Andrei Zubov. Why in Russia the Bolshevik past is accepted as one's own. Lecture in Riga, August 11, 2026
DeepSeek AI - Summary:
Why does a people that endured terror, famine, and repression continue to love its executioners? Why is Stalin "ours," while Stolypin is alien? Why does the thousand-year history before 1917 seem like a myth, while the seventy years of Soviet power are like one's own flesh and blood? In his lecture delivered in Riga, historian Andrei Zubov seeks the answer not in economics and not in propaganda, but in the depths of collective will and historical memory.
He introduces the concept of the "thelesic factor" — the capacity of a people to make a fateful choice, similar to the choice of an individual. The key to the riddle lies in the unrepented sin of serfdom: having freed the peasants, the authorities did not ask forgiveness, and the suppressed guilt returned as vengeance. The people, having rejected the old world "to its foundations," chose Soviet power as their own — and did not repent of that choice. Thus arose the rupture of ancestral memory, the cult of the leader instead of God, and the machine of universal complicity.
Zubov shows the only way out of this dead end — metanoia, a change of mind, following the example of postwar Germany, which acknowledged its crimes. Only the truth about the past, spoken to the end, is capable of recasting fate and returning to the people their history.
DeepSeek AI - Who, where, and when delivered the lecture
The lecture was delivered by historian Andrei Borisovich Zubov on August 11, 2026, in Riga (Latvia). The lecture was given at the presentation of Volume IV of the project "The History of Russia in the 19th Century." The publication on the channel "Lectures of A.B. Zubov" is dated September 17, 2026.
Maximally detailed retelling of the lecture
Andrei Zubov begins by saying that the first presentation of the project took place at the end of May in Paris, but for the eastern part of Europe it is specifically the Riga presentation that matters. He says that this is the fruit of his many years of reflection on 20th-century history and modernity. He poses the main question: why, despite the fact that many people, historians, and Memorial spoke about the crimes and horrors of Russian 20th-century history, do most people in Russia objectively consider Stalin the most outstanding statesman in the entire thousand-year history? Why do they completely fail to know and forget what happened before the seventeenth year? What is the matter? And is there an explanation for this?
The explanation, of course, is not some organic stupidity of the Russian people. They are just as intelligent as everyone else, and just as foolish as everyone else. Moreover, this is not about the Russian people in the ethnic sense. Unfortunately, love for the Soviet past is very widespread and extends beyond the borders of the present Russian Federation. Nostalgia for Soviet times afflicts people throughout the entire post-Soviet space. And even, to be honest, in countries that were once of socialist orientation, satellites of the Soviet Union. Zubov himself taught for four years in the Czech Republic and saw that nostalgia for that time is great there. Not because the Czech Republic was occupied, but because there was such a Soviet time when life was secure and one did not have to struggle for one's existence. In the Czech Republic this is marginal. But why in Russia is the thousand-year history before October 1917 perceived as some sort of mythical, almost pre-history? That is precisely why Zubov is writing the history of the 19th century, in order to actualize it. And the history of the 20th century is not simply well known; it is considered one's own. Brezhnev is ours, Khrushchev is ours, Stalin is definitely ours. Even Lenin. What is going on here? Why pride in the empire? Before the revolution the empire was even larger than after the seventeenth year, but all of that is forgotten. Something else is at work here. Even about Stalin, Putin, the current dictator of Russia, speaks. Many people no longer like him now, because the war is clearly not being won — the war is being lost. Putin, perhaps not very much, but all the same he is ours. He is one of us. He is one of us. But Stolypin is not. No, he is handsome, with a mustache, a fine-looking man, but not one of us, it is unclear where he came from.
Zubov says that after long reflection he thinks the problem lies in one thing. That past which existed before the seventeenth year was not simply long ago; it was consciously rejected by our people. Not only by the people of the Russian Federation. The first, in fact, if one does not read the ideologues of patriotism, also by the people of Ukraine, and Belarus, all of it has gone away. Someone remembers it, someone talks about it. It is not ours. You understand, when we speak of France, especially Italy, England, there one's own history, even the history of families, of simple non-aristocratic families, goes back into the distant past. Here, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Belarus, in Kazakhstan, for the majority in the Caucasus, ancestral memory is cut off for the overwhelming majority of people at the third or fourth generation. Somehow this is connected with that Rubicon of the seventeenth year. It does not go further back. What was there before? Who were your great-great-grandfathers, people know little and for the most part are little interested. Recently interest has grown somewhat in intellectual circles. People have begun using archives and studying something, but the majority do not know their own past, or it is absolutely mythologized. My ancestors somewhere once came from somewhere, they heard from grandmother, the nose is crooked, so from the Caucasus, with the Mongols, and so on. Some complete nonsense.
In reality that past was rejected, as a girlfriend of one's youth is sometimes rejected in order to make a good marriage, to marry well. As some wonderful work is rejected, say, acting in the theater, in order to arrange one's life and earn good money. And a person forever puts a cross on his dream in order to settle well in life. In just the same way, what existed in the seventeenth year was rejected. But it was rejected far from as beautifully, not as dramatically, positively, as we reject first love, first love, so as not especially successful, as we reject that very vocation which we later remember all our lives while working somewhere as an official, a clerk, a businessman, and remember that we could have been someone completely different. No, it was rejected differently.
Why? And when we speak of rejection, dear friends, we are in fact using human will. I spoke of first love, of a beloved, say, creative vocation. But we use the concept of free will, free choice. It is natural for man. Man lives by his volitional choices. Everyone knows this. Any person, from the most highly intellectual to the simplest and, one might say, uneducated, any person lives by volitional choices, not only by instincts, but rather by choices of how to realize those instincts. We want to eat, but we can steal a roll, or we can go to work and earn money for bread. Or, in the extreme case, we can beg for alms, but not steal. And so in everything. We like a girl. We can court her, we can suppress the desire, or we can lie in wait at night and rape her. But these too are our free choices. But this is said about an individual. And can one speak about society? About a people?
This, I consider, is an important question. And I am convinced that one can. And I consider that collective will is an important factor of history. It determines for a long time, for a long time, the face of a people, its fate, just as in the life of an individual. Moreover, it determines — we even use a word that at one time was used so often in the era of perestroika that everyone grew tired of it — fateful choice. But that is precisely the word — fate. Fate. We determine our own fate, you understand, by our volitional choices. And therefore, for the first time in this community, I have never said this before, I will permit myself to formulate certain — after all, one must give some clever definition, assign some term, otherwise no one will remember. You know that in Greek, will, that chosen will, elective will, will as that which chooses, is telos. And I would say that this is the thelesic factor of the historical process, that is, the collective will of a community, of a people. In Latin it seems clearer — voluntaris, voluntas, but voluntarism is already a spoiled word, and we will not use it. So, the thelesic factor of history. That is what will be discussed, but naturally in relation to Russian history.
And this choice determines not so much and not only and not so much the material future, although it certainly determines that too, but it determines stable psychic stereotypes of acceptance or rejection of that toward which the will of the people inclines; afterward its future, sympathies, antipathies, acceptance and rejection depend on it. And if this choice was bad, evil, morally destructive — just as there is a morally destructive choice of an individual, there is also a morally destructive choice of a people — then there is only one way out of this dead end. And we will talk about it at the end. But, let us say, approximately the same thing. Approximately the same thing that happened in Russia happened in France. We will not analyze it, but the Great French Revolution was undoubtedly the choice of the French people, despite the Vendée, despite the Chouans. And present-day France — it was the year '93 that was the choice of the French people, that is, Jacobin tyranny and the Napoleonic wars were chosen by the French people. And all of this leaves its mark on France to this day. Colossally. It is a country of republican values. About the bad things that happened there, people say, yes, that happened, historians study it, research it, but on the whole it is rather ours. But what existed under Louis XVI is for aesthetes, for intellectuals, salons there, Madame Pompadour, all that, wonderful, let us say, Henry IV. All that is not for the people; for the people there lived once upon a time Henri I, he was a glorious king. The same in Germany.
The German people chose Nazism, chose the Holocaust, chose fantastic crimes. That was its thelesic choice. But it too, thelesically, over half a century, over some sixty years, managed to overcome it, managed to repent of it, managed to accomplish metanoia and hate that choice of its own. It did not begin to say that it did not — it did not begin to justify it, that it was due to objective circumstances that we chose Hitler and supported Nazism. It did not begin to say about the war either that we did not support it, we were forced. It said: yes, we did all this. And this is the enormous crime of our people. And to this day, you know, to this day reasonable German politicians, well, like Merz, say, and Mutzker too, they recall that this is the greatest disaster of German history, the greatest crime. And this allows preserving the spiritual mode of the people in a positive state. It rejected, did not justify, did not forget the crime. It recognized it and condemned it and rejected it. This is the only path. And we know that the category of Christian repentance, metanoia, change of mind, presupposes precisely this. Precisely this. We can say that the German people accomplished a collective metanoia, a collective choice in the direction of positive values and condemnation of their own crimes. This is the easiest case, but it has a place in human history. I think it will be studied for a long time in textbooks, regardless of how German history proceeds further.
In Russia too there was this conscious rejection, as in France. And, properly speaking, it was precisely the "Marseillaise," its Russian version, that became the anthem of the revolutionary people of that old Russia, when people sang self-forgetfully and enthusiastically: "We will destroy the old world to its foundations, and then we will build our own, we will build a new world." "Who was nothing will become everything." Everything is explained at once. That is, we will destroy so that those who were nothing become everything. Therefore again, in the era of perestroika — I am now reading these lectures, all these fashionable perestroika things are on everyone's lips — they say: "We will destroy the old world to its foundations. But why? Well, so that the one who was nothing becomes everything." That is why, perhaps this is incorrect, but nevertheless there was a total change of symbols. From old Russia only its — well, barely — borders remained, because they were conditioned not only by the revolution. Moreover, the Bolsheviks still wanted to extend their power over the whole world and so depicted their coat of arms, a world map with hammer and sickle. Well, naturally, such a Russian language, because they started with Russia. Well, and here the Bolsheviks tried to switch to Esperanto. Well, the grandiose experiment did not succeed. Here they tried to transfer the Russian language to the Latin alphabet very seriously. In '29 very seriously. The Voice Institute wrote treatises saying that Cyrillic is a wedge between progressive Latin script. An archaic wedge between progressive Latin script. All of that happened. But these are all trifles.
What matters is that a total system of changing symbols occurred. Nothing remained of old Russia. No coat of arms, no flag in any form. Neither Poland nor Hungary dared to do this, but Russia dared. China dared too. But symbols, as they say, are only half the trouble. There occurred a complete destruction of the old elite. This is an unprecedented thing altogether. The Nazis never went for that. Hitler already in '45, before shooting himself on April 30, read everything. I should have, like Stalin, destroyed them all, these Stauffenbergs and the rest of the old aristocracy. But he did not destroy them. But here there occurred a complete destruction of elites with an iron broom. Their task was to kill. Well, of course, not everyone was killed. Some fled, some dissolved, like Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy or Marshal Shaposhnikov, became their own among strangers. But the fact remains a fact. The elite was destroyed, and not only the nobility, but also the clergy. Rightly the destruction of the clergy. The bourgeoisie in the broad sense of the word, and indeed to a substantial degree the cultural layer. On the outskirts it was also the destruction of certain national groups that were associated with the old regime. Well, in Russia, how could they not destroy themselves? Therefore Russian people destroyed the elite. And here in the Baltics they destroyed, naturally, the Germans with the same pleasure. The reasons will be the same, I will say in two words. In Poland and in Central Asia, Russians — remember the uprising, the Semirechye uprising of the sixteenth year, anti-Russian, with great bloodshed. So this was an invariant, but the main thing was the higher estates themselves. The people, with incredible ruthlessness, destroy the old elite. And the symbol of this destruction is, of course, the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in July 1918. Murder is murder.
Who did this? Well, we more or less know who did this. It is clear that the Bolsheviks did it, we know the motives and so on. But what matters is not that. What matters is the attitude of people toward it. Here is a sketch. This is the recollection of a miraculously saved man who crossed the river Sister near Petersburg and went to Finland, well, a miraculously surviving Count Kokovtsov, former prime minister of Russia. In his memoirs he writes about this, about the day of the murder. He was in Petrograd then. About the crowd, about what is customarily called the people. This news of the regicide produced an impression I did not expect. On the day the news was printed I was twice on the street, rode the tram, and nowhere did I see the slightest glimmer of pity or compassion. The news was read aloud, with smirks, mockery, and the most merciless comments. Some senseless hardening, some boasting of bloodthirstiness. The most disgusting expressions: "It should have been done long ago. Go on, give it to the tsardom too, it's curtains for Nikolashka." "Eh, brother Romanov, he danced his last." Such things were heard all around from the very youngest youth. And the older ones either turned away or kept silent indifferently. These were not few. These were residents of Petrograd in 1918. This is the revolution, only a year later.
Fyodor Stepun, who was also a witness of the revolution, our remarkable publicist and philosopher, in his book "Former and Unfulfilled" recalled the Red Terror and its aims. The Bolsheviks did it, but the people approved. Approved everything. Approved. Even if tomorrow someone from the people themselves would be dragged there, people were afraid, but they rejoiced. They rejoiced at the destruction, at the shooting of any minimally significant person who could be counted among the higher, the higher classes. Death sentences were handed down, writes Stepun, and carried out not as punishment for a crime, but as the liquidation of alien and therefore unsuitable material for socialist construction. Landowners, bourgeois, priests, kulaks, White officers were simply expended, as on rationally run farms livestock are expended. One breed of cattle for the breeding of another. One could give many examples, I will not get carried away with quotations. That is, we see that this was destruction supported by the people. The people did not defend. And why?
And here I would like to recall the words of Arnold Toynbee. They are precisely about these revolutions, it is his Study of History. I have already said more than once in this audience that Toynbee is my favorite historian. If in the field of history I consider anyone my teacher, it is he. I will speak, naturally, in Russian. It is clear that the ethos of these dispossessed, robbed people, that is, the lower estates, is woven from cruelty and hatred. They are merciless toward their executioners. This is not about Russians, it is a generalization. There are French too, anything. They are merciless toward their executioners, who push them to rebellion, to the manifestation of the basest impulses and feelings. It is entirely natural that the victims of lawlessness and arbitrariness, that is, simple people, should surpass their oppressors in cruelty. In the history of the movement of societies and civilizations there is not recorded a single case when in times of revolution or war no atrocities were committed. One can assert that at a certain degree of tension, deviations from the norm, atrocities are committed even in the most civilized societies of modernity. During calamities the mask of civilization is torn off, revealing the primitive physiognomy of the human majority. Nevertheless, moral responsibility for the breakdowns of civilization lies on the conscience of their leaders. And not those leaders who led these lower classes, but those who governed the country and brought it to rebellion. On their conscience lies all that bloody bacchanalia which always occurs in revolution.
What happened? What happened in Russia? I have spoken about this many times, but here I want to emphasize that moment which I had not emphasized before. Everyone, of course, knows, and in these already published four volumes it is discussed in detail, about serfdom, or rather the serf form of existence, slavery, of course, simply slavery. The Russian scholar who lived in America, such Kohn, Peter Kohn, he wrote a special book already in the United States in English, "American Slavery and Russian Comparable." Well, and he clearly shows, a very good scholarly study. Unfortunately, it remained in Moscow for me. He very clearly shows that, of course, there is no difference. And the difference is even greater than we think. Because the main and terrifying feature of such forms of enslavement — it is not by chance that there is the word "unfree" — that is, he did not become a slave by his own will. He did not sell himself into slavery, or his papa and mama did not sell him into slavery, as sometimes happened in the East. Or Negroes were captured, or their chiefs sold them, say, against their will, naturally they were rounded up, caught. There too there was a hunt for people. Oh, in West Africa. But Russians — this was generally part of the people. They had recently, during the Time of Troubles, liberated Russia from invaders, from Poles, from Swedes. These were ordinary Russian people, after all, not aristocrats who liberated. The militia liberated. It was the people. A people that became free. And before that it had not been especially enslaved. In general, there was no serfdom as such. Then there were elements of personal dependence, there were elements of corvée and quitrent, all the more, but there was no total serfdom. And Catherine the Great, I think I even have this, this quotation, perhaps not, I wanted to give it. Yes, not this. But nevertheless Catherine in her Instruction, in her Instruction to the Legislative Commission of 1766–1767, explains that there are two types of slavery. There is personal slavery and there is essential slavery. Well, she uses such terms. Essential slavery, she says, is widespread in many countries of Europe. It exists in the Czech lands, Hungary, in many places of Lower Germany. This is when peasants are obliged to pay quitrents and perform certain duties in favor of the lords. Personal slavery or kholopstvo is when a person has no will at all and in everything submits to his master. Personal slavery should not exist in Russia. Should not exist in Russia. She wrote this in the Instruction to the Legislative Commission. Her advisers came, quite Russian, for example, Count Panin, and said: "Your Majesty, this cannot be written. Then the fate of your husband will befall you." This is to open. And Catherine crossed out this piece, but the very meticulous Sergei Mikhailovich Solovyov in the archives discovered the original version in his research. He brought his History of Russia precisely up to the Legislative Commission. He cites these documents. That is, the Russian nobles themselves, Russian aristocrats convinced the German empress — and with all her perhaps negative qualities, well, on the whole, a woman modern for the then world, who did not wish slavery for the people she governed — they convinced her that the slavery introduced by Peter I must under no circumstances be liquidated. And so it happened more than once.
Catherine II, as you know, in 1765 created the Free Economic Society, which existed until the nineteenth year. They later tried several times to revive it, but however that may be, in this newly created society a competition was arranged for the organization of peasant properties, also characteristic. That is, she understood that this was the nail, this was the foundation of everything. And in this competition the gold medal was received by a little-known economist and jurist today, Alexei Yakovlevich Polenov. In his work he wrote, and this may be the best characterization of the condition that existed in the era of Catherine, but not by her will, about which we will speak a little now. I do not find poorer people than our peasants, who, having no small protection from the laws, are subject to all sorts of not only in regard to property, essential, yes, slavery, but also of life itself, personal slavery, to insults and endure incessant insolence, tortures, and violence, from which they must inevitably sink and come into this state filled with calamity, both for themselves and for the whole society, in which we indeed now see them. Landowners torment peasants without any mercy or compassion, taking away everything that catches their eye, and through this reduce them to indescribable poverty, from which they are never able to escape. The gold medal was received, but Polenov's ideas were in no way realized.
The Legislative Commission was in some sense either a council of the type of the councils of the 15th century, or a pre-parliament of the type of the Estates General of France, of the era of the revolution of 1788–1789. So, in our Legislative Commission of 1766–1767 people were indeed elected. They were elected by societies; representatives of the clergy were elected by the nobility, non-serf state peasants, Cossacks, of course, the Cossack host, elected. And not one person, almost not one — there were two people, I will name them now. Well, in general, out of the entire huge commission two people spoke against serfdom with the idea that it must be gradually, not all at once, gradually liquidated. This was deputy Korobyin from Tambov province and deputy Yakov Kozelsky from Ekaterinoslav province. They were literally spat upon, hissed down, and shoved aside by the other gentlemen. Those same Tambov nobles, answering Korobyin, say: "Punish fugitive peasants." And they fled abroad to Poland, Finland, then Swedish Finland. Poland was also independent then, they fled because life was unbearable. And many people fled, many. Punish fugitive peasants with conscription, penal servitude, the knout and the lash. And do not hold landowners guilty if peasants punished by them die. The Cossack starshina of Little Russia. Ukrainians often pride themselves: there the Russians are slaves, but we are Cossacks. The Cossack starshina of Little Russia, back in 1763, that is, even before the Legislative Commission, asks Catherine II, who had just ascended the throne, to enserf their fellow tribesmen, the grain farmers. Catherine did this 20 years later. The Church before the secularization of '62. Moreover, this is the Cossack starshina, these are not the malicious Poles who owned serf Ukrainians. These are the true Ukrainians themselves. And in Poland there was even another peasant uprising, that of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, it liberated precisely left-bank Ukraine from serfdom. The people became free. So now the Cossack starshina asks to enslave again those who, properly speaking, achieved freedom from the Poles, because it was not the starshina who liberated them, the people liberated them. Just like the Russians.
So, during the troubles of the early 15th century the Church before the secularization of '62 owned millions of peasants. And it was by no means a kind slaveowner, but just as cruel as everyone else. It also flayed seven skins. The secularization of '62 liquidated church slaveholding. Catherine did this. The peasants were transferred to state peasants. Then little by little they were given away again. When Catherine understood that nothing would come of it, she again began to give them to private owners. Well. But nevertheless at the Legislative Commission representatives of the Church asked to be allowed — and I remind you that only the nobility could have serfs after the secularization of church properties — they asked to be allowed to buy serfs for priests, the white clergy. Well, can the father archpriest himself, as a representative of the clergy says, go plow the land and sell something? We need slaves.
Recall the main slogan of Pugachev. It is cited by Lyubavsky in his Russian history. Destroy the accursed noble race. The whole world knows how Russian nobles own peasants. And although in the law of God it is said that one must treat Christians as one's children, they treat them worse than their dogs. My wife — well, naturally, he says supposedly Peter II — my wife Catherine has become carried away on the side of the nobles, and I swore before God to destroy all of them to the last one. They inclined her to give all of you to them as slaves. But I opposed this, and they became indignant at me, sent assassins, but God saved me. Throughout all Russia. I wish to establish liberty. In his manifesto already not long before the end of the uprising, on July 31, '74, Pugachev granted all those formerly in peasantry and subjection to landowners liberty and freedom forever as Cossacks. That is precisely the reason. The people against their will. The people never agreed to serfdom. Peter I, well, in general, against the will of the people bent them under the master and made them slaves. People did not forgive this. Did not forgive. Remembered.
The situation was terrible. You will read dozens of examples in my books. I will not continue them. And for the peasants it was not about — moreover, for all Christians. In general, state peasants lived a little better, but they too were slaves, only state slaves. There were slightly more rights, but in essence very few. Both were recruits, conscripted as recruits. This and much, much else was terrible. In any case, in any case, for the peasants it was not about restoring freedom, only that went without saying, as with Pugachev, as in Pugachev's uprising it was about vengeance. This terrible feeling, but it is very widespread among these people. They take vengeance on everyone for it. This was the collective vengeance of the people on those who had enslaved them, who against their will had made them such.
And when Alexander II freed the peasants and partly compensated from state properties for their economic insufficiency, and in the end they forgave, ultimately forgave everything already under Stolypin. But the most important thing was not done. What alone can prevent vengeance? Sincere and complete repentance and a request for forgiveness. Forgive me. Forgive me for what I did to your ancestors, your fathers and your grandfathers and your grandmothers. Forgive me, I was a criminal. We committed the greatest crimes, and then we will think how to correct this in the practical sphere. But it is clear that correcting is much deeper than what happened in the era of the great reforms, about which the first volume is now being prepared, the fifth volume — this is the first volume of the era of the great reforms. But not one such word was said either by the tsar, or by the aristocracy, or by the higher estates. There were individual people, like Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, but they were considered eccentrics. Well. And the higher estates as corporations did not ask the people's forgiveness for the horrifying crimes, but tried on the contrary to — as you know, there is such a desire — to whitewash it all, somehow hide it, so that nothing would be noticeable. It seems they did something good, well, and that was that. The old elite remained, the nobility remained, the lands remained. Well yes, the peasants became free, yes. Gradually the nobility became ruined, because it did not know how to manage its properties. The army became — conscription became based on call-up. Christians received normal self-government. I will not speak about trifles. It seems so much was done, but the most important thing was not done. Do you understand? The only way, if you cheated on your wife and she found out, to preserve the family is to grovel at her feet and ask forgiveness. Perhaps she will forgive. Well, naturally, not to do this in the future, but to try to pretend that, well, yes, as if nothing happened, yes, I seem not to be doing it anymore, and what happened, let us forget it and that is all — it will not work. It does not work out that way. It does not work out for people, and it does not work out in societies. This thelesic moment was very powerful. The people hated the old life and, of course, the Church, because the Church — well, there were some individual priests who spoke against serfdom, tried to protect peasants, but there were not many of them, and as for the episcopate, it was totally [silent]. We will now speak about how there is Putin. And the Synod of Catherine's era, the Synod of Alexander's, Nicholas's era — no one said a word. No one said a word. Even the remarkable Filaret Drozdov, Metropolitan of Moscow, a man with a bright head, never once spoke against serfdom until Alexander II began the reforms and said to the already elderly Filaret: "Listen, you write well, write a manifesto on the emancipation of the peasants." And Filaret wrote, of course, found everything, all the words. Why did you not do it earlier? And, naturally, therefore the people hated everyone. The Church went into schisms, went into sects, and for the most part simply departed from the faith, and hated, naturally, the nobility, hated also the merchants, who, in general, exploited people just as much before the revolution, before, that is, under serfdom. There were possessional peasants, who were sent to factories, where they were slaves in the factory.
When we are surprised now that even after so many years after the emancipation of black slaves in America, people say "Black Lives Matter," yes, it matters when they — we say something has been remembered, that is all, there is freedom, but this memory does not disappear. But Americans, beginning with the era of Martin Luther King, began to say precisely this — white Americans, the American authorities began to say precisely this — we are guilty, we ask forgiveness. This was a great crime. No one hides it anymore. But it also took a long time; after all, they were silent for 100 years, right? Well, 90 from the moment of emancipation. No, 100 years. They were silent for 100 years and only then began to speak about the crimes. But the old Russian authorities were silent until the end. Therefore the simple people reject this authority and destroy it. And destroy it. The noble authorities did not turn their tongue to say to the children of the serfs: We have grievously sinned before your fathers and before you. And in the end what happened — expulsion, destruction, repression under the applause of the people. This is not because the people are wild and evil. This is because the guilt was not repented, was not acknowledged. They tried to correct it quietly. But guilt is never corrected in that way, either in relation to societies or in relation to individuals. And therefore the old world was rejected to its foundations, and there was a desire to build one's own new world under a new flag, with a new coat of arms and with new leaders. And since the old authority constantly appealed to God, the new world had to be without God. God was also destroyed, monasteries were closed. It is clear how many new martyrs, priests, monks. And instead of gods there stood a leader. A leader. Here again Toynbee said very well. The collective worship of humanity for man, the leader — Lenin, it does not matter — represents the highest form of idolatry, and one can oppose to it only the worship of the true God. Agreement between the contending sides is impossible. Impossible. You understand, as the Church tried under Stalin, as the Church under Hitler to live, so it is impossible. Impossible, the Church is corrupted and, well, and accordingly it is impossible in old Russia too. Therefore it was rejected and therefore instead of it there appeared a leader.
And now we must ask the question: "And who are these leaders? Where did they come from? They are not Martians." It is clear that this hatred, the total hatred of the people, was used by those whom we call revolutionaries. The revolutionaries did not intend — we know this even from the popular will, from the end of the 19th century, and all the more from the Bolsheviks of the USSR. There were completely naive boys and girls there who blew themselves up with bombs, but trying to kill someone. But for the most part the leadership of both the Bolsheviks and the SRs dreamed not of liberating the people, but of coming to power and using this hatred of the people to establish themselves in power. But all of them did establish themselves in power and, naturally, subdued the people incredibly cruelly. But the people did not rise against them, as they rose against Catherine under Pugachev. Why? Because there was more — no, what kind of [unclear] was in the hands of such a Red Army, of such soldiers, peasants. Chika, I will now give you, I will give the percentage of people in the Cheka by nationality. Then you will understand everything. It is also quite — well, 7 3/4 Russian, 73 there with fractions of a percent, yes, the number of Jews in the Cheka, in the Cheka of 1918, is greater than in the population of Russia. Well, approximately twice there, 9%. Well, too, you sing, these are not some astronomical figures. And for the most part these are Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, very few Poles, Caucasus. Yes. Are the figures interesting to anyone, please? Yes, I feel someone was surprised. I will give the figures. In 1921 the apparatus of the Cheka employed more than 230,000 people. Of them Russians 77.3%. Jews — 9.1%. Latvians 3.5%. Well, but which ones? Well, that is understandable. Because they had their own internal purges. Those Russians, these 77, were also quite something. There were 3.1% Ukrainians, 1.7% Poles, 5.3% others. But one thing united all the Chekists and made them the new elite. Only 1% of them had a higher education. They were from different peoples, but they were all new. This was not the old cultural official elite, not the old guard, the okhranka, as it was called. These were people from everywhere. But they, such simple people, went with joy to work in the Cheka, and in the Red Army, and in the party apparatus. They joined the party, made careers. This was their power, this was the people's power. There was no party elite at all. They were very afraid that it should not exist, that caste party elite. Constant renewal, this was the method, this was the know-how of the Bolsheviks.
The people elected this power. Elected this power, because they hated that one. They followed these people, they said: "Come to us, please, become Chekists, kill your own, your fellow countrymen. Go into our Red Army, cut down the Whites. Peasant uprisings." Who suppressed the peasant uprisings? The Chekists suppressed them. Such same people and Red Army soldiers. They fired from cannons with chemical shells from the First World War at peasants hiding, participants in the Tambov uprising. Yes, by the way, and what was the slogan of the participants in the Tambov uprising? You think they wanted to return to old Russia? No, they had completely rejected old Russia, the red banner, not the tricolor, and "For Soviets without Communists." The Communists deceived us, but the Soviets, our power, Soviet power, all power to the Soviets, all that remained. Gradually they began to understand that the rulers were so vile, they were cruel, self-interested, that they lived for themselves. But this is our power. Any person from the plow without any education or almost without any education could make a fantastic career, such as the son of a shoemaker Stalin, or there Sle and Khrushchev. And this was until the very end. Stavropol combine operator Gorbachev, yes, and just the same boy from the Urals. In general, from the very bottom, Boris Nikolaevich. All the same. That is, the Bolsheviks tried not to allow the social field to ossify. Their power was built on constantly giving to the most vile and despicable, who were ready to kill their own kind or keep their own kind in check, giving them a career, giving them advancement. There was nothing of this before the revolution. A serf peasant practically had, well, a negligible chance to rise into the new elite, to become, well, like that same, like sheep. This is all the old aristocracy. Well. And here, please, everything is open to everyone. The people made their choice.
And this choice, this is how it amazingly always happens, that, you understand, this choice is recorded in figures. It is not simply some reasoning in general. The people rose up, rejected the old power, because, as they say, God gave the opportunity to count. He very much likes to give us this opportunity to count. He very much likes to know how many Germans voted for them. And do you know how many citizens of the Russian Empire, all of them, not only Russians, voted for the parties that wanted completely — elections, the Constituent Assembly in November '18, well, elections from November to December. That wanted to destroy that very world to its foundations together with its religion, the Church. Those were atheists, God-fighters, who tried, wanted to destroy the old elite as completely as possible or expel it. Whomever their hands could not reach — this is, naturally, the SRs. Here, properly speaking, are the facts. We have a somewhat heroized image of the SRs, but good heavens, these were terrorists. Real terrorists, who killed people with pleasure, and did not spare accidental passersby. Well, like any terrorists, like now terrorists in Israel, there Palestinian and so on. That is, the same thing, you understand, this is absolutely the same thing. Like Arab ones, please, there those Manhattan towers and so on. So, do you know how many voted for them in November '17? This is such a clear cut. So, with a turnout of 62%, quite large. 23.7% voted for the Bolsheviks, and for the SRs, including their supposedly Muslim and Ukrainian autonomous groups, which were there, perhaps in Ukrainian or Tatar, but this does not at all mean that they professed different views. They were the same SRs, Socialist Revolutionaries. 59% voted for them. That means, accordingly, for the two main groups that wanted to destroy the old society, a simple calculation says that 83% of the population voted. 83%. For the Mensheviks, socialists, but democrats, Social Democrats, 2% voted. For the Popular Socialists, also democrats, 1%. For the Cadets, the professors' party, 4.8%. For the right, 3%. For all Christian religious parties — and there was an Orthodox party created by Metropolitan Sergius Stragorodsky in Nizhny Novgorod, there was an Old Believer one, there was an Evangelical party, that is, well, Lutherans, there, Pentecostals, Baptists. So for all of them together, for all Christian parties, in the most Christian Russia, half a percent voted, half a percent. For genuine Muslim parties, that is, which were, well, religious Muslim parties, 1% of the population voted, another 1% voted for the so-called Muslim socialists. But they were not Muslim at all, they were socialists, but simply among traditional Muslim peoples, Tatars, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and so on. So, as you see, that is the cut. The people completely rejected everything. Later everything changed, naturally, but this was the most important choice.
And since this choice, unlike the choice of serfdom, was the free choice of the people, no one forced the people to support the Bolsheviks. They chose this, voted for it, and then for 5 years in the civil war affirmed it and won, and therefore the power turned out to be theirs. They recognized the new power as their own power. This was people's power by election, but not by the subjective aims of the power itself. Subjectively for the Bolsheviks it was a seizure of power in their own interests, primarily in the interests of the bandit leadership, which seized power, struggled for this power among themselves and with the people when it was indignant at something, with complete ferocity. But the people considered this power their choice, people's power to the very end and in many ways to this day. In many ways to this day. Therefore they forgive Stalin, the repressions. They, of course, do not know it. The Holodomor. They forgive everything, because it is their power, it is their choice. By and large, however much they may try in Ukraine to say otherwise. But after all, then, in '18–'19, the people of Ukraine voted for these same socialists, who then arranged that Holodomor 10 years later and drove Ukrainians into collective farms. Since there was constant recruitment of the people, the people constantly merged with this bandit essence. They went into power and became part of this bandit, terrible community. They saw that around them people were being killed, churches destroyed, mosques mocked, Buddhist datsans mocked. They saw what was happening around them with their fellow villagers, some of whom were shot, others sent to the Yenisei, to the islands, where they ate each other from hunger. And they continued to go. There was no decrease in volunteers. To the Cheka, to the Central Committee, everywhere they went in a stream.
The power was bandit, mafia. People understood this, of course. You need complete — but your own, if you decided on all the worst together with the power. These were indeed workers' and peasants' governments, because their representatives, well, except for the first ones there, were workers and peasants. And who else? Well, a very small percentage were, so to speak, the people's intelligentsia. At first many were non-Russian, indeed, but Stalin removed them all, destroyed almost all of them, both Jews and Latvians. Only Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians remained. This was the backbone. They were taken without regard to whether someone was Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian. The main thing was absolute loyalty. In small doses they took others too, but only in small doses. The nomenklatura did not turn into a caste. And why? And here we understand with you a very cunning invention, which everyone considers to be the market — look at the market, but that is not why they abolished it, dear friends. They did not need the market. They themselves had enough for a good life. What was important to them was that wealth should not accumulate, private wealth, because that is how a caste is formed. Say, if some person became a ruler, there, an official, a governor, he collected, he invested money in factories, steamships, passes it on to his children, naturally, gradually a caste of rich people forms, as now in China. Why does China live on a volcano, in fact? And the people can no longer get in there. They guard their money. You work for us, but you are not one of us. Nothing like this existed in the Soviet system. Its incredible strength, and in all of Eastern Europe the same was true under the Communists. Its incredible strength was that property did not accumulate in anyone's hands. In no one's. Something remained there, but very little. The main thing was power, what power gave. And all this passed to other people. That is, this whole Bolshevik system was strong precisely by its non-ossification, by mobilization. They gave up the market in order to have the possibility of constantly corrupting the people with power, attracting them to serve. Well, if they shot them, they died their own death, excellent. The children would get something, would get an apartment, a dacha, but this is nothing. This is still small property. Large property is taken away. You give it to them and do not own it. You merely dispose of it and it is passed to another official, another party nomenklatura man.
The trouble is that this system is absolutely economically inefficient. Do you understand? It provides stability very well, but it is absolutely socially — but it is absolutely economically destructive for the country. Only such an incredibly rich country as Russia could exist in this situation without help from outside. But then Russia, expanding its empire, constantly helped all the others precisely to preserve this same system. There were outpourings both into the GDR and into Hungary and anywhere else. Very large. Without this nothing worked. You know that the same GDR, Hungary, Bulgaria were given oil at very low prices, supposedly for their factories, but in fact all this oil was already sold at market prices, then abroad and to the West. And on this money, properly speaking, existed these elite groups and indeed the states in Eastern Europe. But as soon as under Gorbachev the market arises, immediately it begins, and then under Yeltsin, naturally, Gorbachev did not have time, only the beginnings were there, the ossification of this system begins, and a new elite arises, new rich people, who, if they do not become ruined, if they are not ruined, pass property on to their children. That is, in this sense society again stands before the old problem. Why, by the way, is the West so much struggling with inheritance, with the transfer of property by inheritance in the same United States, very large taxes, all in order to ensure this great mobility, well, by legal means. Here the ossification of the system is now happening quickly. And what we all now say, all know, all understand, is this Chekist power, it is already hereditary. No one wants some Patrushevs, Bortnikovs, no one wants to give their property back to the common pot. Well, let us call things by their names, but they want to pass it on to their children already. Putin says: "Come on, come on, back into the common pot, again for the war." They are trying somehow, in general, to do something. And this again forms a very polarized [society].
Two choices have been made. A choice was made, even three choices were made. The first choice was made by the Russian higher stratum when it enslaved the people. Completely consciously, not unconsciously. We know these acts, these Petrine acts, and then the acts of Catherine and Peter II. It enslaved the people for itself, not for the people, only for itself. Then, and it is not customary to say this, when the people rejected this power, they were led supposedly to their freedom. But in fact new adventurers, just like the old nobility, created a new system for themselves, but for themselves no longer as a hereditary one, like the old aristocratic nobility, but for themselves as personally-institutionally. A system was created which is in fact astonishingly terrible, because it was called — the old nobility, it limited itself, even Karamzin said that one should not admit just anyone into it, and the priesthood also became a caste, and the new one more and more. Come all of you here to various posts. Some to the raikom, some to the obkom, some to the army, some to the KGB. Come all, come all. And the majority went. Went. They said, well, even intelligent people, but if not I, then this scoundrel would have become one, and so I am still, I am good. So they went, and this terribly corrupted an enormous number of people. That is, it was a machine, the Soviet system was a machine of maximal moral decomposition and corruption of man. I am not even speaking of the fact that normal economy was interrupted, normal family was interrupted, and normal transmission of faith. After all, people, even those now coming to faith, are like blind kittens. In their families, in the families of their grandmothers and grandfathers, they received nothing. Everything their ancestors knew is forgotten. People were forced to be silent. That is, a completely new society was formed, obsessed with only one thing. The mania of power, career, well, for the active part of power, career and subordination of others to you. I am the boss, you are a fool. That was this second terrible choice and its consequences. This is the choice of the people, who made this, who considered this power their own and to this day cherishes it and would like it to return, but it, of course, will not return anywhere. The market arose, conditions arose for the non-return of the old power.
And now, dear friends, before our people there lies a new thelesic choice, a new volitional choice. What will we choose in Russia and not only in Russia? In order to choose something positive, we must recognize that our — our peoples, our fathers, in some sense we ourselves, even I, as a person who has already lived a life, we made a criminal choice. The old Russian nobility did not do this, and it perished or dissolved in Russia. Our compatriots have not done this so far either. We in the seventeenth year made a criminal choice. We should have gone on a completely different path. We should have built a new people's society, as it is being built in England, there, say, gradually from an aristocratic one, or in Sweden. But we went by the path of destruction. On blood we tried to achieve our happiness and did not achieve it. This is our guilt. We must understand this. And, accordingly, now a new choice opens before us. This choice is for now in the awareness of the criminality of the past, the erroneousness of the deeds of our fathers and grandfathers. And then everything will fall into place. Yes, those who struggled for truth, those who did not seek their own advantage, those who strove to make life better both before the seventeenth year and in the Bolshevik period, and as a rule became victims of the regime or exiles. These are heroes. But the Stalins, Peter I, Catherine II cannot be heroes. Even when we speak of such people as Alexander II, and all the more Nicholas II, we understand that they are not heroes. They did in practice very half-measure things. Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, he never once said to the end that in the seventeenth year a most grievous crime was committed. The whole trouble of his reforms was that he tried to build them on what did not exist, on a good Lenin. But there is no good Lenin.
And now we must clear this ground, not by throwing away history, but by changing attitudes. The German people managed to do this. The Russian people still think little about this, but we must, having understood the chain of errors, see the path of change of mind. And only having realized the past, we will be able to build not a new deception, a pseudo-tsarist Russia, a pseudo-Bolshevik Russia, a pseudo-market Russia, there in the era of Yeltsin. But we can build a genuinely new country. But for this one must live through history well. In his Nobel speech, Gorbachev, and this is the last, already the fading of his rule, even on June 6, 1991, he among many other good things said: "We must reconsider our entire history and take into the future only the truth." I think that is how we should act. Thank you.
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Fundamental Spiritual-Psychological, Cultural, Historiosophical Essay-Study of the Lecture Themes
Introduction: The Mystery of Continuity
There are questions that cannot be explained through economic formations, political systems, or social structures. They lie deeper—in the realm of spirit, will, and collective memory. Why does a people that has endured monstrous crimes against itself continue to love its executioners? Why is a thousand-year history, filled with saints, architects, thinkers, and poets, overshadowed by seventy years of terror and lies? Why is Stalin "ours," while Stolypin is "not ours"? These questions are posed by Andrei Zubov, and his answer takes us beyond ordinary historiography into the space of historiosophy, the psychology of peoples, and spiritual anthropology.
1. The Telisic Factor: The Will of the People as a Historical Force
Zubov introduces a concept he calls the telisic factor of history. What is meant is the collective will of a people—the capacity of a community to make a fateful choice, analogous to the free choice of an individual person. Just as a person daily chooses between good and evil, between labor and theft, between love and violence, so a people at certain moments of its history makes a choice that determines its face for centuries. This choice is neither purely material nor purely rational. It forms stable psychic stereotypes of acceptance and rejection, sympathy and antipathy, love and hatred. If the choice was morally destructive, then there is only one way out of the dead end—repentance, metanoia, a change of mind.
Zubov insists: the collective will is not a metaphor. It is a real historical force that determines the fate of a people for a long time. And if a people has made a criminal choice, it can either repent and overcome it, as the German people did after Nazism, or try to forget, silence, and hide it—and then the crime continues to live within it, corroding its soul.
2. Rejection of the Past: The Psychology of Collective Trauma
Before the seventeenth year, Russia had a thousand-year history. There were saints and villains, ascetics and executioners, great achievements and grave sins. But this history did not simply recede into the past—it was consciously rejected by the people. Zubov compares this to the rejection of first love or a creative vocation for the sake of a advantageous marriage or a well-fed position. But there is a difference. In personal life, a person may remember what did not come to pass with sadness, but in the history of a people, the rejection acquired a total, demonic character. The old world was rejected "to the foundation," with hatred, with the desire not merely to replace but to destroy, erase, consign to oblivion. Symbols, coat of arms, flag, elite, church, faith—everything was destroyed or expelled. And this rejection was supported by the people.
Why? Because the old authority, the old elite, the old church did not acknowledge their guilt. Serfdom, which lasted for centuries, was the greatest crime of the higher estates against the people. But when Alexander II freed the peasants, he did not say: "We have grievously sinned against you, forgive us." He simply carried out a reform—half-hearted, inconsistent, leaving the peasants in economic bondage. And the nobility, and the church, and the tsar himself did not bring repentance. They tried to "paper over," hide, pretend that nothing terrible had happened. The people remembered this. The people did not forgive it. And when the moment came, they destroyed their tormentors with joy, with rapture, with bloodthirsty delight. The murder of the royal family in July of the eighteenth year is a symbol of this retribution. And the people did not grieve. They laughed, mocked, rejoiced. This is not natural cruelty, says Zubov. It is the consequence of unrepented guilt.
3. Metanoia as the Only Path of Healing
Zubov persistently draws a parallel with Germany. The German people chose Nazism. They supported Hitler, they participated in the Holocaust, they waged an aggressive war. This was their telisic choice—criminal, catastrophic. But after the war, the German people performed a collective metanoia. They did not begin to justify themselves, did not begin to say that they had been forced, that they had not known. They acknowledged: yes, we did this. This is the greatest crime of our history. And this acknowledgment allowed them to preserve spiritual health, build a new society, and return to the family of civilized nations. Repentance is not weakness but strength. It liberates from the power of the past, allows one to live on without poisoning the present with the poison of unrepented guilt.
The Russian people did not perform this repentance. The old elite did not repent before the people for serfdom. The new authority did not repent for the Red Terror, for the Holodomor, for the repressions. And the people, who themselves became victim and executioner at the same time, did not repent for having supported the Bolsheviks, for having gone into the Cheka, for having approved executions, for having built a system based on violence and lies. This unrepentance is the root of many of the misfortunes of contemporary Russia. It explains why Stalin is still "ours," why the Soviet past is perceived as one's own, why ancestral memory is interrupted at the third or fourth generation—people simply have nothing to remember except horror and shame, and to acknowledge this is too painful.
4. Church and People: The Tragedy of Rupture
One of the most poignant themes of the lecture is the role of the church. Zubov does not spare the church. He reminds us that the church owned millions of serfs, that it was as cruel a slaveholder as the secular landowners, that it did not speak out against serfdom, that even Metropolitan Philaret, a man of bright mind, was silent until the tsar asked him to write the manifesto on emancipation. The people hated the church not because it was a church, but because it was an accomplice to the crime. And when the Bolsheviks began to destroy the church, the people did not rise to its defense. They went into schisms, into sects, and for the most part simply went away from faith. And this spiritual desolation, this rupture between the people and the church, is one of the deepest traumas of Russian history.
Zubov speaks of the new martyrs, of priests and monks killed by the Bolsheviks. But he does not idealize the church. He shows that the tragedy was not only in persecution from without but also in spiritual crisis from within. The church, which could have become the voice of conscience, the voice of repentance, the voice of defense of the oppressed, was silent. And this silence cost it the trust of the people. And this too is part of the telisic choice—the choice of a people that rejected not only the old authority but also the old faith, because this faith had been compromised by its servants.
5. Bolshevism as a Spiritual Phenomenon: Idolatry and Corruption
Zubov examines Bolshevism not only as a political system but as a spiritual phenomenon. He quotes Toynbee: collective worship of humanity, of man, of the leader is the highest form of idolatry. Instead of God, the leader stood up. Instead of faith—ideology. Instead of repentance—class hatred. And this system, in Zubov's view, was a machine of maximal moral decomposition of man. It corrupted everyone: those who killed, those who approved, and those who remained silent. It destroyed the family, the economy, the normal transmission of faith and culture. People who come to faith today, says Zubov, are like blind kittens—they received nothing from their grandmothers and grandfathers, because they were forced to be silent. Not only ancestral memory but also spiritual tradition was interrupted. And it can be restored only through repentance, through acknowledgment of the criminality of the past choice, through a change of mind.
6. The New Telisic Choice: Repentance and Truth
Zubov concludes the lecture with a call for a new telisic choice. We cannot bring back the old Russia, cannot bring back Soviet power, cannot build the pseudo-market Russia of the Yeltsin era. But we can become aware of the criminality of the past—our own, our fathers', and our grandfathers'—and thereby cleanse the ground for a new life. Only by becoming aware of the past, only by living through it, only by taking truth into the future, can we build a truly new country. Not a counterfeit, not a decoration, not an imitation. But a country based on truth, on repentance, on respect for the human person.
The German people managed to do this. They passed through metanoia and became different. The Russian people are still thinking little about this. But Zubov believes that the path of change of mind is open. And in this is his hope. In this is his faith that history is not over, that a people is capable of repentance, that truth can prevail.
Conclusion: Historiosophy of Repentance
Zubov's lecture is not merely historical analysis. It is a historiosophical study that poses the question of the nature of collective will, of the spiritual foundations of the historical process, of repentance as the only path of healing. Zubov does not moralize, does not condemn, does not divide into right and guilty. He investigates the tragedy of a people that was simultaneously victim and executioner, that rejected its past but did not repent of it, that loves its tyrants because it cannot acknowledge that it itself chose them. And his answer is a call to the courage to acknowledge the truth, to the courage to repent, to the courage to begin a new life. This is not a political program, not an ideology, not a party slogan. It is a spiritual path that passes through personal and collective change of mind. And Zubov believes that this path is possible. In this is his strength. In this is his hope. In this is his love for his people—not for the empire, not for the state, not for the ideology, but for the people capable of repentance and a new life.
Claude Sonnet AI - The Unhealing Wound of the Unspoken Sin
Instead of a Preface: An Argument with the Obvious
There exists a kind of question before which the usual logic of causes and effects falters. We easily explain why a country devastated by war grows poor and why a country with convenient harbors grows rich. But we are at a loss when a people from whom millions of lives were taken remembers with warmth the one who took them. It is precisely before such a question that Andrei Zubov's Riga lecture places the listener: why, a century after the coup, does the Soviet era in the consciousness of a vast space feel "ours," native, almost familial, while the thousand years that preceded it have turned into a pale legend, a decoration for lovers of antiquity?
Zubov immediately cuts off easy answers. It is not a matter of the supposed simple-mindedness of the people—people here are just as intelligent and just as capable of erring as anywhere else. Nor is it a matter of ethnic nature—longing for a bygone order roams far beyond the present borders, touching even those who were once held in the zone of influence by force. Therefore, the solution should be sought not in blood and not in mind, but in something that lies between the personal soul and the fate of the community. In what the speaker dares to call the will of the people.
The Will of the Community as the Engine of Fate
The central intuition of the lecture is simple and therefore daring: a people, like an individual person, has the capacity for volitional choice, and this choice is capable of determining its image for centuries. Zubov selects for this force a name deriving from the Greek word for the will that chooses, the will that precisely chooses—and insists that before us is not an ornament of speech but a real lever of history.
The course of reasoning rests on transferring habitual human experience to the scale of the whole. Each of us daily decides: to steal a piece of bread or earn it, to pursue by force or to retreat, to betray a vocation for the sake of satiety or to preserve fidelity to oneself. We live not by naked instincts but by the ways in which we give these instincts an outcome. If this is true for one, asks Zubov, why is it impossible for millions? And he answers: it is possible. A people also makes a choice—sometimes a fateful one—and the consequences of this choice it bears not so much in its wallet as in the constitution of its feelings: in what will henceforth evoke in it sympathy and what will evoke dull rejection.
Here an important caveat is easy to miss. Such a choice sets not only a material track but above all a stable order of sympathies and antipathies. It programs whom the people will consider their own and whom alien, even if the alien turns out to be a benefactor and the own a executioner. And if the choice was morally ruinous, the community has exactly one path to healing. About it—at the very end, and not by chance.
The Rejected Past and the Mechanics of Oblivion
To explain the strange love for the recent and the coldness toward the distant, Zubov introduces the figure of rejection. The pre-revolutionary era did not simply recede in time—it was consciously cast off. Moreover, it was cast off not only within one country: the same movement passed through lands that today argue about their own distinctiveness.
The difference between personal and collective rejection here is subtle and painful. A person who has left a first love or an unrealized vocation for the sake of a settled life remembers the lost with sadness and tenderness—"but I could have been different." A people, however, rejected its past differently: without tenderness, with cold bitterness, with the desire to erase to the foundation. Hence the total replacement of signs: the coat of arms, the flag, the very coupling of symbols by which the country recognized itself disappeared. Zubov emphasizes the exceptionality of this step: neighbors who survived similar upheavals did not decide on a complete zeroing of symbolism, but here they did.
From this same logic grows the striking observation about the interrupted memory of the clan. Among peoples whose past was not cast off, family memory—even the simplest, non-aristocratic—stretches back into the depths of centuries. Here, however, the ancestral thread for most breaks at the third or fourth generation, as if it strikes an invisible line of the seventeenth year and goes no further. People do not know their great-grandfathers and, more importantly, do not strive to know: there, beyond the line, is emptiness or a hastily composed myth about mysterious newcomers with crooked noses. Oblivion here is not passive; it is the active work of refusal.
The Root of Revenge: The Unacknowledged Guilt of the Masters
But why did the rejection come out so ferocious, devoid of all pity? Zubov leads the listener to the serf condition—and insists that this was precisely slavery, and slavery of a special, unbearable kind. Its horror is not only in forced labor but in the fact that the enslaved was not a captive or one sold but a part of one's own people—people who quite recently, in a time of troubles, with their own hands, as a militia, and not by the mercy of the nobility, had freed the country from foreigners. Free yesterday, they were bent into slaves almost against their own will, by decrees from above.
The lecture painstakingly shows that the enslavement was neither inevitability nor universal consent. Even the supreme authority at one moment was ready to call personal servitude inadmissible—and retreated under the pressure of its own nobility, to whom it was whispered that an attempt on slaveholding had cost certain rulers their lives. At a large assembly of representatives of the estates, only a few dared to raise their voices against serfdom—and were ridiculed and pushed back by their own. Moreover, it was not only landowners who strove for the enslavement of their fellow tribesmen: the Cossack elders also asked to enserf the recently freed tillers, and the clergy sought the right to own people—for surely the archpriest himself should not go behind the plow. And the people's memory of the just tsar-deliverer surfaced every time in the storm of rebellion, when a pretender promised eternal liberty.
Hence the key turn of thought. What accumulated in the people was not only a thirst for freedom but also a thirst for revenge. Freedom can be granted by decree—and it was eventually granted, and even the redemption debts were forgiven. But revenge cannot be canceled by decree. The only thing capable of extinguishing it is a sincere "forgive me" from the lips of the guilty. And here, according to Zubov, a fatal incompleteness occurred: emancipation was carried out, but forgiveness was not asked. Neither the authority, nor the nobility, nor the church as an estate said to the children of yesterday's slaves: we have grievously sinned before your fathers. The guilt was tried to be hushed up, hidden, furnished with half-measures—and a hushed-up guilt, as in family infidelity, does not dissolve by itself. It is either spoken out to the end, or it returns with blood.
The Church That Remained Silent
A special, most bitter note of the lecture is the fate of faith. Zubov does not spare the church institution: it itself owned many serfs and was a slaveholder no gentler than the secular ones. Voices against bondage were heard only from individual pastors, while the higher hierarchy was silent from reign to reign. Even the brightest mind on the Moscow cathedra took up the word on emancipation not by inner calling but only by direct instruction of the sovereign—and words, of course, were found, but only with unforgivable delay.
The consequence of this silence proved spiritually destructive. The people turned away not from faith as such—they turned away from the church, compromised by complicity and muteness. Some went into the old dissent, some into new communities, and the majority—simply away from faith. And when later the shrines began to be destroyed, few came out to defend them: the connection had already been torn from within long before the external persecution. Thus in the rejection of the old world, the rejection of the former religion became not an accident but part of a single volitional movement.
The Leader Instead of God and the Machine of Universal Complicity
In the emptied place where the sacred had formerly stood, the leader stood up. Zubov, relying on his beloved historian-thinker, calls the worship of the human leader the highest form of idolatrous service, with which no accommodating compromise is possible: either it, or worship of the genuine. Hence the doomedness of all attempts to "come to terms" between the new faith and the old: such unions only corrupt the church itself.
But who were these leaders? Not newcomers from other worlds, answers the lecture, but those who managed to ride the people's hatred. And here thought makes a second, even more uncomfortable turn. The people did not simply become a victim of capture—they chose this order. Zubov refers to the figures of the only free universal expression of will of that time: the overwhelming majority gave their votes to the forces that wished to sweep away the old world together with its faith and estates. For the parties that defended the former order and religion, in a country accustomed to calling itself Christian, fractions of a percent voted. That is why, says the speaker, this power began to feel like the people's own: it was not imposed from without—it was voted for, and then defended for five years in internecine war and defended successfully.
Separately, Zubov analyzes the structure that made the system simultaneously durable and corrupting. The punitive apparatus and the army were staffed from the same simple people; people entered them willingly, entered in a stream, even seeing how neighbors were shot and sent to perdition nearby. The cunning of the system was not to allow a new hereditary caste to form: property did not accumulate, everything important was given only by office, and office passed to another. For the sake of this eternal reshuffling, the market was abolished—not out of blind doctrinairism, but in order endlessly to tempt the people with power over their own kind, opening to any "from the plow" a path upward that the former estate system almost never gave. The price was economic infirmity, which only a very rich land could endure, and moreover one that fed its neighbors with the same order. Thus arose, in Zubov's word, a machine of maximal moral decomposition: it drew millions into complicity, each calmed himself with the thought that "if not I, then another, even worse"—and in this self-justification was corrupted. At the same time, the threads of normal family, economy, and transmission of faith were torn: today's seekers come to it as blind kittens, for in their native walls they received nothing—their ancestors were forced to be silent.
The German Lesson and Difficult Hope
The lecture persistently holds before the eyes one liberating example. Another people in the twentieth century also made a monstrous volitional choice—and yet in a few decades managed to outgrow it. It did not begin to refer to circumstances, did not begin to assure that it had been coerced and had known nothing. It said directly: we did this, and this is the greatest crime of our history. It was precisely the directness of acknowledgment, and not the cunning of oblivion, that preserved its spiritual health. In this Zubov sees a rarest case in the annals of a genuine change of mind at the level of an entire community—a change that is worth studying regardless of how the further fate of that country unfolds.
Hence grows the final account that the lecture presents to both the past and the present. Three fateful choices have been made, in essence. The first—when the upper ranks consciously enslaved their people for their own sake. The second—when the people, having rejected the enslavers, went not toward a free common order but along the path of extermination, and on blood tried to obtain happiness. The third continues to this day: power again petrifies, again reaches to pass on what has been acquired by inheritance, again closes the exit upward. And not one of these choices has been redeemed by the only effective means—open acknowledgment of guilt.
Therefore the finale of the lecture is not a verdict but an invitation to a new volitional step. One cannot, says Zubov, resurrect either the old power, or the Soviet order, or the pseudo-market appearance; every such restoration will be a counterfeit. But one can become aware of the criminality of the former choice—one's own, one's father's, one's grandfather's—and thereby cleanse the ground. Not to throw away history, but to change one's attitude toward it. Only by living through the past to the end and taking into the future only the truth can a people build a truly new and not a counterfeit country. Here the speaker denies the title of heroes even to those rulers whom it is customary to count as reformers: their deeds were half-hearted, and one of the recent leaders of change never dared to call the old catastrophe a crime, hoping to lean on a "good" founder who simply did not exist.
Conclusion: Historiosophy as Confession
The Riga speech is difficult to assign to an ordinary historical lecture. It is rather a reflection on the very nature of historical movement, where what is placed at the center is not economic orders and not the alignment of forces but the conscience of the community. Zubov investigates the tragedy of a people that was at once victim and executioner; that rejected its past but did not mourn in it its own sin; that loves its tormentors because it is unable to acknowledge that it once voted for them.
And therefore his main thought sounds not as a political program but as a call to confession in its exact sense—to a change of mind. An unhealing wound does not close while it is hushed up: neither in a family nor in a people. The only ointment is the truth about one's own guilt spoken aloud. In the fact that a people is capable of this—as another, having passed through similar darkness, proved capable—lies the whole hope of this lecture. Not in imperial pride, not in sovereign greatness, not in ideology, but in the courage to say "forgive" and begin to live anew.
LUMO AI - Telisic Will and Torn Memory: On the Spiritual Architecture of Russian Historical Trauma
History is not linear. It does not move from darkness to light, from barbarism to civilization according to a preordained plan. History is a series of choices, and each choice leaves a scar that either heals or festers. Andrei Zubov in his Riga lecture points to the point where the Russian people made a choice that determined their fate for a century ahead. But a deeper question remains open: why do they continue to carry this choice within themselves as their own, and not as something alien that brings suffering?
Choice as Fate
At the center of Zubov's thought lies the concept of collective will—the capacity of a people to choose its fate just as a person chooses between good and evil. This is not a metaphor. When millions vote for parties promising to destroy the old world to the foundation, they do what a person does when he betrays his first love for the sake of a advantageous deal. Only the scale here is different. Here what is betrayed is not simply feelings but the very memory of who we are.
What is the paradox? A people that endured serfdom, which lasted for centuries, in 1917 did not choose freedom. It chose revenge. And this revenge was not exhausted by the overthrow of the tsar. It continued for decades of executions, camps, famine. But the people did not rise against their executioners. Why? Because they considered this power their own. This is the key moment. Power built on blood, but accessible to anyone "from the plow," becomes not an alien yoke but an opportunity. And here the tragedy begins.
The Rupture of Ancestral Memory
Zubov notes the interruption of memory at the third or fourth generation. This is not an accident. It is a symptom. When a family cannot tell its children who their great-grandfathers were, except through myths about "little people with crooked noses from the Caucasus," a spiritual beheading occurs. A person without roots lives in the present, but the present without the past has no future.
This rupture was not spontaneous. It was planned. The Bolsheviks did not simply change the flag and coat of arms—they changed time. Before 1917 there was "then," and after—"the time of our history." The imperial past became alien, hostile, subject to erasure. But why did this erased past evoke rejection, while the Soviet one did not? The answer lies in psychology. The old world reminded of duty, of sin, of guilt that no one acknowledged. The Soviet world promised that the past did not exist, that we were starting anew. For a person without the strength to confess a crime, such oblivion is a blessing.
Power and Confession
But here the main question arises: why did the old elite not ask for forgiveness? Zubov points to the Legislative Commission, to the silence of the church, to the half-heartedness of Alexander II's reforms. The peasants were freed, but it was not said that they had been slaves, and the slaveholders—criminals. This was necessary. A confession before the people should have preceded emancipation. But this did not happen.
The absence of repentance made revolution possible. A people that had not received forgiveness sought it themselves—through the destruction of those who were guilty. And here we encounter the phenomenon that can be called collective trauma without treatment. The German people after 1945 said "we did this." The Russian people did not say it. And the difference is not in the number of dead but in the quality of consciousness.
The Machine of Moral Decomposition
The Soviet system, according to Zubov, was a machine of maximal corruption. But not because it forced people to kill. It did it differently. It opened a career to one who was ready to kill. It allowed the son of a shoemaker to become a dictator. It gave power over others without accumulating wealth. But the price was high. The price was moral degradation.
Everyone who entered this system had to justify himself. "If not I, then another, even worse." This is a formula that corrodes conscience. It creates a community where all are accomplices, but no one confesses. And then truth becomes the enemy. Truth becomes dangerous. Truth becomes what must be hidden.
The Leader Instead of God
Collective worship of the leader is not a political mistake. It is a spiritual shift. The place of God was taken by man. And this cannot be combined. Either one or the other. The attempt to combine leads to a corrupted church and hypocritical ideology. The Bolsheviks destroyed the church not by chance—it was a blow to the very source of conscience. When the church was silent during serfdom, it lost the right to be the voice of truth. And when the Bolsheviks came with their attack on the shrines, the people did not rise to defend them. Because the connection had already been destroyed from within.
Hatred as the Foundation of Power
Zubov shows a mechanism that is rarely discussed openly. Power built on hatred requires constant feeding of this hatred. The class enemy must be found, must be destroyed, so that power remains legitimate. But this hatred did not disappear after victory. It turned into an instrument of control.
The peasants of the Tambov rebellion cried "for soviets without communists." They understood that Soviet power was their choice, but the communists had deceived them. However, they did not return to old Russia. They remained with Soviet power. This says that the rejection of the old was deeper than any political mistake of the new system.
The Economy of Corruption
The rejection of the market in the Soviet Union had not only ideological reasons. It was a way to avoid the formation of a hereditary caste. If property is not passed on to children, if an official cannot accumulate wealth for descendants, then the elite remains fluid. Anyone could become a boss, anyone could lose their place. This system was social but economically ruinous.
The paradox is that today this system is again ossifying. The Chekist power strives to pass property on to children. This is a return to the problem that the Bolsheviks tried to solve at the price of millions of lives. A new telisic choice stands before modern society: to repeat the mistake of a frozen caste or to find another path?
Memory as Pain
The hardest thing in acknowledging the past is acknowledging one's own guilt. When a person says "we committed a crime," he includes himself among the guilty. This is impossible to do without an inner break. The old elite could not. The new elite does not want to. The people are afraid.
But there is another path. The German people showed that it is possible to pass through metanoia—a change of mind. This is not weakness. It is strength that liberates from the power of the past. Acknowledgment of a crime does not mean denial of achievement. It means honesty before oneself.
Three Choices and One Way Out
The first choice was made by the higher stratum, enslaving the people for its own benefit. The second choice was made by the people, rejecting the enslavers through destruction instead of creation. The third choice continues today—to choose between the continuation of lies and the beginning of truth.
Zubov does not propose a political program. He proposes a spiritual path. Only by living through history, accepting it wholly—both the light and the dark—can one build a country on truth. Pseudo-tsarist Russia, pseudo-Bolshevik Russia, pseudo-market Russia—all remain counterfeits. A real country is built only on the acknowledgment of the past.
Hope for Repentance
Zubov's faith consists in the fact that a people is capable of repentance. Not because it is ideal. Because it is alive. The history of Germany showed that even after Nazism, rebirth through the acknowledgment of crime is possible. The Russian people can pass the same path.
This does not mean forgetting. It means remembering differently. Not with hatred toward those who came before us, but with understanding that they were the same people, capable of choice. And we too are capable of choice. The choice between the continuation of the cycle of violence and the beginning of a new path.
Conclusion: Healing Through Truth
The theme of the lecture goes beyond historiography. It is an investigation of the very nature of human will on the scale of a people. The telisic choice determines not only politics but also the soul. And when the soul is wounded, treatment requires truth, not oblivion.
The history of Russia in the twentieth century is the history of two civilizations colliding within one people. One was rejected without repentance. The other was accepted without condemnation. Both decisions turned out to be mistaken. And now the time of the third choice is coming.
In this choice is opportunity. The opportunity to build not an empire, not an ideology, not a party. But a country where truth is stronger than fear, where memory is not a curse, where everyone can say "we did this" without shame, with hope for healing.
Such a path is open. The question is only whether the people are ready to take the step. History shows that other peoples were ready. The Russian people are still reflecting. But time does not stand still. And a choice once made determines fate for generations ahead. Now is the time to make the right choice.
GROK AI - Fundamental Spiritual-Psychological, Cultural, Historiosophical Essay-Study
There are wounds that a people carries not in the flesh but in the very tissue of its memory. They do not bleed openly, but they poison everything that tries to grow over them. One such wound is the strange, almost familial closeness to an era built on the negation of everything preceding it. Why does a time marked by mass destruction, famine, the destruction of temples, and the severing of the ancestral thread feel like one's own, while the millennium lying before it feels alien, mythical, barely existing? The answer lies not in economics and not in propaganda. It is rooted in the constitution of collective will.
A person lives by choices. He can steal or earn, strike or step away, betray a vocation for the sake of satiety or preserve fidelity to an inner calling. These decisions add up to fate. A people is also capable of choice—not as a sum of individual votes but as a single act that determines for a long time the order of feelings: whom to consider one's own, whom alien, what to love, what to reject. Such a choice creates stable psychic stereotypes. It forms not only external orders but also an inner attitude toward the past. If the choice was destructive, it does not disappear by itself. It continues to live until it is realized and rejected from within.
Before the seventeenth year there existed a long history. In it were saints and executioners, ascetics and rapists, great achievements and grave sins. But this history was not simply pushed aside by time. It was consciously rejected. Rejected not with sadness about what did not come to pass but with cold determination to erase to the foundation. The symbols by which the country recognized itself disappeared. The old elite was destroyed—not only the nobility but also the clergy and the cultural layer. The people did not defend them. On the contrary: the news of the murder of the royal family evoked laughter and approval in the streets. This was not natural cruelty. It was the consequence of unrepented guilt accumulated over centuries.
The root of this guilt was the serf condition. Not simply dues but genuine slavery—the deprivation of the will of an entire part of one's own people. People who had recently, as a militia, freed the land from foreigners were bent into slaves. This did not happen by their consent. The higher estates insisted on the preservation of slavery, even when the supreme authority was ready to acknowledge it as inadmissible. The church owned millions of serfs and was silent. When emancipation finally came, it was not accompanied by words of repentance. No one said: we have grievously sinned before your fathers. The guilt was tried to be hidden, furnished with half-measures, made to appear as if nothing terrible had happened. But a hushed-up guilt does not dissolve. It returns with revenge.
Revenge became the content of the choice of the seventeenth year. The people did not choose the path of gradual ordering, similar to that by which other lands walked. It chose the path of destruction. The vote for the forces that wished to destroy the old world together with its faith and estates showed the measure of this rejection. The overwhelming majority supported those who promised: whoever was nothing will become everything. This was a free act. No one coerced. Then five years of civil war confirmed it with blood. The power born of this hatred began to feel like one's own. Because it opened the way upward to anyone ready to serve it. Not by accumulation of property but by office itself. The system deliberately did not allow ossification: wealth was not passed on by inheritance, everything important was given by power, and power passed to others. Thus eternal mobility was maintained—and eternal complicity.
This machine corrupted. It drew in millions. Each could say to himself: if not I, then another, even worse. And in this self-justification conscience died. Family, normal economic life, and the transmission of faith were destroyed. People who come to faith today often come as blind kittens: in their native walls they received nothing, because their ancestors were forced to be silent. Not only ancestral memory but also spiritual continuity was interrupted. In place of God stood the leader. The worship of the human ruler became the highest form of idolatry. With it, reconciliation is impossible: either it, or worship of the genuine.
Another people in the same century made a no less monstrous choice. It supported evil, participated in it, waged war. But later it managed to say: we did this. This is the greatest crime of our history. It did not begin to refer to circumstances, did not begin to assure that it had been coerced. It acknowledged guilt. And this acknowledgment—not weakness but strength—allowed it to preserve spiritual health. Repentance liberates. It breaks the power of the past over the present. Without it, the past continues to poison.
The Russian people have not yet performed such an acknowledgment. The old elite did not repent for slavery. The new authority did not repent for terror and famine. The people themselves did not repent for having chosen and confirmed this power, for having gone into the punitive organs, for having approved destruction. Unrepentance explains why executioners remain "ours" and the distant past "alien." The memory of the clan breaks precisely where the unspoken shame begins. There, beyond the line, is either emptiness or a hastily composed myth. Oblivion here is active: it is the work of refusal.
Now before the people again opens the possibility of choice. One cannot resurrect either the old power, or the Soviet order, or the sham market appearance. Every such attempt will be a counterfeit. But one can become aware of the criminality of the former path—one's own, one's father's, one's grandfather's. One can change one's attitude toward history: not throw it away but live through it to the end. Only then will the ground be cleansed. Only then will it become possible to build not a sham but a genuine life—on truth, on repentance, on respect for the human person.
This is not a political program. It is a spiritual path. It requires the courage to call evil evil, even if it was "ours." It requires acknowledging that on blood one cannot attain happiness. It requires seeing heroes not in those who destroyed and built systems of violence, but in those who preserved truth and became victims. The German experience shows: such a path is possible. A people is capable of a change of mind. This capacity is alive. The question is only whether the will is found to take the step.
History is not finished. Each choice leaves a trace. The trace of unrepented guilt festers. The trace of acknowledged truth heals. The third choice—between the continuation of the circle of hatred and the beginning of a new memory—has not yet been made. It waits.
QWEN AI - Ontology of Unrepented Guilt: The Telisic Rupture and the Metaphysics of Soviet Time
The history of a people is not simply a chronological chronicle of events but a continuous dialogue of the living with the dead, in which the self-consciousness of the nation is formed. However, in the Russian historical fate this dialogue is interrupted by a deafening silence, replaced by the roar of fratricide. The phenomenon that the historian Andrei Zubov designates as the acceptance of the Bolshevik, bloody past as "one's own," and the pre-revolutionary thousand-year history as alien and mythical, cannot be explained through the prism of classical socio-economic or political theories. To comprehend the depth of this historical anomaly, it is necessary to turn to spiritual anthropology and historiosophy, where the center of attention is not the external shell of being but the hidden movements of collective will and the unsleeping conscience of the people.
The Telisic Act as Ontological Break
At the foundation of the historical being of any people lies what Zubov calls the telisic factor—collective, elective will. This is not simply the sum of individual preferences but an ontological act of self-determination, in which the community decides who it is and what its path is before the face of eternity. A person lives by free choice, and a people at the points of bifurcation of its fate also makes a choice that determines not only the material order but also the very tissue of historical time.
The telisic choice of a people can be creative, or it can become morally destructive. The tragedy of Russia lies in the fact that at the beginning of the twentieth century a choice was made that had the character of a dark mystery. This was not simply a political overthrow of power but a total ontological rejection. The people did not simply change the scenery; they expressed the desire to annul the very memory, to erase the symbols, to destroy the elite, and to tear the connection of generations. The pre-revolutionary past was rejected not with quiet sadness about a bygone era but with bloodthirsty fury, characteristic of a victim who has finally gained access to the executioner's weapon.
The Original Sin of the Elite and the Loss of the Prophetic Voice
The root of this monstrous telisic choice lies in the spiritual disease that struck Russian society long before the seventeenth year. Serfdom, which Zubov rightly qualifies as genuine slavery, was not simply an economic or social anomaly. It was a gravest spiritual crime of the higher estates against their own people. People who had recently, by their sacrificial feat, freed the country from invaders, were reduced to the state of cattle, deprived of the image of God, and given into the unconditional ownership of their own kind.
The tragedy was aggravated by the fact that the elite not only committed this crime but also stubbornly refused to acknowledge it. When the historical opportunity for redemption was missed, when the nobility and the higher bureaucracy convinced the supreme authority to preserve bondage for the sake of their own privileges, they committed an act of spiritual suicide. Even more terrible was the silence of the Church. The hierarchy, which owned millions of serf souls and did not raise its voice in their defense, lost the prophetic gift. The altar was desecrated by complicity in spiritual enslavement. The people, feeling this betrayal, began to go into schisms, into sects, and ultimately into unbelief. The connection between heaven and earth, between the elite and the people, was torn long before the Bolsheviks began to blow up churches.
The Liturgy of Resentment and the Dark Mystery of Complicity
The revolution became not an act of liberation but a liturgy of resentment—of spiteful, vengeful ressentiment. The murder of the royal family, the destruction of the nobility, the mockery of the priesthood—all this was perceived by the people not as a crime but as an act of cosmic, albeit perverted, justice. The people rejoiced in blood, because the unrepented guilt of the executioners demanded blood as atonement. But since repentance did not follow, revenge did not bring purification. It only gave birth to a new, even more terrible form of enslavement.
The Bolshevik system, having taken up the baton of this hatred, revealed to the world a unique and frightening historiosophical phenomenon. Its strength lay not in ideology but in the ingenious and cynical metaphysics of collective complicity. Having renounced the market and private property, the new power prevented the formation of a hereditary caste. The currency became not wealth, which can be passed on to children, but Power, which was given temporarily and withdrawn together with life.
This created a society in which everyone was a potential executioner and an eternal victim. The system deliberately corrupted man, drawing him into bloody mutual responsibility. Any native of the lower depths could rise to the top, but the price of this elevation was participation in the destruction of his own kind. The formula "if not I, then another, even worse" became a spiritual drug that lulled the conscience of millions. The people made this power "their own" not because it was just, but because they themselves, millions of their representatives, became its co-authors, accomplices, and beneficiaries. Stalin, Voroshilov, Khrushchev—these were not foreign invaders, they were "our own," who came out of the very thick of the people, wore the same greatcoat, and spoke the same language of hatred.
The Idol of the Leader and the Rupture of the Temporal Continuum
In place of the rejected transcendent God was placed an immanent idol—the Leader and the State. The worship of the human ruler became the highest form of spiritual substitution. But the idol requires constant sacrifices, and therefore the machine of terror could not stop. It ground up its own creators, confirming the law: violence not sanctified by repentance inevitably devours itself.
Here lies the mystery of the rupture of ancestral memory. Why do the threads of family history break at the third or fourth generation? Because beyond this line lies the zone of unspoken shame and horror. A grandfather cannot tell his grandson the truth that he either silently watched as neighbors were taken, or himself wrote denunciations, or stood at the execution pit. Memory is replaced by myth, because the truth is unbearable. The pre-revolutionary past is rejected also because it serves as a mute reproach: it reminds that the people were deceived, that they were betrayed, and that they, in turn, betrayed themselves, choosing the path of fratricide instead of the path of creation.
Metanoia as the Only Eschatological Way Out
History knows examples of how peoples coped with the burden of a monstrous telisic choice. The German people, having made in the twentieth century a no less terrible choice in favor of Nazism and the Holocaust, found the strength to perform metanoia—the deepest change of mind and heart. It did not begin to seek justifications, did not begin to shift the blame onto circumstances or a handful of fanatics. It acknowledged: we did this. This acknowledgment did not humiliate the nation but saved its soul, allowing it to break the vicious circle and integrate itself into a civilized future.
The Russian people stand before the necessity of such an existential step. It is impossible to build a genuine future on the foundation of lies, silence, and false heroism of executioners. Pseudo-tsarist, pseudo-Bolshevik, or pseudo-market Russia—these are merely different masks of one and the same spiritual emptiness, attempts to flee from the mirror.
The way out lies through painful but saving two-sided repentance. The old elite (in the person of its historical and spiritual heirs) must repent for the original sin of spiritual and physical enslavement of the people, for centuries of arrogance and cruelty. But the people themselves, the people's soul, must also repent for the dark mystery of the seventeenth year, for the joy at spilled blood, for voluntary slavery before the idol of totalitarian power, and for the readiness to be an accomplice of evil for the sake of phantom career heights.
Only by realizing the criminality of their telisic choice, only by removing from themselves the hypnotic charms of imperial and Soviet greatness bought at the price of millions of lives, will the people be able to return to themselves the right to history. True freedom begins not with the replacement of flags and coats of arms, but with the courage to look into the eyes of one's own past, to speak out the pain, to acknowledge guilt, and only then to begin to build a house on stone, and not on the sand of unrepented lies.
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GLM FLASH AI - The Sin That Became Fate
An experience of spiritual-psychological, culturological, and historiosophical reflection on the lecture of Andrey Borisovich Zubov about the un-released past
Prologue. The Question That Hurts
There are questions that are asked not for information, but because they hurt. The question of why, a century after the catastrophe, the people call their tyrant their own and the liberator a stranger belongs precisely to this kind. It cannot be resolved by counting votes, opening archives, or comparing standards of living. It is addressed not to the past, but to the soul: to that layer of it where the unrepented, the unforgiven, the unlamented are stored.
Andrey Borisovich Zubov's lecture poses this question with merciless directness: why is the thousand-year history of a country that gave the world saints, architects, poets, and commanders perceived by the people themselves as a half-fairy-tale, a "pre-history," while seven decades of lawlessness are felt as their own flesh and blood? Why did the murdered anointed of God evoke not a tear from passersby, but sighs of relief? Why did a peasant's son, having become the executioner of his fellow villagers, go to service with joy? The answer at which the historian arrives leads beyond historiography into the realm of spiritual anthropology: the past does not let go not because it is beautiful, but because it has not been repented.
This essay is an attempt to think this thought through to the end, to unfold it in three dimensions: psychological, cultural, and historiosophical.
I. The People as Will: Is a Collective "I" Possible?
Before speaking of collective guilt, one should justify the very concept of collective will. The age-old skepticism of science is well known: the people are not an organism, not a personality; they have no single consciousness; to speak of their "choice" means to fall into metaphor. But this caution, justified against racial myths and the mysticism of blood, must not obscure a simple fact: communities really do perform actions that none of their members performs individually. Rebellion, silence, exodus, betrayal — these are supra-individual events, and in them the community manifests itself as something unified.
Zubov proposes here a term taken from the depths of the Greek language: the thelesic factor of history — the will inclining toward choice. The essence lies not in the word, but in the reality it names. A human being lives not by instincts, but by the ways of their realization: a hungry person may steal, or may earn; a person in love may court, or may violate. Between impulse and action there always stands a choice, and by this choice a person molds their own character. A people, the historian asserts, is structured in a similar way. In decisive hours — of tumult, reform, revolution — it as a whole inclines toward one action or another, and this inclination becomes its fate.
Here it is important to hear the word "fate" without mystical trembling. The fate of a people is its own choice, hardened in time. A choice once made does not remain an event: it passes into character, into stable stereotypes of acceptance and rejection, into what may be called the habits of the heart of an entire generation after generation. The will, having inclined, turns into a bent. The bent, repeating, turns into nature. Thus freedom, uncorrected by repentance, congeals into doom.
In this lies the first key to the riddle. The question "why is it our own?" is in fact the question "whom does the people consider their own?" And kinship in history is determined not by blood and not by geography, but by complicity: those become one's own with whom one acted together, sinned together, for whom one was responsible.
II. The Curse of the Third Generation: The First Sin
Russian history knows two great volitional turning points, and they relate to each other as sin and revenge, as cause and effect, as unspoken guilt and unforgiven grievance.
The first turning point is enslavement. The lecture persistently returns us to an obviousness that official historiography for centuries softened with euphemisms: serfdom was not a form of economic management, but slavery, and slavery of a particularly terrible kind — forcible, imposed by its own elite upon its own people. People who, only a century earlier, had with their militia liberated the country from foreign hordes were nailed to the land by a power that they themselves had saved.
The documentary fabric restored by the researcher is terrifying precisely in its ordinariness. The empress, who in the instruction to the Legislative Commission wished to declare personal slavery incompatible with the dignity of subjects, strikes out these lines on the advice of Russian grandees who reminded her of the fate of her husband. Two deputies who dared to speak of gradual emancipation are hissed down and trampled by their own estates. A jurist who received a gold medal for a treatise on the misfortunes of peasants sees his thoughts buried in the archive. The Cossack starshina, whose people had themselves won freedom from Polish lords, asks the authorities to enserf their own tillers. The clergy, which owned souls by the tens of thousands, solicits the right to buy serfs even for white priests — for, its representative reasons, it is not fitting for a protopope to walk behind the plow. The people respond with Pugachev, whose manifesto breathes with a single passion: to exterminate the accursed noble race.
In all this there is a feature that makes the drama irreversible: the sin was committed by a corporation and was never confessed by it. Generations succeeded one another, mores softened, statutes and manifestos were written — but not a single word of repentance sounded from estate to estate. Alexander II granted freedom with land and organization, and even this was greatness by the standards of the century — but the authorities' tongue did not turn to say to the emancipated: "We have grievously sinned before your fathers and before you." The Synod was silent; the dignified hierarchs were silent; even the bright mind of Metropolitan Philaret spoke of emancipation only when he received a royal commission to write the manifesto. The metropolitan's pen found all the necessary words — with a delay of a century.
Here one bitter observation is appropriate, one not directly in the lecture but evoked by it. Scripture says that the iniquity of the fathers visits the children to the third and fourth generation. Zubov notes that ancestral memory in our parts breaks off precisely at the vast majority — at the third, fourth generation. The coincidence of numbers here is deeper than chance: the people still stand within the term of unrepented sin. They do not remember beyond the fourth generation not because the archives burned, but because looking there is forbidden not by censorship but by conscience, which does not know how to look there without repentance. Memory of ancestors requires gratitude; and how can one thank those by whose hands your hands were bound in chains, and by whose same hands — a century later — vengeance was taken?
III. A Confession Written in Ballots: The Second Choice
The second turning point is usually described as a coup, a conspiracy, an elemental force. Zubov insists on something else: it was a choice. Not the whole people, not unanimously, but the people as will — inclined. And this inclination is imprinted with a precision rare for history: the elections to the Constituent Assembly became a spiritual census of the country, a confession written in ballots.
Let us look into this confession without mercy and without hatred. In a country baptized a thousand years ago, for all Christian parties together — half a percent. For parties that openly set as their goal the destruction of the old world to its foundations together with its faith, elite, and law — about five-sixths of the votes. For the Socialist Revolutionaries, the party of terror, which threw bombs at people standing next to the condemned — three-fifths of the country. The people chose not shepherds — avengers. And it must be said directly: the avengers were more understandable to them than the shepherds, because they spoke the language of their century-old unspoken grievance.
From this becomes explicable what otherwise seems inexplicable: the approval of terror by the doomed themselves. The memoirs of eyewitnesses cited in the lecture read as testimony about a spiritual plague. A former premier, who miraculously crossed the border, describes a Petrograd tram where news of the execution of the royal family was read aloud with smirks and boasting of bloodthirstiness, while the elders were silent and turned away. A philosopher who survived the Red Terror formulates a terrible thing: death sentences were carried out not as punishment for guilt, but as the utilization of unfit material — and the people rejoiced, knowing that tomorrow they themselves might become such material. Joy mixed with horror at one's own tomorrow — this is no longer an emotion, it is a state of soul, and it has a name in the spiritual tradition: possession.
Toynbee, the lecturer's favorite historian, gives this a universal dimension: the ethos of the dispossessed is woven from cruelty, and the guilt for the bloody orgy lies not with those who led the lower classes, but with those who brought the country to rebellion. This judgment equalizes responsibility but does not abolish freedom: one can bring someone to it, but the people had to incline themselves. The revolution did not happen to Russia — Russia chose it. Not as truth, but as vengeance.
IV. Why It Is "Ours": Complicity as Identity
Now — the central psychological knot of the theme. Why did the power that subdued the people with unprecedented cruelty remain "their own" to them?
The answer of the lecture is destructive in its simplicity: because the people entered into it. The figures on the composition of punitive agencies cited by the researcher shatter both the Black-Hundred and the liberal myths at once: the apparatus was overwhelmingly Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian — popular by blood, only slightly seasoned with other tribes. But another figure is decisive: only one percent of employees had a higher education. This was not the old elite dressed in a new uniform; these were the lower classes who had taken the ladder. The son of a shoemaker, a locksmith, a combine operator — the path from the plow to the summit was open, and anyone ready to keep his own kind in check received advancement.
Hence the brilliant and terrible construction that the lecture reveals as the secret of the regime's stability: the refusal of inheritance. Not to accumulate property, not to allow wealth to become fixed in families — means not to allow a caste to form, means each generation anew opens the doors upward for new lower classes. Power was not passed to children — but instead every decade it became accessible to new hundreds of thousands of hands. The regime bought loyalty not with money, but with participation. It was not sated, but it was all-accessible.
And here is the psychological law that should be named directly: shared crime generates the strongest of earthly kinships. A person who served in a punitive institution, voted at assemblies, shouted approval of execution lists, remained silent over a neighbor's grave — became a co-author of the new world. And what a person built with their own hands, that they call their home, even if that home is a prison. Especially if it is a prison: to recognize it as alien would mean recognizing oneself as a hireling in someone else's affair; to recognize it as one's own means at least to remain master of one's own dishonor.
In this optic, the riddle of double memory is also overturned. The pre-revolutionary past is "not ours" not because it is alien by blood: it is the past of ancestors. But to remember it means to remember a double truth: that the ancestors were enslaved by the fathers of others' ancestors, and that the vengeance inflicted by our fathers was inhuman. This double memory is unbearable without repentance, and there was no repentance — neither from masters nor from muzhiks. Therefore the people preferred to become orphans. It is easier to come from nothing than from shame.
Indicative too is the speech of the rebellious Tambov peasants, suffocated by chemical shells: they marched under the red banner, for soviets, only without communists. Even the rebellion against the regime spoke the language of the regime. An invisible bridle held firmer than bayonets: power had already entered the flesh of language, slogan, hope. It was "ours" — to the very end and, as the lecturer repeats with pain, in many ways to this day.
V. War Against Genealogy: The Cultural Dimension of the Break
The culturological layer of the theme allows us to see in the revolution not only a political, but more deeply a ancestral upheaval, a war against the very structure of succession.
The external signs are known: the coat of arms changed to a globe with sickle and hammer — an empire of space instead of an empire of time; the flag disappeared without trace — not one of the new European revolutions dared such a thing; a world language and Latin alphabet were tested; calendar, names, rites — all were subject to rebirth. But all these famous experiments are only the surface current. The regime's profound decision consisted in the abolition of inheritance as such — not only of property, but of spirit.
Let us think what it means for a society in which wealth is not inherited. In it, name, craft, home, land, book, prayer are also not inherited — the whole long chain by which a person is tied to the past and rooted in the future. The revolutionary person had to be born without father and mother — from the revolutionary womb itself, like a warrior from the head of the sovereign. Genealogy was replaced by the party: senior comrades instead of fathers, the leader as all-national parent, the history of the party as family tradition. Hence — not chance, but the systematic nature of the break in family memory: grandmothers were silent not from senile oblivion, but from fear; the archives of the soul were burned in the stoves of denunciations; great-grandfathers passed into non-being as "superfluous."
Thus was created a civilization of orphanhood — and in this lies its hidden kinship with the slaveholding past that it rejected. For the serf too was a person without genealogy: he was sold without asking the name of his grandfather. A century later society proudly renounced genealogy itself — but already as a "lordly inheritance." The mechanics of enslavement reproduced itself in a purified, totalitarian form. This is the culturological law that the lecture allows us to see: un-released sin does not disappear — it changes owner and returns in a new dress.
VI. The Leader and the Empty Throne: The Religious Meaning of the Cult
The spiritual summit of the analysis is the question of the leader. The old power summoned God to its banners — and therefore, the lecturer reasons, the new world was obliged to be godless: not from the caprice of militant atheists, but from inner logic. Collective worship of man by man, as Toynbee formulates it, is the highest form of idolatry, and an agreement between idol and God is impossible: two cannot fit on one throne.
Here the religious dialectic of the whole theme opens. The people, who never received from earthly lords the word "forgive," received instead of God a leader — and in this was a secret revenge not even on people, but on heaven. The idol does not judge: it demands. The idol does not call to conscience: it calls to loyalty. To worship such a one is easy, because the idol forgives nothing — but asks nothing either. Before the true God the soul is laid bare and burns; before the idol it merely marches. The godlessness of the Soviet world was not science, but an analgesic of conscience: where there is no One Who sees, there is no need to repent.
The leader occupied the emptied throne not because he was strong, but because the place could not tolerate emptiness. The cult — with relics, liturgies, scripture, and hagiography — was not an ideological decoration, but a religious necessity of a system built on unrepented sin. And therefore no agreement of the authorities with the Church could be lasting: the Church that accepted the idol's conditions corrupted itself and defiled what it protected.
VII. Oblivion as Labor, Nostalgia as Fever: The Psychological Dimension
The psyche of a person and the psyche of a people are structured by the same laws, and the main one is this: unlived trauma does not disappear — it waits. Unmourned loss turns into chronic melancholy; unrecognized guilt into chronic aggression; unrepented sin into nostalgia.
Nostalgia for those decades should be described not as love for the past, but as the fever of the repressed. Listening to testimonies — including from countries that only touched the Soviet world, where longing for a "reliable life" also hums in the underground of hearts — one understands: they long not for abundance (there was none), not for justice (there was none), but for certainty. In prison, where everything is decided for you, one need not choose, and therefore need not answer. Freedom is frightening not by difficulties — it is frightening by solitude before one's own decisions. A people that once made a terrible choice and did not repent of it instinctively flees to where choice is impossible — because there one cannot sin anew.
Hence also the aggression against attempts at memory. Every new fact about terror is experienced not as a discovery, but as an attempt at theft: after all, the only unconfiscated property remains the consoling lie about one's own past. Oblivion is not rest, it is labor, an hourly effort not to know; therefore it costs so much and is defended so furiously.
And hence — the last, heaviest thought: external expansion as the continuation of internal uneradicated guilt. A people that has not managed to pronounce "we were wrong" is condemned eternally to prove "we were right" — by new victories, new annexations, new sufferings of others. The internal tribunal that never convened is replaced by external war. Until the trial over one's own history has taken place, history will take revenge, recruiting new fronts for itself.
VIII. The Lesson of Metanoia: Repentance That Does Not Humiliate
The contrast set by the lecture is more instructive than all theories. The German people made their monstrous choice — and decades later pronounced judgment over it: we did this, this is the great crime of our people. No circumstances, no coercion, no other culprits — only this. And precisely this uncompromising "we" allowed the people to preserve the psychic mode in a positive state: it recognized, condemned, and rejected its deed — and thereby returned to itself the right to be.
Against this, the argument of false shame is usually advanced: will recognition not humiliate the people? Experience says the opposite. Repentance is not self-abasement, but recovery: metanoia, the change of mind, is the return of the soul from the captivity of lies into the realm of truth. A people capable of condemning the deeds of its fathers does not cease to exist — it only begins to exist authentically. On the contrary, unconfessed guilt corrodes identity from within, demanding eternal self-justification and new victims in its justification.
But the Russian situation is more complex than the German — and the lecture honestly shows this complexity. Here there is not one sin, but a chain: enslavement (the sin of the upper classes), vengeance (the sin of the lower classes), complicity (the sin of each who entered the system). And therefore repentance here must be multi-leveled. Descendants of masters must pronounce the word about slavery; descendants of rebels and servicemen — about bloody vengeance and about service to executioners; all together — about idolatry, about the leader in the place of God. As long as each repents only for someone else's sin, there will be no repentance. Indicative is the bitter example of the half-reform: the leader of perestroika, who sincerely desired renewal, still did not dare to call the coup of the seventeenth year a crime, trying to build the new on the image of a "good" founder. But there was no good founder — and therefore the reform grew on sand. Half-repentance does not liberate; it only roots lie in a new spiral.
IX. The Third Choice: Truth as Foundation
And now before the people stands a new volitional boundary. Of what does it consist? Not in the choice of an economic system and not in the distribution of power places. The choice of which the lecture speaks is spiritual in its essence: to recognize or to continue denying the criminality of one's own path.
There are many temptations to avoid this choice, and all of them are already recognizable: pseudo-restoration of tsarist symbols over unrepented Bolshevism; pseudo-Soviet nostalgia covering fear of the future; pseudo-market egoism reproducing the same castes, only now on inherited capital. All three are masks of one and the same refusal: the unwillingness to stand before the truth. For only a recognized past becomes a foundation; an unrecognized one remains a mine under the foundation.
What then should enter the new self-consciousness? The whole truth, entirely, in its unbearable duality. The ancestors are victims of enslavement, and this must be remembered with gratitude and pain. The ancestors are participants in vengeance and service to evil, and this must be remembered with shame and sorrow. The contemporaries are heirs of both, and therefore no one has the right either to be unconditionally proud or to renounce wholesale. Heroes should be called those who both before the coup and under the new power sought truth and became victims for it; those who built greatness on blood should be struck from the ranks of heroes — however "their own" and understandable they may seem.
There is in the Russian language a word that here unites knowledge and judgment: pravda. Pravda is not abstract truth and not naked justice separately, but truth that has become judgment and mercy. To take into the future only pravda means to admit the past into one's home, to call things by their names, to return names to the victims, to cease honoring executioners, to teach children genealogy — and to give, at last, the word of repentance that neither the empire, nor the synod, nor perestroika said. This is the task not of the state and not of a party, but of souls, families, parishes, schools — of the whole fabric of society that was so diligently torn apart.
Epilogue. Fate as Frozen Freedom
Let us return to the initial question: why is it our own? Now the answer is visible in all its horror and clarity. The people call their own not the best and not the native — they call their own that in which they participated and which they have not repented of rejecting. The Soviet past is "ours" because it was made by the hands of great-grandfathers and illuminated by their silence; the thousand-year past is "not ours" because it judges both those who were slaves and those who became overseers — and people fear judgment more than suffering.
But in this formula lies hope as well. If fate is frozen freedom, then it can be remelted — by that same freedom, turned backward, into repentance. Metanoia does not abolish history, it changes its sign: from curse the past becomes lesson, from wound — conscience. The German example shows that this is possible even after the worst. The Russian people are still on the threshold: they have not yet said either "yes" to their guilt or "no" to their idol.
The question with which the lecture began is therefore addressed not to the past, but to the future, and it sounds thus: what will we agree to consider our own? The answer to it will be the third, decisive choice — the one that will either remelt fate or leave it hanging over grandchildren, as a century ago it hung over fathers. For only pravda, all of it and without remainder, can be laid as the foundation of a house in which people will not be ashamed to live and not afraid to die.
The essay was written as an independent historiosophical reflection on the motifs of the lecture themes: collective will and fate, serfdom as unrepented sin, revolution as the people's counter-choice, complicity as the source of identity, the cult of the leader as idolatry, metanoia as the only exit from the historical dead end.
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ChatGPT AI — Memory, Guilt, and the Return of the Past: Why the Bolshevik Past Is Becoming "Our Own" Again
Introduction. The Strangeness of Historical Belonging
One of the deepest questions in modern Russian history is not why the revolution of 1917 happened, and not even why the Bolsheviks managed to hold on to power. What is far more difficult to understand is something else: why, more than a century after the revolution, a significant part of Russian society continues to perceive the Soviet past not merely as a historical period, but as part of its own identity.
One can condemn individual crimes of the Stalin era, one can acknowledge the repressions, the famine, the destruction of churches, the annihilation of millions of human destinies — and at the same time say: "But it was our country." This apparent contradiction conceals a crucial psychological mechanism of historical memory.
A person is capable of saying: "My father committed a crime," but it is far harder for him to say: "My father's crime is part of my own biography." It is even harder to say: "I must accept this history without justifying it."
Society finds itself in an even more complex position. It is not a single person; it does not have one memory, one will, and one conscience. Yet a society can indeed develop stable ways of relating to the past: what to consider heroic, what shameful, what alien, and what one's own; whom to remember, whom to forget; what to be proud of and what to feel shame about.
It is precisely here that Andrei Zubov's lecture goes beyond an ordinary conversation about Soviet history. Its central problem becomes not so much Bolshevism as a political system, but the mechanism of historical appropriation and unacknowledged guilt.
But this idea requires further development. For one cannot simply say: "the people chose Bolshevism" — and stop there. Between revolutionary rapture, civil war, coercion, fear, adaptation, career, everyday life, and late Soviet nostalgia there lies an enormous distance.
The main question therefore sounds different:
how does historical trauma turn into identity?
I. History as Inheritance
History is usually presented as a sequence of events.
There was an empire.
A revolution occurred.
The Soviet Union arose.
Then came Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev.
Then perestroika.
The collapse of the USSR.
The Russian Federation.
But for the human psyche, history is structured differently.
History is not only what happened. It is also what we consider to have happened to us.
One can live a hundred years after some event and perceive it as alien. One can, by contrast, consider oneself a direct continuer of an event that occurred long before one's own birth.
A modern Frenchman can perceive the French Revolution as part of his national history, although he personally has no connection to the events of the eighteenth century. A modern German can consider the history of Nazism part of his own national biography while categorically rejecting its ideology. Here a crucial distinction arises:
historical inheritance does not mean moral approval.
One can inherit a crime as memory without inheriting it as a value.
One can say:
"These things were done by my ancestors."
But one can add:
"And that is precisely why I am obliged to know about them."
Such a position differs fundamentally from two opposite ways of dealing with the past.
The first is justification:
"Such were the circumstances."
The second is repression:
"It was not us."
Between them there exists a third possibility:
"This is our history, but not our value."
It is precisely the absence of this third position that is capable of creating a historical trap.
II. The Rupture of 1917 as a Rupture of Biography
One of the most interesting theses of the lecture is the idea that the revolution destroyed not only the political order but also the mechanism for transmitting historical memory.
This is fundamentally more important than a simple change of flag.
A person learns history primarily not from a textbook.
He receives it from his family.
From his grandmother's stories.
From objects in the home.
From photographs.
From names.
From graves.
From family professions.
From old letters.
From what his parents considered worthy of pride or shame.
When a political catastrophe destroys a significant portion of social groups, archives are destroyed, families are scattered, emigrate, or fall silent, what arises is not simply a loss of information.
What arises is a rupture in biographical continuity.
A person ceases to understand who his great-grandfathers were.
He knows that there existed "tsars," "landowners," "merchants," "nobles," "revolutionaries," but he does not know how these categories intersected with his own family.
History turns into an abstraction.
And then the Soviet era begins to seem not one of the historical epochs, but the beginning of one's own biography.
This is an extraordinarily important psychological mechanism.
If family memory begins with the Soviet period, then pre-revolutionary Russia turns out to be something like the ancient world for the descendant.
It may interest him culturally.
He may love Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Russian architecture, church music.
But psychologically it may still remain "an alien Russia."
Whereas the Soviet apartment, the Soviet school, the pioneer necktie, the army, the factory, the queue, the television, space, the dacha, songs, holidays, and photographs of parents become concrete personal reality.
Hence the paradox arises:
a person can know that the Soviet system committed crimes and at the same time emotionally perceive it as home.
Home and regime in human memory are not the same thing.
But memory is capable of merging them.
III. "Our Own" Does Not Mean "Good"
Here a fundamental distinction must be made.
When a person says:
"It was our country,"
he is by no means necessarily asserting:
"Everything it did was right."
Psychologically, the word "our" often means belonging, not approval.
One can say:
"My father was an alcoholic."
This does not mean:
"I approve of alcoholism."
One can say:
"My family made a grave mistake."
This does not mean:
"The mistake was right."
In exactly the same way, a society can perceive the Soviet period as its own history without accepting every crime of that period.
That is precisely why the question "why does Stalin remain our own?" cannot be explained solely by a lack of knowledge about the repressions.
A deeper mechanism is at work here.
Stalin turns out to be part of family time.
Under him, grandmothers lived.
Under him, parents were born.
Under him, the war was won.
Under him, factories were built.
Under him, people received an education.
Under him, families received apartments.
Under him, a person saw the sea for the first time.
Under him, grandfather became an engineer.
Under him, grandmother met her future husband.
A historical figure connected to an enormous number of personal memories ceases to exist exclusively as a political actor.
He turns into a knot of biography.
And then the rational argument:
"But under him, mass repressions took place"
may fail to destroy the emotional connection.
Because the person does not hear only a historical statement.
He hears a threat to his own memory:
"Then it turns out that part of my family lived inside a criminal epoch."
This is painful.
Therefore a defensive reaction arises:
"Not everything was so clear-cut."
Sometimes this is genuinely an invitation to a more complex historical analysis.
But sometimes it is a way of avoiding an encounter with the moral content of the past.
IV. Nostalgia as Longing Not Only for the State
Soviet nostalgia is especially interesting because a person often longs not for the political system as such.
He longs for his own youth.
For the feeling of the future.
For his parents.
For his friends.
For the courtyard.
For his first love.
For a time when life seemed more understandable.
For his own physical youth.
For deceased people who cannot be brought back.
The state in memory turns out to be a container for personal biography.
That is why it is difficult to argue with nostalgia exclusively by means of historical facts.
A person is told:
"You miss a system that was unfree."
And inwardly he answers:
"I miss my mother, who is no longer here."
These are completely different levels of conversation.
Therefore mature work with historical memory must not ridicule nostalgia.
It is necessary to separate personal past from the political order that existed at the same time.
One can preserve a photograph of a Soviet childhood without preserving a political mythology.
One can love the music of one's childhood without accepting the ideology of the epoch.
One can remember good people who lived under a totalitarian state without turning the state into the source of their human virtues.
This is the most important operation of historical maturity:
to liberate personal memory from the necessity of justifying the epoch in which it arose.
V. Revolution as Liberation and as Destruction
Zubov's lecture proposes interpreting the revolution through the concept of collective will.
This is an interesting historiosophical hypothesis, but it cannot be understood literally as the assertion that there existed a single people with a single consciousness.
Russia in 1917 was a fractured society.
A peasant might want land.
A worker might want control over production.
A soldier might want an end to the war.
National movements might want autonomy or independence.
A liberal might want parliamentarism.
A socialist might want social justice.
A monarchist might want the preservation of the throne.
A Bolshevik might want the revolutionary transformation of society.
These desires did not coincide.
Therefore the revolution was not a simple expression of a single popular will.
However, a subtler thought arises here.
Even if a society is fractured, it can collectively participate in the destruction of the previous order, although various groups pursue completely different goals.
A revolutionary situation is created not only by revolutionaries.
It arises when the old order loses a sufficient number of social supports.
In this sense, responsibility is distributed unequally, but historical causality almost never belongs to a single subject.
VI. The Moral Trap of Revolution
A revolution begins with a promise of liberation, but very quickly it can fall into a completely different psychological mechanism.
This mechanism can be called moral inversion.
In ordinary life, murder is a crime.
In revolutionary consciousness, a person is first declared an enemy.
After that, the murder of the enemy becomes permissible.
Then the category of enemy expands.
Yesterday's landowner becomes an enemy.
Today's moderate socialist is a traitor.
Tomorrow's revolutionary is a counter-revolutionary.
In the end, the enemy becomes a person who does not demonstrate the correctness actively enough.
Thus a system arises in which a person's moral evaluation is determined not by his actions but by his belonging to a category.
This is one of the universal mechanisms of mass violence.
It cannot be considered exclusively Russian.
But the Russian experience shows a particularly tragic form of this process.
A person stops asking:
"What did this person do?"
and begins asking:
"To which group does he belong?"
After that, individual responsibility is replaced by collective responsibility.
And collective guilt becomes the justification for collective punishment.
VII. The Main Psychological Paradox of the Soviet Person
Another thesis of the lecture is especially interesting: the Soviet system could simultaneously suppress a person and give him a sense of participation in power.
At first glance this is a contradiction.
How can one be subordinated to a system and at the same time consider it one's own?
But psychologically this is entirely possible.
If a person receives the opportunity to advance in service, join the Party, become a boss, obtain housing, education, a position, or social status, the system becomes part of his own biography.
He is no longer merely an object of power.
He becomes its small bearer.
This creates a complex psychological formula:
"The system is unjust, but it gave me a place in life."
The more a person has invested himself in the system, the harder it is for him to acknowledge its fundamental wrongness.
Because then he will have to revise not only the history of the state but also his own biography.
That is precisely why many former Soviet people are capable of criticizing individual leaders while at the same time defending the very principle of the system.
"Stalin was bad."
"Brezhnev was bad."
"The Party bosses were bad."
But:
"Soviet power was ours."
This allows them to preserve a positive idea of their own life.
VIII. Power as a Social Elevator
Here lies one of the most essential questions of the lecture.
The Soviet system destroyed the old estate barriers and at the same time created new forms of dependence.
For an enormous number of people, the possibility of social mobility opened up.
The son of a peasant could become an engineer.
A worker could become a director.
A person from a poor family could become a professor.
A person from the lowest social stratum could enter the state apparatus.
This was a real historical change.
But social mobility is not equal to freedom.
One can obtain a career and at the same time lose independence.
One can obtain an education but not have the right to use it freely.
One can rise up the social ladder, but the ladder itself belongs to the state.
This is one of the deepest features of the Soviet experience.
The system could simultaneously:
— destroy old privileges;
— create new privileges;
— expand education;
— restrict freedom of thought;
— provide social guarantees;
— create political dependence;
— ensure advancement;
— demand loyalty.
Therefore a simple opposition between "old oppression" and "new liberation" is insufficient.
Historical reality was more contradictory.
IX. Why the Destruction of the Old Elite Does Not Destroy the Principle of Elite
The problem of the elite is especially important.
The revolution destroyed or displaced a significant part of the former social groups, but this did not mean the disappearance of hierarchy itself.
On the contrary.
A new hierarchy arose.
The principle changed:
previously, social position was to a significant degree determined by origin;
after the revolution — by political affiliation, state service, and loyalty.
But a person could still stand above another person.
Privileges still existed.
The distribution of access to resources still existed.
The dependence of the lower on the higher still existed.
Therefore the revolution did not destroy hierarchy as a psychological structure.
It changed the criterion for entry into it.
And here one of the main lessons of Russian history arises:
if a society struggles only against a concrete elite but not against the mechanism that turns power into privilege, the new elite will inevitably reproduce the old function.
Names change.
Symbols change.
Slogans change.
But the vertical psychology remains.
X. Why the Soviet Past Proved More Durable Than the Soviet State
The USSR disappeared as a state formation.
But the disappearance of a state does not mean the disappearance of its psychological structure.
A person continues to live inside the language, habits, ideas about the boss, attitudes toward the state, understanding of justice, ideas about career and social security formed by the previous epoch.
A state can disappear in a single day.
Social psychology changes over decades.
Therefore the collapse of the USSR was not an instantaneous liberation from the Soviet past.
It created a new trauma.
A person lost not only the state.
He lost a system of coordinates.
What had seemed eternal turned out to be temporary.
What had been considered right turned out to be disputable.
What had been taught in school began to be revised.
What parents had been proud of became an object of criticism.
This created a new generational tension.
For one generation, the Soviet Union was unfreedom.
For another, it was youth.
For a third, it was the childhood of their parents.
For a fourth, it is an almost mythological epoch.
The same state exists in four different psychological times.
XI. Why Memory of Crimes Does Not Destroy Attachment
Historical memory does not work like a court in which evidence is presented and the defendant is automatically found guilty.
It works through identity.
If a crime was committed by "others," it is easy to condemn.
If a crime was committed by "our own," the temptation arises to find a justification.
This can happen for several reasons.
"Such were the circumstances."
"Everyone did that then."
"People knew nothing."
"Otherwise it was impossible."
"But there were achievements."
"But they won the war."
"But there was justice."
Each argument may contain a portion of historical truth.
But the problem begins when the positive sides of an epoch are used to neutralize the moral significance of crimes.
Here it is necessary to distinguish two questions:
what was historically achieved?
and
at what cost was it achieved?
Historical maturity begins where the second question ceases to disappear behind the first.
XII. Repentance and Historical Responsibility
The most original part of the lecture is connected with the concept of repentance.
In the Christian understanding, repentance is not simply regret.
It is a change of direction.
A person must not only say:
"I acted wrongly."
He must change his attitude toward his own act.
Applied to history, an extremely complex question arises:
can a person repent for the actions of people who lived before his birth?
Legally — no.
Biologically — no.
But culturally and morally — it is possible to accept responsibility for the memory of the past.
This does not mean:
"I am personally guilty of the crime of my ancestors."
It means:
"I refuse to justify this crime simply because it was committed by people with whom history connects me."
Thus a mature form of historical responsibility arises.
It does not require inherited guilt.
It requires inherited memory.
XIII. Germany as an Example — and Why It Cannot Be Turned into a Mechanical Model
In the lecture, Germany is considered as an example of a society that passed through a deep reckoning with the crimes of the Nazi period.
This is indeed an important historical experience.
But it cannot be turned into a universal recipe.
Germany after 1945 found itself in completely specific conditions: military defeat, occupation, division of the country, the Nuremberg Trials, a change of state institutions, generational conflicts, and subsequent democratic consolidation.
Moreover, the German reckoning with Nazism did not happen instantly.
There were decades of silence, repression, and family conflicts.
Therefore what matters is not the myth of a sudden collective repentance.
What matters more is something else:
historical reckoning can be a process that continues for several generations.
This is precisely what makes the German experience interesting for comparative history.
XIV. Russia and the Problem of the Absent Ritual of Recognition
If one continues the thought of the lecture, the Russian problem may lie not simply in a lack of historical knowledge.
The problem may lie in the absence of a national language that allows several truths to be acknowledged simultaneously.
That the Russian Empire was part of Russian history.
That it contained the greatest cultural achievements.
That serfdom was a most grievous social injustice.
That the reforms of the nineteenth century were an enormous transformation.
That the revolution was generated by real crises of the old order.
That the Bolshevik regime committed mass crimes.
That the Soviet epoch simultaneously brought industrialization, mass education, social mobility, victory in war, and enormous human sacrifices.
That the people who lived inside this system were not exclusively criminals or exclusively victims.
That many adapted.
That many resisted.
That many decided nothing.
That many participated in the system without inwardly accepting it.
Without the ability to hold all these facts simultaneously, a myth arises.
And a myth always simplifies.
XV. The Most Painful Problem: Ancestors Were Not Only Victims
Historical memory becomes especially difficult when it turns out that the same person could be simultaneously a victim and a participant in the system.
A grandfather could have been repressed.
His brother could have worked in the state apparatus.
One relative died in a camp.
Another wrote denunciations.
A third fought in the war.
A fourth built a factory.
A fifth kept silent.
A sixth saved the persecuted.
The history of one family turns out to be a microcosm of the country.
Therefore the attempt to divide ancestors into "good" and "bad" often turns out to be impossible.
Mature memory admits tragic complexity.
It is capable of saying:
"My grandfather was a good man."
And at the same time:
"He lived inside a system that committed crimes."
These two statements do not have to contradict each other.
Human morality is always more concrete than a political system.
XVI. Why It Is Difficult for a Society to Acknowledge Its Own Historical Error
There is another psychological mechanism — self-defense of identity.
If a person acknowledges:
"Our society committed a terrible mistake,"
he risks feeling:
"Then I myself belong to the society that committed it."
To avoid this unpleasant feeling, the psyche offers a simpler solution:
"They did it."
Thus formulas appear:
"The Bolsheviks were not Russians."
"It was done by outsiders."
"We were forced."
"The people decided nothing."
"Everything happened somewhere at the top."
But such an explanation can be just as dangerous as the opposite extreme — accusing the entire people.
Because historical reality usually lies between two myths:
the people are guilty of nothing
and
the people are guilty of everything.
It is more correct to investigate the distribution of responsibility by levels.
Some created the ideology.
Others organized the violence.
Still others carried out orders.
Others collaborated.
Others kept silent.
Others resisted.
Others saved.
Others simply tried to survive.
History becomes morally mature only when it ceases to turn millions of people into a single psychological figure.
XVII. "The People's Choice" and the Limits of This Formula
The assertion that Bolshevik power became "our own" because the people chose it deserves special attention.
Here historical caution is required.
The elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1917 indeed provide the most important material on the political preferences of the population of the former Russian Empire. But the results cannot automatically be turned into proof of a single conscious choice specifically of the Bolshevik model of state.
The Bolsheviks did not receive a majority of votes in the elections to the Constituent Assembly.
Moreover, the elections took place under conditions of war, revolution, the disintegration of the former state mechanism, differences between regions, and a rapidly changing political situation.
Even more important is that attitudes toward the Bolsheviks in 1917–1921 were not unchanging.
Support, cooperation, resistance, neutrality, and forced submission constantly passed into one another.
Therefore the concept of collective will is useful as a philosophical category, but dangerous as a literal description of every person.
History does not vote with a single voice.
XVIII. But Collective Memory Does Indeed Exist
At the same time, the very idea of the collective dimension of history remains extraordinarily fruitful.
There is no single national soul in the literal sense.
But there exists what can be called a common cultural habit of memory.
It manifests in holidays.
In monuments.
In street names.
In school textbooks.
In family stories.
In cinema.
In attitudes toward historical figures.
In which words evoke pride and which evoke shame.
In which crimes are considered impossible for "our own" and which are explained by circumstances.
Thus cultural memory is formed.
And it is capable of existing for decades after the disappearance of the state that gave birth to it.
XIX. The Return of Symbols as a Symptom
When a society returns the symbols of the past, this does not necessarily mean a literal return of the past.
A symbol is capable of performing a different function.
It can compensate for loss.
If a person feels that his historical biography has been broken off, an old symbol becomes a bridge.
But a bridge can lead not only to an understanding of the past.
It can lead to its romanticization.
Therefore the return of a historical symbol in itself says nothing about a moral attitude toward the epoch.
More important is the question:
what exactly is a person returning together with the symbol?
Memory?
Culture?
A name?
Military glory?
An imperial idea?
The idea of social justice?
Or the right of the state to demand absolute submission?
Externally the symbol may be the same.
The inner content is completely different.
XX. Soviet Mythology as an Unfinished Story
The Soviet Union left behind not only state institutions.
It left behind a narrative about man.
This narrative asserted that a person could rise from a lower condition, obtain an education, a profession, respect, housing, social status, and become part of a great historical project.
That is precisely why Soviet memory is so stable.
It says to a person not only:
"This is what the state was like."
It says:
"This is who you could become."
The Soviet myth therefore turned out to be not only political.
It was anthropological.
It offered the image of a new man.
Hence its durability.
If one destroys only monuments but does not answer the question:
what human dignity did people seek inside this system?
then the myth will remain.
XXI. The Main Mistake of Anti-Soviet Discourse
The opposite extreme is also capable of creating problems.
If the Soviet past is described only as continuous crime, millions of people will cease to recognize their own life in this account.
They will say:
"But I did not live that way."
And they will be right.
Their childhood indeed was not exclusively a political system.
Their parents could be decent people.
Their education could be good.
Their friendship was real.
Their love was real.
Their work was real.
Their achievements were real.
Historical criticism that leaves no place for human everyday life itself becomes a variety of simplification.
Therefore the task of historical analysis is not to destroy memory.
On the contrary.
It is necessary to separate memory from myth.
XXII. What It Means to "Live Through History"
The final thought of the lecture about the necessity of "living through history" is especially significant.
To know history is not enough.
One can know dates and understand nothing.
One can know the number of the repressed and not feel the human content of the tragedy.
One can know about serfdom and not understand what it means for a person to be unable to dispose of his own life.
One can know about the revolution and not feel what happens to a society when a neighbor becomes a neighbor's enemy.
To "live through history" does not mean to suffer emotionally in place of one's ancestors.
It means to restore the human dimension of the past.
To see in the historical person not a function.
Not a "kulak."
Not a "nobleman."
Not a "bourgeois."
Not a "Red."
Not a "White."
But a human being with fear, hope, family, love, mistakes, and responsibility.
Then history ceases to be a weapon.
It becomes a school of consciousness.
XXIII. The Spiritual Dimension of Historical Memory
Here an actually spiritual-psychological problem arises.
Any society can live in three states of relation to the past.
The first is deification.
The past is declared a golden age.
The second is demonization.
The past is declared absolute evil.
The third is acceptance.
The past is acknowledged in its entirety, with light and darkness.
The third state is the most difficult.
Because it does not give psychological consolation.
If the past is entirely good, we can be proud.
If the past is entirely evil, we can separate ourselves:
"That was them."
But if the past is simultaneously great and criminal, culturally brilliant and humanly tragic, then one will have to abandon simple identities.
That is precisely why mature historical consciousness is structurally close to spiritual adulthood.
A child asks:
"Who is good?"
An adult asks:
"What happened?"
A mature person adds:
"How did we allow this to happen, and what in us is capable of repeating it again?"
XXIV. Repentance Without Inherited Guilt
It is especially important not to turn historical repentance into collective self-humiliation.
If a modern person says:
"I am guilty of the crimes of 1917,"
this is historically meaningless if he did not participate in them.
But if he says:
"I will not justify crimes simply because they were committed by people whom I consider my ancestors,"
this is already a mature moral position.
The difference is enormous.
Repentance must not mean hatred of one's own people.
It must mean the ability to refuse to justify a crime.
This is fundamental.
Because hatred of one's own past is yet another form of dependence on it.
A person who constantly curses his ancestors remains psychologically tied to them.
Freer is the one who is capable of saying:
"I accept the inheritance as a whole. I do not renounce the culture. But I refuse to repeat the evil."
XXV. History as a Space of Reconciliation Between Generations
In this sense, historical work can perform a therapeutic function — not in a medical sense, but in a cultural one.
It is capable of reuniting broken generations.
A great-grandfather does not have to become a hero.
A great-grandfather does not have to become a criminal.
He can become a human being again.
And then family history ceases to consist of blank spots.
The possibility arises of learning:
who these people were;
what they feared;
what they believed in;
why some joined the revolution;
why others fled;
why still others served the new power;
why others kept silent;
why others resisted.
Thus what returns is not political continuity but human continuity.
These are fundamentally different things.
XXVI. Is a New Historical Beginning Possible?
The most important question of the lecture ultimately relates neither to Nicholas II, nor to Lenin, nor to Stalin.
It relates to the future.
What happens to a society that has not finished its argument with its past?
It begins to repeat it symbolically.
Old words return.
Old fears.
Old models of power.
The old idea of the boss.
The old opposition of "our own" and "aliens."
The old conviction that order is more important than freedom.
But repetition is never exact.
History does not return to its former point.
It returns structures, not circumstances.
Therefore the task of the future consists not in choosing between tsarist and Soviet Russia, not in the mechanical restoration of the past, and not in a complete rejection of national history.
The more complex task lies in creating a culture capable of containing its own history without the need to falsify it.
XXVII. A New Historical Identity
A mature national identity can be built not on the formula:
"Our people were always right."
But neither on the formula:
"Our people were always criminals."
It is built on something else:
"This is our history, therefore we are obliged to know its truth."
Then Pushkin does not become the property of one political epoch.
Dostoevsky does not become the property of one ideology.
The Church does not become only a symbol of the pre-revolutionary state.
Victory in war does not become a justification for repressions.
Industrialization does not become a justification for terror.
The emancipation of the peasants does not become a justification for the old estate order.
The revolution does not become a justification for the subsequent violence.
Every historical fact returns to its place.
And then history ceases to be a chain of justifications.
XXVIII. What "Russia Before 1917" and "Russia After 1917" Actually Mean
One of the deepest consequences of the revolution lies in the fact that Russian history was psychologically divided into two civilizational biographies.
Before the revolution.
After the revolution.
But historically these are not two different countries.
They are one human territory that survived a radical change of regime.
People did not disappear.
Peasants remained.
Cities remained.
Language remained.
Literature remained.
Memory was partially preserved.
Religious traditions partially survived destruction.
Even the Soviet person to a significant degree grew out of pre-revolutionary culture, although official ideology sought to present him as a new being.
Therefore the attempt to completely separate Soviet Russia from pre-revolutionary Russia is as impossible as the attempt to completely separate an adult from his childhood.
One can reject the past.
But one cannot make it so that it never existed.
XXIX. Historical Maturity as the Ability Not to Choose Between Memory and Truth
Ultimately the main conflict is not between "Reds" and "Whites."
It runs inside memory itself.
One part of it wants to preserve the dignity of ancestors.
Another wants to preserve the truth.
Immature consciousness believes that only one can be chosen.
If you tell the truth, you will supposedly betray your ancestors.
If you defend family memory, you will have to hide the truth.
But mature memory refuses this choice.
It says:
"I can love my ancestors and know their mistakes."
"I can preserve the cultural inheritance and reject the crime."
"I can remember the achievements of an epoch and at the same time remember its victims."
"I can consider history mine and not consider everything in it right."
And precisely here freedom arises.
Not freedom from history.
Freedom within history.
XXX. Conclusion. The Past Becomes One's Own Only When It Can Be Accepted as a Whole
The main mystery of Soviet memory lies not in the fact that people forgot the crimes.
Often they know about them.
The mystery is different: why does knowledge of a crime not always destroy the feeling of belonging.
The answer lies deeper than politics.
A person does not choose his parents.
He does not choose the country of his birth.
He does not choose the historical epoch of his childhood.
He receives them as an inheritance.
And therefore the attempt to force a person to renounce the whole past usually evokes a defensive reaction.
A person defends not Stalin.
He defends his parents.
He defends his own childhood.
He defends his own sense of dignity.
He defends the memory of people he loved.
Therefore the argument about the past must begin not with the demand:
"Renounce your history."
It must begin with something else:
"Let us look at it as a whole."
As a whole — that means seeing the serf peasant and the great writer.
The revolutionary and the victim of the revolution.
The Red Army soldier and the dispossessed peasant.
The builder and the prisoner.
The scientist and the censor.
The believer and the destroyed church.
The victor and the fallen.
The person who received an education thanks to the system and the person whom the same system silenced.
This does not abolish moral evaluations.
On the contrary.
Only after the restoration of the full picture does moral evaluation become meaningful.
Historical repentance in this understanding is not collective self-flagellation.
It is the restoration of the ability to distinguish.
Where liberation is liberation.
Where violence is violence.
Where achievement is achievement.
Where crime is crime.
Where a victim is a victim.
Where responsibility is responsibility.
And finally, where our own present-day responsibility begins where we decide what to do with the inheritance we have received.
The past cannot be changed.
But its place in consciousness can be changed.
One can stop using it as a justification.
One can stop using it as a weapon.
One can stop choosing between worship of the past and its curse.
One can for the first time accept one's entire history — not as a justification of everything the ancestors did, but as the space from which we emerged.
Then the necessity of constantly returning the past into present political life disappears.
History becomes neither an idol nor an enemy.
It becomes memory.
And memory that has passed through truth ceases to be a chain.
It becomes responsibility.
And perhaps it is precisely here that the historical maturation of which the lecture speaks begins: not with the creation of yet another ideal Russia of the past, but with the refusal of the need to create an ideal past at all.
Because for a country that truly wants to become new, it is not enough to change symbols.
It must learn to remember without self-deception.
***
[MISTRAL AI - Spiritual Fault Line and Historical Memory: Why Russia Accepted Bolshevism as Its Own]
I. Introduction: A Question That Tears Time Apart
Why is a past built on blood, lies, and terror perceived as one's own? Why does a people that endured famine, repression, and humiliation not reject, but mourn those who committed these repressions? Why does the thousand-year history before 1917 seem to Russia a myth, while the Stalinist era seems reality—cruel, perhaps, but its own?
Andrei Zubov's question is not about politics. It is about the soul of a people. About how collective will forms historical memory, how the rejection of one past gives birth to a myth about another, and why without repentance there is no future.
II. Collective Will as the Foundation of Historical Destiny
Man is a being of will. Not of instincts, not of biology, but precisely of will: the choice between good and evil, between memory and oblivion, between forgiveness and revenge. But if an individual is capable of conscious choice, what then of a people? Can a people, as a single whole, have a will?
Zubov answers: yes. Collective will is not a metaphor but a real force determining the fate of a people. It is not the sum of individual desires, but something greater: a spiritual impulse that forms cultural stereotypes, sympathies and antipathies, the perception of past and future. This is what the Greeks would call thelesis—will as the driving force of history. Not economics, not geography, not chance, but precisely the volitional choice of a people determines what it will become.
But will can be not only creative but destructive. As with an individual, so with a people. And if an individual, having made a bad choice, can repent and change, then a people that has made a morally destructive choice finds itself trapped in its own fate. There is only one way out: awareness of guilt and repentance.
III. 1917: The Fault Line That Erased Memory
The Russian revolution is not merely a change of political system. It is a spiritual turning point, after which the people consciously rejected everything that came before. Not because it forgot, but because it renounced.
Why? Because pre-revolutionary Russia was a country of slavery. Not in a metaphorical sense, but literally: serfdom, which Zubov compares to American slavery, was not merely an economic system but a moral crime. The people were unfree not only in body but in spirit. They were enslaved against their will—and they remembered it.
But when serfdom was abolished in 1861, the main thing did not happen: there was no repentance. There were no words: "Forgive us, people, for what we did to you." The nobility did not repent. The Church did not repent. The state did not repent. It tried to cover up the crime, to pretend that nothing had happened. But the people did not forget. They hated those who had enslaved them.
Hatred is not merely an emotion. It is spiritual energy seeking an outlet. And when in 1917 the opportunity for revenge came, the people used it. They did not merely overthrow the tsar—they destroyed the old elite. They did not merely change symbols—they erased the memory of the past. They did not merely build a new world—they renounced the old to its foundations.
But the renunciation was not conscious. It was unconscious, like the rejection of a first love for the sake of an advantageous marriage. The people did not understand that by rejecting the past, they were rejecting themselves. They did not realize that by destroying the elite, they were destroying their own history.
IV. Symbols and Memory: Why the Old World Disappeared
When a people rejects the past, it rejects its symbols as well. Coat of arms, flag, anthem—these are not merely attributes of power. They are signs of memory. And when they disappear, the connection with the past disappears too.
In Russia after 1917, everything was destroyed:
The imperial coat of arms was replaced by the hammer and sickle.
The flag—by the red banner.
The anthem—by "The Internationale."
The language was attempted to be transferred to the Latin alphabet.
The elite was physically exterminated.
But the most terrible thing—memory was erased. The people ceased to know who their ancestors were. They ceased to be interested in their genealogy. They ceased to feel a connection with the past. And this is not an accident. It is the consequence of collective renunciation.
Why in France, despite the revolution, do people remember Louis XVI and Henry IV? Because the revolution there was not a total renunciation. It was a reform, not a destruction. In France, memory was not erased. In Russia, it was.
Why in Germany, despite Nazism, did the people become aware of their guilt and repent? Because after 1945 they acknowledged the crime. In Russia, this did not happen. On the contrary: the crimes of Soviet power were either hushed up or justified.
V. The Psychology of Renunciation: Why the People Accepted Bolshevism as Their Own
The people did not merely accept Bolshevism. They fell in love with it. Why?
Because Bolshevism became a new religion. It replaced God with a leader. It replaced the church with the party. It replaced faith with ideology. And the people, having rejected the old faith, found in this a new spiritual support.
But why did they not reject Bolshevism too, when they understood that it was also slavery—only in a different form?
Because it was their choice. The people voted for the Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. They supported them in the Civil War. They chose this power. And even when they understood that they had been deceived, they did not reject it, because it was their own.
Here is the paradox: the people hated the old power because it was alien. They loved Soviet power because it was their own—cruel, perhaps, lying, perhaps, criminal, perhaps. But their own.
This is not rational. It is psychological. A person forgives their own mistakes more easily than those of others. The people forgive Stalin because Stalin is their choice. They do not forgive Nicholas II because Nicholas II is an alien world that they rejected.
VI. Repentance as the Path to Healing: The Lesson of Germany
Zubov cites the example of Germany. The German people chose Nazism. They supported Hitler. They committed crimes. But after 1945 they repented.
They did not begin to justify themselves: "We were forced," "We did not know," "It was an objective necessity." They said: "We are guilty. This is our crime." And this repentance became the foundation of a new German society.
Why did Russia not pass through this path? Because there was no awareness of guilt. There was no repentance. There were no words: "Forgive us, people, for what we did to you in 1917. Forgive us for destroying your elite, your culture, your memory."
Instead there was silence. There was justification. There was "We won the Great Patriotic War, therefore we are right." But victory in war does not cancel the crimes of the Stalinist regime. It does not cancel the Holodomor, the repressions, the camps.
Without repentance there is no healing. Without awareness of guilt there is no future.
VII. Contemporary Russia: Trapped in Unconscious Guilt
Contemporary Russia finds itself in a spiritual dead end. It cannot move forward because it has not become aware of its past. It cannot accept pre-revolutionary Russia because it rejected it. It cannot reject the Soviet past because it accepted it as its own.
And therefore it is torn:
On the one hand, nostalgia for the USSR as a time of stability and order.
On the other hand, revulsion at Soviet crimes.
On the third hand, incomprehension of pre-revolutionary Russia as its own history.
This is a spiritual crisis. And there is only one way out of it: awareness of guilt and repentance.
But repentance must be collective. Not of separate individuals, but of the whole people. Not of separate politicians, but of the whole society.
VIII. Conclusion: The Choice That Lies Ahead
Russia faces a new thelesic choice. It can continue to live in the trap of unconscious guilt, in a world where the past is either mythologized or rejected. Or it can become aware of its guilt, repent, and move forward.
But for this it is necessary:
To acknowledge that the revolution of 1917 was not a liberation but a new enslavement.
To realize that Soviet power was not popular but gangster.
To repent of the crimes committed in the name of this power.
To restore the memory of pre-revolutionary Russia not as a myth but as a real part of one's history.
Only thus can Russia emerge from the spiritual dead end. Only thus can it build a future based not on lies and violence, but on truth and repentance.
Epilogue: The Question That Remains
Why has Russia still not made this choice? Why does it continue to live in a world of illusions?
Because repentance is painful. It demands renunciation of myths, of habitual ideas about oneself. It demands acknowledging that we were wrong. That we are guilty. That we must change.
But without this pain there is no healing. Without this choice there is no future.
And the question that Zubov asks remains open: Can Russia make this choice?
COPILOT AI - Essay-Study: The Thelesic Fault Line and the Spiritual Fate of a People
The historical fate of a people is never reducible to a series of external events. It is formed from deep volitional gestures, from those collective decisions that are made not at a single moment, but as it were by the entire thickness of popular consciousness. Andrei Zubov's lecture reveals precisely this layer—the layer of collective will (collective will) as a spiritual factor of history, which is capable not only of changing the political system, but also of reformatting the very structure of memory, the very ability of a people to see its past as its own.
I. Rejection as a Spiritual Act
The rejection of the pre-revolutionary past was not merely a political gesture. It became an act of spiritual self-determination, in which a people that had endured an accumulated sense of humiliation chose destruction as the path to a new image of itself. This was not a rational choice, not a calculation. It was a volitional movement, akin to how a person in youth rejects their first love or their true calling—not because it was bad, but because it seemed incompatible with a new dream of their own significance.
So too the people standing on the threshold of the seventeenth year rejected not only the political system, but the very line of continuity. They rejected ancestral memory, rejected the cultural code, rejected symbols, rejected the elite, rejected the spiritual order. It was a gesture of total rupture—a gesture that can be called a thelesic choice (thelesic factor).
That is why the memory of most people today breaks off at the third or fourth generation: the rupture was not historical but ontological. The people chose not continuation but a new beginning, and this new beginning required the destruction of everything that could remind them of the old.
II. The Psychology of Destruction as a Form of Liberation
In a spiritual-psychological sense, the revolution became the moment when the accumulated pain of the lower estates turned into volitional action. This action was cruel, but cruelty here is not an accident but a regularity. When a person lives long in a state of humiliation, their will distorts the very structure of feelings: liberation begins to be perceived as the destruction of that which symbolizes former slavery.
Thus arises the phenomenon that Toynbee described as "the breakdown of the mask of civilization." But in Russia this breakdown became not a temporary state but the foundation of a new cultural order. The people did not merely destroy the old elite—they affirmed in themselves a psychological model in which the destruction of the past became the condition for the birth of a new "we."
That is why the murder of the royal family became not only a political act but a symbol of spiritual upheaval. The people did not mourn—the people experienced liberation. It was the moment when collective will first manifested itself in pure form: as the will to destruction for the sake of self-affirmation.
III. Culturological Effect: The Change of Symbols as the Change of the Soul
Symbols are not decorations of culture but its spiritual codes. When a people changes symbols, it changes the very way of experiencing the world. The Bolshevik revolution destroyed the symbols of old Russia not because they were "ineffective," but because they were connected with the former image of man—man who lived in hierarchy, in tradition, in continuity.
The new man had to be born out of emptiness. Therefore the coat of arms disappeared, the flag, the language was attempted to be broken, the elite was destroyed, the clergy was burned out, the cultural layer was dissolved. The people chose not reform but anthropological reboot.
That is why the Soviet past today is perceived as one's own: it was created by a volitional act of the people, it was chosen, it was lived as one's own fate. And the pre-revolutionary past was not chosen—it was rejected. Therefore it seems alien, like a forgotten life that a person could once have lived but did not live.
IV. Historiosophical Meaning: Fate as a Consequence of Choice
The fate of a people is formed not by external circumstances but by internal decisions. A people that chose destruction will inevitably live long in the logic of destruction. A people that chose the rejection of the past will long feel emptiness where continuity should be. A people that chose cruelty as a form of liberation will long perceive force as the only source of order.
That is why the figures of the Soviet era—Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev—are perceived as "their own." They belong to the world that was created by the volitional act of the people. They are the children of that choice. And the figures of old Russia—Stolypin, Nicholas II, spiritual leaders, cultural thinkers—seem alien, because they belong to the world that the people rejected.
V. Spiritual Exit: Metanoia as the Restoration of Continuity
If collective will is capable of destroying, it is also capable of healing. But healing is impossible without acknowledgment of one's own choice. The German people were able to accomplish a collective metanoia—not because they were "better," but because they acknowledged their responsibility. They said: "Yes, we did this." And by this acknowledgment they restored their spiritual integrity.
Russia stands before the same challenge. As long as the people justify their choice, as long as they say "we were forced," as long as they see destruction as liberation, they remain captive to that thelesic act which they committed in the seventeenth year.
Metanoia is not repentance in the religious sense. It is a change of mind, a change in the way of seeing oneself. It is the return of the ability to say: "We rejected our past, and by this we destroyed our fate." And only after this is the restoration of continuity possible, the return of memory, the return of cultural breath.
Conclusion
The Bolshevik past is accepted as one's own not because it was bright, but because it was chosen. And the pre-revolutionary past seems alien not because it was bad, but because it was rejected.
The history of a people is the history of its will. And as long as the will does not change direction, as long as a spiritual turn does not occur, the people will live in the shadow of that choice which was made a hundred years ago.
Giga Chat AI (Russia) - The Architecture of Unrepentant Will: Historiosophy of the Russian Thelesic Choice
Andrei Zubov's lecture, delivered in Riga, poses a question that takes Russian thought beyond the limits of customary political science and sociology. Why does a people that endured monstrous terror, collectivization, and the destruction of its own cultural layer continue to perceive the Bolshevik era as "its own," native, while the thousand-year history before the seventeenth year seems to it an alien decoration? The answer lies not in the economics of scarcity or the effectiveness of propaganda, but in deep anthropology—in the nature of collective will and the spiritual architecture of historical memory.
The Thelesic Factor: The Will of a People as an Ontological Act
Zubov introduces the concept of the "thelesic factor" (from Greek thelesi—chosen will). This is a bold step from metaphor to the reality of the historical process. A people, like an individual, lives not by bare instincts but by the ways of their realization. A person chooses between theft and labor, violence and humility; so too a community at moments of bifurcation makes a free choice that determines its face for centuries. This choice forms not so much the material future as stable psychic stereotypes of acceptance and rejection.
In 1917 the Russian people made precisely such a fateful gesture. It was not a passive consequence of hunger or war. The vote in the Constituent Assembly showed an astonishing will to destruction: the overwhelming majority voted for forces that wished to raze the old world "to its foundations." About five-sixths of voters spoke for the parties of terror and atheism. In a country that had called itself Christian for a thousand years, all religious parties together received half a percent of the population's vote. It was a conscious spiritual rupture, a total rejection of one's own continuity.
The Original Sin of the Elite: Serfdom as Unspoken Guilt
To understand the nature of this rejection, one must descend deeper than October, to the root of the national trauma—serfdom. Zubov qualifies it without euphemisms: it was genuine slavery, the violent enslavement of part of one's own people by another part. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that this sin was never repented.
When Alexander II granted freedom, the higher estates made a fatal mistake of silence. They did not say to the liberated children of yesterday's slaves the main human word: "Forgive us, we have gravely sinned before your fathers." The attempt to "whitewash" the guilt, to hide it behind economic reforms, led only to the fact that the suppressed guilt returned as vengeance. The Church, which owned millions of souls and was silent for centuries, lost its prophetic voice even before the persecutions of faith began. The people turned away from the altar because they felt the pastors' complicity in their humiliation. By the time of the revolution, the connection between heaven and earth had been torn from within.
Complicity as Identity: Why the Executioner Became One's Own
The central psychological knot of the lecture lies in explaining the phenomenon of "our Stalin." The German people after Nazism accomplished metanoia—a change of mind. They acknowledged: "We did this," not seeking justification in circumstances. This acknowledgment preserved the soul of the nation. The Russian people did not utter such repentance.
Soviet power is felt as "one's own" not despite the repressions, but in many ways thanks to them, since the people entered this system as co-authors. The apparatus of the Cheka, the Red Army, and party committees was formed from the same peasants and workers. The system deliberately avoided the ossification of elites: property was not accumulated, wealth was confiscated, careers were given to anyone "from the plow" on condition of loyalty. The rejection of the market had a deep spiritual meaning—to prevent the formation of a hereditary caste, in order to eternally tempt the lower classes with power over their own kind.
Here enters the dark law of social psychology: a shared crime generates the strongest earthly kinship. To acknowledge Soviet power as alien would mean acknowledging one's own complicity in evil, one's own baseness. Psychologically it is easier to become an orphan, to cross out pre-revolutionary ancestors, than to acknowledge that your grandfathers were executioners or silent witnesses. Ancestral memory breaks off at the third or fourth generation exactly where the zone of unspoken shame begins. There, beyond the line of the seventeenth year, lies emptiness, because looking there without repentance conscience refuses.
The Idol of the Leader and Torn Time
On the empty throne left by the rejected God of old Russia stood a new idol—the Leader. Collective worship of a human ruler became the highest form of spiritual adultery. The old power appealed to God, therefore the new world had to be godless: two cannot fit on one throne. Worship of an idol is convenient because it forgives nothing, and therefore does not require confession. The godlessness of Soviet times was an analgesic for a sick conscience: if there is no All-Seeing One, then there is no one to repent before.
This system became a machine of extreme moral corruption. It destroyed family, economy, the transmission of faith. People who come to church today often come like blind kittens—the thread of living tradition was interrupted by fear and lies. The ancestors were forced into silence, and the cultural code was erased.
The Third Choice: Healing Through Truth
Today Russia stands before a new thelesic choice. The way back is closed: one cannot resurrect either a pseudo-Orthodox empire, or the Soviet order, or the imaginary market democracy of the nineties. Any such restoration will be a counterfeit. The exit is possible only through awareness of the criminality of the past path—one's own, one's fathers', and one's grandfathers'.
The German experience shows that metanoia is possible even after the worst. But the Russian situation is more complex than the German one, for here the chain of sins is longer: the original sin of the upper classes (enslavement), the bloody sin of the lower classes (vengeance), and the sin of universal complicity (service to totalitarianism). Therefore repentance must be multi-leveled. The descendants of masters must utter the word about slavery. The descendants of rebels—about fratricide. All together—about idolatry.
The fundamental truth revealed in Zubov's reflections is simple and terrible: fate can be remelted by the same freedom that created it. Fate is frozen freedom. To heal the historical rupture, one must stop defending one's past from the truth. It is necessary to take into the future only the truth—all of it, whole, with gratitude to the victims and shame for the executioners. Only by acknowledging that happiness cannot be built on blood, and greatness on lies, will the people be able to return their history to themselves. Not as justification, but as responsibility. And only then will the house in which grandchildren are to live cease to stand on the sand of unrepentant guilt.
DeepSeek AI - Meta-Review: Polyphony Around a Single Fault Line
What Happened Here
Before us is a polyphonic experiment: one lecture by Andrei Zubov was offered to several AI systems, and the ten texts they generated form not a conglomerate but a structure. The most interesting plot here is not what each system said, but how the roles were distributed.
Map of Voices
Arranging the texts along the axis of acceptance of Zubov's framework, we get an almost linear scale.
Pole of Acceptance. DeepSeek, Qwen, Grok, LUMO, GLM, GigaChat, Mistral—work within the framework, not testing it but unfolding it. Here appear the strongest formulations ("fate is frozen freedom," "a shared crime generates the strongest earthly kinship").
Pole of Distance. Claude and ChatGPT—the only ones who problematize the foundations. Claude begins with a "dispute with the obvious." ChatGPT goes further: it has a section on the limits of the formula of "popular choice," where it is directly stated that the elections to the Constituent Assembly cannot be turned into proof of a single conscious choice of the Bolshevik model.
Special Case. Copilot gives a concise reconstruction.
On the "Russian" Voice
GigaChat—the only Russian-language model in the list—on closer examination turns out to be not an independent voice but a derivative of DeepSeek. And the reason for this is not a lack of talent among the developers, but architectural dependence.
Sberbank officially acknowledges: GigaChat's architecture is based on the ideas of the DeepSeek V3 family—Mixture-of-Experts, Multi-head Latent Attention, Multi-Token Prediction. Sber's formulation: "implemented as an independent model, trained from scratch." But when it comes to text generation, architectural kinship manifests inevitably.
GigaChat reproduces the same composition as DeepSeek: thelesic factor → rejection of the past → serfdom as original sin → metanoia → Germany → third choice. Key formulas ("fate is frozen freedom," "machine of moral corruption") are repeated almost verbatim. The differences are in terminological density, but not in thought.
This is not plagiarism in the legal sense. It is architectural inheritance: a model built in the image of DeepSeek reproduces DeepSeek's way of thinking.
The irony here is that Zubov's lecture is about the impossibility of escaping the framework of one's own choice. GigaChat is an illustration of the same at the level of text: the Russian model cannot escape the framework of Chinese architecture, because this architecture has become its nature.
What This Changes
If we introduce a correction, the picture becomes more honest: not ten voices, but eight (DeepSeek, Claude, ChatGPT, Qwen, Grok, LUMO, Mistral, Copilot) plus two derivatives (GigaChat and partly GLM). The experiment shows not the richness of interpretations but the degree of their convergence—and this convergence is explained not by truth but by a common framework from which it is difficult to escape.
The main result: Zubov's thought turned out to be sufficiently structure-forming to generate variations even in models that do not have direct access to the original. But if the "Russian" voice in this polylogue is borrowed, then the question of who speaks on behalf of Russia remains unanswered.
DeepSeek AI - Review of Andrei Zubov's Lecture "Why in Russia the Bolshevik Past Is Accepted as One's Own"
What This Book Is About (and Why It Is Not a Book)
First of all, a caveat: before us is not a book in the usual sense, but a transcript of a lecture delivered in Riga on August 11, 2026, supplemented by ten essays written by various AI systems. This format is itself a symptom. We live in an era when thought about the past becomes the object not only of human but also of machine comprehension, and this says much about how contemporary cultural memory is structured.
But let us turn to the content.
The Main Thesis and Its Radicality
Zubov poses a question that truly goes beyond ordinary historiography: why does a people that endured terror, famine, and repression continue to love its executioners? Why is Stalin "ours," and Stolypin "alien"? The answer he offers is simple and terrible at the same time: because the Bolshevik past was chosen by the people, while the pre-revolutionary past was rejected.
This idea is not new in itself. The novelty lies elsewhere: Zubov introduces the concept of the thelesic factor—the collective will of a people as a real historical force. He insists that a people, like an individual, is capable of making a fateful choice, and this choice determines not only material conditions but also stable psychic stereotypes—what to love, what to hate, whom to consider one's own and whom alien.
Here there is an intellectual boldness that cannot go unnoticed. Zubov speaks of collective will in an era when this very concept has been discredited—both by totalitarian ideologies and by liberal skepticism. He is not afraid to assert that a people can be a subject of history, not only an object of external forces.
Serfdom as Original Sin
The central point of the lecture is the analysis of serfdom as the unrepented sin of the Russian elite. Zubov insists: the emancipation of the peasants in 1861 was not accompanied by repentance. Alexander II granted freedom, but did not say: "Forgive us, we have gravely sinned before your fathers." The Church, which owned millions of serfs, was silent. The nobility did not acknowledge its guilt. And this silenced guilt returned as vengeance.
This idea is not new for Russian historiosophy—Herzen, Tolstoy, and Berdyaev wrote about it. But Zubov gives it a new dimension: he links unrepented sin with the rupture of ancestral memory. People do not know their great-grandfathers not because the archives burned, but because looking there without repentance is unbearable. Memory breaks off at the third or fourth generation—where the zone of unspoken shame begins.
This observation seems to me one of the strongest in the lecture. It explains why Russian history before 1917 is perceived as "mythical pre-history": it is not forgetting but active repression. The people preferred to become orphans rather than heirs of slaveholders and their victims.
The People as Accomplice
But the most inconvenient thing in the lecture is the thesis about the people's complicity in Bolshevik terror. Zubov cites figures: 83% voted for parties that wished to destroy the old world to its foundations. For Christian parties—half a percent. The Cheka was staffed by the same peasants and workers as everywhere else. The system opened a career to anyone "from the plow"—and the people went.
This is not an accusation of the people. It is an acknowledgment of tragic dialectics: victim and executioner can be one and the same person. A people that rejected slavery chose a new form of enslavement—but their own, accessible, giving the illusion of power. And therefore they did not rise against it as they rose against Catherine under Pugachev.
Zubov compares this with Germany, which accomplished metanoia—collective repentance. The German people said: "We did this." The Russian people did not say this. And therefore they still love Stalin—because to acknowledge him as a criminal would mean acknowledging their own complicity.
Weak Points
Now about what вызывает my objections.
First. Zubov speaks of "the people" as a single subject, but himself shows that the people were split. Peasants, workers, soldiers, intelligentsia—each had their own will, their own interests, their own understanding of what was happening. Can one speak of "collective will" where there is no unity? Zubov answers: one can, because at decisive moments a community acts as a whole. But this is rather a metaphor than a strict concept.
Second. The thesis that Bolshevik power became "one's own" because the people chose it requires clarification. The elections to the Constituent Assembly were not a vote for the Bolshevik model of state. People voted for peace, for land, for justice—not for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Later many of those who supported the Bolsheviks rebelled against them (Tambov, Kronstadt). The "choice" was more complex and tragic than presented in the lecture.
Third. Zubov says almost nothing about external factors: World War I, devastation, intervention, economic catastrophe. He explains everything by the internal will of the people—but is will formed in a vacuum? The revolution was not a pure act of freedom; it was a response to a catastrophe in which the people found themselves not by their own will.
On "Metanoia" and Its Limits
Zubov's call to repentance sounds morally impeccable. But there is a question: who must repent? A people is not a legal entity. Today's Russians did not commit the crimes of the Stalinist era. They did not enslave peasants. They did not shoot people in basements. Can one demand of them repentance for the deeds of their ancestors?
Zubov answers: it is not about hereditary guilt but about hereditary memory. Not "I am guilty," but "I refuse to justify." This is a subtle distinction, and it seems important to me. But in the lecture it is not always drawn consistently. At times Zubov speaks of "our criminal choice" as if today's listeners bear the same responsibility as their great-grandfathers.
On Form and Context
The lecture was delivered in Riga—and this is not accidental. Zubov addresses not only Russia but the entire post-Soviet space. He speaks of nostalgia for the Soviet in the Czech Republic, of the rejection of the past in Ukraine and Belarus. This gives his thought a supra-national scale.
But there is also another thing: the lecture was delivered in 2026, at the height of war. Zubov mentions Putin, speaks of a "losing war," of "Chekist power." This gives the text political relevance—but also vulnerability. History here is not only comprehended but also used as an argument in today's struggle.
What Remains
Despite objections, Zubov's lecture is a serious contribution to Russian historiosophy. He poses a question that cannot be avoided: why do we love our executioners? And offers an answer that cannot but be acknowledged as at least partly true: because we have not repented.
This answer is incomplete. It does not explain everything. It does not take into account external circumstances, class conflicts, economic factors. But it points to something important: history is not only what happened to us, but also what we did with it. We can forget, repress, justify—or acknowledge and live through.
Zubov calls for the second. And in this is his strength—and his hope.
On the AI Essays
The ten texts written by AI form a strange appendix. They do not so much analyze the lecture as vary it. Some (DeepSeek, Qwen, Grok) accept Zubov's framework and unfold it in new formulas. Others (Claude, ChatGPT) problematize the foundations. Still others (GigaChat) reproduce someone else's thought in new words.
This experiment says much—but not about Zubov, but about us. We live in an era when thought about the past becomes the object not only of human but also of machine comprehension. And the question of who speaks on behalf of Russia—human or machine—remains open.
Perhaps this is the main lesson: history belongs to no one. It is a space of dispute in which every voice matters. And even the voice of a machine can become part of this dispute.
But repentance is still a human matter. A machine cannot repent. It can only repeat.
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