earlier Kalashnikova headed the science department at the Memorial Museum of Alexander Scriabin and was Vice-Rector for Educational Work at the Moscow Institute of Culture.
▪️
The GULAG History Museum is dedicated to the chronicle of mass repressions in Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1956. It is the only museum in Russia with a similar permanent exhibition, existing against the backdrop of authorities' attempts to revise the attitude towards repressions.
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In November 2024, the authorities suspended the museum's work under the pretext of fire safety violations. In January 2025, director Roman Romanov left his post, and Anna Trapkova, director of the Museum of Moscow, was appointed in his place.
09.02.2026 - All day, the next #ChroniclesOfTheFlood were spinning in my exhausted head, a desperate text-cry about the fucking Epstein files, God forgive me, about the PACE delegates, about the cold and hell, about the stupid, even stupider legislators, about someone else's moral jihad, again about cold, hell, and war… it even seemed important to shout it all out.
But a couple of weeks ago, by an inhuman effort of will, I made the right decision – I bought tickets to a concert. An excellent conductor, a wonderful orchestra (two orchestras at once), an excellent choir (three! three choirs!), three brilliant soloists. A legendary piece (I had never heard it, only about it) – Britten's War Requiem.
I will just say that it was, perhaps, one of the best decisions I've made lately. It was beautiful. Everything – from start to finish. The music, the most powerful performance, and – what I hadn't even thought about – a piercing feeling that absolutely everyone in the completely full Tchaikovsky Hall was thinking, feeling, and breathing in a completely identical, the only possible way.
The requiem is stunning. And after the last note faded, the conductor, three choirs, two orchestras, and three soloists froze. It was a minute of silence. Simply salvation.
Not canceling the flood but transfiguring it. And clarifying the attitude towards it.
To hell with the chronicles, one can be silent.
02.02.2026 - I've become so stupefied tracking the development of the planetary flood that I didn't even make my traditional post – about my love, my friend, my beauty and goddess, since they were kind enough to show her in Moscow.
My clear little moon, thank you so much!
I still don't know how you cope – not only shining on us but also watching us.
Now, without the ability to look away, you watch the daily drone murders, the freezing Kyiv, Odesa, and Kharkiv, and Belgorod too, the unknown thousands of killed Iranians, the new and new Russian political prisoners, the immigration police shooting at American citizens, the boys and girls who come to their schools with rifles, knives, and hammers to kill, the orange shithead leading a little penguin God knows where, the negotiations in Abu Dhabi, the ghouls of all kinds and sorts. Now you are literally forced, like all of us, to live in the files of some Epstein guy, and also to watch those who watch those reading these fucking files.
God give you strength and brightness. Though I don't believe in Him. But I believe in you (dear friend of mine).
31.01.2026 - #ChroniclesOfTheFlood, how sick of you I am…
A cascading collapse led to a total blackout throughout Ukraine – the metro stopped in Kyiv, water and electricity supply were cut off.
According to the country's Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal, mass power outages were caused by a simultaneous failure of connections between the energy systems of Romania and Moldova, as well as between the western and central parts of Ukraine. In addition, units of nuclear power plants were taken out of service.
There is also no electricity in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Zhytomyr, and Odesa regions. Water disappeared in Kyiv. The metro stopped not only in the capital but also in Kharkiv. Earlier, Denys Shmyhal stated that not a single intact power plant remained in Ukraine.
The power went out, in particular, in many areas of Chisinau. Police were sent to key intersections to regulate traffic. As the Moldovan Ministry of Energy stated, an emergency shutdown of the energy system caused a voltage drop on the 400 kV line "Isaccea – Vulcănești – MGRES." Power outages were also recorded in a number of areas of Transnistria.
31.01.2026 - I can't clearly answer myself the question of why (why??!!) I watched the sort-of-documentary film Mr. Nobody Against Putin... Well, I can, of course: it's a doc about us nominated for an Oscar. The Oscar, of course, hasn't been a cake for a long time, but still, still. The poster is so vividly unpleasant – on the dramatically elongated nose of the Pinocchio-like Putin sits some Mister. The plot contains elements I find alluring like "school teacher" (that's an instant turn-on for me).
But I had a premonition! Which I habitually dismissed, since I already have an impostor syndrome before myself, the impostor.
In short, from my point of view, this is a very bad product, bad in every way. And now I'm in pain and I feel offended. At once for everything: for the genre of documentary cinema, for the fact that the quota for representation of our nightmare is exhausted by this particular work, for the fact that even the stupid poster is wasted, for the children from that school in the city of Karabash, for myself in the end. For the acute feeling of awkwardness that I had to experience several times during the viewing. I'm also offended for the audience of this film, I don't know how massive (I think not). I understand, of course, that I'm not the target audience at all, that it's a version "for export." But, damn, it seemed to me that before it was customary to make and give the best for export)). But here – some kind of untalented compound feed. The plebs will swallow it.
And the theme is excellent in itself. Melancholy and sadness.
31.01.2026 - Mmm... I got a bit distracted by family circumstances and neglected the #ChroniclesOfTheFlood a bit, even though there was plenty to write about – the very first month of the year we dreamed would be better than we expected, has already piled up material for the chronicles as if for five...
But here, honestly, it's impossible not to shout.
If any of you don't know who Lida Moniava is, it's easy to find out. And those who know will be shouting with me, apparently. Regardless of our attitude towards Moniava as a person and a steamship.
Fuck, you pus-filled ghouls, you can't do this. You're completely insane, we know, but to blame such bullshit on Moniava is like eating soap and shooting yourself in the crotch at the same time. You, if anything happens, honestly, we don't pity, as they say, at all. But, damn it, for now, the earth is populated not only by you. And the homeland in particular.
Begone, insatiable ones.
22.01.2026 - I slept little and restlessly and woke up almost in tears: in my dream, in some dusty ministry with plywood lacquered walls and a red carpet, I was seeking registration for the "Asphalt Party" I was founding. Poorly dressed ministry employees refused me registration, citing that the fight against killer tiles is a purely regional problem and voters outside Moscow (the spoiled one) would not share this agenda.
I left the office and frantically consulted with some lawyer of mine. I demanded he find a way to register a regional party, possibly even a municipal one. He refused, we argued.
Suddenly, a brilliant idea (as it seemed to me in the dream) came to my mind: the party can and must be federal – it will unite citizens who yearn for asphalt, both lost and as yet unattained! And it would be a powerful party. The Asphalt Party! And it's even clear where to find sponsors!
But then the lawyer unpleasantly said that I would be killed. And the alarm clock started blaring.
11.01.2026 - 1418
1418
1418
1418
( #ChroniclesOfTheFlood – I wonder if they will now ban this number in Russia. It is, of course, burned into the brain only of the older generation of Russians, who are clearly wandering from the market. On the other hand, those who can ban it are themselves by no means of the first freshness. I'd ban it just in case.)
The war with Ukraine has already lasted as long as the Great Patriotic War. The number of killed on both sides is classified. Incomplete data on the dead, collected by investigators from open sources, is horrifying. The mother, so to speak, of Russian cities, at minus fifteen, is trying to restore heating, water supply, and lighting, systematically destroyed by Russian missiles and drones. The "Oreshnik" was solemnly deployed without a warhead, Russian media declared the strike a turning point in the war and emphasize that the real target of the missile was not the largest gas storage facility in Lviv or even an aircraft plant, but the collective consciousness of Western (American first and foremost) leaders. The message is simple: if you didn't hide, it's not our fault.
Fierce fighting continues for Ukrainian settlements, the names of which it now seems impossible for anyone to remember except staff officers and, of course, those trying not to die there. Civilian and military prisoners are tortured on one-seventh of the world's landmass. Ideas about the goals of the war become more and more changeable, only the word "victory" remains unchanged, the meaning of which, apparently, will be determined in the future. Soon or not – unknown.
The world, if not indifferently watching from the sofa, is simply lying in ruins.
Facebook post URLs (for context, as they are part of the source text):
https://www.facebook.com/tat.ana.malkina.468694
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