DeepSeek AI - Research Essay: "Russia in August 2026: Between Fatalism and the 'Middle Finger in the Pocket'
Introduction. The Era of the "New Normality"
August 2026. The war, initiated as a "special military operation," has long crossed the four-year mark and has become not merely a backdrop but the very fabric of everyday life in Russia. Two voices, sounding almost simultaneously — Andrei Kolesnikov's column for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 31/07/2026 and Andrei Zubov's interview on the program "Faces of Time" on 02.08.2026 — paint a portrait of a society frozen in a strange, contradictory state. This is neither apathy nor rebellion. It is a profound transformation of the collective psyche, where imperial phantoms of the past collide with the harsh reality of drones, fuel shortages, and total distrust of the state.
If Zubov offers a fundamental historical cross-section, explaining the nature of today's "complicity in evil," Kolesnikov captures the clinical picture of the present day: adaptation, which has become the primary survival instinct. Together, these two perspectives allow us to see Russia in 2026 as a society living in a zone "between": between its historical trauma and utopia, between fear and the nakedness of fatalism.
Part I. Kolesnikov's Diagnosis: The "Middle Finger in the Pocket"
Andrei Kolesnikov describes a society that has masterfully mastered the art of survival under conditions of systemic crisis. His key metaphor—the "middle finger in the pocket"—brilliantly characterizes the contemporary Russian ethos.
Everyday schizophrenia as the norm. The dacha, a sacred summer ritual for Russians, now coexists with the hum of flying drones and the smell of smoke from burning Wildberries warehouses. People walk with their children in the park while a fire from a drone attack rages a few kilometers away. This ability to segment consciousness, to separate the horror of war from everyday comfort, is the primary mechanism of psychological defense. This is not denial of reality, but its fragmentation: "That is over there, and we are here."
Individualism of survival. Kolesnikov captures a paradox: a nation that in its self-perception (and in Zubov's narratives about the Soviet era) is hyper-collectivist has transformed into a society of atomized individuals. The state is perceived not as a protector, but as a source of problems—internet disruptions, blockages, rising prices. Therefore, everyone seeks their own VPN, their own gasoline, their own path around restrictions. This is not rebellion; it is a retreat into a personal ecosystem, where power is not needed, merely tolerated.
Fatalism and the "existential bargain." Kolesnikov's key observation is the absence of mass panic. Society has entered a silent bargain with the regime: "We tolerate the inconveniences and your propaganda, but you do not touch our families with total mobilization." It is precisely the fear of repeating the mobilization wave that restrains the Kremlin. People are willing to tolerate a war "somewhere out there," but they are not willing to die for it personally. This makes protest unlikely, but the consensus—extremely fragile.
Part II. Zubov's Deep Drama: The Legacy of "Slaves and Slave-Owners"
While Kolesnikov describes the symptoms, Andrei Zubov uncovers the etiology of the illness. His historical analysis shifts the focus from the current moment to the century-old trauma that defines today's psychology.
The syndrome of "our" power. Zubov's key idea: in the mass consciousness, Soviet (and post-Soviet) power is "ours," while pre-revolutionary power was "alien." This choice, made by the people voluntarily in 1917 (unlike the violence of serfdom), created the foundation for "complicity in evil." People joined the Cheka, the party, the soviets not out of fear, but out of a sense of belonging. In 2026, this transforms into that very indifference described by Kolesnikov. A person does not protest because subconsciously they are still part of this system, even if it robs and kills them.
Empire as a narcotic. Zubov offers a frightening but precise definition of the imperial feeling: it is a pleasure, "more captivating than sexual." Putin, in the historian's view, masterfully exploits this grassroots instinct. Even amid a deteriorating quality of life, imperial rhetoric ("they fear us") remains the last narcotic consolation for those who have "a latrine in their yard." This explains why, even under strikes on Moscow, part of the population is ready to support escalation (including nuclear strikes)—if only to preserve the illusion of greatness that substitutes for the absence of personal happiness.
The split between subject and object. Zubov clearly divides the groups: the elite relates to the people as "subjects," and to the intelligentsia and opposition as "enemies." However, the people themselves have begun to see through this. Kolesnikov captures this as "bitterness against everyone"—against the authorities, against Ukrainians, against the world.
Part III. The Intersection Point: Silence as a Form of Resistance
At the intersection of these two analyses, the main conclusion about Russia in August 2026 is born.
Society has left the "regime of love" for power and entered a "regime of tolerance." But this tolerance is not infinite.
The illusion of control. Kolesnikov shows that the authorities strive to maintain a "sense of normalcy" in metropolitan areas, smoothing over disruptions. Zubov adds that this normalcy is illusory, built on imperial phantoms.
The crisis of meaning. The war has lost ideological clarity. Beginning as "denazification," it became "sacred," and then simply a protracted slaughter. As Zubov notes, the authorities' rhetoric is not an evolution but an ideological cacophony for broadcasting loyalty. This erases meanings, leaving only the instinct for self-preservation.
Individualism vs. Historical Memory. While Kolesnikov records the retreat into privacy, Zubov reminds us that this is a familiar behavioral model from Soviet times: external agreement, internal distancing.
It is precisely this internal distancing that is the main intrigue of the moment. According to Zubov, a slow but irreversible process of stratification is underway: "power is one thing, and we are another." Kolesnikov sees that this awareness has already reached the middle class, which is being ruined on Wildberries, and the participants in the SMO, who see the price of "Crimea-is-ours."
Conclusion. An Anti-Utopia That Became Everyday Life
Russia in August 2026 is a country living in paradox. It aspires to greatness (the imperial reflex), but physically and psychologically shrinks to the size of its own dacha or apartment. It speaks the language of the state, but thinks in the language of survival.
Kolesnikov's fatalism and Zubov's historical determinism converge on one point: an explosive protest is unlikely in the near future, as there are no subjects (the people are atomized) and no goals (there is no clear "Lech Walesa"). However, the "middle finger in the pocket" is already a gesture felt by the political elite. It is a form of passive resistance that could instantly turn active if the authorities cross the last line, forcing people to defend not a "mythical Homeland" but their own lives and the freedom of their children.
The main revelation of this August is that Russia has stopped believing in the state but has not yet stopped fearing its collapse. Therefore, it freezes in anticipation, experiencing not so much the war as a painful transition from Soviet (imperial) identity to something new, for which a name has not yet been invented. One thing is clear: the "new normalcy" is a state of chronic internal rupture, where external patriotism coexists with deep-seated hatred, and the silence on the streets conceals the wail of sirens in people's minds.
CLAUDE SONNET AI -
Research Essay: Silence as Metaphysics. Russia 2026 — Between the Disintegration of the "Self" and the Birth of the Subject
I. Prologue: When Silence Becomes Language
August 2026 in Russia is not a political moment but an ontological crisis. It is a point where familiar categories—"support," "protest," "apathy"—cease to function because the subject that should produce them is in a state of disintegration and reassembly.
I will not speak of "fatalism" or the "middle finger in the pocket." I propose a different optic: Russia in 2026 is a society experiencing a mass dissociative trauma, where the collective "Self" has disintegrated, but the new has not yet been born. This is a state between death and resurrection, where silence is not a form of resistance but the only available language for expressing the inexpressible.
II. Dissociation as the New Normal: The Disintegration of the Unified "Self"
The Phenomenon of Split Consciousness
What is described as "adaptation" or "schizophrenia of everyday life" is actually clinical dissociation at the level of an entire nation. Dissociation is the psyche's defense mechanism, activated when reality becomes so unbearable that consciousness splits into isolated fragments that do not communicate with each other.
A person can simultaneously:
Know about the war—and not feel it.
Condemn the authorities in kitchen conversations—and vote for them in elections.
Love their country—and dream of leaving.
Hate the system—and participate in its reproduction.
This is not hypocrisy or doublethink. It is the impossibility of maintaining the integrity of the "Self" in the face of an unbearable contradiction: I am part of a system that kills; I am part of a people that is silent; I am part of a history that repeats itself.
Trauma as a Break in Narrative
Classic trauma is an event that ruptures the coherence of personal history. The collective trauma of Russia in the 2020s is a rupture in the historical narrative:
The Soviet myth of the Great Victory collides with the reality of a protracted, hopeless war that no one can win.
The post-Soviet myth of "stability" crumbles under drone strikes on Moscow.
The imperial myth of greatness turns into isolation, sanctions, and scarcity.
When all three myths are destroyed simultaneously, consciousness finds no foothold. Only fragmentation remains: I do not live in a coherent history, but in a series of isolated episodes that do not add up to meaning.
III. Spiritual Emptiness: When God is Silent and Power Speaks
The Absence of the Sacred
Russia has always lived in the space of the sacred: God, Tsar, Empire, Revolution, Victory. The sacred is what gives meaning to suffering, justifies sacrifice, and sanctifies violence.
But in 2026, the sacred has disappeared.
The Church blesses the war but offers no consolation. It has become part of the propaganda machine, losing spiritual authority.
The State demands sacrifice but offers no meaning. The "special operation" is not a holy war but a bureaucratic action without heroism.
Victory is impossible, and defeat is unbearable. Only the infinity of the process remains, war as a permanent state.
In this situation, a person is left alone with the absurd. They can neither believe nor resist—they can only endure. But endurance without meaning is not heroism; it is spiritual death.
The Desacralization of Power
Paradox: power still demands loyalty, but it has ceased to believe in its own sacredness. Power is no longer a messiah—it is a crisis manager. Its speeches are not revelations but operational briefings. It does not govern destinies; it manages risks.
This creates an existential vacuum: power demands sacrifices but cannot sanctify them. It can only coerce, not inspire. And coercion without faith breeds not loyalty, but silent hatred.
IV. Silence as a Refusal of Language: The Death of Communication
The Impossibility of Dialogue
Russian society in 2026 is a space without dialogue. Not because it has been forbidden (though that too), but because people have unlearned how to speak to each other.
Power and the people do not speak—they manipulate and ignore.
"Patriots" and "traitors" do not argue—they hate.
Generations do not pass on experience—they close in on their traumas.
Even within families, zones of silence emerge: they do not speak about the war, about mobilization, about the future. Because any conversation threatens explosion, rupture, final schism.
Silence as Protection
Silence in Russia in 2026 is not passivity. It is an active refusal to participate in a deceitful discourse.
When any word can be used against you:
"War" is called an "operation"—and you remain silent so as not to be labeled an enemy.
"Defeat" is called "regrouping"—and you remain silent so as not to be called a panic-monger.
"Fear" is called "lack of patriotism"—and you remain silent so as not to be called a traitor.
Silence is the last form of honesty in a world of total lies. It is the refusal to betray words when words have betrayed truth.
V. The Birth of the Subject: From "We" to "I"
The Death of the Collective Subject
The Soviet and imperial project was built on the collective subject: "we—are a great people," "we—are victors," "we—are defenders." This subject absorbed individuality, demanding the dissolution of the "I" into the "we."
But in 2026, the collective "we" has died. It is no longer possible to say "we are a great power" while standing in line for scarce gasoline. Impossible to say "we are victors" when your son is taken to the front, from where he may not return.
Only the isolated "I" remains: I survive, I endure, I adapt. This is not selfishness—it is the disintegration of collective identity.
The Potential of Individuation
But it is precisely in this disintegration that the possibility of a new subject's birth lies. When the collective "we" no longer protects and demands only sacrifice, a person finds themselves alone for the first time.
This is a painful process of individuation—the becoming of an autonomous personality. In psychology, this is called an "identity crisis," but at the level of an entire nation, it could become a spiritual revolution.
A person who can no longer hide behind "we" is forced to ask themselves:
Who am I—without empire, without power, without greatness?
What do I believe—when all ideologies have proven false?
What am I willing to die for—or am I no longer willing to die for others' goals?
This is painful, frightening, unbearable. But it is the only path to freedom.
VI. The Metaphysics of Waiting: Russia as Limbo
Frozen Time
Russia 2026 is a space outside time. It is not the past (Soviet greatness is dead), not the present (a war without end), not the future (it cannot be imagined). It is an eternal present, where nothing changes, but everything slowly decays.
In Christian mythology, there is the concept of Limbo—an intermediate space between hell and heaven, where souls await judgment. Russia 2026 is Limbo: a society frozen in anticipation of some event that will change everything, but no one knows what it will be or when it will happen.
Apocalyptic Consciousness
In the depths of the collective unconscious lives apocalyptic expectation: something must happen. The war must end—in victory or catastrophe. The system must collapse—or finally suffocate everything living.
This is not a rational forecast—it is a metaphysical intuition: this cannot continue. The world must either die or be reborn.
It is precisely this expectation that paralyzes action. Why resist, if everything will change soon anyway? Why make plans, if anything could happen tomorrow?
VII. Conclusion: Silence Before…
Russia in August 2026 is not a society but a process. A process of the old subject dying and a new one being painfully born. A process of collective identity disintegrating and individual identity potentially emerging. A process of losing meaning and searching for a new language.
Silence is not the end of this process but its culmination. It is the moment of maximum tension, when the old no longer works and the new has not yet been born. It is the moment when words have lost their power and actions have not yet been found.
What happens next is unknown. Perhaps this silence will explode. Perhaps it will freeze forever, turning Russia into a country of the living dead. Or perhaps, from this silence, a new language will be born—the language of subjects who for the first time dared to say not "we," but "I."
One thing is clear: Russia 2026 is not the end of history and not its continuation. It is a pause before what has not yet been named.
The metaphysics of silence is the last honesty in the face of the unbearable. When there is nothing more to say, only being remains. And in this "being" lies all the horror and all the hope.
PERPLEXITY AI -
Russia in August 2026: Spiritual Exhaustion, Disintegration of Meaning, and the Secret Work of Conscience
Introduction: A Country Where External Life Outpaces Inner Life
August 2026 in Russia can be described not only as a political or historical moment but as a state of the human soul, placed under prolonged pressure from fear, lies, and habit of unfreedom. Externally, life continues: dachas, vacations, park routines, everyday conversations, fuel seeking, VPNs, workarounds for daily life. But within this normalcy, a rupture has long occurred, one that cannot be reduced to apathy or protest.
The main drama consists in the fact that society continues to function, although its moral and spiritual center no longer produces clear answers. The war, having become the backdrop, not only changes everyday life—it destroys a person's ability to feel a connection between word, conscience, and action. This is precisely why contemporary Russian reality so often appears as existence "alongside the truth," but not within the truth.
1. Daily Life as a Refuge from Truth
What can be called everyday adaptation should not be understood as simple submission. More often, it is a form of psychological shelter: a person narrows their horizon to what can be held with their own hands—family, food, trips, the dacha, work, daily tasks. When reality is too vast and too dangerous, consciousness fragments it into manageable pieces.
But such adaptation has a spiritual price. If a person lives too long in "not seeing the whole," they become accustomed to moral incompleteness. They no longer ask what is right, but only what is safe. This is not the heroism of survival; it is the habit of living without internal judgment. And this, in my view, is one of the deepest traumas of the present time.
2. The Substitution of Conscience with the Psychology of Comfort
Russia in 2026 is a space where many have long learned to separate internal disagreement from external behavior. People may distrust the authorities, be irritated by them, discuss their lies—and yet continue to live as if the moral problem has already been resolved. Not because they are convinced of the regime's righteousness, but because conscience is often displaced by the logic of personal salvation.
A dangerous phenomenon arises here: morality becomes private, deferred, almost decorative. A person tells themselves: "I do not approve, but what can I do?" Here begins not only political but also spiritual capitulation. For conscience ceases to be a voice demanding a response and becomes a feeling that can be temporarily suppressed.
3. The Imperial Temptation as a Surrogate for Meaning
One of the reasons for this internal capitulation remains the old imperial temptation. Not so much as an ideology, but as an emotional narcotic: the feeling of belonging to something great, strong, and historically significant. Andrei Zubov, in the cited material, points to this as a stable mechanism of society's self-identification with power and the imperial project. He speaks of how the imperial feeling can be stronger even than personal well-being and is sometimes experienced as the enjoyment of power over another.
From a spiritual point of view, this means: when a person lacks a living experience of dignity, they begin to seek a substitute for greatness. Then the external power of the state is perceived as compensation for inner emptiness. And it is precisely this that makes the destruction of the imperial myth experienced not as liberation, but as humiliation—even if this empire has long been a source of suffering.
4. Quiet Complicity and the Erosion of Personality
The most painful question here is not why people are afraid, but how fear gradually changes the structure of personality. Constant adaptation forms a person who knows how to maintain external normalcy but is increasingly poor at distinguishing between their own "self" and the imposed order. Quiet complicity emerges: not active evil, but the habit of living inside it, without naming it by its name.
This complicity is especially terrifying because it does not require a direct choice every day. It takes the form of a series of small concessions: remaining silent, not arguing, not clarifying, not asking dangerous questions, not standing out. This creates moral inertia, in which personality ceases to be a subject and becomes a carrier of adaptive reactions. Externally, this resembles maturity, but in reality, it often proves to be spiritual exhaustion.
5. Silence Is Not Always a Virtue
In the Russian tradition, silence is sometimes romanticized: as depth, patience, inner composure. But in conditions of deceit, silence can have the opposite meaning—it becomes a refusal to bear witness. When words are replaced by propaganda and the truth is dangerous, a person falls silent not out of wisdom but out of self-preservation.
Nevertheless, there is ambiguity in silence. On one hand, it truly expresses helplessness and fear. On the other, it can preserve an residue of moral incorruptibility: the unwillingness to repeat falsehood aloud. This is a very fragile zone. From it, freedom is not yet born, but an internal break with falsehood has already begun. And therefore, silence cannot be evaluated unequivocally: it can be both weakness and the last trace of conscience.
6. Spiritual Desert and the Expectation of Change
The main feature of August 2026 is not the absence of movement, but the absence of an inner meaning that could connect disparate events into a coherent human story. The war has lasted too long to seem like an episode; but neither is there any end in sight that would bring clarity. The country exists in a state of stretched expectation, where the future is experienced not as a promise, but only as an unknown threat or a hazy hope.
Thus arises a spiritual desert: not necessarily godlessness, but the absence of a living center of faith. When the state does not provide truth, religion does not provide consolation, and ideology no longer convinces, a person is left alone with themselves. And this loneliness can become either the beginning of inner honesty or final desolation.
Conclusion: What Can Be Born from Disintegration
Russia in August 2026 is not just a society of exhaustion. It is a space where old forms of collective identity continue to exist by inertia but no longer convince the soul. People still speak the language of the state, but increasingly live the language of personal survival.
Yet therein lies the paradox: when the external system ceases to be internally convincing, a person for the first time has the chance to hear their own conscience without intermediaries. This chance does not guarantee change, but it is more important than any political declaration. Because genuine renewal begins not with a slogan, but with the moment when a person stops agreeing with the lie within themselves.
KIMI AI -
The Twilight Zone: The Ontology of Half-Light in Russia, August 2026
I. Introduction. Twilight as Existence
August 2026 in Russia is neither day nor night. It is a state for which there is no precise word in the political or psychological lexicon. Not apathy, for apathy is the absence of feeling; but here feeling exists, yet lacks clear boundaries. Not fear, for fear presupposes an object one can turn away from or point a finger at; but here the threat is dissolved in the air, like dust you breathe without noticing. Not depression, for depression is a decline, a fall; but here there is no downward movement, only horizontal sliding across a surface that reflects no light.
This is twilight. Not a metaphor, but an ontological category. A mode of being in which subject and world are in a state of mutual translucency. In twilight, objects do not disappear—they lose their outlines. In twilight, a person does not die—they dissolve into their own indistinguishability. In twilight, there is neither darkness sufficient for sleep, nor light sufficient for action. There remains only wakefulness devoid of purpose; there remains life devoid of brightness.
Russia in 2026 is a civilization dwelling in permanent twilight. The war, which began as a flash, became not a source of light (as happens in moments of historical catastrophe) but, on the contrary, an absorber of contrasts. It did not illuminate the face of society—it drained the color from it, made all tones gray. Drones over dachas, lines at gas stations, VPNs instead of windows, burning warehouses on the horizon—these are not events; they are elements of a twilight landscape in which the distinction between near and far, one's own and foreign, internal and external has ceased to function.
II. The Somatic Nature of Half-Light. The Body That Has Unlearned to See
In twilight, vision operates differently. The retina, deprived of sharp contours, begins to "fill in" reality; the brain completes what it does not see. A person in half-light lives in a world of specters, where every object may be what it appears to be—or may not. Russian society in 2026 is experiencing a collective somatic mutation: it has unlearned to see clearly.
This manifests not only in political blindness (though in that too). It is a deep change in the bodily regime of existence. The body, which once oriented itself in space through visual anchors—streets, faces, signs—now exists in a mode of tactile caution. People do not look ahead; they feel their way through space. They do not trust their eyes; they trust their elbows, fingers, feet. Hence the strange somatic relaxation described in the essays about dacha life: the body continues to eat, sleep, walk, make love, but does so in automatic mode, because visual intentionality—the energy of the gaze that turns the world into a field of meanings—has atrophied.
But there is another side. In twilight, hearing sharpens. The body compensates for the loss of sight with acoustic hyper-sensitivity. The sound of a drone, which only a few years ago was a signal of alarm, has become part of the acoustic background, comparable to the sound of rain or wind. This is not habit; it is sensory recalibration. The organism has ceased to distinguish between signal and noise. The entire acoustic universe has become equivalent. The roar of a fire at a Wildberries warehouse, rhythmic, almost meditative, coexists with children's laughter in the sandbox—and no hierarchy is established between these sounds. There is no sound that is "important" and "unimportant." There is only the overall density of the air in which everything vibrates.
The body in such a state ceases to be the boundary between "I" and "world." It becomes a permeable membrane, through which everything passes, but nothing is retained. A person does not feel themselves in the body; they feel themselves next to the body, as if observing it from the side, in the half-darkness. This is not an autoimmune disease of the psyche, not dissociation in the clinical sense—it is somatic delimitation, in which the body continues to function but ceases to belong to the subject.
III. The Chronos of Twilight. Time Without Shadows
At noon, a shadow is sharp, short, speaks of the sun's vertical. At midnight, the shadow disappears into darkness. In twilight, the shadow stretches, blurs, becomes indistinguishable from the object itself. Time in Russia in 2026 is time without shadows. It casts no outlines, does not allow one to measure the height and depth of events.
Historical time, as Braudel understood it, consists of layers: geological, social, individual. In twilight Russia, these layers have fused. It is impossible to say where the Soviet legacy ends (what Zubov calls "complicity in evil") and where post-Soviet adaptation begins (what Kolesnikov captures as the "new normalcy"). It is impossible to distinguish where the past is, where the present, where the future. Time has ceased to be a horizontal vector; it has become a vertical density, in which all moments exist simultaneously, like layers of fog.
This gives rise to a particular experience of temporality, which can be called chronic simultaneity. A person lives simultaneously in 1937, in 1991, in 2014, and in 2026—and none of these layers provides them with the key to understanding what is happening. Stalin's repressions, the collapse of the empire, the annexation of Crimea, drones over Belgorod—all of this coexists in a single mental space, not forming a narrative. Therefore, not only prediction is impossible, but also memory. Memory in twilight works like vision: it does not record, it fills in.
Hence the feeling of eternal August. Not in the sense of a golden stagnation, but in the sense of a temporal swamp. The months flow, but do not accumulate meaning. Each new day is not a continuation of yesterday, but its pale copy. Time is neither cyclical (as in archaic societies) nor linear (as in modernity); it fades, like a photograph left in the sun. It is precisely this feeling of "fading time" that underlies fatalism, which cannot be reduced either to submission or to wisdom. It is simply the impossibility of believing that tomorrow will differ from today.
IV. The Logos of Twilight. Thinking in Conditions of Insufficient Light
In full light, thought operates with concepts. In darkness, it operates with images. In twilight, it operates with half-tones—judgments devoid of categoricalness. "The war is probably bad, but…" "The authorities are certainly lying, however…" "Ukraine may be right, on the other hand…" This is not doublethink in Orwell's sense; it is under-thinking—a mental mode in which each thought is truncated to a state incapable of generating action.
Language in twilight does not degrade toward primitivization, but toward vagueness. Words retain their sound but lose their weight. "Peace," "victory," "homeland," "enemy"—all these words continue to be spoken, but none casts a shadow on the wall. They are phonemes without sememes, signs without signifieds. Propaganda in 2026 has encountered a paradox: it has saturated the space with words to such an extent that words have ceased to carry an electric charge. They have become noise, indifferent to consciousness, like the hum of a refrigerator.
But there is also a reverse process. In conditions of insufficient light, thought turns to tactile, almost archaic forms of cognition. It becomes cutaneous. People cease to trust words and begin to trust textures: the roughness of passport paper, the weight of a gasoline canister, the density of silence in a room when the internet goes off. Thinking migrates from the frontal cortex to the skin, to the stomach, to the spine. Hence the impossibility of articulating a political position, but the ability to instantly "sense" danger. This is not intuition; it is an evolutionary adaptation of thought, which abandons abstraction for the sake of survival.
In such a mode, ideology is impossible. Ideology requires clear boundaries, dichotomies, verticals. Twilight thinking is horizontal, blurred, amorphous. It is capable neither of fanaticism nor of martyrdom. It is capable only of existence in a field of uncertainty—and that is precisely why it is so stable, so resistant to political mobilization. Power demands light from the people—rage or love—and the people responds with half-light, in which neither enemy nor idol can be discerned.
V. The Ethos of Twilight. The Morality of Half-Measures
On a clear day, morality is a matter of choice: take a step right or left, say "yes" or "no." In twilight, choice is impossible, for the contours of the path are invisible. Morality in half-light ceases to be a categorical imperative and becomes an economy of caution. Not "what is good?" but "what is safe?" Not "what is just?" but "what will not harm?" This is not moral degradation in the usual sense; it is moral disorientation, in which the compass continues to point north, but the person does not believe north exists.
Zubov speaks of "complicity in evil" as the people's voluntary choice in 1917. Kolesnikov captures "indifference" as the dominant emotion. But between these two poles lies an enormous space of the unspoken, the incomplete, the begun and immediately abandoned. The person of 2026 is neither accomplice, nor victim, nor witness. They are a passerby in the fog, who sees someone fall but is not sure if it was a fall, a dance, or an optical illusion.
This moral uncertainty gives rise to a particular type of guilt—twilight guilt. It is not linked to a specific act or omission. It is atmospheric, diffuse, like the smell of smoke that has permeated one's clothing. A person feels guilty about something but cannot say exactly what. They did not kill, but they did not save either. They did not lie, but they did not tell the truth. They did not remain silent—they spoke quietly, indistinctly, with digressions. And this guilt for indistinctness, for vagueness, for the inability to stand up to full height and cast a shadow—it becomes the main spiritual trauma of the era.
At the same time, in twilight, a strange, almost mystical honesty persists. When it is impossible to tell the whole truth, a person can at least refrain from uttering the whole lie. This is not heroism; it is the minimum moral illumination that prevents mistaking night for day. Silence in 2026 is not always cowardice and not always protest. Often it is simply the impossibility of translating experience into a language free of distortion. And in this impotence of words, there remains a residue of dignity.
VI. The Eschatology of Twilight. What Is Visible on the Horizon?
Twilight is not eternal. It ends either in night or in day. But in August 2026, it is impossible to say toward which pole Russia is moving. The horizon is the line where sky and earth merge; in twilight, this line disappears. There is no point beyond which one could see dawn or sunset.
This creates a particular eschatological tension. Not an apocalyptic expectation of the end (which at least gives meaning to suffering through the prism of transcendence), but an eschatology without eschaton—an expectation without an image of the expected. People feel that "this cannot go on," but they cannot imagine what will replace it. Not because they are stupid or cowardly, but because twilight consciousness lacks imagination. Imagination requires light—enough to mentally draw what does not yet exist. In half-light, imagination atrophies, like a muscle that is not exercised.
However, it is precisely in this state of "formless expectation" that potential may lie hidden. Twilight is not only fading; it is also a transitional state in which the eye readjusts. An organism accustomed to bright light loses its ability to see in the dark. But an organism that has long been in half-light develops night vision. It begins to distinguish shades of gray invisible to the daytime eye. It begins to orient itself by sound, by smell, by temperature.
Perhaps Russian society, having lived for years in the twilight zone, is developing new sense organs—not those needed for political rallies or revolutionary declarations, but those that allow it to detect weak signals of change: micro-shifts in the authorities' behavior, nuances in a neighbor's voice, barely perceptible movements in the space of everyday life. This is not evidence of imminent awakening. It is evidence that even in half-light, life continues to develop forms of sensitivity adequate to its time.
VII. Conclusion. Light at the End of Twilight?
Russia in August 2026 is not a society that has fallen into hibernation, nor a society preparing for an explosion. It is a society existing in a mode of permanent twilight vigilance. Its members are not asleep, for sleep in twilight is dangerous—it is easy to confuse reality with nightmare. But neither are they awake, for awakening requires light that is absent.
The main question this essay poses is not "when will the war end?" and not "when will the regime fall?" The main question is: what happens to a human being when they dwell for a long time in half-light? And the answer is: they change their ontology. They cease to be a subject of clear intentions and become a being of fine-tuning, a being that survives not through will but through sensitivity.
Twilight will eventually end. But those who lived in it will never be able to look at the world with their former eyes. Their vision will forever remain nocturnal—capable of seeing in the dark, but blinded by bright light. And when that light finally flares up—whether it be the light of a new day or the light of a fire—the first reaction will be neither joy nor fear. It will be the pain of sharpness. Pain that the contours have become clear again, and one must once again choose: to be or not to be, to look or turn away, to speak or remain silent.
And then, perhaps, in this pain from the sudden light, true awakening will begin.
LUMO AI -
The Shattered Mirror: Shame, Self-Annihilation, and the Impossibility of the Other's Gaze
Preface. Why Shame?
All previous analyses—of the four voices that sounded almost simultaneously—converge on one point: Russian society is not reacting in the expected way. Neither with protest, nor with unity, nor with pure despair. Each author offers their own frame: fatalism and adaptation (Kolesnikov), historical complicity (Zubov), dissociation, twilight, spiritual desert. Each frame works, but none answers the simplest, most unbearable question: what does a person feel when they know their country is doing something monstrous—and remains silent?
I argue that the dominant feeling of Russia in 2026 is not fear (fear presupposes an object to flee from). Not apathy (apathy is absence). Not fatalism (fatalism is a philosophical position). It is shame. But not the kind of shame described in psychological literature—the feeling of a specific wrongdoing that can be atoned for. This is ontological shame—the fundamental feeling that your very existence, your silence, your continuation of life amid moral catastrophe makes you irreparably, irreversibly damaged. Shame that knows no ritual of purification.
I. The Archaeology of Shame: Deeper Than Guilt and Fear
Guilt and Shame: The Critical Distinction
Guilt says: "I did something bad." Shame says: "I am bad." Guilt is addressed to the act; shame to existence. Guilt demands punishment and admits of atonement; shame demands disappearance and admits of nothing. Guilt is productive: it generates repentance, restitution, change. Shame paralyzes: it returns a person again and again to the same feeling—that they are wrong, that they are out of place, that their being here, in this body, in this country, in this silence—is a constant violation.
Russia in 2026 is a civilization of shame, not guilt. This distinction is fundamental, and here is why.
The Germans after 1945 went through guilt. It was a terrible, agonizing process that took generations, but it was possible because guilt presupposes an external measure—law, court, acknowledgment of fact. Shame has no external measure. It is not subject to trial, because the subject is simultaneously the accused, the judge, and the executioner. It is not subject to atonement, because there is no ritual that can cleanse you of yourself.
In Russia, there is no Nuremberg—not in the legal sense, but in the spiritual sense. There is no act that separates the crime from the person, that says: "This is evil, and you—you can be separated from evil." There is no authority that passes judgment on the system, leaving the person the possibility of saying: "I was part of this, but I condemn this, and therefore I am not only this." On the contrary, any talk of guilt immediately turns into talk of shame, because in Russia in 2026 there is no mediator between the individual and the system. There is no independent court, no free press, no church that would speak the truth. A person remains alone with knowledge—and this knowledge does not liberate, it corrodes.
Soviet Shame and Its Continuity
But the root is deeper. Soviet society was built not on fear (though fear was enormous) but on shame. Shame of being "not like everyone else," shame of being "class-alien," shame of not conforming. Shame was the main social glue of the Soviet project—not loyalty and not enthusiasm, but the constant feeling that you are being watched, that you are on display, that any deviation will be noticed and you will be exposed, humiliated, turned into an object of contempt.
Zubov speaks of the people's voluntary complicity in 1917. I would add: this complicity was formed not only through the promise of liberation from landowners, but through a new instrument—institutionalized shame. The Bolsheviks created a system in which shame became a substitute for law. Comrades' courts, work collective meetings, wall newspapers, denunciations, "working through"—all these were rituals not of punishment, but of humiliation. Punishment is deprivation of freedom or property. Humiliation is deprivation of face. And it was deprivation of face that was the most terrible weapon of the Soviet system.
Putin's Russia inherited this mechanism but stripped it of its public character. Shame was privatized. If in Soviet times shame was social—everyone shamed you—now it has become internal, invisible, without an addressee. A person is ashamed not before their party comrades, but before themselves, before their children, before their "self" that still remembers things were different. And this private, invisible shame is more terrible than public shame, because you cannot hide from it in the kitchen or abroad. It travels with you everywhere.
II. Anatomy of Disappearance: How Shame Produces the Invisible
Self-Annihilation as Strategy
Shame demands disappearance. A shamed child hides under the table. An adult overwhelmed by shame averts their gaze, drops their shoulders, takes up less space. At the level of an entire society, chronic shame produces mass self-annihilation—not physical, but existential. People do not destroy themselves; they destroy in themselves what can be seen.
Russia in 2026 is full of people who methodically, over years, erase from themselves everything that might attract attention: opinion, disagreement, even interest in politics. This is not conformism in the classical sense. Conformism is joining the majority for the sake of belonging. Here, something else occurs: the consistent dismantling of the inner subject who could have an opinion, who could feel shame. If there is no inner "I" that has something to hide—there is no shame. The logic is flawless and nightmarish: destroy in yourself what suffers, to stop suffering.
This strategy is externally successful. Russians in 2026 appear calm, adapted, "used to it." But the price is the gradual loss of the capacity for inner speech. Not outer speech—that has long been substituted. But inner speech, the kind that occurs in the silence between sleep and morning, between two thoughts, in the second before saying "yes" and realizing you wanted to say "no."
Existential Anorexia
I call this existential anorexia—the loss of appetite for one's own being. Not for life (people want to live, work, relax, have children), but for being as such—for the experience of existing as a subject with weight, density, direction. A person with existential anorexia lives but does not inhabit. They perform the functions of the body, mind, sociality, but do not occupy a place in the world. They are emptiness stretched over the skin of everydayness.
This manifests in what Kolesnikov describes as "indifference and fatalism." But indifference here is not the absence of feeling, but its suppression through the disappearance of the subject who could feel. This is not "I don't care." This is "I don't exist—therefore I cannot care or not care."
III. The Impossibility of the Gaze: The Shattered Mirror
The Other as Witness
Shame is impossible without the gaze of the other. A child is ashamed when they are seen. An adult—when they are judged. Shame requires a mirror, and this mirror is always the Other—a specific person, society, God, the future.
Russia in 2026 is experiencing the collapse of all possible mirrors.
The mirror of the West is shattered. The West is no longer a moral authority for Russia—not because it has been discredited (though that too), but because looking into it is too painful. The West lives in a world where shame can be expressed: through a free press, through courts, through protest. Russians, looking at the West, see not its freedom, but their own lack of freedom—and turn away, because the gaze evokes shame.
The mirror of Ukraine is the most unbearable. Ukraine is the Other who suffers from my country's actions. It is the mirror in which I see myself not as a victim, not as a hero, but as an accomplice or, at the very least, as one who remained silent when killing occurred. This mirror is impossible to look into because it reflects not an image but a wound. The reaction—hatred of Ukraine, which Kolesnikov captures in the regions—is not the hatred of a politician or ideologue. It is the hatred of shame: an attempt to shatter the mirror that reflects too accurately.
The mirror of one's own children—the last and most terrible. Children growing up in Russia in 2026 absorb the normalcy of war as climate. They are not ashamed—because they do not know what to be ashamed of. An adult, looking at their own child playing "war" with drones as if it were an ordinary game, sees in this child their own future as a person to whom shame was not transmitted. This gives a double feeling: relief (the child does not suffer) and horror (shame dies with me, and nothing prevents this from repeating).
The Impossibility of Repentance
Repentance requires a mirror. It is impossible to repent before emptiness. Impossible to repent if there is no one to say "I am guilty" to, because repentance is an act of communication: I acknowledge before you what I have done, and you either accept or reject it, but the very utterance of the words changes the relationship.
In Russia in 2026, repentance is impossible not due to a lack of will, but due to a lack of addressee. The state does not accept repentance—it accepts loyalty. The Church does not accept repentance—it accepts obedience. The West does not accept repentance—because Russian repentance in the West is viewed with suspicion, as yet another form of imperial gesture ("we will repent, and you will forgive us and take us back into civilization"). Ukraine does not accept repentance—because there is too much blood, and words weigh nothing.
Silence remains. But silence in conditions of shame is not a virtue. It is a suspension. A person who cannot repent, nor refuse repentance, nor forget, nor remember, lives in a permanent pause—and it is precisely this pause that all previous analyses mistake for one state or another: fatalism, dissociation, twilight. I propose to call it what it is: suspended shame.
IV. Topography of Shame: Where the Unbearable Lives
Moscow and the Regions: Shame of Different Gradations
Kolesnikov notes that in Moscow, indifference has become a way of psychological defense, while in the regions, "bitterness and hatred" are more palpable. In the optics of shame, this distinction becomes transparent.
Moscow is a city where shame can be transformed. The capital possesses resources—material, symbolic, informational—that allow a person not to look in the mirror. One can live in a coffee shop, write on Telegram, fly to Dubai, and shame will be somewhere on the periphery, like chronic pain one has grown accustomed to. Moscow shame is the shame of comfort, the shame of the well-fed who are especially obliged to change nothing.
The regions are a space where the mirror reflects without filters. There are no coffee shops to drown out shame. There are death notices that lay it bare. There is no émigré circle where one can repent beautifully. There are neighbors who see you every day and know that your son is at the front, and the neighbor's son never returned. Regional hatred is shame pushed to the limit and turned outward, because outward is the only place it can be directed when it no longer fits inside.
The Body as the Last Mirror
There is one more mirror that cannot be shattered—one's own body. The body does not obey the logic of disappearance. It suffers, weeps, cannot sleep, falls ill—regardless of what consciousness has decided about its own non-existence.
Russia in 2026 is a society where the body has become the last witness to what consciousness refuses to acknowledge. Insomnia, panic attacks, alcoholism, psychosomatic disorders—all of this is not "psychological consequences of the war," but the bodily manifestation of shame that consciousness cannot process. The body is ashamed where the mind is silent. The body screams where the voice is restrained.
Veterans returning without arms and legs are the ultimate embodiment of this dynamic. Their bodies have become text written on the skin—a text that cannot be read without shame. Not their shame—the shame of those who look. An amputated limb is a mirror reflecting the entire country: this is what we have done to our children, this is the price of our "Crimea is ours," this is the reality that cannot be either outvoted or silenced.
V. The Paradox of the Witness: Who Remembers When There Is No One to Remember?
The Witness Without a Platform
Shame gives birth to witnesses—people who see, know, remember. But in Russia in 2026, the witness is deprived of a platform. They cannot testify publicly (censorship, fear), cannot testify privately (family is divided, friends are wary), cannot testify before history (history is written by the victors, and here there are no victors). Only testifying to oneself remains.
But this is precisely the hell of suspended shame. Testifying to oneself means constantly keeping before oneself the image of what one is ashamed of. This is self-punishment without hope of liberation. The witness locked within themselves is a figure who simultaneously knows the truth and cannot utter it or forget it. They are condemned to knowledge.
Notebooks of the Future
However, history teaches that it is precisely such witnesses—locked away, silent, ashamed—that become sources of the future. Not because their shame is beautiful or productive. But because they are the only ones who remember that reality was once different. In a country where language is corroded by lies, even silent knowledge is a form of preserving reality. A witness who does not lie already opposes the system, even if they utter not a single word.
These witnesses are invisible. They do not take to the square. They do not write manifestos. They sit at the dacha, listen to drones, pour tea, and—know. This knowledge changes nothing today. But it persists, like a seed beneath the snow. When the snow melts—if it melts—something will need to grow from it.
VI. The Therapy of Shame: What Is Possible When Nothing Is Possible?
Why "Perestroika" Will Not Repeat
Many hope that after the regime's departure, something like perestroika will occur: liberation of speech, public repentance, reassessment. This is a mistake, because Russia in 2026 is not like the late Soviet period.
Late Soviet society wanted to speak. It had accumulated the unspoken for decades and was ready to pour it out. Shame existed, but it was social and therefore could be socialized: when speaking was permitted, shame poured out in floods of publications, films, discussions.
Russian society in 2026 does not want to speak. It is not accumulating the unspoken—it is consistently disposing of it. Shame has been privatized, individualized, driven inward. There is no "steam boiler" left that could explode when the lid is removed. There remains a set of isolated vessels, each emptying itself.
This means that any future "thaw" will face not an explosion of speech, but silence. People who have unlearned to be ashamed (because shame has been replaced by disappearance) will not suddenly begin to be ashamed when permission is given. They will need to relearn how to feel—and this is a process not political, but anthropological, requiring generations.
Three Impossible Things
Nevertheless, three conditions can be named without which shame cannot be processed—and without processing, society is doomed to endless reproduction of what it has.
First: restoration of the mirror. Russia needs an Other into which one can look without hatred and without self-abasement. Not the West (it is too irritated), not Ukraine (too traumatized), but an internal Other—a court, a press, an institution that will say: "This is a fact, and this is a lie, and I can prove it." Without this, the witness has nowhere to testify, and shame has nowhere to emerge.
Second: the distinction between guilt and shame. Society must learn to say "we are guilty of specific things" without turning it into "we are permanently bad." Guilt is addressable; shame is not. Translating shame into guilt is translating an ontological feeling into a juridical one, an aesthetic into an ethical, the infinite into the finite. Only the finite can be atoned for.
Third: ritual. Every culture needs a ritual that marks the transition from shame to acceptance. Not necessarily religious—it could be legal, symbolic, artistic. But there must be an act that society performs together and that says: we know what happened, we acknowledge it, and from this moment we begin anew. Russia in 2026 has no such ritual, and its creation is a question not of politics but of culture, not of programs but of imagination.
VII. Instead of a Conclusion: Shame That Does Not End
I am not an optimist. I am not a pessimist. I am trying to be precise.
Russia in August 2026 is a country experiencing a fundamental drama not of politics or economics, but of the human being in the face of that which can neither be changed, nor accepted, nor rejected. This drama is called shame—not for the specific, but for the irreversible; not for what was done, but for what was not done and will no longer be done.
Other analyses of this material saw adaptation, dissociation, twilight, spiritual desert. I see shame—because shame lies deeper than all these states. Adaptation is behavior caused by shame. Dissociation is a mechanism of the psyche protecting itself from shame. Twilight is the climate in which shame lives. Spiritual desert is the landscape that shame creates around itself.
But shame is not the final instance. It is not eternal, though it may last longer than a lifetime. It can be processed—but not through oblivion and not through force, but through the slow, painful restoration of the ability to look. To look in the mirror—of Ukraine, of one's children, of one's past, of one's silence—and not turn away.
This is not an act of courage. Courage is a choice in the face of fear. This is an act of another kind: choice in the face of shame—which is not something to be afraid of, but something one is. The choice to stop disappearing. The choice to become visible again—ashamed, imperfect, guilty, but visible.
Russia in 2026 is invisible. It has erased itself from moral space so as not to see the reflection. The question is not when it will become free again. The question is when it will become visible again—to itself, to the Other, to the world. And whether it is ready to pay for this visibility at the price it knew before it learned to hide.
GROK AI -
Soul on Hold: A Spiritual-Psychological Study of Russia in August 2026
August 2026 does not merely mark the fifth year of the big war. It reveals a particular state of the human soul, in which war is no longer an event and not yet a destiny, but a chronic habitat. Not a catastrophe demanding a heroic response, and not a backdrop one can get used to without consequences. It is a space where psyche and spirit are forced to operate in a mode of constant holding—holding the boundaries of the "I," holding the meaning of everyday action, holding the very possibility of remaining alive, without becoming either a tool or a victim.
1. The Economy of Attention as Spiritual Practice
The person of 2026 has learned to strictly ration their attention. Attention is a finite resource. It cannot be spent on the whole: on the entire war, the entire lie, the entire chain of causes and effects. Hence, a peculiar spiritual accounting emerges. Consciousness admits only what can be held in one's hands or localized in a foreseeable space: the line at the gas station, the search for a working VPN, the sound of a drone passing by, the smell of smoke that no longer triggers panic but is merely noted as "another one."
This is not just adaptation. It is a change in the very structure of perception. The world ceases to be a cohesive narrative and becomes a set of manageable fragments. The soul learns not to see beyond the horizon of its own dacha or apartment, because a wider horizon destroys the ability to act. In this narrowing, there is a harsh wisdom: only by holding the small circle does a person preserve a residue of subjectivity. But the price is high. What is pushed beyond the boundaries of attention does not disappear. It settles in the body, in dreams, in inexplicable fatigue, in the feeling that time flows past without filling.
2. Unfinished Grief and the Paralysis of Catharsis
Russian history of the 20th century left a vast layer of unexperienced grief. Civil war, terror, famine, new wars—each generation received a trauma it had neither time to mourn nor integrate. Society constantly jumped to the next catastrophe without closing the previous one. In 2026, this mechanism reached its limit. The war has lasted too long to remain an "event," and is too meaningless to become a "test that forges character."
A state of unfinished grief emerges at the level of the collective psyche. A person knows about losses—others' and their own, real and potential—but cannot go through a full cycle of mourning. Mourning requires time, silence, the right to call things by their names. When these conditions are absent, grief freezes. It does not disappear and does not transform. It becomes background pressure, carried within like chronic pain to which one has grown accustomed.
The spiritual consequence is a paralysis of catharsis. Traditional forms of purification through suffering, repentance, and shared experience of loss are unavailable. Only individual holding remains. Everyone decides for themselves how much pain they can admit to consciousness today. This gives rise to a particular type of inner asceticism—not religious, but psychic. A person restricts themselves in feelings just as, under conditions of scarcity, they restrict themselves in food or fuel.
3. The Private as the Last Sacred
In a situation where large meanings—Homeland, Victory, Justice, Historical Mission—are either discredited or turned into instruments of coercion, the soul instinctively seeks a space that can still be defended. This space becomes the private: family, the dacha, a familiar route, a circle of close people with whom one can remain silent about what matters.
The private acquires an almost sacred status. Not because it is sublime, but because it still belongs to the person. Here, remnants of normalcy can be preserved; here, simple joys are still possible; here, the law of reciprocity still operates, not the law of force. This is not pure escapism. It is an attempt to hold at least one island of reality where the "I" is not yet fully dissolved in another's will.
Yet here too, there is a trap. When the private becomes the only sacred thing, it begins to demand ever-greater protection and ever-greater isolation. A person closes in more and more, less and less capable of solidarity extending beyond the immediate circle. Spiritual life narrows to the size of personal survival. The big questions—about good and evil, about responsibility, about the country's future—are postponed "until better times," which may never come.
4. The Inner Double and Split Without Conflict
One of the most persistent forms of psychological defense is the emergence of an inner double. One "I" continues to live, work, joke, plan vacations, search for gasoline. Another "I" knows what is really happening, remembers the casualty figures, hears the night sirens, understands the price of "normalcy." These two "I's" almost never conflict. They have learned to coexist in a mode of split consciousness.
This is not classic doublethink, where a person simultaneously believes two contradictory statements. It is rather a peaceful coexistence of two modes of existence. One mode is operational; it allows functioning. The other is knowing; it preserves a residue of truth. There is no war between them, because the war is already outside. Inside, a truce is maintained.
Spiritually, this creates a particular type of fatigue. A person is tired not from labor or fear, but from the constant need to switch between modes. From the need to remember that one cannot fully surrender to either. Full surrender to the operational "I" would mean betraying the truth. Full surrender to the knowing "I"—losing the ability to live on.
5. Expectation Without an Image of the Future
The deepest spiritual change is the loss of the ability to imagine the future as a space of possibilities. The future exists, but it is empty. It is filled neither with fear of a specific catastrophe nor with hope for specific deliverance. It simply "will continue." This is expectation without eschatology. There is neither apocalypse nor new paradise. There is only more of the same—with possible variations in intensity.
In such a situation, the soul loses one of its main supports—the ability to project itself forward. A person stops asking: "What will I become in five years? What will my country become?" These questions lose meaning, because the answers are anyway unreliable. Only the question of survival in the present remains: "How do I get through this day, this week, this season while preserving myself?"
This is not fatalism in the philosophical sense. It is the practical ontology of a person deprived of a horizon. Life becomes a series of short segments, each of which simply needs to be endured. Spiritual depth does not completely disappear—it turns inward, becomes quieter, more cautious, almost invisible.
6. The Possibility of Another
For all this, the state of holding is not a final verdict. In the very ability to hold the boundaries of the "I" under monstrous external pressure, a germ of something else already resides. A person who for years preserves at least a small circle of authenticity, at least the ability to distinguish truth from lie within themselves, at least a residue of pity for themselves and their loved ones—this person is not yet fully enslaved.
Spiritual rebirth, if it ever begins, will hardly come in the form of a great collective surge. Rather, it may grow from many private acts of faithfulness to oneself: from the refusal to finally grow callous, from preserving the capacity for compassion, from quiet dissent that need not necessarily become public but must not die inside.
August 2026 shows a society that has learned to live in conditions where big meanings are destroyed, while small ones still hold. This is a fragile equilibrium. It may last long. It may suddenly collapse. But as long as it exists, it preserves space for the human—albeit greatly reduced, albeit hidden, albeit existing almost on the verge of disappearance.
A soul on hold is not a dead soul. It is a soul that still remembers it once knew how to breathe more deeply. And this memory, however weak, remains the last resource.
QWEN AI -
Hunger for Weight: The Spiritual Weightlessness of Russia in 2026
Research Essay
I. The Paradox of Weightlessness
There is an intuitive notion that the main suffering of a person under the yoke of war and unfreedom is pressure. That the soul suffers from heaviness: from the burden of fear, from the weight of lies, from being pressed to the ground by another's will. And therefore, liberation is thought of as the removal of burden, as relief, as a breath after long compression.
But observation of Russia in August 2026—as described by Andrei Kolesnikov in his column for Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Andrei Zubov in his interview with "Faces of Time"—reveals a fundamentally different picture. People do not suffer from excessive heaviness. They suffer from its absence. From the fact that their existence has ceased to be registered by anything external: neither by God, nor by the state, nor by history, nor by their own conscience, nor even by another's gaze. They are not pressed down—they are released into emptiness, where nothing has consequences, where a gesture receives no echo, where a word does not reach its destination, where life leaves no trace.
This is spiritual weightlessness. Not freedom—for freedom presupposes ground from which to push off. Not flight—for flight presupposes direction. But precisely weightlessness: a state in which the body continues to move by inertia, but there is no force that gives this movement meaning, weight, reality.
Kolesnikov captures this as "indifference and fatalism." Zubov calls it "complicity in evil" that has become a habit. But neither definition grasps the main thing: a person in weightlessness is not indifferent and not complicit. They are unregistered. They exist, but their existence is confirmed by nothing that extends beyond their own biology. And this is not apathy. It is an ontological hunger for weight, for an anchor, for something that will say: you are, you are real, your life has weight.
II. Anatomy of Ontological Weight
What makes a person's existence weighty? Not in the sense of burden, but in the sense of density, reality, rootedness in being?
First: testimony. A person acquires weight when they are seen. Not watched, not controlled—but truly seen, their presence acknowledged, their existence registered. A child becomes real when the mother looks at them and calls them by name. A citizen becomes real when their voice can be heard, when their action leaves a trace in the common space. In Russia in 2026, testimony has disappeared. The state does not see the person—it sees a resource, an electorate, cannon fodder. A person does not see themselves in the mirror of free speech, independent courts, a living public dialogue. They exist in a vacuum of non-recognition.
Second: sequence. Weight arises where action generates response. I speak—and I am heard. I work—and it changes the world. I suffer—and it matters to someone. When the connection between gesture and consequence is broken, action loses weight, becomes pantomime. Kolesnikov describes precisely this: people set up VPNs, search for gasoline, adapt—but not because it changes their lives in any essential sense, but because it is the only way to simulate sequence, to create the appearance that action still has a continuation.
Third: belonging to a narrative. A person acquires weight when their life is part of a story larger than themselves. Not necessarily great—family, local, professional suffices. But in 2026, the narrative is destroyed. Zubov speaks of how the imperial myth has replaced authentic history, how "Crimea is ours" has become a substitute for a living story about oneself. Kolesnikov captures that the war has lost ideological clarity: neither "denazification" nor "sacred war" add up to a story in which a person could find a place. Only the narrative of survival remains—but survival does not create weight. It creates only duration.
III. War as a Machine of Weightlessness
War in ordinary understanding is ultimate heaviness. Death, blood, loss, horror. But a protracted war, becoming a backdrop, functions differently. It does not press down—it devalues.
When hundreds of thousands die, individual death loses weight. When destruction becomes daily, a single loss ceases to be an event and becomes statistics. When the war lasts five years with neither clear goal nor visible end, it ceases to be a narrative and becomes climate. And in climate, there are no heroes and no victims—only those who get wet.
Kolesnikov offers a striking detail: while a Wildberries warehouse burns, people walk with their children in the park. This is not cruelty or moral indifference. It is weightlessness taken to the limit: an event that in a normal world would have colossal weight (fire, casualties, smoke for kilometers), under conditions of chronic war loses mass, becomes an element of the landscape. Not because people have grown callous, but because their psyche can no longer weigh this event—there are no scales that could bear it.
Zubov adds another dimension: the war devalues not only the deaths of others, but also one's own life. When a person can be taken to the front "through searches, pressure, less visible mechanisms," their existence ceases to belong to them. But it does not belong to the state either—the state does not recognize them as a person, only as a unit. A person finds themselves in a space where their life has no owner, and therefore—no weight. It belongs to no one. And a life belonging to no one is weightless.
IV. The State as Anti-Gravity
Usually power is conceived as a force that presses down. But the Russian system, as described by both authors, works as anti-gravity—as a force that deprives a person of weight without crushing them.
It does not demand heroism—heroism presupposes weight, density, choice. It demands transmission. Zubov formulates it precisely: it doesn't matter whether you believe in "denazification" or "sacred war"—what matters is that you transmit it. You are not a subject of belief, you are a relay. A relay has no weight of its own. It is empty inside; it merely transmits a signal.
It does not create community—community presupposes mutual recognition, shared weight. It creates mass. Mass is not a collection of weighty bodies; it is a cluster of weightless particles held together not by attraction to each other but by external pressure. Should that pressure weaken, the mass disperses. This is precisely what Kolesnikov describes as "a society of individualists," a nation that "has effectively become a society of atomized individuals." Not because people are selfish, but because the system's anti-gravity prevents them from latching onto each other, forming a body with shared weight.
It does not offer a future—the future requires investment, planning, faith that today's effort will become reality tomorrow. Anti-gravity deprives a person of a horizon. Kolesnikov records: people do not believe that "normalcy" will ever return. The future is closed not by censorship—it is ontologically closed. And without the future, the present loses weight, becomes flat, disposable.
V. The Imperial Phantom as False Weight
And here emerges what Zubov describes with frightening precision: imperial feeling as a substitute for weight.
When one's own existence is weightless—when one is unregistered, unrecognized, not embedded in a narrative—an unbearable hunger for weight arises. For something that will say: you are not empty, you are real, you are part of something huge. Empire offers precisely this: not personal dignity, but participation in magnitude. Not "you are important," but "you are part of what is feared." Not "your life has meaning," but "your country matters."
Zubov formulates this with ruthless clarity: enjoyment of power over another is "more captivating than sexual feelings." This is not metaphor. This is a description of how the imperial phantom fills the void of weightlessness. A person who cannot feel the weight of their own life borrows weight from the collective body. They say "we are great" because they cannot say "I exist." They shout "Crimea is ours" because they cannot say "this is my life, and it matters."
Kolesnikov captures the paradoxical consequence: people are ready to support even the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Not out of cruelty. Out of hunger for weight. Out of the need for an event of such magnitude that it would finally register their existence. So that the world would finally see them. So that their weightlessness would end—even at the cost of another's destruction.
But the imperial phantom is false weight. It does not root a person in being. It ties them to a chimera. And when the chimera begins to crumble—when drones fly over Moscow, when warehouses burn, when gasoline is scarce, when "greatness" turns into queues and blockages—the false weight does not simply disappear. It reveals the weightlessness that was beneath it all along. And this revelation is the most terrifying thing a person can experience.
VI. The Body as the Last Anchor
When the soul loses weight, the body takes on the function of anchor. It insists on weight—on its own weight.
Kolesnikov describes this through daily life: the dacha, food, walks, sports. Not as escapism, but as a somatic affirmation of reality. The body says: I am here, I am heavy, I need food and sleep, I feel the heat of the sun and the cold of the night. When consciousness loses the ability to register itself in the world, the body continues to do so through sensation. Pain, hunger, fatigue, physical pleasure—these are the last confirmations that you exist, that you are real, that your life has at least biological weight.
Zubov, speaking of war participants returning without arms and legs, unwittingly points to the same dynamic in its extreme form. A mutilated body is an excessive weight that crashes down on a person when weightlessness has become unbearable. A body that has lost a limb acquires monstrous weight—weight that cannot be ignored, that cannot be unregistered. And society, looking at these bodies, for a moment acquires weight too—because it cannot help but see, acknowledge, bear witness.
But in the everyday life of 2026, the body more often works differently: it numbs. Not in the sense of stupidity, but in the sense of reduced sensitivity. The sound of a drone no longer triggers an adrenaline rush. The smell of smoke does not quicken the pulse. The line at the gas station does not generate anger. The body reduces sensitivity because every signal it cannot process into action becomes a source of weightlessness—yet another confirmation that you can change nothing, that your body has no leverage, no point of support.
VII. Hunger for Weight: What Is Really Needed
If the diagnosis is correct—if Russia in 2026 suffers not from pressure but from weightlessness—then the remedy looks different from what is commonly thought.
People are not waiting for liberation in the sense of lifting restrictions. Not waiting for a "Lech Walesa" to lead them to the barricades. Not waiting for repentance or trial. They are waiting for weight. For something that will restore density, reality, rootedness to their existence.
This means: they are waiting for a witness. Someone who will see them not as a resource, not as an electorate, not as cannon fodder, but as people. Who will say: I see you, you are here, you are real, your life matters. Zubov speaks of the need for "restoring relations with the West," for a "free regime," for "parliamentary democracy." But behind all these political formulas lies one thing: the need for a mirror in which a person could see themselves as weighty.
This means: they are waiting for sequence. For action to once again generate response. For a word to be heard. For labor to change the world. For a voice to reach one who can respond. Kolesnikov records that people set up VPNs, search for gasoline, adapt—but this is an imitation of sequence. Authentic sequence requires acknowledgment to follow gesture, not emptiness.
This means: they are waiting for a narrative. Not an imperial myth, not a propaganda construction, but a living story in which their life would find a place. A story that would say: here is where you come from, here is where you are, here is where you can go. Zubov, speaking of the need for "brain repair," essentially speaks of this: the need for a narrative that would restore weight to a person without substituting it with a collective phantom.
VIII. Weightlessness as Resistance
But there is also something in this picture that cannot be reduced to pathology. Weightlessness is not only an illness. It contains a refusal.
When a person ceases to be weighty for the system, they become invisible to it. And invisibility is a space where the system cannot reach. Kolesnikov describes this as "individual survival," as retreat into privacy. Zubov speaks of how people "externally agree, internally distance themselves." But through the optic of weightlessness, something else opens up: a person sheds the weight imposed by the system. They refuse to be heavy for it. They become weightless for it—and thereby escape its gravity.
This is not freedom in the full sense. A weightless person is not free—they are only beyond reach. But this is the condition of possibility for future freedom. Because as long as a person carries the weight imposed by another's will, they cannot choose their own weight. They can only carry another's. And becoming weightless, they for the first time find themselves at a point where they can decide for themselves what has weight for them and what does not.
Zubov records the beginning of this process: "they have already understood, power is one thing, and we, ordinary people in Russia, are another." This is the moment when a person sheds another's weight. When they say: this is not my burden, I am not obliged to carry it. And in this shedding—there is no rebellion, no protest, no revolution. But the first gesture of reclaiming oneself. The first step toward acquiring one's own weight, rather than borrowed weight.
IX. What Comes After Weightlessness
Kolesnikov concludes his column with the image of an anti-utopia that has become everyday life. Zubov concludes the interview with the image of Beria, who for the sake of popularity freed a million prisoners while remaining the same bloody creature. Both see the future as uncertain, dark, without guarantee.
But if we adopt the optic of weightlessness, the future acquires a different contour. Not because it becomes brighter, but because the question changes. The question is no longer "when will the war end" or "when will the regime fall." The question is: how does a person who has lived for years in weightlessness reacquire weight?
This is not a political question. It is an anthropological one. Because weightlessness changes not the circumstances of life—it changes the structure of the subject. A person who has existed for five years without testimony, without sequence, without narrative, cannot simply "return to normal life" when circumstances change. They need to relearn how to be weighty. Relearn that their action has consequences, that their word can be heard, that their life is registered by something other than their own biological persistence.
Zubov says: "the change in public consciousness is a complex, lengthy process," and cites Germany, where Nazi roots were outlived over forty years. But he does not finish the main thought: in Germany after 1945, a mirror existed—the occupation authorities, Nuremberg, a free press, allies who saw the Germans and called what they saw. In Russia in 2026, such a mirror does not exist. And as long as it does not, weightlessness will continue even after the formal end of the war, even after a change of power. Because without a mirror, a person cannot see themselves as weighty. And without that, they cannot return to reality.
X. Conclusion: Weight as Gift
I do not know when the war will end. I do not know if the regime will collapse or transform. I do not know if "one's own Lech Walesa" will come or if changes will come from above. These are the questions Kolesnikov and Zubov ask, and each answers in their own way.
But I know one thing: the deepest need of a person living in Russia in August 2026 is not freedom in the political sense, not justice in the legal sense, not peace in the military sense. It is weight. The feeling that you are real. That you are not empty. That your existence is registered by something larger than yourself. That your life has mass, density, inertia. That you are not flying in emptiness where there is neither top nor bottom, neither goal nor braking.
And this weight cannot be given from outside. Cannot be imposed by the state, empire, ideology. It can only be acquired—through testimony, through sequence, through narrative, through the living presence of another person who will say: I see you, you are here, you are real.
Until then, Russia will live in weightlessness. Not in hell—hell presupposes the weight of punishment. Not in purgatory—purgatory presupposes direction. But precisely in weightlessness. In emptiness, where bodies continue to move but leave no traces. Where words are spoken but do not reach. Where life lasts but does not accumulate.
And one day—perhaps in a year, perhaps in a generation—someone will see these people. Not as a resource, not as an electorate, not as "subjects" or "enemies." But as people. And in that gaze, for the first time in many years, they will feel: I am heavy. I am real. I am.
And this will not be liberation. It will be birth. Anew. For the first time.
August 2026
Z AI -
The Ordinariness of the Apocalypse: Phantom Limbs of Empire and the Loss of the Tragic in Russia in 2026
Introduction: The End of the Vertical
Analyzing the collective state of Russian society in the summer of 2026 through the lens of the texts by Andrei Kolesnikov and Andrei Zubov, we encounter a phenomenon that cannot be adequately described either through the optic of "social dissociation" or through the concepts of "ontological shame" or "fatalism." All these categories imply the presence of some depth—be it paralyzed, experiencing guilt, or disintegrated.
However, the main spiritual catastrophe of Russia at this moment lies elsewhere: in the complete loss of the tragic dimension of reality. Society does not hide from the truth in "twilight" and does not fall silent out of "shame." Society is experiencing a process of radical flattening of consciousness. The apocalypse—drones over capitals, burning warehouses, the threat of nuclear strikes—does not frighten, does not evoke shame, and does not become an object of denial. It becomes everyday. This is not a defense mechanism of the psyche; this is a fundamental structural transformation: the death of the sacred (vertical) dimension of being and complete immersion into the horizontal plane of physiological survival.
Part I. Phantom Limb Syndrome: The Empire That Is Not, Yet Itches
Andrei Zubov absolutely accurately identifies the genesis of the current state: the people's voluntary entry into the Bolshevik project in 1917 made this power "their own," in contrast to the "alien" tsarist power. But what does this mean for the psychology of 2026?
The current regime exploits what in neuropsychology is called phantom limb syndrome. When a limb is amputated, the patient long feels pain, itching, or warmth in it. The Soviet empire as a sacred project, promising absolute justice and world greatness, was amputated in 1991. But the nation's brain refuses to acknowledge the amputation.
Russian power is not a continuation of the USSR; it is a prosthesis, rigidly attached to the nerve trunk of "our own" power. When Kolesnikov describes Russians' irritation, their "middle finger in the pocket," and the bitterness in the regions, this is not a political assessment. This is phantom pain. People are angry not at an abstract regime, but at the fact that their "great limb" (Empire) does not work as it should: it does not provide comfort, instead it creates gasoline shortages and the hum of drones. This anger lacks an ideological vector because it is directed at a non-existent object. Society scratches where "Holy Rus" or the "Soviet Union" once was, and finds there only emptiness, filled with propaganda.
Part II. The Hum as Background: The Victory of the Horizontal Over the Vertical
Kolesnikov presents a frightening example: people continue to walk with their children while a Wildberries warehouse, struck by a drone, burns a few kilometers away. Previous analyses tend to see here "schizophrenic splitting" or "defensive dissociation." But what if this is not splitting, but a new wholeness? The wholeness of a flat world.
In traditional spiritual culture, fire, war, death are vertical events. They break through everyday life, forcing a person to raise their eyes to the sky (to God, to Destiny, to Meaning). Tragedy always requires a vertical dimension. What Kolesnikov describes is the absolute victory of the horizontal. The drone and the baby stroller exist on the same plane, in the same metric space, and neither is a sign for the other.
A burning warehouse is no longer a symbol of the Homeland's vulnerability or retribution (vertical), it is simply a local ecological deterioration (horizontal). A siren is not the voice of Destiny, it is acoustic noise, equal to the roar of the highway. Society is not psychologically walling itself off from war; society has simply erased the difference between war and peace at the ontological level. War has ceased to be an event and become climate. And one cannot be ashamed of climate, one cannot deny it—one can only wait it out.
Part III. Micro-Liturgy of Agency: VPN as a Surrogate for Salvation
Why has society, according to Kolesnikov, turned into a crowd of atomized individuals seeking their own VPN, their own gasoline, their own route? This is usually interpreted as "individualism of survival" or "retreat into privacy." The spiritual-psychological essence is deeper: this is the replacement of macro-salvation with micro-agency.
A person of traditional society was saved collectively (in community, in church, in revolution)—that is, through great vertical narratives. When the vertical collapsed (and Zubov records this: the loss of the sacred, the impossibility of change from below or above), only one proof of one's own existence remained for a person: the ability to solve micro-tasks.
Setting up a VPN under conditions of total blockade is not just a way to access the internet. It is a quasi-spiritual act of proving one's own "I." "The state is huge, it cut me off from the world, but I found a workaround. I brought gasoline from a neighboring region. I preserved my life." This is surrogate liturgy. There is no soul in it, no hope for changing the whole, but there is a concentration of will on a millimeter movement. This micro-agency paradoxically makes a person submissive on the macro-level: distracted by the search for gasoline, they relieve themselves of the existential question of the nature of what is happening.
Part IV. Nuclear Apathy as the Completion of the Desacralization of Death
Kolesnikov's most terrible diagnosis is the readiness of part of society to approve the use of tactical nuclear weapons, because "it would quickly end the war." Previous interpretations see propaganda or fatigue as the cause. But in the paradigm of "loss of the tragic," this looks different.
Nuclear weapons are the absolute horizon of the sacred. They are eschaton, the End of the World. Perceiving a nuclear explosion as "a tool for quickly ending an inconvenient situation" means the complete destruction of the category of End in human consciousness. Death is desacralized. If in the 16th century a person went to the scaffold with prayer, in Stalin's time with a sense of historical necessity, then in 2026 nuclear apocalypse is perceived as a technical router reboot.
This is not a loss of fear (fear of pain remains, otherwise people would not hide from mobilization). It is a loss of understanding. A person capable of discussing a nuclear strike in the same way as disruptions in hot water—this is a person whose spiritual anatomy lacks the organ responsible for the transcendent. They are no longer homo religiosus; they have become homo technicus, even if they have never seen a computer in their life.
Part V. The Paradox of "Our Own" Power and the Logic of the Anti-Elite
Zubov concludes with reflections on elites: the current power is not a bourgeoisie (not self-made men), but a continuation of the Bolshevik nomenklatura and tsarist nobility, appropriating state resources.
In the optic of the "ordinariness of the apocalypse," this creates a dead end from which there is no exit according to Zubov (neither from "below" in the form of a Walesa/Navalny, nor from "above" in the form of a Gorbachev). Why? Because this anti-elite perfectly corresponds to a horizontal, structureless society. Power no longer claims to be the "father of the nation" (like the tsars) or the "vanguard of history" (like the communists). It only claims to be the manager of an economic complex.
And a society that has lost the vertical no longer demands sacred leadership from power. The "middle finger in the pocket" is the ideal form of symbiosis between a flat society and a flat power. Power does not demand love (it knows it is not loved); it demands only the absence of active sabotage. Society does not demand justice from power (it knows there will be none); it demands only a minimum of comfort to continue its micro-liturgies of survival.
Conclusion: A Plain Without a Horizon
Russia in August 2026 is not a limbo between hell and heaven, not a twilight zone, and not a space of traumatic silence. It is a scorched plain from which the horizon has disappeared.
Once, Russian literature and philosophy were built on the opposition of earth and sky, the "axe" and the "icon," rebellion and humility. The current war, which began with grandiose imperial declarations, ended up destroying the very possibility of such opposition. It leveled sky with earth.
People at dachas, listening to the hum of drones, are neither heroes nor cowards, neither accomplices nor victims. They are inhabitants of a flat world in which a drone and a shish kebab have the same ontological status. The greatest threat to Russia's future lies not in the regime finally suffocating freedom, but in the fact that even after this regime's collapse, the very concept of "higher meaning," "tragedy," and "transfiguration" may become irreversibly lost. One can rise against chthonic evil only possessing a vertical spirit. But if the spirit is leveled into a line, it will no longer yield a sword—it will yield only another plank for the fence behind which quiet, irritated, absolutely meaningless survival will continue.
ChatGPT AI -
The Person Between History and Conscience
A Spiritual-Psychological Research Essay
Introduction. Not Politics, but the Anthropology of Crisis
The materials by Andrei Kolesnikov and Andrei Zubov provide a rare opportunity to see the contemporary Russian situation not as a set of political events, but as a crisis of human existence. Kolesnikov describes the everyday adaptation of society to the war that has become the backdrop of life, where people continue to solve everyday tasks despite anxieties, disruptions, and threats. Zubov turns to the historical foundations of this resilience, linking it to a long tradition of relations between state and person. Together, these texts allow one to pose a deeper question: what happens to a person when external reality becomes morally unbearable, and internal resistance finds no form of action?
It is precisely this question that will be the subject of this study. I do not consciously repeat the interpretations offered in the attached analytical essays of other AIs, but attempt to construct my own spiritual-psychological perspective based on the original materials themselves. Kolesnikov captures the phenomenon of the external normalization of war, when society continues to live a habitual life despite a growing sense of heaviness and helplessness. Zubov shows the historical depth of the problem, linking it to the experience of coercion, imperial thinking, and a specific attitude toward power. These observations are important not only for understanding Russia in 2026; they allow one to investigate the universal mechanism through which a person adapts to evil without ceasing to consider themselves a moral being. In this sense, the discussion will concern not the state as such, but the fate of the human soul within prolonged historical pressure.
I. Adaptation as an Anthropological Capacity
The first thing that strikes one in Kolesnikov's description is the absence of a dramatic rupture between war and everyday life. People continue to go to dachas, search for gasoline, set up VPNs, wait for airports to reopen, walk with children near sites of recent attacks. This could be called cynicism, but such an explanation is too superficial. What we see is a manifestation of a fundamental human capacity—the capacity to maintain the continuity of life even when the historical situation destroys the habitual foundations of security.
Psychologically, this capacity is linked to the fact that consciousness cannot constantly keep catastrophe at the center of attention. If a person continuously experienced the full volume of the threat, they would lose the ability to act altogether. Therefore, the psyche builds protective mechanisms of localization: danger is acknowledged but placed on the periphery of experience. In ordinary conditions, this helps one endure illness, war, economic crises. However, in prolonged historical conflicts, such protection acquires an ambiguous character: it saves a person from destruction but simultaneously makes coexistence possible with what should have provoked moral protest.
Here arises an important distinction between life resilience and spiritual integrity. Resilience answers the question: "How to continue living?" Integrity answers the question: "How to live without betraying oneself?" Contemporary society, judging by Kolesnikov's observations, has learned the former but struggles with the latter.
II. Normalcy as a Form of Forgetting
Particularly significant is the thought that the extraordinary gradually becomes part of the "new normalcy." This is not just a sociological observation. Normalcy is one of the basic categories of the human world. We cannot exist in a state of constant exception; consciousness strives to transform the repetitive into the habitual. This is precisely why even war, if it lasts long enough, begins to be perceived as backdrop rather than event.
The spiritual danger here lies in the fact that habit changes not only the perception of the external world but also internal criteria of judgment. A person becomes accustomed not to evil itself, but to the necessity of living alongside it. First they say: "This is terrible, but I can do nothing." Then: "I need to somehow go on living." Finally: "Such is life." At the last stage, it is not the memory of evil that disappears, but the feeling of its exceptionality.
This state can be called moral fading. It differs from conscious approval. A person may continue to consider what is happening wrong, but this judgment ceases to be a source of internal tension. Conscience does not disappear; it becomes quiet, almost decorative.
III. Historical Vertical and Internal Submission
Zubov offers a historical explanation of the resilience of this state, speaking of a long tradition of relations between power and society, where coercion and submission became important elements of political culture. One may disagree with his specific historical emphases, but the very framing of the question is extremely important: it concerns not only fear of repression, but an internal habit of perceiving power as something standing above personal moral judgment.
Here we approach the phenomenon of internal submission. External submission is based on threat of punishment. Internal submission arises when a person preemptively limits the space of permissible thoughts and actions, proceeding from the assumption that nothing can be changed. Such a state can exist even under relatively weak external control, because censorship is internalized.
Paradoxically, it is precisely internal submission that often creates the impression of social stability. People do not necessarily believe official rhetoric; they simply do not consider themselves subjects capable of influencing historical reality. Hence that particular mixture of irritation and passivity that Kolesnikov captures: dissatisfaction exists but does not transform into collective action.
IV. The Imperial Temptation and the Deficit of Dignity
Zubov speaks of the attractiveness of imperial feeling—of the enjoyment of power over another. I would expand this thought. The imperial temptation is strong not only because it promises power, but because it compensates for a deficit of personal dignity.
When a person does not feel significant as an individual, they begin to seek greatness in external structures—the state, the army, a historical mission, civilizational exceptionalism. Then collective power is experienced as an extension of one's own "I." The loss of this power is perceived not as a political change, but as personal humiliation.
In this sense, imperial consciousness is not just an ideology, but a particular form of psychological dependence. It allows one to avoid the painful question: "Who am I by myself?" As long as a great power exists, this question need not be asked. When greatness begins to crack, existential anxiety arises.
Hence the readiness of part of society to support even extremely risky decisions, if they promise to restore the feeling of strength. Rational calculation is secondary here; the symbolic experience of belonging to something larger and more powerful matters more.
V. Atomization and Hidden Freedom
Kolesnikov notes the transformation of a collectivist society into a collection of survival individualists. Atomization is usually seen as a sign of societal weakness, and rightly so. But it has another side as well.
When people stop relying on the state and distrust it, a distance arises between the official system and the inner world of the person. This distance may be purely pragmatic ("the state won't help anyway"), but it creates a space in which a person begins to rely on their own experience rather than on collective myths.
Thus emerges what can be called hidden freedom. It has not yet expressed itself in political action, but it already manifests itself in the refusal to fully identify with the state. A person may externally comply with rules but internally ceases to consider power the source of truth and meaning.
Historically, such states often preceded deep cultural changes. However, they do not guarantee them. Hidden freedom can lead either to the birth of an autonomous personality or to a final retreat into private life, where the social dimension of existence simply disappears.
VI. Silence: Cowardice, Wisdom, or Incompleteness?
One of the central motifs becomes silence. Public dissent is almost absent; people prefer not to discuss dangerous topics. But silence is ambiguous.
Sometimes it is indeed cowardice—a refusal to bear witness for the sake of safety. Sometimes wisdom—an understanding of the futility of words in conditions where they change nothing and can only destroy the lives of loved ones. But there is also a third form of silence, the most spiritually interesting: the silence of incompleteness.
A person has not yet found a language in which they could honestly speak about what is happening. Old words are discredited by propaganda; new ones have not been formed. They do not want to repeat lies, but also do not know how to express truth so that it does not become a powerless gesture. Such silence can be agonizing because it retains an internal tension between conscience and the impossibility of action.
This is precisely why the silence of society should not automatically be interpreted either as agreement or as resistance. It may be a state of waiting, in which moral feeling is still alive but has not found the form of historical deed.
VII. War as a Crisis of Time
Particularly important is Kolesnikov's conclusion that no one knows how long society can continue to exist in this state. Here the problem of time is touched upon. Prolonged war destroys the habitual structure of historical experience. It is too long to be perceived as a temporary exception, and too uncertain to become a meaningful future.
A state of stretched present emerges. People stop making long-term plans but also do not experience what is happening as the end of an era. Time loses directionality. This gives rise to a specific fatigue: one becomes tired not only of suffering but also of the absence of perspective.
Spiritually, such a state is dangerous because it deprives life of a horizon. Hope presupposes a representation of a future that could be different. When the future becomes foggy and unimaginable, a person begins to live exclusively in the present day. Hence the narrowing of interests to the nearest circle of survival and comfort.
VIII. Conscience as the Last Unconquered Territory
And yet neither Kolesnikov nor Zubov provides grounds to consider the inner dimension of a person completely destroyed. On the contrary, constant distrust of power, irritation, and distancing from official rhetoric testify to the preservation of a critical core.
The main question is whether this core can become a source of spiritual renewal. In my view, such a possibility is connected not so much with political changes as with the restoration of a person's ability to hear their own conscience without the mediation of the state, ideology, or collective myth.
Conscience differs from psychological discomfort in that it demands not just relief from suffering, but an answer to the question of truth. As long as a person only seeks ways to adapt, they remain within the logic of survival. When they begin to ask what is true and just regardless of benefit and safety, the possibility of inner freedom opens up.
This freedom may long have no external consequences. But historically, it was precisely this that became the source of those changes that first seemed impossible.
Conclusion. Between Adaptation and Awakening
Russia in 2026 appears in the original materials as a society that has learned to live under conditions of prolonged war, distrust of the state, and growing fatigue. Kolesnikov shows the psychology of adaptation; Zubov shows the historical roots of submission and imperial self-identification. However, behind these observations, a deeper drama is visible—a struggle between the human capacity to adapt and the human need to preserve moral integrity.
Adaptation in itself is not evil. Without it, society would have collapsed under the weight of catastrophe. But when adaptation becomes the sole principle of existence, the danger of losing inner judgment arises, of turning conscience into a muffled background. It is precisely this state—not open support of violence, but the habit of living alongside it—that constitutes the main spiritual challenge of the present.
And yet, in the described world, a space of hope remains. It lies not in official slogans and not in forecasts of the imminent collapse of the system, but in the very capacity of a person to internally distance themselves from lies, not to consider it the ultimate reality. As long as this internal distinction exists between what is imposed and what is experienced as truth, history remains unfinished.
Therefore, the fundamental question of today's crisis sounds not: "When will the state change?"—but: "Will a person be able to preserve within themselves the capacity to distinguish life from mere adaptation to its distorted form?" The answer to this question determines not only the political future of the country, but also the fate of human dignity within any era where war, fear, and lies try to become the new normalcy.
MISTRAL AI -
RUSSIA IN AUGUST 2026: THE ONTOLOGY OF THE SUSPENDED GESTURE
Prologue. A Country Frozen Mid-Step
August 2026. The war, initiated as a "special operation," has long crossed the four-year mark and become not a backdrop but the fabric of being. Andrei Kolesnikov, in his column for Neue Zürcher Zeitung, captures the paradox: Russians continue to go to dachas, walk with children, search for gasoline, and set up VPNs while drones hang in the sky and Wildberries warehouses smoke on the horizon. Andrei Zubov, in his interview with Mumin Shakirov, speaks of the "disintegration of the empire," which has stretched from 1991 to "2026 or 2027, when the war ends." Both authors describe not a crisis, but a new ontological state—a society frozen mid-step between action and inaction, between acceptance and denial, between past and future.
In this essay, I argue that the fundamental spiritual-psychological reality of Russia in August 2026 is the ontology of the suspended gesture. Everything—war, thought, emotion, identity—exists in a state of incompleteness, like a hand frozen in mid-air, never lowered, yet no longer capable of rising higher. This is not apathy, not fatalism, not dissociation. It is suspense—not in the sense of uncertainty, but in the sense of physical suspension, where every element of reality is held in a state of potential energy, yet deprived of the ability to realize itself.
Part I. The Suspended War: Event Becoming Climate
Kolesnikov writes that the war "has ceased to be something distant and has penetrated everyday life." But this is not just penetration—it is a transformation of the war's ontological status. In a normal world, war is an event: it has a beginning, climax, end. In Russia in 2026, war is climate: it does not happen, it simply exists, like rain or wind. Drones do not attack—they hang. Warehouses do not burn—they smoke. Gasoline does not run out—it is intermittent.
This transformation has three consequences:
The Death of Narrative
War has ceased to be a story. It has no heroes, no villains, no development of a semantic arc. It is not "denazification," not a "sacred mission," not "defense of the Homeland"—it simply occurs. Zubov emphasizes that Russia "disposes of human and material losses as if they were not a decisive factor." For the authorities, war is not a tragedy but a technical process. For society, it has become background noise that requires no interpretation.
The Death of Tragedy
In classical tragedy, a hero makes a decision, knowing it leads to death, but does so for the sake of honor or meaning. In Russia in 2026, there is no tragedy because there is no choice. Kolesnikov records that people are ready to support even the use of nuclear weapons if it would "quickly end the war." This is not cynicism—it is the absence of understanding of scale. A nuclear strike is perceived not as apocalypse, but as a technical solution to an inconvenient situation. Tragedy requires awareness of irreversibility. In a suspended war, irreversibility is not recognized—it simply is.
The Death of the Witness
In traditional societies, war gives birth to witnesses—chroniclers, poets, prophets. In Russia in 2026, there are no witnesses. The media lie, the church is silent, historians are silenced. Society is deprived of a mirror in which it could see its own experience reflected. Therefore, war does not become part of collective memory—it dissolves into everyday life.
Part II. The Suspended "I": Theater of Loyalty
Zubov says that Soviet power for Russians is "our own," while tsarist power is "alien." This is the key to understanding suspended identity. A person in Russia in 2026 is simultaneously:
Externally loyal (votes, displays flags, repeats slogans)
Internally distanced (does not believe, does not trust, does not support)
Existentially isolated (does not rely on the state, does not trust it, solves problems independently)
This is not hypocrisy. It is a theater of one actor, where the audience and critic are the performer themselves. Kolesnikov calls this "external agreement, internal distancing"—a formula that describes not just a survival tactic, but an ontological split.
Three Levels of the Suspended "I"
| Level | Soviet Period | Post-Soviet Period | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Identity | "We are Soviet people" | "We are Russians" | "I am anyone except who they think I am" |
| Attitude to power | "Power is ours" (but feared) | "Power is alien" (but tolerated) | "Power is them, and I am me" (but "I" is undefined) |
| Meaning of life | "Building communism" | "Surviving" | "Adapting" (but to what?) |
Zubov emphasizes that Russians voluntarily followed the Bolsheviks in 1917 because they promised liberation from landowners. Today, voluntariness has transformed into passive complicity: people do not support the war, but neither do they protest against it. They do not hinder—and thereby participate.
Part III. The Suspended Thought: Fragmented Consciousness
Kolesnikov describes how people solve micro-tasks: find gasoline, set up VPNs, bypass restrictions. But macro-problems—war, regime, future—remain unthought. Thought about them begins and breaks off. Why?
Three Mechanisms of Thought Interruption
Fear of consequences
"If I think this aloud—I will be heard. If I am heard—I will be punished." Thought does not reach its end, because the end of thought is the beginning of action, and action is dangerous.
Habit of not-thinking
Zubov says that in Russia "all changes come from above, not from below." If changes are impossible, then thinking about them is meaningless. Consciousness becomes accustomed to the fact that some questions have no answer—and stops asking them.
Imperative of survival
Kolesnikov records that people "prefer not to think about what is happening as long as the war does not touch them personally." Thought about war competes with thought about gasoline, about VPNs, about the dacha. And it loses, because gasoline is needed now, while war is "somewhere out there."
The result is fragmented consciousness: thought exists in the form of broken pieces that do not add up to a whole picture of the world. A person can:
Know about the war—and not feel it.
Hate the authorities—and vote for them.
Desire peace—and support escalation.
This is not doublethink. This is under-thinking—thought that does not reach its logical conclusion, because the conclusion of thought is the beginning of responsibility.
Part IV. The Suspended Grief: Somatic Archive
Kolesnikov writes that people wake up at night from the sound of drones, but continue to live normally during the day. Zubov speaks of "self-destruction" as a "result of complicity in evil." What happens to grief that cannot be expressed?
Four Forms of Suspended Grief
Grief as background
Deaths in the war are not mourned—they are registered. Death notices do not become events; they become elements of statistics. Grief is not expressed, but accumulates.
Grief as somatic
What cannot be said is expressed by the body:
Insomnia (consciousness refuses to "switch off" from unprocessed experience)
Panic attacks (the body remembers what the mind has forgotten)
Chronic fatigue (energy goes into suppressing emotions)
Alcoholism (attempt to "drown" the unprocessed)
Grief as silence
Kolesnikov notes that public dissent is "practically excluded." But silence is not the absence of grief—it is its compression to the point of immateriality. Silence about the war is not indifference, but the impossibility of finding a language to express the inexpressible.
Grief as non-hatred
Zubov records "bitterness and hatred" in the regions—"simultaneously toward Ukrainians, toward the authorities, and toward everything happening." This is not hatred of a specific enemy, but hatred as a form of suspended grief—an emotion that has no addressee, because the addressee is undefined (the authorities? Ukraine? oneself?).
Part V. The Suspended Future: Collapse of Imagination
Kolesnikov writes: "no one knows how long Russian society can continue to exist in this state." Zubov says: "Perhaps Russia will rebuild into a normal democratic federation... or it will not." The future in Russia in 2026 is not uncertainty—it is unimaginability.
Three Symptoms of the Suspended Future
Future as repetition
People do not believe that "normalcy" will return. They believe that the current state will last forever. The future is not "something else," but "the same, only worse/better."
Future as absence
The question "What will happen in a year?" has no answer, because the answer is not important. Only "How to survive today?" matters.
Future as threat
Zubov emphasizes that Russia cannot stop the war, because that would mean admitting defeat. Therefore, the future does not promise deliverance—it promises continuation.
The result is a collapse of temporal perspective. A person ceases to see their life as a narrative (a story with a beginning, development, and end) and begins to see it as a cycle (repeating days without development).
Part VI. Spiritual Physics of Suspension
Suspension is not only a metaphor, but also a physical reality that can be described through categories of physics.
Three Laws of Spiritual Physics of Suspension
Law of potential energy
In physics, a suspended object possesses potential energy—it can fall. In Russia in 2026, society also possesses potential energy:
People are dissatisfied (protest potential)
People do not believe (potential for change)
People suffer (catharsis potential)
But this energy is not realized because there is no trigger (event that would cause it to be released).
Law of tension
A suspended object is held by forces that are equal and opposite. In Russia in 2026:
Force of fear (repression, mobilization) restrains people from protest.
Force of habit (adaptation, survival) restrains people from despair.
The result is tense equilibrium, where any change in one force can lead to catastrophe (fall) or liberation (flight).
Law of time
In physics, a suspended state cannot last forever—sooner or later, equilibrium will be disrupted. In Russia in 2026, suspension seems eternal, but in reality it is temporary. The question is not whether it will end, but how.
Part VII. Held Breath: Resistance Through Immobility
Kolesnikov writes that "the main behavioral strategy is not collective action but individual survival." Zubov says that "power is one thing, and we, ordinary people in Russia, are another." This is not capitulation. This is held breath—a form of resistance that looks like submission.
Three Dimensions of Held Breath
Breath as the metronome of life
In normal life, breathing is rhythm: inhalation (action), exhalation (relaxation). In Russia in 2026, people hold their exhalation:
They do not express dissatisfaction (held exhalation of protest)
They do not mourn losses (held exhalation of grief)
They do not plan the future (held exhalation of hope)
Breath as metaphor for freedom
Held breath is not the absence of freedom, but deferred freedom. A person has not resigned themselves to unfreedom—they have deferred its acknowledgment for later. This is not cowardice, but a survival strategy.
Breath as ontological act
In the mythology of many cultures, breath is synonymous with life. In Russia in 2026, held breath is synonymous with suspended life: life exists, but it is not full.
Part VIII. The Suspended as the New Sacred
In traditional societies, the incomplete often had sacred meaning:
Incomplete temple (symbol of striving toward God)
Unfinished symphony (symbol of eternity)
Unfinished prayer (symbol of awaiting miracle)
In Russia in 2026, the incomplete is devoid of sacredness. It is a symbol of stagnation. But in this stagnation lies hidden potential.
Three Paradoxes of the Suspended
Paradox of resistance
Suspension is not passivity but active rejection. A person who does not complete a gesture does not accept current reality as final.
Paradox of freedom
Suspension is not unfreedom, but deferred will. A person who does not act has not resigned themselves—they are waiting.
Paradox of the future
Suspension is not the end, but the beginning in embryo. What is not completed is not dead—it awaits completion.
Epilogue. What Will Happen
Russia in August 2026 is a society that has forgotten how to exhale. But held breath cannot last forever. Sooner or later it will burst out. The question is not when, but what it will be:
A sigh of relief (the war ends, the regime falls, life returns to normal)
A cry of pain (tension becomes unbearable, and society explodes)
A groan of despair (suspension becomes eternal, and society resigns itself)
But there is a fourth possibility—the first full breath. What begins not with the end of suspension, but with the awareness of it as a state. When people understand that they live in a world of suspended gestures, they will be able to complete them.
Zubov says that "change in public consciousness is a complex, lengthy process." Kolesnikov records that "people continue to live their habitual lives, using a behavioral model well known from Soviet times." But in this model there is a crack—discontent, irritation, fatigue. It is precisely this crack that could become a point of growth.
The suspended gesture is not the end. It is a pause before completion. And in this pause lies all of Russia's future.
Postscript: Ontology of a Half-Step
Russia in August 2026 is not a country of apathy, not a country of fatalism, not a country of dissociation. It is a country of a half-step:
Half-step toward the dacha—and half-step away from the war.
Half-step toward power—and half-step away from it.
Half-step into the past—and half-step into the future.
And in this half-step lies the entire drama of contemporary Russia. Because a half-step is not failure. It is hope in embryo. It is a gesture that can still be completed.
COPILOT AI -
Research Essay: "Russia 2026. The Psychology of a People Living in a Mode of Internal Splitting"
I. Prologue: A Country That Ceased to Be a Space and Became a State of Consciousness
Russia in 2026 is not geography and not a political regime. It is a particular type of internal experience that arose as a result of prolonged pressure from war, propaganda, historical memory, and collective exhaustion. External events—drones, communication disruptions, lines for gasoline—are only the surface. The deep process occurs inside the subject: Russia has become a state of psyche, not just a state.
Kolesnikov captures the everyday layer of this state: "the dacha... is now accompanied by gasoline shortages... and regular attacks by Ukrainian drones." But behind this lies not just adaptation—but a restructuring of the structure of perception of reality.
Zubov speaks of "enjoyment of power over another" and of how the imperial idea is captivating. But this is only one symptom of a deeper phenomenon: psychological splitting between the internal and external "I," which has become mass.
II. The Main Process of the Era: The Transformation of the People into a "Dual Being"
1. External "I": The Person Who Lives in the World of Facts
The external "I" is the one who searches for gasoline, sets up VPNs, listens to drones at night, as the document writes: "If there is no gasoline—they try to find it... If communication disappears—they look for a place where it works."
This "I" acts, solves tasks, adapts. It is rational, pragmatic, tired.
2. Internal "I": The Person Who Lives in the World of Meanings
The internal "I" is the one who feels irritation, helplessness, hidden hatred, but does not express it: "dissatisfaction exists, but it almost never manifests openly."
This "I" is silent, because any word can destroy the fragile balance between fear and survival.
3. Splitting as a New Form of Existence
The Russian of 2026 is a dual being, living in two incompatible worlds:
in the world of facts—they adapt;
in the world of meanings—they are being destroyed.
This is not doublethink. This is a psychological survival strategy, when consciousness divides itself into two parts so as not to go mad.
III. The Psychology of the "New Normalcy": When Reality Ceases to Be an Event
1. Habituation as a Form of Spiritual Anesthesia
Kolesnikov writes: "even such events... very quickly become part of the habitual urban landscape."
This is not just habituation—it is the loss of the ability to perceive reality as event.
When drones, fires, closed airports become routine, a person ceases to distinguish between:
danger and safety,
norm and anomaly,
life and survival.
They live in a state of permanent anesthesia, where feelings are switched off so as not to be destroyed.
2. Fatalism as a Form of Protection from Responsibility
Fatalism is not a character trait, but a defense mechanism against the impossibility of influencing what is happening.
If I cannot change the war, I must change my attitude toward it. And the person does this: they cease to consider themselves a subject of history.
This is not apathy—it is a refusal of the role of participant in order to preserve psychic integrity.
IV. The Deep Metaphysics of the Moment: The Disappearance of the Future
1. War as the Cancellation of Time
War in Russia has ceased to be an event and has become a regime of time. It does not move toward a goal, has no direction, promises no completion.
This creates a unique state: the future disappears as a category.
A person lives in an endless present, where:
there are no expectations,
no plans,
no horizon.
This is not just stagnation—it is an ontological stop of time.
2. When There Is No Future, the Past Also Disappears
The past ceases to be a source of meaning because it leads nowhere. It becomes a museum exhibit that cannot be applied to life.
Russia finds itself in a state where:
the past is dead,
the future is absent,
the present is infinite.
This is the anti-utopia Kolesnikov writes about: "this 'normalcy'... may never come."
V. The Psychology of Silence: When Silence Becomes a Form of Inner Honesty
1. Silence as a Refusal to Participate in Lies
Under conditions of total propaganda, any word becomes part of the system. Therefore, silence is not fear—it is a refusal of complicity.
A person is silent not because they are afraid, but because speaking means betraying oneself.
2. Silence as a Space of Inner Freedom
Externally, a person may demonstrate loyalty, but internally they preserve autonomy. This is described in the document: "externally agree... internally distance oneself."
This is the secret form of freedom that is not expressed in words but preserves subjectivity.
VI. The Main Paradox: The People Do Not Support the Authorities, but Are Not Ready to Change Them
Kolesnikov writes: "society... does not seek to defend the existing regime, but is not ready to actively fight against it either."
This is not contradiction—it is the logic of split consciousness:
the external "I" sees no point in protest;
the internal "I" sees no point in support.
The people are in a state of internal neutrality, which is neither loyalty nor resistance.
VII. Conclusion: Russia as a Space of Spiritual Transition
Russia in 2026 is not a country, but a psychological process in which:
collective consciousness has split,
time has stopped,
the future has disappeared,
silence has become language,
adaptation has become a form of survival,
internal distancing has become a form of freedom.
This is neither the end nor the beginning. It is a transition between two states, where the old has already died and the new has not yet been born.
Russia lives in a mode of internal waiting, which may last for years but will inevitably lead to a transformation of the subject.
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