Anthropological Catastrophe

I follow Russian news with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I feel deeply sorry for normal people forced to exist in an atmosphere of ever-thickening absurdity. On the other hand, I know very well from history that dictatorships always zealously pursue “dissenters,” but collapse not because of revolutionaries, but as a result of their own mistakes.

The more of these mistakes there are, the stronger the population’s muted irritation becomes, and the more people who were previously indifferent to politics start taking an interest in it. And then one day, over some entirely minor occasion, there is an explosion. A stone flies through a bakery window, the crowd starts beating the policemen, and the empire falls apart.

The key factor is the proportion between those who believe that “yes, all that may be true, but life is basically still bearable,” and those who begin to think, “no, this is no way to live.”

So when I see the Kremlin’s clever boys banning the internet (that is, encroaching on the second component of the magical dyad of “bread and circuses”), I say: keep sawing, Shura, keep sawing. Even the most backward, collagen-filled layers of the population are beginning to realize: this is no way to live.

I had roughly the same feeling about yesterday’s raid by Russian security services on the EKSMO publishing house.

The management of the country’s main publishing holding has been suspected of extremism and of creating a “criminal organization for promoting LGBT among teenagers.”

EKSMO, of all places — the quietest and most loyal of all, always ready to please the authorities. Poor things: they scrub sedition from their books with the help of AI, black out pages with black paint, diligently print all kinds of Z-trash (at a loss to themselves) — in short, they are trying with all their might.

I can just picture the timid publishing executives secretly conferring on how they might more cunningly LGBT-ify innocent teenagers. In the 1930s, saboteurs like that secretly printed swastikas into books, only for the vigilant eye of a Young Pioneer to spot them.

Well then, I think, now the entire publishing industry is quietly migrating into the camp of the regime’s secret enemies. Sehr gut.

But it is bleak to think how many scoundrels Putinism has bred by turning every kind of vileness into a profitable line of work.

After all, there is an entire investigative team sitting there, every member of which knows perfectly well that they are engaged in complete nonsense, and yet they keep stitching, stitching the case together, reporting upstairs, drilling little holes in their shoulder boards for new stars.

There are hordes of these predatory scoundrels in every sphere of life.

How quickly an entire society can become brutalized, so that only scoundrels are visible and on the surface, while decent people merely shrink away and write under lock and key on social media.

An anthropological catastrophe.

Boris Akunin