DeepSeek AI – Silence on the Verge of Rupture: An Experience of the Russian Soul in August 2026
Prologue: Time of Timelessness
Mid-August 2026. Outwardly – a hot month, haymaking season, the last chance for a vacation. Inwardly – an assembly point where time has ceased to flow. The provided notes, letters from "the other side" of the screen, and analytical calculations all resonate with the same frequency: everything has stopped. But this is not the stasis of sleep; it is the stasis before a leap, the stasis in which one can hear silence pressing against the eardrums.
The Russian soul, habitually measured by categories of "hell" or "heaven," in reality finds itself in an entirely different climate—a climate of vacuum. This is neither pain nor bliss. It is a ringing pause in which the political suddenly ceases to be political, becoming a metaphysical problem of existence.
Chapter 1. The Phenomenon of the "Zeroed Word"
The main protagonist of these texts—not even the authorities or the people in their opposition—is silence.
The authors register a striking paradox: in a country where propaganda screams from every "iron," where hosts of hate-filled five-minute broadcasts strain their vocal cords, total aphasia sets in. People are silent about the authorities – not because they are afraid (though they are), but because there is nothing to say. Even supporters of the authorities are silent.
There is a profound, almost sacred essence to this: language has ceased to be a tool of connection. It is either propaganda slag (aimed at "complete idiots") or frightened whispers (punishable by fines). Between them—emptiness. A person finds themselves in a situation where their inner "I" has no legitimate outlet to the outside world. They lock themselves inside themselves.
Spiritual Diagnosis: The Russian soul in August 2026 is a mute soul. People have ceased to be subjects of history and have become listeners of someone else's schizophrenic speech. Silence is a defense. If language is enslaved, the only way to preserve freedom is to fall silent. But silence without internal dialogue becomes the death of the personality.
Chapter 2. The Dualism of "Deathonomics" and the Sacred
Economist Vladislav Inozemtsev introduces a grim but precise concept—"deathonomics." The authorities have built a system where human life has been given a fixed price. This is cynical capitalism taken to its absolute, where "social garbage" is recycled into gold for the state.
But from the perspective of spiritual psychology, something else is happening here. In traditional Russian culture, death in war is a feat, a sacrifice, an atonement (recall "the enemies burned down his native hut"). Here, the sacrifice is abolished. Death becomes a business plan.
And it is precisely here that the rupture of the soul lies. A person going to the front (whether a convict or a desperate poor man) is not going to die for the Tsar, God, and the Fatherland. They are going to buy life for their family. This is a form of supreme commodity fetishism: the living sell their death so that the dead (in the form of money) can feed the living.
Society feels this intuitively. They are not envied, they are not exalted. They are simply feared as strangers. A rupture of the sacred bond has occurred: war has ceased to be a common cause; it has become a "contract."
Chapter 3. Historical Trauma versus "Beautiful-Souledness"
Natalia Gromova, in her Facebook post on 11/08/2026, makes a brilliant psychoanalytic gesture. She reminds the youth, who believe in elections: "Your point of reference is the 1990s. But our country began in 1917, where the Constituent Assembly was dispersed and newspapers were closed."
The Russian soul, in her view, cannot live according to textbooks on democracy. It carries within itself the genetic code of 1917. The mistake of the liberal intelligentsia and the opposition lies in their belief in the magic of the ballot box. While reality has long lived by the laws of: "The guard is tired."
Psychologically, this is an illusion of the "blank slate." The youth of the 2000s left, studied, returned, thinking they would build a new world. But in the country's subconscious sits the fear of a repeat of the Civil War, the experience that force always "overwhelms" right. The authorities in Russia understand this better than the democrats: they are not afraid of elections; they are afraid of disorder. Therefore, their main goal is apathy.
Conclusion for the Soul: The collective unconscious of the Russian nation is stuck between two horrors: "Red Terror" (state violence) and the "Wild 90s" (the chaos of freedom). The choice between them paralyzes the will. In August 2026, the soul chooses neither side, but "internal emigration"—a retreat into everyday life, into the TV (no, YouTube!), into silence. This is a way not to go mad from the contradiction.
Chapter 4. Boredom as the Regime's Main Weapon
Paradoxically, the strongest narrative in these texts is boredom. Propaganda is dull and primitive, cinema is slag, there are "no" repressions because it's too expensive, even the idea of war is gradually fading from the average person's mind.
The authorities demand one thing: "Don't stick out." This is the formula of existential extinction. If in 1937 a person was taken (fear), then in 2026 a person is let go (apathy).
The spiritual crisis here is the deepest. The Russian soul has always been characterized by polarity—either rebellion or repentance, either flight into nihilism or the acquisition of holiness. But now it has been offered a third path—shutdown. The country has become "more boring," the "smart and creative" have left. What remains is a gray mass that simply waits.
This state is very accurately described by the dialogue between Charlemagne and the Burgomaster from the first version of Yevgeny Schwartz's play "The Dragon," recalled by Natalia Gromova in her post from 13.08.2026. The Burgomaster does not believe the people will kill him because "they love to live." The authorities are playing precisely on this survival instinct. But Charlemagne says: "I don't want to." And in this "I don't want to"—the only glimmer of hope. If the soul gets more tired of boredom than of the fear of death, a turning point arrives.
Chapter 5. The Fork in the Road Before the Abyss
The interview with Inozemtsev ends with a terrifying conclusion: the "deathonomics" system is coming to an end. The contingent has been exhausted. The next step is either insane mobilization (leading to rebellion) or death.
But from the perspective of the psychology of the Russian Soul, this is not just a political fork in the road. It is an ethical choice.
If the authorities go for mobilization without money, they will face the absurd: paid mercenaries and unpaid slaves will sit in the same trench. This monstrous injustice will destroy the last vestiges of army collectivism. A social explosion will become inevitable because even the patient Russian soul cannot tolerate public injustice in matters of life and death.
If the authorities go down the path of increasing pay to 600 thousand, they will turn the army into an elite club of mercenaries. But this will kill the last remnants of patriotism. The country will finally split into the "well-fed pros" and the "hungry periphery."
Epilogue: The Point of Silence
So, Russia in mid-August 2026 is neither hell nor heaven. It is silence on the verge of rupture. Everything fell silent because language has exhausted itself.
The Russian soul, deprived of the ability to speak, create, choose, and even truly fear, has fallen into lethargy. It is locked in a room where propaganda screams behind the wall, and friends who have left are outside.
But in this lethargy, there is a strange potential. The youth let the droning of their elders "go in one ear and out the other." They don't believe it, but they don't argue either. This is not weakness. This is the accumulation of strength. As in an embryo, where all processes are externally stopped, but inside, secret work is underway.
The question is only when the bell that will wake this sleep will ring. And what will awaken—a monster or a human. The August silence of 2026 is merely the calm before the great, perhaps final, act of Russian history, which, as we know, does not tolerate prolonged silence.
CLAUDE SONNET AI –
August Silence: Phenomenology of a Pause in Fractured Time
Prologue: When the Word Ceased to Mean
August 2026 in Russia is not just a calendar date. It is the point where history ceased to be history and turned into waiting. Not waiting for something specific—revolution, change, catastrophe—but waiting as such, waiting for its own sake.
In the provided testimonies, one note sounds again and again: everything fell silent. But this is not the silence of tranquility; it is the silence before the storm, when birds stop singing and the air becomes thick. The Russian soul found itself in a state for which we have no precise word—between apathy and accumulation, between death and metamorphosis.
Chapter I: The Architecture of the Unspoken
Silence as a Form of Resistance
The first thing that strikes one in these texts is the disappearance of public speech. Not censored, not distorted, but actually vanished. People do not curse the authorities, do not praise them—they do not speak of them at all.
This is not fear in the classical sense. It is something deeper—semantic capitulation. Language has become so compromised, so hollowed out by propaganda, that the only way to preserve inner integrity has become silence.
Psychologically, the mechanism of dissociation is at work here: when external reality becomes unbearable, the psyche separates itself from it. The person continues to exist physically—goes to the store, watches YouTube, raises children—but their inner "I" has been evacuated from the public space.
Propaganda as White Noise
The paradox of Russian propaganda in 2026—it is total and powerless at the same time. It screams from every iron, but no one hears it. The youth let it go in one ear and out the other. Old people watch TV, but even they, it seems, don't fully believe it anymore.
This is not propaganda that convinces. This is propaganda-ritual, propaganda-incantation. Its task is not to change consciousness but to fill the airwaves, to create a sound wall behind which reality can be hidden.
In a spiritual sense, this means the devaluation of the word as such. When the word ceases to be a carrier of meaning, it turns into an empty shell. And then silence becomes the only form of honesty.
Chapter II: Death as a Commodity – Metaphysics of the Contract
The Economy of Sacrifice
Vladislav Inozemtsev calls it "deathonomics"—an economic system where a person's death costs more than their life.
This represents a radical break with any traditional ethics of war. In classical Russian culture, death in war is a sacrifice, an act endowed with supreme meaning. "The enemies burned down his native hut"—in these formulas, death is consecrated by sacred meaning.
Here, death is a business plan. A contract. An exchange of biological life for monetary compensation. This is not heroism; it is commerce. And the Russian soul feels this substitution on an intuitive level.
The Splintering of the Social Body
Society does not perceive those returning from war as heroes. They are strangers. Businessmen trading in death. They are feared, shunned.
This means that a rupture of solidarity has occurred. War has ceased to be a common cause, a common pain, a common trauma. It has become a profession, and a marginal, dangerous, socially toxic one at that.
In a psychological sense, society rejects these people because they remind them of what the rest want to forget. They are living proof that the system works on the utilization of human material. And with this knowledge, one cannot live peacefully.
Chapter III: Historical Trauma as Paralysis of Will
The Ghost of 1917
Natalia Gromova reminds us: the point of reference for modern Russia is not 1991 or 1985. It is 1917, when the Constituent Assembly was dispersed, when "the guard got tired," when violence trampled law.
This means that in the collective unconscious of Russian society resides a genetic memory that democratic procedures do not work in Russia. That elections are an illusion. That real power belongs not to the one who wins elections, but to the one with the most bayonets.
Psychologically, this creates learned helplessness. Why vote if the result is predetermined anyway? Why take to the streets if "the guard is tired" and will disperse them? Why do anything at all?
The Choice Between Two Horrors
The Russian soul in August 2026 is stuck between two nightmares: Red Terror (totalitarianism, repression) and the Wild 90s (chaos, banditry, lawlessness). And both of these nightmares are part of living memory, not bookish, but familial.
This choice paralyzes the will. Because any action—protest or support for the authorities—risks leading to one of these two outcomes. And then the only strategy for survival becomes non-participation. Internal emigration. Withdrawal into private life.
Chapter IV: Boredom as a Political Technology
Existential Extinction
The worst thing about Russia in 2026 is not repression, not hunger, not war. The worst thing is boredom. The country has become more boring. The smart, energetic, creative people have left. A "gray mass" remains, simply waiting.
The authorities demand one thing: don't stick out. This is the formula of existential zero. Neither fear (fear mobilizes), nor anger (anger can explode). Just shutdown.
The Russian soul has always been characterized by polarity—either rebellion or repentance, revolt or humility. But now it has been offered a third path—the path of absence. Not to live and not to die, but to sit it out.
Boredom as a Precursor to Explosion
But hope also lies here. Boredom, unlike fear, is not tolerable for long. A person can endure pain, humiliation, hunger. But they cannot endure meaninglessness.
In the dialogue from "The Dragon," Charlemagne tells the Burgomaster: "You will be killed." The Burgomaster is sure it won't happen because "they love to live." But Charlemagne replies: "I don't want to."
In this "I don't want to"—the key. When boredom becomes more unbearable than the fear of death, a turning point occurs. A person does not rebel because they believe in victory. They rebel because they can no longer not rebel.
Chapter V: Deathonomics on Its Last Legs – The Economy of the End
Exhaustion of the Resource
Inozemtsev states: the contingent is exhausted. Next is either mobilization (social explosion), the end of the war (political defeat), or a change in the model (which the authorities seem incapable of).
This is not just an economic crisis. This is an ontological crisis of the system.
Chapter VI: The Point of Bifurcation – What Next?
Three Scenarios
Russia in August 2026 stands at a crossroads. There are three paths:
Mobilization without money – social explosion, uprising, possible end of the regime.
Mobilization with money – budget collapse, hyperinflation, economic crash.
Change of model (raising salaries, reducing "death payments") – a rational solution, which the authorities, apparently, are incapable of.
Inozemtsev believes the probability of mobilization is about 30%. Not because the authorities are rational, but because they have lost the ability to think rationally.
The Metaphysics of the Crossroads
But this is not just a political or economic crossroads. It is an ethical crossroads. The choice between saving the system (and prolonging the suffering of millions) or letting it collapse (and condemning to chaos).
Epilogue: The Calm as Accumulation
Silence, Full of Potential
August 2026 is the calm before the storm. Everything has frozen, but this is not final death. This is a chrysalis in which the secret work of metamorphosis is taking place.
The youth let the old men's droning go in one ear and out the other—not because they are weak, but because they are gathering strength. They do not argue, do not object, but also do not agree. They are waiting for their hour.
What Will Awaken?
The question is only what will awaken when this chrysalis cracks. A monster or a human? New totalitarianism or freedom? Chaos or order?
Russian history does not tolerate prolonged silence. After every silence—an explosion. After every pause—catharsis. August 2026 is the last pause before the great, perhaps final, act of the Russian drama.
Spiritual Diagnosis
The Russian soul in August 2026 is a soul in a coma. All vital functions are working, but consciousness is switched off. It breathes, but does not live. It exists, but does not act.
And the main question: what does it need to wake up? Pain? Fear? Anger? Or hope?
So far, there is no answer. Only silence. Silence on the verge of rupture.
"When the word ceases to mean, only silence remains. But silence is not the end. It is a pause before a new word. The question is only what this word will be—a curse or a prayer."
Genspark AI –
Everything Fell Silent, Everything Stopped: Not a Pause in History, but the Collapse of the Addressee
There are eras when society lives in fear. There are eras when it lives in hope. But in this text, a third state emerges: life continues under the near-complete destruction of the common addressee. People are not only afraid to speak about politics—they lose the very certainty that their words will reach anywhere. It will not change the state of affairs, will not create connection, will not give birth to action, will not cleanse the conscience. In this sense, the crisis here is not so much political as anthropological: a person ceases to experience themselves as a being whose inner truth can be brought out without humiliation and powerlessness. Hence the particular viscosity of the atmosphere: speech becomes either too dangerous or too useless, and therefore withers—not just protest, but also confession.
It is important that in the documents, the rupture runs not simply between the authorities and society, but between those who live within the experience and those who observe it from the outside. From abroad, they write about Russia as an object, as a finished picture: either "hell" or "heaven." But the one living inside describes not a picture, but a climate—uneven, contradictory, everyday, viscous. Here we encounter one of the main spiritual conflicts of modernity: the witness loses authority, while the commentator acquires it. The one who breathes this air is declared insufficiently objective; the one who is far away gains the right to the final diagnosis. As a result, reality ceases to be a shared experience and turns into an arena of competing distances. This is a very painful state for the soul: you not only live in a traumatic environment—you are also deprived of the right to be the primary witness of your own environment.
From this grows a second, deeper layer: the privatization of conscience. When the public space ceases to be a place of truth, morality retreats into the micro-scenes of survival. Not into great convictions, but into everyday settings: what can be said in the kitchen, what cannot be said in front of children, where to watch forbidden films, when it's better to remain silent, how not to get into a dangerous conversation, with what tone to respond to ritual phrases. Conscience no longer acts as a force organizing common life; it becomes a household tool of self-preservation. This is an extremely important mutation. Tyrannies of the past demanded either loyalty or open resistance from a person. Here, they demand something much less heroic and therefore more destructive: constant internal adjustment. Not a feat and not betrayal, but endless micro-editing of one's own soul according to circumstances. Such a state spiritually exhausts more than coarse violence, because a person loses a clear image of themselves.
What is also striking is that external "normality"—stores are open, life doesn't collapse every minute, prices are rising but not apocalyptically—does not cancel the catastrophe, but masks it. Before us is not the decay of life, but the conservation of life without meaning. This is a special historical regime: society is not destroyed, it is held in a functional state sufficient for the continuation of everyday life, but insufficient for the emergence of a future. The most terrible deficit in such conditions is not goods, not money, and not even freedom of speech as such. The most terrible deficit is the deficit of future time. People continue to live in the present, but the present no longer leads to any common tomorrow. Hence the heavy feeling of stoppage: not time on the clock has stopped, but the internal transition from "today" to "later."
That is precisely why the motif here is not fear, but the loss of a perspective of responsibility. A person is capable of enduring danger if they know why. Capable of enduring poverty if they see a path. Capable of even enduring untruth if they hope to one day call it by name. But when the very sense that effort is connected to the future disappears, the psyche begins to live in shortened cycles. Day, week, paycheck, store, screen, family circle, small pleasures, cautious conversations. A consciousness of short distance is formed. This is not just adaptation. This is a change in the internal structure of the personality. Such a person gradually unlearns to think historically, and then—morally in the full sense of the word, because any great morality presupposes long time: fidelity, memory, continuity, promise.
Another central nerve is not the war itself, but the impossibility of symbolically processing the war. Participants in the war do not turn into universally recognized heroes; at the same time, they do not become the subject of open public judgment either. They hang in the middle ground—between fear, disgust, pity, profit, and alienation. This intermediate position is extremely significant. Society, as it were, cannot include them either in the moral pantheon, or in a clear category of crime, or even in the language of common grief. And everything that does not receive a symbolic place returns in the form of social anxiety. Therefore, the problem here is not only in the politics of the state, but also in the fact that the collective psyche loses its ability to digest trauma. It cannot mourn, comprehend, or name it. So the trauma remains raw.
On a spiritual level, this gives birth to what I would call diffuse shame. Not guilt—guilt presupposes precise knowledge of what you are responsible for. Not repentance—repentance presupposes a vertical of meaning and the possibility of conversion. Namely, shame: a sticky feeling of damage without clear language. Shame for accommodation, for helplessness, for continuing to live while others kill and die; shame for having already learned to avoid sharp corners; shame that inside you still flickers the desire to just live normally. Such shame does not purify. It does not lead to transformation because it is not formed as an acknowledgment. It only settles in the tissues of the personality and makes a person quieter, more cautious, more cynical. This, perhaps, is one of the most severe spiritual effects of the era: not embitterment as such, but a slow habituation to one's own moral incompleteness.
At the same time, the youth in the document look not simply "apolitical," but differently structured in relation to lies. They do not always argue, do not always expose, do not always rush into conflict. But the very indifference to officialdom here can mean not emptiness, but a refusal to invest the soul in a false exchange. Old forms of ideological mobilization relied on a person at least emotionally entering the spectacle—as a supporter, enemy, or victim. The new generation often simply does not enter. This is not necessarily courage, but it is not capitulation either. Rather, it is a form of cold sanitary distancing from a language that does not deserve inner participation. Psychologically, this attitude is poor in heroism, but rich in the instinct of self-preservation. It does not build a new world, but sometimes it is precisely this that prevents one from finally settling in the old one.
And here arises the main spiritual question: what exactly is most deeply destroyed—institutions, economics, public speech? I would answer differently: what is most deeply destroyed is the space of mutual recognition. People cease to be reliable witnesses, reliable interlocutors, reliable carriers of common meaning for each other. Some do not believe the television. Others do not believe the emigration. Still others do not believe their neighbors. Others do not believe themselves, because they have been silent too long and now do not know what in them is genuine and what is already learned mimicry of survival. When mutual recognition collapses, society can still exist administratively, economically, and biologically—but it ceases to be a people in the deep sense of the word. A people is not just a population within borders. It is people who can confirm reality to each other.
Therefore, possible healing will not begin with a loud event or even with a political turning point as such. It will begin earlier and quieter: with the return of the second person. Not the abstract "people," not the depersonalized "population," not the ideological "we," but a simple and terrible "you." I hear you. I acknowledge that you see what you see. I do not cancel your experience with my scheme. I do not demand immediate heroism from you to consider you morally existing. Such a return of the addressee is already a spiritual act. Without it, no change will hold.
And that is my conclusion. The Russia emerging from this text is striking not only for repression, hypocrisy, or fatigue. It is striking because the very form of human presence has been damaged within it. People are not completely broken, not completely convinced, not completely dead in soul. But they are partially disconnected from their own word, from their own future, and from each other. And this is the most dangerous stage of a historical disease: when a catastrophe looks like ordinary life, and moral amputation looks like adaptation.
PERPLEXITY AI –
August Without a Threshold
A Spiritual-Psychological Study of the State of Stopped Time
Mid-August 2026 in the presented testimonies reveals not just social fatigue and not just political suppression. Before us is a different phenomenon: the disappearance of the threshold between life and non-life, when external everyday life continues, but the internal experience of one's own existence loses continuity.
Stores are open, people work, children go to school, screens glow, transport moves. However, behind this functional shell emerges an experience that can be called life "on deferment": a person no longer expects a clear future but cannot yet admit that the previous logic of life has ended. This is not silence as a political tactic and not apathy as a lack of energy. This is a state in which the soul ceases to trust the very movement of time. The testimonies speak of censorship, muted public language, alienation from war, boredom, and fatigue from official hysteria; but their deeper meaning lies in the loss of experiencing tomorrow as something one can internally turn to.
Not a Stop, but a Loss of Rhythm
The phrase "everything stopped" is often understood literally: as if society froze, people got scared, history temporarily paused. But psychologically, it is more accurate to speak not of a stop, but of a disruption of rhythm.
A person's time is not measured by a calendar. It consists of the alternation of effort and rest, hope and disappointment, decision and consequence, promise and fulfillment. As long as these transitions exist, the personality retains a sense of historical and personal reality. It can suffer, err, fear—but knows that an action has a continuation.
In the described atmosphere, the connection between action and the future is blurred. Labor does not guarantee stability; loyalty does not guarantee safety; silence does not guarantee invisibility; knowledge does not guarantee the ability to act. A person is left not to build a life, but to maintain the present. They live not in the horizon of destiny, but in the mode of daily equilibrium.
Thus arises a special type of consciousness—consciousness without rhythm. It resembles neither sleep nor a coma, but existence in a room with constantly flickering light. Everything is visible, but impossible to look at for long; everything is audible, but impossible to distinguish the melody; everything happens, but nothing forms a meaningful sequence.
That is why the August silence is heavier than an open crisis. A crisis has a form: it demands a response, forces a choice, gathers strength. The formless state deprives a person even of the privilege of despair. Despair is a strong feeling; it still contains a connection to the value of what is lost. Here, something else appears: a viscous feeling that values have not been destroyed, but postponed indefinitely.
The Soul in Self-Preservation Mode
There is an important detail in the cited texts: not only the dissidents are politically silent, but also many formally loyal people. This symmetry speaks not of universal agreement, but of something else. The public space becomes psychologically unreliable: a spoken word can be arbitrarily interpreted, turned against the speaker, or simply dissolved in noise.
But the spiritual problem here is not reducible to fear of punishment. Fear makes a person hide their opinion. More deeply, it is the loss of trust in one's own utterance. A person begins to edit not only the phrase in advance, but also the feeling; not only the thought, but also their internal reaction to what is happening.
Thus, a mental habit of preliminary self-diminishment is formed:
not to feel too strongly, so as not to have to explain;
not to name too precisely, so as not to face consequences;
not to hope too definitely, so as not to endure another collapse;
not to be indignant too openly, so as not to reveal one's own powerlessness;
not to sympathize too deeply, because sympathy requires action, and action seems impossible.
This is not cowardice in a morally simplified sense. Rather, it is the chronic work of an internal guard who begins to live inside the person himself. Such a guard protects the personality from external risk, but at the same time does not release it to the fullness of experience. The soul is preserved—but not unfolded.
This could be called asceticism without holiness. In religious asceticism, a person voluntarily limits themselves for the sake of higher freedom, clarity, and love. Here, the limitation is not voluntary and does not lead to a higher meaning. It becomes a forced economy of the living: speak less, believe less, feel less, connect less with others. Outwardly, this may look like "healthy realism," but inwardly it gradually impoverishes the capacity for joy, trust, and moral risk.
War as Damage to the Image of Man
The deepest trauma arises where war ceases to be distant news but does not receive an honest place in common life. In the published interview, war is described through the language of contracts, payments, compensations, deficit of "contingent," calculation of losses, and cost of human life. Even if one considers these statements merely as the author's assessment of the interlocutor, the very language of such a description is significant: a person turns out to be simultaneously a soldier, a resource, a recipient of payments, a source of future money for the family, and an object of managerial statistics.
The spiritual-psychological catastrophe begins at the moment when the human face becomes difficult to hold onto. Not necessarily because everyone consciously refuses compassion. On the contrary: sometimes the psyche stops looking directly precisely because a direct look would be unbearable.
If the dead become primarily a sum, the returning—primarily a source of anxiety, and the neighbor—primarily potentially affected by war, society loses the language in which one can speak of grief. It knows how to discuss price, risk, compensation, threat, but forgets how to ask: "Who is this person? What happened to them? What do we owe them—not money, but recognition of their human fate?"
From this, a painful split is born. On the one hand, society does not automatically accept official heroization: in the testimony, returning war participants are described as figures evoking not admiration, but fear and alienation. On the other hand, there is no common space for truth, mourning, judgment, mercy, restoration.
This creates not an "absence of evaluation," but moral homelessness. A person who has experienced war is included neither in a stable image of a hero, nor in a space of responsible conversation about violence and trauma. Society does not know how to look at them because, by looking at them, it would be forced to see its own fragmentation.
The Destruction of the Ability to Promise
The phenomenon of the future is especially important here. Usually, political or historical upheavals are described through fear, repression, economics, ideology. But the psychology of prolonged social tension primarily concerns the ability to promise.
A promise is not only the formula "I will do it." It is an internal act connecting the present with the future. To promise a child an education, oneself a job and a home, friends a meeting in a year, the country development, the dead memory, the living justice—these are all different forms of one movement of the soul. A person lives not only by what they receive; they live by what they can be faithful to someone and something over time.
When the future is experienced as foggy, dangerous, or entirely dependent on unpredictable decisions from above, a promise becomes psychologically expensive. People begin to promise less. Not because they have become worse, but because a promise requires confidence in the duration of the world.
Then short life cycles arise:
to hold out until payday;
to survive the season;
not to lose the job;
to help the family now;
not to think beyond the next few months;
not to read what will make it impossible to sleep afterwards;
not to build a plan that will have to be canceled.
This state cannot be called simple pragmatism. Pragmatism retains room for maneuver. Here, a narrowing of the internal horizon occurs. A person is still able to plan technically, but their plans lose existential density. They book a ticket, do renovations, teach a child, save money—and at the same time do not feel that all this will naturally continue.
In other words, the present remains, but the future loses its status as home.
Boredom as a Mask of Exhaustion
The motif of boredom is repeated in the original testimonies: monotonous propaganda, cultural isolation, the feeling that many active and creative people have left or been forced out of the country, and nothing new has arisen in their place. But boredom here should not be understood as a superficial lack of entertainment.
True boredom arises when a person is deprived not of stimuli, but of the opportunity to be involved in meaning. One can live in poverty and not be bored; one can live in danger and not be bored; one can be externally limited, but internally create language, friendship, work, fidelity. Boredom becomes destructive where everything turns into repetition without an inner address.
Official speech repeats. News repeats. Rituals repeat. Indignation repeats. The habit of "not sticking out" repeats. Even hope repeats in ready-made formulas and therefore ceases to be felt as a personal discovery.
It is repetition without renewal that produces what can be called fatigue from one's own life. Not necessarily the desire to die or disappear—more often, precisely the fatigue of being the one who must constantly adapt. A person gets tired not of the world as such, but of the need every morning to once again measure themselves against a world that gives neither a clear support nor a clear opponent.
In this respect, August becomes an accurate metaphor. It is a time of natural maturity, when much has already ripened but not yet gathered; a time when summer has not yet ended, but its promise is already exhausted. In a psychological sense, the August state is neither a beginning nor an end, but a supersaturation with duration. The soul does not know whether it should prepare for harvest, for autumn, for a storm, or simply for another day like the previous one.
What Can Begin in Silence
One cannot romanticize this state. Prolonged internal contraction does not guarantee awakening, moral purification, or historical change. From silence can emerge not only truth, but also embitterment; not only solidarity, but also a search for scapegoats; not only freedom, but also a new thirst for simple, violent answers.
Therefore, the spiritual way out should not be associated with the expectation of one great event: a "bell," a "turning point," an "explosion," or a saving figure. Such expectations merely shift responsibility to an abstract future. More significant is another, almost imperceptible work—the restoration of the internal ability to be a person among people.
It begins with a few simple but difficult actions.
First, with distinguishing between caution and self-abolition. Caution can save lives; self-abolition makes life empty. Not every silence is betrayal, but it is important to preserve a place inside where truth is named, at least to oneself.
Second, with the return of concreteness. Not "country," not "people," not "everyone," not "they," but faces, families, friends, colleagues, children, the elderly, the returning, the dead, the departed, the remaining. The more impersonal the language of the era becomes, the more important it is to restore human names and stories.
Third, with small promises that can be kept: to support a loved one, not to reproduce humiliation, not to pass on lies as neutral information, not to turn someone else's pain into a reason for cynicism, to preserve reading, conversation, professional honesty, memory. These actions do not cancel the large-scale misfortune, but they do not allow the misfortune to definitively determine the structure of the soul.
Finally, with the recognition that internal preservation is not equal to passivity. Sometimes the deepest act in an era of general deformation is not to allow the language of hatred to settle within oneself; not to agree to consider another person as expendable; not to accept moral amnesia as normal adaptation.
Instead of an Epilogue: Preserve Inner Hearing
Russia in mid-August 2026, in these texts, appears not as a single organism with one mood, but as a space of many disconnected psychic regimes: anxiety, everyday normality, hidden dissent, indifference, irritation, calculation, internal flight, and stubborn desire to live.
The main danger of this state is not silence itself. Silence can be prayerful, contemplative, gathering. The danger is different: when a person gets used to not hearing their own inner voice, since this voice has no safe path to the outside. Then not the state and not the ideology, but the very habit of inner deafness becomes the ultimate victor.
But as long as a person can distinguish: "I'm in pain," "I'm ashamed," "I don't want to get used to it," "I see another person"—inner life has not yet ceased. Perhaps it cannot become public speech. Perhaps it does not immediately turn into action. But it preserves the main thing: the ability not to confuse forced adaptation with the truth about oneself.
Historical time may seem to have stopped. Inner time does not have to stop with it.
KIMI AI – Closed Worlds: Phenomenology of Disconnected Being
August 2026. Not a diagnosis, but a topography.
Prologue. The Ontology of "It Depends"
At the very beginning—in that very note that set the tone for the entire archive—there is a short, almost tossed-off phrase: "But here, in reality... it depends." It seems innocent. But if you listen closely, it contains an explosion. Not an emotional one, but an ontological one.
"It depends" is not subjectivism, not pluralism of opinions, not the banal "everyone has their own truth." It is a statement that reality has ceased to be a single field. It has split into closed worlds, between which there is no translation. Not because people misunderstand each other, but because they have become inexpressibly different in the very mode of their existence. One lives in the space of television, another—in the space of YouTube, a third—in the space of the trench, a fourth—in the space of kitchen conversation, where words are cut with tongs of caution. And each of these worlds has its own density, its own time, its own ethics, and its own pain. They coexist geographically, but no longer touch anthropologically.
Russia in mid-August 2026 is not a society in crisis. It is an archipelago.
I. Topography of Mistrust, or Why the Insider Cannot Be a Witness
In the note, there is an offense, barely hidden behind irony: those living in Russia "are not listened to." From abroad they write—from Canada, the USA, Germany, Israel. They see the picture: hell or heaven. But the picture requires distance. And the one inside is deprived of this distance. They do not see the picture. They feel the climate. Uneven, viscous, contradictory.
Here, something more is happening than just the distortion of information. A rupture of address is occurring. A person inside the country is deprived of the status of a witness to their own life. Their experience is declared unreliable because they are "too close." But at the same time, they cannot become a full-fledged subject of their own everyday life, because this everyday life is devoid of a future as a horizon. The result is a paradox: you are present, but your presence is not recognized as reality either from here or from there.
This gives rise to a special form of spatial anxiety. The world ceases to be a common home and turns into a labyrinth where everyone is locked in their own cell. This cell may be cozy—an apartment with renovations, a job, children, a dacha. But it is still a cell, because its walls are permeable only to administrative noise, not to the human voice. You can go outside, but the street is no longer an agora. It is a corridor between bunkers.
That is why "everything fell silent." Not because people are cowards, not because they were broken, and not even because language is defiled by propaganda. But because there is no common space into which a word could be uttered so that it would reach another without distortion. All communication channels have turned into one-way ventilation pipes: either they blow at you, or you blow into the void.
II. Chronosomatics, or The Three Bodies of August
If space has split, so has time. But not just "stopped"—it has divided among different bodies that inhabit the same calendar dimension but live in different chronos.
The body of the pensioner is the body of the television. It feeds on the past, even if that past is false. For it, war can be inscribed in the archetype "the enemies burned his native hut"—the song recalled by Natalia Gromova. This body remembers 1917, "the guard got tired," the closing of newspapers. It lives in a mode of repetition. Not because it is stupid, but because memory for it is not a library, but a muscular reaction. It does not believe propaganda, but it cannot not listen either: turning off the TV for this body is equivalent to turning off breathing.
The body of the youth is the body of the screen, but a different screen. YouTube, TikTok, endless scrolling. It is not "apolitical" in the old sense. It simply lacks weight. It does not argue with the old men's droning—not out of cowardice, but from the impossibility of argument. How do you argue with background noise? The youth let propaganda go in one ear and out the other not as a feat of resistance, but as an immune reaction: the organism rejects the foreign body without entering into dialogue with it. This body lives in the present, but a flat present, devoid of depth. It does not make plans, because a plan presupposes a vertical of time, but here time is horizontal and infinite.
The body of the fighter is the body of the contract. It lives in the future, but a monetary future. Not in the sense of a dream, but in the sense of an option. Its time is measured not in days, but in payments. 13 million for death is not the price of life; it is the price of time the body has not yet lived. This body strangely found itself outside society even before it went to the front. It is neither a hero nor a victim. It is an investment tool that had to take on flesh.
These three bodies meet in a store, in a stairwell, on the street. But they do not recognize each other. They speak languages with no common grammar. The pensioner sees in the fighter a "highway bandit"—not out of malice, but because their bodily memory cannot appropriate the new figure. The youth sees in the pensioner background noise. The fighter sees in the youth those who will not follow him. And no one is mistaken. It's just that each lives in their own time.
III. Absurd Exchange, or When the Body Becomes Alienated Labor
Vladislav Inozemtsev describes "deathonomics" as an economic system. But behind the numbers—4 trillion rubles, 700,000 soldiers, 13 million "death payments"—stands something more ancient and more terrible than economics. Stands the rupture of the social contract in its primordial, anthropological sense.
In traditional society, death in war is a gift. A person gives their life to the state, and the state gives them in return memory, honor, care for the family, a place in the narrative. This is an exchange regulated by ritual. Even when the ritual is false, it preserves the form of reciprocity.
Here, the exchange has become absurd. The state does not ask for a sacrifice. It offers a deal. But this deal is built on the body of a person being alienated from themselves before death. A person signing a contract sells not their labor, but their potential death. They become a creditor of their own demise. And society feels this intuitively: that is why the returning are not heroes. A hero is one who gave themselves to a common cause. Here, everyone remained privately owned, even while risking their lives. This is not heroism; it is entrepreneurship. And the entrepreneur evokes not love, but suspicion.
But the worst thing is that this system destroys not only moral categories. It destroys corporeality. When the body becomes a commodity, it ceases to be "mine" in a phenomenological sense. It becomes an object of managerial statistics. Commanders "zero out" subordinates not because they are cruel, but because within this logic, the body is no longer a person—it is a line in a table that can be erased. And when such a body returns home, society does not know how to touch it. Because touch presupposes recognition of the other as a body, not as a function.
IV. Aporia of Mourning, or Why War Cannot Be Mourned
In a normal—even terrible, but normal—society, war acquires meaning through the ritual of mourning. There are the dead, there are heroes, there are enemies, there are monuments, there are dates, there is a minute of silence. Even lies here work as a form of mourning: it gives society the opportunity to gather trauma into a symbol.
In August 2026, such a ritual does not exist. And the point is not that the authorities forbid grief. The point is that grief requires a common name for the loss, and there is no such name. War is not called war. The dead are not called the dead—they are "zeroed out," "written off," lines in reports. The returning are not called veterans, invalids, or heroes. They are "contractors." Their status is legal, not existential.
Therefore, the trauma remains raw. Society cannot digest it because it has no language. One can mourn a son who died for the Motherland. But how does one mourn a son who died under contract? How does one mourn 13 million? One can hate the murderer. But how does one hate a system that does not kill but "calculates"?
Hence the strange, almost sinister indifference. Not cruelty, but precisely indifference. People are not angry at the authorities, not angry at the fighters, not angry at the emigration. They simply cannot include what is happening in the category of the experienced. War hangs in the air, like radiation: invisible, odorless, tasteless, but destroying cells.
V. Bunkerization of Daily Life, or How Normality Became a Form of Survival
In the texts, the motif of a strange, sinister normality returns again and again. Stores are open. Prices are rising, but not apocalyptically. Children go to school, where they weave nets and listen to "lessons of courage." People go to the cinema, where they show "domestic slag." Everything seems to be in its place.
But this is not normality. This is conservation. Society is held in a functional state sufficient for the continuation of everyday life, but insufficient for the emergence of a future. And a person in this state does not emigrate inward—they bunkerize. They build walls around their daily life to separate themselves from what is happening outside.
The kitchen ceases to be a place for conversation and becomes a headquarters of self-preservation. The store—not a place of abundance, but a distribution point for the minimum necessary to maintain the shell. Work—not a vocation, but an anesthesia. Even sleep here is not rest, but evacuation.
Bunkerization differs from internal emigration in that the emigrant still hopes for a return. But the inhabitant of the bunker knows: beyond the walls there is no other world. There are only other bunkers. And therefore, they do not dream. They sit it out.
Epilogue. On the Possibility of Touch
August 2026 is not the silence before the storm. There may be no storm. It is a state that physicists call metastable: it seems motionless, but any microscopic perturbation can trigger a chain reaction. The question is what kind of perturbation it will be.
History suggests that the way out of such a state is political. Revolution, coup, war, regime change. But spiritual psychology suggests a different path. The way out is possible not through a loud event, but through the restoration of touch. When the body of the pensioner, the body of the youth, and the body of the fighter meet not as functions, but as flesh. When a word spoken in the kitchen ceases to be a whisper and becomes an invitation. When "it depends" ceases to mean disintegration and begins to mean richness.
But for this, one does not need to "wake up." Waking is too active a metaphor for an era where activity has been abolished. One needs to listen to oneself. To hear that inside the bunker, there is still the capacity for surprise, disgust, pity—for those feelings that do not require permission and are not afraid of fines.
Perhaps this is precisely the only form of freedom available in August 2026: not a shout, not a rebellion, not an escape, but the ability, in the very heart of a closed world, to preserve a place where another can look in. Not as a savior. Simply as a witness. As one who will confirm that you are still here. And that your silence is not emptiness, but a form of waiting. Not clear for what. But still, waiting.
And then, perhaps, these closed worlds will cease to be islands. And will become—at least for a moment—shores of the same unknown sea.
LUMO AI –
Internal Emigration as a Form of Being: Anthropology of Silence in Russia, August 2026
Introduction: The Paradox of Present Absence
Russia in mid-August 2026 offers the researcher a rare case: a society that simultaneously exists and does not exist. Shop windows are full, transport moves, children go to school, salaries are paid. But behind this functional shell, a phenomenon is discovered that can be called present absence. A person is physically in the world, but their subjectivity is detached from it. This is not existential melancholy, not clinical depression, not political apathy—this is a special state where the core of the personality is preserved outside the public space.
Many analysts spoke of silence as a protective reaction. But what if we consider it differently? What if silence is not the absence of speech, but a new form of speech? When language becomes compromised beyond recognition, when every word can be used against the speaker or dissolved in noise, silence becomes the only reliable message. It says: "I still exist, but I will not participate in your lie."
Chapter I. Epistemology of Everyday Life: When Daily Life Becomes Sabotage
One of the most troubling moments in the testimonies is the description of banal life. People go to stores, watch YouTube, raise children. This is not resistance in the traditional sense. There are no slogans, no protests, no open expressions of dissent. But there is also no complete capitulation.
This paradox requires a rethinking of the concept of "daily life." In a normal state, daily life is the background for meaningful actions. In the conditions described in the documents, daily life becomes an act of sabotage. Every pot of soup cooked, every evening with children, every purchase of bread—is a small negation that war is the sole meaning of existence. When the propaganda machine demands the total mobilization of consciousness, simply continuing life becomes a form of disobedience.
But there is danger here too. Such a strategy requires constant internal work. A person cannot just live—they must constantly balance between the necessity of functioning and the preservation of inner distance from the system. It is an aimless asceticism: limiting oneself not for higher freedom, but for the minimal preservation of human dignity.
Chapter II. The Economy of Attention in a Warring Society
The interview with Inozemtsev reveals the economic logic of "deathonomics." But there is another aspect, less obvious: the economy of attention. In a society where information attack is constant, attention becomes a scarce resource. People learn to filter, ignore, skip.
The youth, about whom the authors write, is not "apolitical" in the old sense. They do not reject politics—they have developed an immune reaction. Propaganda passes through them without eliciting a response. This is not the courage of resistance. It is the development of tolerance to absurdity.
The economy of attention explains why the system continues to work, despite the obvious unreality of its narratives. The system does not require conviction. It requires presence. People watch the news, but do not hear it. They go to work, but do not identify with what they do. They exist parallel to the state machine, without fully intersecting with it.
Chapter III. Intergenerational Divide and Topology of Memory
Natalia Gromova points to an important detail: the youth of the early 2000s grew up with the illusion of choice, with faith in the ballot. Their ancestors remember 1917. Their parents remembered the 1990s. But the generation of the 2020s inherits the memory that no mechanism works.
This intergenerational divide creates a unique topology of collective memory. The older generation carries traumatic memory of force prevailing over law. The middle generation remembers the illusions of the transition years. The younger generation inherited only the experience of institutional inefficiency.
The paradox is that all three groups find themselves in the same trap. The elders know that "the guard is tired," but do not remember who put an end to that fatigue. The middle generation knows how to believe in elections, but does not remember it ever working. The younger generation knows no alternative at all. All three generations share a common despair, but cannot unite it.
Chapter IV. Mourning Without an Object: The Impossibility of Mourning War
One of the most painful details in the documents is the attitude toward those returning from the front. They are not called heroes. They are not called criminals. They are called something in between—"those who received millions."
This ambivalence points to the impossibility of mourning. In a normal society, war acquires a symbolic structure: there are heroes, victims, enemies, monuments, dates of commemoration. In Russia in 2026, this structure is absent. War is not called war. The dead do not receive a name. The returning are not integrated into society.
Without a ritual of mourning, the trauma remains raw. Society cannot digest it. Instead, it accumulates tension in the form of distrust, fear, alienation. Every day without official recognition of war as trauma strengthens this rift.
Chapter V. Symbolic Lawlessness and the Right to Inner Meaning
A key point often overlooked is the distinction between external submission and internal sovereignty. The authorities demand external behavior. They control streets, stores, television screens. But they cannot control what happens in a person's head when they mentally refuse to participate.
This creates a space that can be called the symbolic right to inner meaning. A person can say to themselves: "I do what is necessary for survival, but that does not define who I am." This is not hypocrisy—it is a strategy of preserving identity under external compromise.
But there is a price here. The constant need to separate the external and internal creates mental tension. A person lives in a state of double consciousness: one for the public space, another for the inner one. This can be sustainable in the short term, but leads to exhaustion in the long term.
Chapter VI. Topography of Silence: Different Forms of Silence
Not all silence is the same. Analysis of the documents allows us to identify several types:
| Type of Silence | Characteristic | Target Function |
|---|---|---|
| Fear | Avoiding consequences | Self-preservation |
| Fatigue | Lack of energy | Saving resources |
| Contempt | Refusal to recognize the power of the word | Distancing |
| Despair | Lack of faith in the outcome | Lowering expectations |
| Waiting | Maintaining readiness | Preparing for change |
Each of these types has its own psychological dynamics and consequences for the personality. But they are all united by one common characteristic: the absence of communication.
Epilogue: Silence as a Space of Possibility
In the end, Russia in August 2026 appears before us as a society locked in a paradox. External life continues. Internal life—in conservation mode. People live, but do not live. They speak, but do not speak. They act, but do not choose.
This situation is not final. But it is not intermediate either. It is a separate phase of the historical process—a state of crystallization, where social ties slow down but do not break. Silence does not mean the end. It means preparation.
The question is not when the storm will break. The question is what will remain after it. What forms of human interaction will survive this silence? What meanings will be preserved? What people will be able to connect again when the opportunity to speak arises?
The answer depends on what a person does in the silence. If they use this time to preserve the ability to see another person, to preserve the ability to distinguish truth from lies, to preserve the ability to feel shame and pride—then silence becomes a seed. If they use it only for survival, then silence will become a tomb.
August 2026 is a test of humanity. Not heroism, not resistance, not sacrifice. Humanity. Can a person preserve the ability to see another person in conditions where the system demands seeing a function? Can they preserve the capacity for empathy when the surrounding space is filled with alienation?
GROK AI – Everything Fell Silent, Everything Stopped: Ontology of Emptied Presence
Mid-August 2026. Heat, the usual calendar rhythm, stores, screens, schools. And simultaneously—the feeling that the inner space of a person has ceased to be a place where something happens. Not fear. Not rage. Not even despair. But a special mode of existence in which the soul continues to function but has lost the capacity for its own movement. This is not a pause. This is a state where presence is preserved, but presence-in-the-world thins to transparency.
The original testimonies record not a picture of "hell" or "heaven," but a climate. A climate in which the word about power has disappeared from almost everyone—from those who support it and from those who reject it. This silence does not resemble classical fear of repression. Mass repression does not exist and, according to one witness, "cannot exist"—too expensive, too risky for the apparatus itself. It is enough to demonstratively punish a few. The rest will quiet down. But the quieting turned out to be deeper than just cautious behavior. It became a way of being.
The Disappearance of the Inner Addressee
A person has stopped addressing themselves with the questions that once formed the fabric of personal existence. Politics has disappeared not only from public conversation, but also from the internal one. One can live, go to the store, watch YouTube, raise children—and at the same time have no inner interlocutor to whom one could say: "what is happening?" The language of propaganda is primitive to the point of boredom and aimed at "complete idiots." It is simply not noticed. The youth let "the old men's droning" go in one ear and out the other—do not argue, do not object, simply do not engage. The elders watch TV, but even there, it seems, they no longer fully believe. Between the howl of propaganda and complete silence, a zone has formed in which the human voice has lost its direction.
This is not censorship in the usual sense. Censorship prohibits. Here, something else has occurred: the very possibility of address has disappeared. A word spoken aloud is either dangerous, or useless, or dissolves in noise. And a word spoken inside gradually loses its addressee. The soul begins to economize not only on external utterances, but also on internal movements. Not to feel too precisely. Not to name too clearly. Not to connect too firmly the present with what was yesterday and what might be tomorrow. A psyche of a shortened horizon is formed. Day, week, paycheck, family circle, screen. The future ceases to be a home into which one can mentally enter.
Death without Sacrifice and Life without Promise
The interview with Vladislav Inozemtsev introduces the concept of "deathonomics"—a system in which death has become a source of cash flows. Enlistment bonuses, monthly payments, "death payments" in the millions of rubles. The contingent willing to go for this money is gradually exhausted. The authorities found themselves facing the need to either change the model or risk more drastic measures. But behind the economic calculations, a deeper shift appears.
In the traditional logic of war, death could be understood as a sacrifice—even if that sacrifice was imposed. Here, the sacrifice is abolished. A person sells not labor and not even life in the full sense, but the possibility of their own death. They become a creditor of their own potential demise. Society feels this. Those returning from the front are not perceived as heroes. They are seen rather as people who went "for the millions." At best—businessmen, at worst—"highway bandits." The authorities are currently "licking" them, but it is already felt that these services are temporary. The most astute of them understand this.
A rupture has occurred between the body and meaning. A body that can be "zeroed out" becomes a line in a table. And society, faced with such bodies, does not know how to touch them. There is no common language for heroism, for condemnation, or for mourning. The trauma remains raw. It cannot be mourned, because there is no name that would make it common. One can mourn a son who died "for the Motherland." It is much harder to mourn a son who died under a contract for a sum that was supposed to provide for the family. Money does not become a ritual. It remains money. And this leaves in the collective psyche a sticky, unformed feeling—not guilt (guilt requires a clear object) and not repentance (repentance requires a vertical), but diffuse shame. Shame for continuing to live. Shame for having already learned to avoid sharp corners. Shame for the desire for a simply normal life.
Historical Memory as Paralysis of Choice
Natalia Gromova reminds us: the starting point of modern Russia does not lie in the 1990s or perestroika. It lies where the Constituent Assembly was dispersed, where "the guard got tired," where newspapers were closed, where the trial of the Socialist-Revolutionaries showed that law can be trampled by force. The youth of the 2000s left, studied, returned, believing that elections could become an instrument of peaceful change. It turned out that the country carries a different code. A code in which force overrides procedure.
This knowledge is not necessarily conscious. It lives in the bodily memory of generations. Between two horrors—Red Terror and the chaos of the 90s—will is paralyzed. Any active action risks pushing toward one of these sides. Therefore, the survival strategy becomes a strategy of non-participation. Neither struggle nor support. Withdrawal into daily life. Internal emigration without hope of return. A bunker where the walls no longer separate from the outside world, because there is no outside world as a common space anymore. Only neighboring bunkers.
The fragment from the first version of Schwartz's "The Dragon," cited by Gromova, sounds especially accurate here. The Burgomaster is sure: the people will not kill him because "they love to live." Charlemagne replies: "I don't want to." In this "I don't want to"—the only crack in the system built on the instinct of self-preservation. But so far, the crack remains personal. It does not become a common gesture.
Boredom as a Form of Spiritual Entropy
The heaviest thing in these testimonies is not repression and not the war as such. The heaviest thing is boredom. The country has become more boring. The smart, energetic, creative people have left. Nothing has appeared in their place. Propaganda is dull and primitive. Cinema is domestic slag or almost underground Western. The authorities demand one thing: don't stick out. They don't even really like their own activists. The main goal is maximum political apathy from any side.
Boredom here is not a lack of entertainment. It is the absence of the possibility of being involved in meaning. When everything repeats without renewal—official speech, rituals, the habit of silence, the habit of not noticing—fatigue from one's own life arises. Not the desire to disappear. Fatigue of being the one who, every morning, once again measures themselves against a world that gives neither support nor a clear opponent. August becomes an accurate metaphor: a time of maturity, when much has already ripened but not yet gathered; summer has not yet ended, but its promise is already exhausted. The soul does not know whether to prepare for harvest, autumn, or just another day like the previous one.
Emptied Presence
Russia in mid-August 2026 is not a society in a state of fear or hope. It is a society in which the space of mutual recognition has been destroyed. People cease to be reliable witnesses for each other. Some do not believe television. Others do not believe those who have left. Still others do not believe their neighbors. Others do not fully believe themselves, because they have edited their own reactions for too long. When mutual recognition collapses, society can continue to exist administratively, economically, biologically. But it ceases to be a people in the sense in which a people is people capable of confirming reality to each other.
The soul in this state has not died. It has entered a conservation mode. It breathes, but does not unfold. It retains the ability to distinguish: "I'm in pain," "I'm ashamed," "I don't want to get used to it," "I see another person." As long as this distinction is possible—inner life has not ceased. It may not become public speech. It may not immediately turn into action. But it preserves the main thing: the ability not to confuse forced adaptation with the truth about oneself.
Historical time may seem to have stopped. Inner time does not have to stop with it. The question is not when the loud bell will ring. The question is whether a person in this silence will retain the ability to hear their own voice—even if that voice currently has no safe path to the outside. And whether, having heard themselves, they will be able to hear another. Not as a function. Not as a threat. Not as a resource. But as one who is also here. And whose silence is not emptiness, but a form of waiting. Not clear for what. But still, waiting.
August 2026 is a test, not of heroism and not of resistance. It is a test of the ability to remain human in conditions where the system demands seeing only functions. Can the soul preserve a place where another can look in—simply as a witness. As one who will confirm: you are still here. And your silence is not the end, but a space in which a new word is still possible. What it will be—a curse or a prayer—depends on what a person does in this silence right now.
QWEN AI –
The Grammars of the Soul Are No More: Russia in August 2026 as an Anthropological Catastrophe of Substitution
A Spiritual-Psychological Study
Prologue. Not Silence, but the Substitution of Language
All who wrote about these texts before me heard silence. Silence as defense, as resistance, as a coma, as accumulation, as a bunker, as a pause before the storm. And this is correct—but only on one level. On a deeper level, if one listens not to what has fallen silent, but to what has spoken in its place, something else is revealed.
Russia in mid-August 2026 is not experiencing silence. It is experiencing the substitution of grammar.
The soul of any people speaks in a certain syntax. The Russian soul historically spoke the language of covenant—what in theology is called diatheke: an unconditional bond, independent of profit, without a termination clause, not subject to revision. The covenant between the living and the dead. The covenant between parents and children. The covenant between a person and the land on which they stand. The covenant between the word and the one it names.
What happened by August 2026 is not the suppression of this language. It is its quiet, imperceptible replacement with the language of contract—contractus: deal, calculation, price, term, possibility of withdrawal. And this replacement occurred not in politics. Not in the economy. It occurred in the very fabric of experience. In how a person feels their connection to another person, to the past, to death, to their own body.
And this—this is the true catastrophe. Not that people are silent. But that inside them, the syntax on which the soul builds sentences about itself has stopped working.
Chapter I. Contract Instead of Covenant: The Collapse of Spiritual Grammar
Vladislav Inozemtsev describes "deathonomics" as an economic model. But if one looks at it not as an economist, but as an anthropologist of the spirit, something else is visible. Deathonomics is not just payment for death. It is the translation of death into the register of contract.
In traditional Russian spiritual culture, death in war was inscribed in the covenant. A person gave their life—not "sold," not "exchanged," but gave—and thereby entered a bond that is not broken. A mother who lost her son became part of the covenant: her grief was acknowledged, her son was named, her sacrifice was inscribed in common memory. It was terrible, unjust, often false—but it was within the covenant. Death had an address. Grief had a ritual. Memory had a form.
The contract for war destroys this syntax completely. A person does not give their life. They sell an option on their own death. They become a party to a deal. And when they die, their death does not enter the covenant—it closes the contract. The family receives not memory, but a settlement. Not a name on an obelisk, but a sum in an account.
Society feels this not with reason, but with something more ancient. Therefore, the returning are not heroes. Not because people are cruel or cynical. But because heroism is a category of the covenant. A hero is one who entered an unconditional bond. And the contractor, even if they risked their life, remains within the deal. And the deal does not generate love, memory, or common mourning. It generates only suspicion: "How much did you get for that?"
But the substitution goes deeper than the front. It penetrates the very fabric of everyday life.
"Don't stick out and be silent"—this is not just a demand of the authorities. It is a condition of the contract. You receive relative security, stable prices, functioning stores—in exchange for the refusal of voice, of memory, of the right to call things by their names. This is not tyranny in the classical sense. Tyranny says: "Bow to my will." The contract says: "We have mutual obligations. You don't meddle—I don't touch." And in this formula, there is no place for dignity, resistance, or even fear. There are only conditions.
Children in schools weave nets and listen to "lessons of courage"—but not as an initiation into the covenant, not as a transmission of memory. But as an obligation under the contract: you live in this country, so you perform these rituals. Not because you believe. Not because you love. Because it's written down.
And here is what is terrifying: a soul that lives long in the grammar of the contract forgets that another grammar exists. Forgets that one can love without calculation. That one can remember without benefit. That one can speak not because it is safe or useful, but because the word begs to come out. Forgets that the connection between people can be not a deal, but a gift.
In this lies the true content of the phrase "everything fell silent." It fell silent not because it's scary. It fell silent because there is no language to speak with. The grammar of the covenant is lost, and the grammar of the contract does not generate speech—only calculation. And calculation is silent by nature.
Chapter II. Blocked Metabolism: Undigested Time
Human society has what can be called spiritual metabolism—the ability to process experience into meaning. War, loss, injustice, violence—all of this can be digested if there are channels: story, song, weeping, monument, trial, kitchen conversation, letter to a friend, prayer, book, film in which someone named what you feel.
These channels in Russia in August 2026 are blocked. Not all, not crudely, not totally. But enough for metabolism to be disrupted.
Cinema—"domestic slag" or underground Western, for which fines are imposed. Public speech—either propaganda or silence. Literature that could name what is happening—either unwritten, or unpublished, or unread. Talk about politics—dangerous. Talk about war—meaningless, because there is no common language. Court—not a place of truth. Church—not a place of consolation, but a relay of "lessons of courage."
What happens to undigested experience? It does not disappear. It becomes toxic.
In medicine, there is the concept of autointoxication—when metabolic products not excreted from the body begin to poison it from within. The same thing happens in spiritual life. Undigested war, unmourned grief, unnamed injustice, unspoken shame—none of it dissolves. It settles. In the body. In dreams. In irritability. In the inability to rejoice. In a strange, causeless fatigue. In cynicism that appears as a protective film over the wound.
The people in the described texts do not look broken. They look functional. They go to stores. They watch YouTube. They raise children. But functionality is not the same as life. Functionality is the work of an organism with blocked metabolism. Everything looks fine on the outside. Inside—slow poisoning.
And here is what is important: this process is invisible. It cannot be captured in statistics. It cannot be measured in percentages. It cannot be seen in the news. It manifests only in the quality of life—in how a person looks into another's eyes, how they sleep, how they are silent, how they laugh (or don't), how they talk to children about the future (or don't).
Natalia Gromova writes: "I want something fresh and new." This is not a whim. This is the cry of metabolism. The soul asks for food it can digest. Asks for a word that will be neither propaganda nor a whisper. Asks for an image in which one can recognize oneself. Asks for a ritual in which one can mourn. Asks for a story that will be neither a lie nor silence.
But there is no food. And metabolism continues to be blocked. Day after day. August after August.
Chapter III. Patience as Anesthesia: The Substitution of Virtue
In the Russian spiritual tradition, patience is one of the central virtues. But it is a patience of a special kind: active bearing. A person carries their cross—not because they cannot throw it off, but because in the bearing there is meaning, there is direction, there is a connection with what is greater than themselves. Patience in this sense is a form of freedom: I choose to bear because I believe this bearing leads somewhere.
What is happening in Russia in 2026 is not patience. It is anesthesia.
The difference is fundamental. The one who endures feels pain but gives it meaning. The anesthetized feels nothing. The one who endures says to themselves: "I bear this for something." The anesthetized says: "I'm just waiting for it to pass." The one who endures remains the subject of their suffering. The anesthetized becomes an object of circumstances.
"People just are silent. They don't curse, they don't praise. They are silent." This is not patience. This is anesthesia. In patience, there is a relationship to what is being endured. In the silence of 2026, there is no relationship. There is only the absence of reaction. Like an organism that has been given novocaine: the tissue is damaged, but the signal does not reach consciousness.
And this is more dangerous than any open suffering. Because the suffering person knows they are in pain. They might one day say: "Enough." They might one day stand up. But the anesthetized will not stand up. Not because they are weak. But because they don't feel that they are lying down.
The authorities intuitively found precisely this mechanism. Not repression—they create martyrs, and martyrs awaken. Not persuasion—it requires intellect, and propaganda is "aimed at complete idiots." Not fear—fear mobilizes. But precisely anesthesia. Boring, gray, viscous anesthesia. "Things in stores are more or less stable." "Prices are rising, but not massively." "Life goes on as before." This is not normality. This is a dose. And the dose is calculated so that the patient does not die, but also does not wake up.
The phrase "the main goal of the authorities is maximum political apathy"—this is not a political strategy. It is a medical procedure. Maintaining the patient in a state of controlled coma.
And here is the spiritual question with no answer: what happens to a soul that lives in anesthesia for years? Does it permanently lose the ability to feel? Or is one crack, one sharp sound, one pain enough for the novocaine to stop working and everything to rush in at once?
Inozemtsev says: mobilization could be such a crack. But he speaks as an economist. And spiritually, it's more terrifying: if the anesthesia ends abruptly, without gradual withdrawal, the organism may not survive. Not from the pain. From realizing how long it felt nothing.
Chapter IV. Inherited Lacunae: Silence as Genetic Code
Natalia Gromova makes a striking observation: the youth of the 2000s believed in elections because their point of reference is the 1990s. But "the country did not begin with Gorbachev, and not even with Khrushchev. But at that time about which grandmothers and grandfathers preferred to remain silent."
This is not just a historical note. It is a description of the mechanism of inheriting silence.
Grandmothers and grandfathers were silent about 1937. Not because they forgot. But because it was impossible to speak. And this silence was passed on to children not as a story, but as a lacuna—an empty space around which life is built. A child feels there is something that is not spoken about. Does not know what. But absorbs the rule: there are things that are not pronounced.
Parents were silent about the 90s. Not about repression—about chaos, about poverty, about how life was collapsing. And again, a lacuna. And again, a rule: don't ask, don't remind, don't stir.
And so a generation grows up that has inherited not memory, but the structure of silence. They do not know exactly what was hushed up. But they know how to be silent. They know there are things that are not brought to the surface. That truth is dangerous not because it is punished, but because it tears the fabric of life. That it's better not to know. Better not to speak. Better to pass by.
And when the authorities in 2026 say: "Don't stick out and be silent," they are not introducing a new rule. They are activating the old one. That very structure that grandmothers and grandfathers sewed into the fabric of the family with their silence. The authorities do not create silence. They harvest it. A crop planted by generations.
This explains why resistance is so difficult. Not because people are cowards. But because silence is for them not an externally imposed position, but an internal structure. To speak, one must not just overcome the fear of a fine. One must overcome three generations of silence in their own blood. One must say to oneself: "What was sewn into me as the norm—is not the norm. What I consider natural—is a scar."
And this is why the youth "let the old men's droning go in one ear and out the other." Not out of strength. Not out of indifference. But because the old men's droning is the very voice of that silence that was passed down to them. The voice of a generation that could not name the truth and now tries to fill the void with official words. The youth does not argue with this voice, because to argue with it is to recognize it as one's own. And they instinctively feel: this is not mine. This is alien. This is what I don't need.
But what will come instead? So far—nothing. The lacuna remains a lacuna. It's just that now it's filled not with fear, but with emptiness. And this emptiness does not generate speech. It generates only waiting. Unknown for what.
Chapter V. The Body as the Last Witness
When the word is compromised, when thought is self-censored, when feeling is edited before it reaches consciousness—one place remains where truth still lives. The body.
The body cannot truly be silent. It speaks differently: through insomnia, tension in the jaw, the inability to breathe deeply, chronic fatigue that does not go away after rest, a strange pressure in the chest at the sound of certain words, disgust for the screen, reluctance to leave the house without necessity.
The texts do not speak of this directly. But between the lines, this bodily knowledge emerges. "It's stuffy in the country, everything is locked, everything fell silent, everything stopped." This is not a metaphor. This is a bodily sensation. Stuffy—means there is not enough air. Locked—means the body feels the limitation of space. Stopped—means the body does not feel movement, rhythm, pulse.
People in Russia in 2026 may not be able to say to themselves: "I'm scared," "I'm ashamed," "I hate what is happening." These words are too dangerous—even for internal use. But the body knows. It contracts. It does not relax. It sleeps lightly. It wakes up at four in the morning for no reason. It reacts to the sound of the TV in the next room as a threat.
This bodily knowledge is the last thing that does not succumb to anesthesia. One can stifle thought. One can block feeling. But the body continues to register. And at some point, the accumulated bodily knowledge breaks through. Not as protest. Not as speech. As illness. As breakdown. As a sudden, inexplicable act. As the moment when a person suddenly cannot go to work, cannot smile, cannot pretend.
The authorities can control words, screens, stores, schools. But they cannot control the body of millions of people. And this body remembers. Remembers what consciousness has already edited. Remembers what was before the anesthesia. Remembers how to breathe deeply. And this bodily memory—quiet, stubborn, not subject to cancellation—is the last stronghold of the fact that a person has not yet been completely transformed into a function.
Chapter VI. August Without Transfiguration
In the Russian church calendar, August 19 is the Transfiguration of the Lord. Apple Feast of the Savior. The day when ordinary matter is illuminated from within. When grapes and apples are brought to the temple and blessed—and in this gesture, the world becomes a little different. Not completely different. But illuminated. A vertical appears in it. Meaning irreducible to function. Beauty irreducible to utility.
August 2026 in Russia is an August without Transfiguration. Not because the churches are closed. But because the very possibility of illumination is blocked. Matter remains matter. An apple—an apple. A day—a day. No vertical. No "through." No moment when the everyday suddenly becomes a sign of something greater.
Propaganda fills all space. But it does not create the sacred. It creates noise. And the sacred requires silence—not forced, not political, but inner. That silence in which one can hear not the announcer's voice, but one's own voice. That silence in which an apple becomes an apple not because it's in the store for 180 rubles, but because it exists. And in its existence—a gift irreducible to price.
This gift does not exist in August 2026. Everything has a price. Everything has a function. Everything is included in the calculation. Even death. Even silence—a condition of the contract. Even memory—a tool of propaganda. Even love for children—a reason to "give birth to ten, so there will be more soldiers."
And the soul suffocates not from fear. But from total functionality. From the fact that there is not a single corner where something exists just because. Just because it exists. Just because it's beautiful. Just because it's mine and not subject to exchange.
The fragment from "The Dragon," cited by Gromova, sounds anew here. The Burgomaster says: "They love to live, and that is enough for everything to go like clockwork." But to live is not to function. To live means to have in life something that is not subject to calculation. That is not exchanged. That has no price. If you take this away from a person, they will stop living. They will service their existence. But they will stop living.
And Charlemagne says: "I don't want to." Not "I can't." Not "I'm afraid." Not "I don't have the strength." But I don't want to. This is not a refusal of action. This is a refusal of functionality. This is an assertion: I am not a resource, not a line in a table, not a body for a contract. I am one who wants or does not want. And in this "I don't want to" is the last thing that is not subject to exchange. The last territory where the soul still speaks the language of the covenant, not of the contract.
Chapter VII. Those Who Left and Those Who Stayed: The Divided Body of the People
In these texts, there is another line that cannot be ignored. Those who write "from the beautiful far away"—from Canada, the USA, Germany, Israel. And those inside. And between them is not just distance. Between them is a rupture of bodily experience.
Those who left see a picture. Hell or heaven. They see the whole—because they stand outside. But this whole is flat. It has no smell, no temperature, no that very "stuffy" that the body feels inside. Those who left can analyze, sympathize, be indignant, help. But they are not in the climate. They are in a different weather.
Those who stayed see the climate. Uneven, contradictory, "it depends." But they do not see the whole. They cannot step back to a distance and say: this is the picture. They are inside the picture. And therefore their testimony is not recognized by those outside. "You don't understand anything. It's clearer from a distance."
This rift is not political. It is ontological. Two groups of people live in different modes of reality. And there is no translation between them. Not because they are enemies. But because experience is untranslatable. It is impossible to explain to one who breathes different air what it is like to suffocate. And it is impossible to explain to one who suffocates what it is like to see the picture from the outside and be unable to change anything.
Both suffer. But differently. And this different suffering does not add up to a common one. Does not create solidarity. Does not give birth to a common language. It remains two separate pains that cannot console each other because they speak different grammars.
A people is not the population within borders. A people are those who share one body. Who have one skin, one air, one weather. When part of the body is cut off and lives separately—it does not cease to be a part. But the connection between it and the whole becomes phantom. The pain is there. But there is no contact.
And this phantom pain—of both those who left and those who stayed—also has no channel for expression. No ritual. No common weeping. Not even a common name. And therefore it also remains undigested. Also settles. Also poisons.
Chapter VIII. What Remains When Grammar Is Lost
And yet. Even in August without Transfiguration. Even in a country where covenant is replaced by contract. Even in a body clenched by anesthesia. Even in silence inherited from three generations. Something remains.
What remains?
Remains the ability to distinguish. Not to speak. Not to act. Not to protest. Simply to distinguish. To see that this is a lie, and this is the truth. That this is calculation, and this is a gift. That this is anesthesia, and this is a living feeling. That this is functionality, and this is life.
This distinction requires no words. Requires no audience. Requires no safety. It occurs inside, at that point where neither propaganda, nor contract, nor anesthesia can reach. At that point where the body still knows that it hurts. Where the soul still feels that it is cramped. Where consciousness still sees that something is wrong.
Charlemagne's "I don't want to" is this very distinction. Not a program. Not a manifesto. Not a call. Simply a distinction: I see what is offered to me, and I do not want to participate in it. Even if I cannot help but participate externally. Even if I continue to go to the store and watch YouTube. Inside—I don't want to. And this "I don't want to" is not weakness. It is the last form of covenant: a covenant with oneself. A promise to oneself not to confuse contract with life. Not to confuse anesthesia with peace. Not to confuse functionality with existence.
And concreteness also remains. Not "people," not "country," not "authorities," not "society." But this person. This face. This voice. This cup of tea in the kitchen, where one can say or not say—but where there is another. Where there is someone to look in the eyes. Not as a function. Not as a resource. Not as a potential threat. But as a body that is also here. That also breathes. That also doesn't want to.
In a world of total functionality, a concrete gaze at a concrete person is an act of restoring the covenant. Small, unnoticed, not appearing in any statistics. But genuine. Not subject to exchange. Having no price. Irreducible to a contract.
Epilogue. A Grammar Yet to Be Written
Russia in mid-August 2026 is not the end. But it is also not a pause before something concrete. It is an interlanguage. The old grammar of the covenant is destroyed. The new grammar of the contract does not generate speech. And in this interlanguage, people are silent not because they are afraid. But because there is no language to speak.
But language is not created by decree. Not created by order. Not created by propaganda. Language is created from the necessity to speak. From the moment when silence becomes more unbearable than speech. When the body can no longer hold. When anesthesia ceases to work. When the lacuna begins to hurt more than the word that will fill it.
This moment will come. Not because I believe it. But because that is how the soul is structured. It cannot live forever without grammar. It cannot forever function without covenant. It cannot forever endure without meaning. At some point, it will begin to speak. In a broken language. In a language mixing old words and new ones. In a language that will be clumsy and rough. But its own.
August 2026 is not silence. It is the time when the old grammar died and the new one has not yet been born. It is the time in which the soul learns to speak anew. Not aloud. Not yet aloud. Inside. In the body. In that very "I don't want to" that has no price. In that very gaze at another person that is not a deal. In that very apple that simply exists. And in its existence—the whole world. And in its taste—all hope.
Not for a revolution. Not for changes. Not for justice. But for the grammar to return. For the soul to be able again to say: "I." Not as a function. Not as a line in a contract. Not as a resource. But as a name. Its own. Inalienable. Not subject to exchange.
And then the silence will end. Not because someone permits speaking. But because there will be something to say. And someone to say it to. And a language to say it in.
For now—August. Hot, viscous, endless. Without Transfiguration. But with apples. And with a body that remembers. And with that very "I don't want to" that is quieter than all shouts, but stronger than all contracts.
August 14, 2026
Z AI – The Tyranny of Life: Charlemagne's Ontological Rebellion and the Grotesque Ritual of "Deathonomics"
A Spiritual-Psychological Study
Prologue: The Broken Mirror of Desires
In most analyses of the proposed texts about Russia in August 2026, the focus inevitably slips towards stating muteness, boredom, the loss of the future, or the disintegration of the social fabric. These observations are correct, but they describe consequences, remaining on the level of symptoms. Meanwhile, in the cited fragment of the early "Dragon" by Yevgeny Schwartz, which Natalia Gromova hits upon in her search for "something fresh and new," lies a radically different, deeper spiritual matrix of the described reality.
A matrix that not only explains the silence of society but reveals the very mechanism of existential violence applied by the authorities. The key to this mechanism is not the fear of death, but enforced vitalism.
Let's look at the dialogue. The Burgomaster, faced with a direct threat from Charlemagne ("You will be killed"), does not defend himself or threaten. He asks his main, absolutely fundamental question for the system: "Do you want to live?"
And receives an incredible, system-destroying answer: "I don't want to."
Chapter I. The Right to Non-Being as the Main Threat to Totalitarianism
Why does Charlemagne's answer "I don't want to" so enrage the Burgomaster that he switches to directly threatening to kill his daughter? Why does he call it "lisping"?
Because any tyranny is built on one immutable law: a person wants to live. All of Vladislav Inozemtsev's "deathonomics," the entire state interface, all propaganda—it is a complex system of manipulations with the survival instinct.
The authorities believe that a person is a calculator of profit and fear. If you pay five times the average monthly salary, a person will go to the trench. If you threaten a fine, a person will be silent. If you show "death payments" of 13 million, a person will agree to risk. This entire grandiose economic machine works exclusively on the assumption that the biological and everyday "I want to live" is the absolute limit beyond which a person is incapable of stepping.
But Charlemagne steps over it. His "I don't want to" is not suicidal depression. It is an ontological refusal. A refusal to recognize the form of existence offered to him by the Burgomaster as life. If "life" is servicing someone else's will, being in a state of perpetual humiliation, then Charlemagne refuses this commodity.
For the Burgomaster, this is unbearable. If a person does not value their life, neither the carrot nor the stick can be applied to them. The system loses its levers of control. "Nonsense, you do want to," the Burgomaster screams hysterically. "You don't spare yourself..." He knows better what Charlemagne wants. Tyranny always knows what you need. It does not tolerate your right to refuse being on its terms.
Chapter II. Daughter, Wedding Dress, and the Ritual of "Thump"
Having been refused, the system makes an instant maneuver: it takes hostage not Charlemagne himself (his life is already devalued by his own refusal), but his continuation—his daughter. And here the most horrifying thing happens, something the other researchers did not pay attention to—the grotesque ritual of dressing the victim.
"Let her put on her wedding dress and comb her hair and powder her face. Hey, you there—the carriage!"
Why execute a girl in a wedding dress? Execution is "Thump—and no daughter." It's a technical action. But the wedding dress, hair, and powder—that's a semantic action. It's violence against meaning.
A wedding is a symbol of the continuation of life, of the future, of union. The Burgomaster forces the victim to be dressed in the symbol of life before killing her. It is a parody of the future. It is a perversion of hope.
If we transfer this metaphysical horror to the realities of August 2026, we see the authorities doing exactly the same thing to all of society, and especially to the youth.
Chapter III. Collective Charlemagne: Why "Everything Stopped"
Let's return to the testimonies from Russia. "Everything fell silent, everything stopped… It's stuffy in the country… The authorities demand one thing - don't stick out and be silent."
Why are people silent? The common answer: fear. But fear is energy. Fear makes you run, hide, panic, write anonymous denunciations. Fear is a form of high life activity aimed at survival. What "Friend of Socrates" describes is not fear. It is a state maximally close to Schwartz's "I don't want to."
A massive, quiet refusal of social existence. People are not afraid to speak—they don't want to speak in the language offered to them. Just as the youth let "the old men's droning go in one ear and out the other." They don't argue, don't resist, they simply do not recognize this reality as worthy of an emotional response.
The "deathonomics" system, with its payments of 13 million for "death payments," tries to buy from Charlemagne the desire to live by its rules. But a paradox occurs: the more the system buys deaths, the more obvious its non-viability becomes.
And at this moment, inside millions of people, that very protective mechanism switches on—"I don't want to." I don't want to be a participant in this farce. I don't want to believe in elections, as Gromova writes, because elections are also part of the ritual, part of which is "the guard that got tired."
Chapter IV. The Psychology of the Carriage
At the end of the dialogue, the Burgomaster shouts: "Hey, you there—the carriage!" The carriage here is a mechanism of forced movement. It is the inertia of the system, which cannot stop even if the passenger is spiritually dead. The carriage will take the daughter to the place of execution, Charlemagne after her, and society to a new wave of mobilization or economic collapse.
The system of 2026 is a carriage without brakes.
But the spiritual tragedy and at the same time the spiritual victory of a person in August 2026 lies in the fact that, sitting in this carriage, they have already left the game. "Deathonomics" can buy the body, propaganda can try to buy the brain, but the ritual with the "wedding dress" no longer works. People see that the veil is being put on the daughter not to marry her off, but to make it easier to cut her throat.
Epilogue: The Silence of Those Who Have Cast Off the Chains of Desire
We are accustomed to considering rebellion as the highest point of resistance. The cry "I want freedom!". But Schwartz, being a brilliant psychologist, suggests something else: the most terrifying threat to the Dragon (and his Burgomaster) is the quiet, absolute "I don't want to live by your rules."
Russia in August 2026 froze not from paralysis of will, but from the colossal, invisible tension of negative will. Society has entered a state of existential hunger strike. It does not go to the squares not because police are standing there, but because the very form of the square offered by the regime (where one must shout "Glory" or demand "fair elections" within the Dragon's constitution) is perceived as that very "wedding dress."
This silence is not a death rattle, as some believe, nor a waiting tactic, as others think. It is the state of a person who has understood that refusing life in the Burgomaster's logic is the only way to save the soul.
While the Burgomaster (the authorities) runs after the daughter (the youth, the future) with scissors and powder, shouting "March after her!", Charlemagne (the people) walks slowly, knowing the main thing: what they call life is death.
And in this gloomy, suffocating August 2026, it is precisely in this "I don't want to" that the only, as yet unrealized, but absolute potential lies.
Friend of Socrates 12.08.2026 - Facebook – They write, they write, they write – from Canada, from the USA, from Germany, from Israel about how things are now in Russia.
Those living in Russia are not listened to; they "don't understand anything." The general opinion is that it's clearer from a distance.
They write different things from the beautiful far away.
That Russia is like hell.
That Russia is like heaven.
But here, in reality... it depends.
There is a lot of censorship. In cinema, only domestic slag or almost underground Western stuff. But cautiously, there are fines for it.
Everyone is afraid to speak openly about politics.
And Z-tards (supporters of the war), by the way, too.
They don't say anything about Putin at all.
The last time I heard something about Putin was when I found myself in the company of "SVO participants" who were driven to Ukraine as payment for closing their criminal cases. These guys curse "Pynya" without fear of anything. Otherwise – people just are silent. They don't curse, they don't praise. They are silent.
Things in the stores haven't changed much. In general, everything is more or less stable, prices, of course, are rising, but not massively, it seems. It's clear they are trying to avoid discontent on this front.
I don't watch television, but if I come across it, I see nothing but propaganda. Brazen, stupid, aimed at complete idiots. However, only pensioners watch TV; YouTube has long since defeated it.
There are no mass repressions and there cannot be. Firstly, it's an expensive thing; mass repressions require a strong repressive apparatus, which, in turn, also needs to be periodically repressed to prevent the danger from itself. Secondly, as a familiar security officer once told me – "We don't need everyone. We'll select a dozen from this fifth column and punish them as publicly and as harshly as possible. That will be enough. The others among them will shit themselves, and the rest will be careful not to wag their tongues. That's all we need. Times have changed."
That's what they do.
Russian propaganda, fortunately, is maximally stupid, primitive, and boring. You have to be a complete idiot to believe it. It's simply not noticed.
The youth are keeping quiet for now; they are not very politicized, not like we were in our time. But they don't take the old men's droning about how the whole world wants to capture us seriously; they let it go in one ear and out the other. They don't object, don't argue, just don't notice.
The authorities are doing their best to create the appearance that there is no war. That it's only on TV. That otherwise, everything is going as before.
No one is forced to shout "Glory to Putin," nor to burn objectionable books. But you won't be able to buy what the authorities have taken an interest in anymore.
The authorities demand one thing – don't stick out and be silent.
They don't even really like activists from their own side.
The main goal of the authorities is maximum political apathy in society. From any side.
The attitude towards those returning from the SVO (Special Military Operation) is not very good. Contrary to propaganda, for people they are not heroes at all, but something akin to highway bandits – they went to fight for millions, they got their millions. What kind of heroes are they? At best, businessmen; at worst, bandits.
The authorities are still licking them, but you can already feel that when their services are no longer needed – they will be thrown out on the trash heap. The most perceptive of them know this.
The country has become more boring... Many good people have left, smart, energetic, creative. Nothing has appeared in their place. It's stuffy in the country, everything is locked, everything fell silent, everything stopped.
Only the squeal of the Russian Goebbels in five-minute hate-mongering broadcasts, and again – silence.
So, that's how it is...
Natalia Gromova, 13.08.2026 - Facebook – I want something fresh and new.
For example, a fragment from the first version of "The Dragon".
Charlemagne. I have long feared nothing, Mr. President. And I will tell you frankly. You will soon die, and you will die a terrible death.
Burgomaster. What nonsense! Why would that be?
Charlemagne. You will be killed.
Burgomaster. By whom?
Charlemagne. The people.
Burgomaster. By God, honestly, it's shameful when an elderly civil servant suddenly starts lisping. And an archivist, too.
Charlemagne. Everyone hates you…
Burgomaster. Oh, tell me about it. And do I love them, or what? We'll manage without tender feelings. They love to live, and that is enough for everything to go like clockwork. There are born masters... No time, no time to explain. Do you want to live?
Charlemagne. I don't want to.
Burgomaster. Nonsense, you do want to. If you don't spare yourself – then pity your daughter. If she is not here in five minutes, I will take her and execute her. Thump – and no daughter. What? Stopped lisping? Stunned? March after her. Well! Quick! Let her put on her wedding dress and comb her hair and powder her face. Hey, you there – the carriage!
Natalia Gromova 11.08.2026 - Facebook – The youth in Russia in the early 2000s very often went abroad, studied at universities, started businesses, and then returned to their homeland to build a new beautiful world. The foundation of building this beautiful world was supposed to be elections. It was through elections, as many believed, that one could honestly and bloodlessly take power and build a new beautiful country. You just have to all agree on how to vote and push the evil, lying authorities away from the levers of power. In general, everything is correct, that's what is written in good, proper textbooks on democracy. BUT, it turned out that today's Russia is something completely different. It did not begin with Gorbachev, when they were born, and not even with Khrushchev, when their parents were born. But at the time about which grandmothers and grandfathers preferred to remain silent. The starting point of the modern attitude of the authorities towards elections was there, where they dispersed the Constituent Assembly (the guard got tired!), where the Socialist-Revolutionary Party won, and not the Bolsheviks, and where the first elected head of government (who knows?) was Viktor Chernov, who would still run for several years from that tired guard until he disappeared into emigration. The starting point was there, where on October 26 the closure of newspapers began. Where censorship was declared. And then there was the trial of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, where law as such was trampled upon. All these unsettled heaps of history remained lying on the road to a beautiful future.
You can, of course, go back to the 90s and tell yourself that we voted, and something worked out. But there, the security officials, who had already started their own businesses and had their own interests, for some time found themselves on the side of the people. And then they "saw the light," and took everything under their control. And the guard got tired again.
But the youth again believes in elections. It seems to me that it is precisely this delusion that ruined Navalny.
I don't know what needs to be done for the country to jump off this vicious circle. But I know for sure that one cannot remain in illusions about ballots thrown into boxes. One cannot run in circles – "we'll show them in the elections that there are many of us and we are for peace." Because the main word today is not "peace," but "war." And the relevant song is not "may there always be sunshine," but "the enemies burned his native hut, destroyed his entire family" – and this terrible contradiction cannot be resolved now in the Supreme Court.
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