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392 pages, Hardcover
Published September 23, 2024


As I finish the last few pages of this book, two questions haunt me.
First: how many "casual" romance novels, read in between, can lighten the darkness outlined by Glukhovsky? The answer is—none. My long-standing practice of using escapism as a buffer fails here, as it does in those rare, concentrated instances where the level of truth is so high that no distraction can disperse it.
The second is less of a question and more of a reflection on our generation—those born in the late '70s. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc produced a unique demographic: we possessed a baseline revolutionary worldview, a taught love for science, space, and progress, followed by the tsunami of "cursed" capitalist reality. It confused everything before maturity forced the incompatible pieces of our experience into a crystalized, though unpleasant, picture.
There is nothing nostalgic in this picture (save for childhood itself). The idea that we could be forced to live like past generations is terrifying. In our Eastern latitudes, there is too much history—and it is a far cry from the exalted "Z" of modern Russians or the local tattoos of national heroes mixed with swastikas and praises for Nazi-colliding generals.
In Glukhovsky’s case, Putin and the "shrewd operators" around him—with their mafia-KGB-isolationist backgrounds—have rebooted the past. They told an entire generation: "Now you will live correctly and believe in the right things, or you won't live at all." Putin never understood that the mafia and totalitarianism aren't "sexy." Irritated by Western criticism, he decided to sell them a recipe for a Brave New World where tyranny is salvation, and the "angels" of xenophobia and secret services sing hymns about everyone knowing their place.
For Glukhovsky’s (and Navalny’s) generation, the timing was unfortunate. Their brains hadn't been fully bleached by the old ways, nor were they complicit in past atrocities they’d want to forget. Instead, they took the revolutionary fire of 1917—the very thing the propaganda praises but actually chokes—and used it to tear that propaganda to shreds. They exposed the truth: that continental-scale thieves don't like talking about theft and murder; they prefer to speak of national destiny, historical predestination, and God (who, presumably, reserved those billions just for them).
But they were few. Nostalgia is a massive force, and "happy ignorance" is twice as powerful. Those who could, emigrated. The rest paid the price.
This book is mandatory. It should be distributed for free at special checkpoints. It should be sent to the Presidency, the Ministry of Interior, the General Staff, and the National Security agencies. Otherwise, the same fate awaits us—but from the perspective of a subordinate province.