Life on the Banks of War

Anna Ochkina

A colleague of mine, Professor N., recently died, a lovely woman who was only forty years old. Despite her youth, she has been the head of the journalism department at the university for almost ten years and has generally been very successful in her academic career. Just ten days before her death, she suddenly felt felt unwell at work, and after a short time lost consciousness at home. She didn’t wake up again. She was buried in the evening of the Eighth of March, International Women's Day, magnificently celebrated in Russia.

Such a sudden death of a young woman shook the city, and many people came to the university to say goodbye – almost all of the university employees, journalists, employees of the regional administration, former classmates, and current students. By the invariable irony of life, less than two months previously, in the same hall where N. lay surrounded by a sea of flowers, they had said goodbye to the first head of the same department, a venerable professor who passed away at the age of eighty-seven. By the way, he also worked until almost the last day.

Of course, I cried along with everyone, as one always cries at the funeral of a well-known but not close acquaintance, experiencing their own grief, and at the same time re-living their own legacy of recent or long-standing grief. But the eternal sociologist into me is hard to confuse; I watched the crowd of mourners while I cried, and noticed.

Here is what the sociologist observed. The grief was for a common cause, but the grief was not common. Sudden grief no longer unites people as it used to, as it always has been. Everyone experienced the existential horror of this sudden untimely death alone, as if afraid to share it with others. At the recent funeral of the elderly professor, everything was as always reported – we experienced his death, remembered, grieved sincerely and brightly. This is how people remember and grieve about a person who lived a good, honest, dignified life. The farewell to the patriarch of the university gathered people because each understood what was felt by the other and was in solidarity with him and was not afraid not of him, nor of his own emotions.

But in parting with N., I acutely felt, and my inner sociologist impassively noted, how each participant in the mournful ceremony was inside his own emotions, his own associations, and experiences. These were personal thoughts about death, which today you can’t share with everyone, suddenly some of your associations will seem seditious to your interlocutor. Russia is now at war, and even the attitude towards death has become an ideology.

The death of a young woman, a sudden death without a previous long illness, for many unwittingly became an echo of the horror that is happening every day, every minute now through the fault of Russia. The death of the young becomes our routine. Propaganda is trying with all its might to soften, to drown out the instinctive horror of this, to stop the natural desire to ask the question: for what? The Russians, at the merest suggestion of any questions, are told about the joy of dying for their Motherland, contrasting a glorious death on the battlefield with a miserable death from drunkenness or some kind of boring illness. “Sometimes a person lives and dies – as if they had turned the page, as if he had not lived at all,” Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with the mothers of dead soldiers. “But your son lived, his goal was achieved.” “Ten, twenty, thirty years is not such a big difference in terms of eternity,” argues Russia’s main propagandist Margarita Simonyan, “it’s not a fact that it’s better to die old and decrepit from a painful illness than young and strong for a just cause.” Children in schools and even kindergartens, dressed in military uniforms, read poems about death for the Motherland, about glorious deeds, and terrible enemies around the Motherland. Propagandists from TV screens, numerous pro-government bloggers constantly threaten the whole world with nuclear hell, disgustingly rejoicing at missile strikes against Ukraine.

In Russia today the moral compass has been knocked down, the coordinates of good and evil have been obscured by the Jesuit arguments of the authorities and by the misanthropic statements of ideologists. Propaganda does its best to promote the idea of some higher Truth, for the sake of which one can do anything, even a crime, which ceases to be a crime thanks to the service of this Truth. Most people wince internally under this pressure. Many in Russia still remember well the end that justifies the means and know that it does not end well. But historical memory and fear only motivate the majority to even greater passivity. The Russians do not want to know anything about the war, but they never forget about it.

The cult of death and aggression has been planted in the country by all propaganda forces. Almost no one in Russia protests against this, but nothing of their response is enthusiastic either. There is no impulse, at least, a general patriotic impulse, in Russian society. There is support for power, forced, almost slavish loyalty in exchange for protection, or out of fear of persecution. And therefore there is an internal breakdown: every day you justify the murder, but you yourself don’t know exactly why. Hence the hysterical tone of all supporters of the notorious special operation (SMO), which they bring to all discussions with opponents of the war. Although incidents of such discussions are negligible. They are almost non-existent in public space, and they are also rare in the kitchens – a traditional Russian place for political discussions. The Russians prefer not to think about the war, but they never forget about it. This is how we live, divided by common doubts and fear.

I often think about what must happen, what shock can push Russians toward each other and unite them for real; not for the sake of individual survival, but for the sake of a common life. And more and more often I think with horror that this will be some kind of great, incredible tragedy, such a disaster that will immediately and obviously destroy not only the possibilities, but also the illusory hopes for individual salvation. I don’t even want to imagine the details of this trouble, and it is here that my internal analyst finally gives in.

The Russians live on the banks of the war, desperately trying to ignore it. But sooner or later they will have to face it, and this will be the first step towards turning the Russian population into the Russian people. When and how the Russians will take this step is the question of the future of Russia, and, perhaps, not only of Russia.