28-29 October 2025
by Anna Karetnikova
Source: Facebook
28 October 2025
Source: Facebook
I learned to play the guitar, eight or so chords… maybe twelve, along with other girls from the eighth year, because I wanted to. We would all kick off our snowshoes to dry by the stove as soon as we arrived and quickly start singing all kinds of songs, mainly ‘Sunday’ and ‘Time Machine’, but we also congratulated war veterans on Victory Day and the dark night and whistling bullets. We didn’t fill stadiums, but the veterans clapped and enjoyed themselves and kept inviting us back. Oh, they really liked ‘The Campanile’. After that, all kinds of protest songs, mainly in Spanish and in my own Russian translation, while at the same time learning how to compose my own—and then we moved on more confidently to songs about Afghanistan, a place letters rarely reached home from… That’s what seemed relevant to us particularly because, naturally, we liked the tenth-year boys who also played guitars and we had a notion that the boys might be sent to this Afghanistan the moment they passed their graduation exams.
A bad turn of events, and perhaps only at that age can the simplest and most obvious decision present itself. Ours was this: we had to bring down Soviet power, and then the war would end, and they wouldn’t take the boys into the army and kill them in Afghanistan. To do this, we had to create a good anti-Soviet organization among our schools, which we did, though we did not, of course, forget all the houses of culture and veterans gatherings. We couldn’t abandon the old men… (Meanwhile, though, they kept saying: Lena, did you summarize all of ‘The State and Revolution’? Anya, what’s that about contacts with such-and-such a school? Fine, later, right now we’re playing ‘Vitka from Mokhovaya’, the old gramps are waiting…) That’s why I don’t know whether it was about the music or not.
This was 1984. I think hundreds of thousands of girls (and boys) in the USSR learned their first three chords having nothing at all in mind beyond playing and singing. Expressing themselves, having fun, being liked, occasionally provoking. But the regime and its loyal special services well know where to expect disaster from. Or guard against. Or invent.
Time has come full circle and now everything is worse. Rays of support.
29 October 2025
Source: Facebook
The situation has become very unpleasant around the debates between Yulia Galyamina and Kirill Martynov. I saw there were going to be debates, sighed, went to the gym, put on my headphones, and listened. Everything in my headphones was calm, contained, no anguish, no furious accusations, with courtesy and a few not very successful comebacks, for a good quarter of it. Well, maybe a little less.
The debaters left the ring… and then, evidently, they decided to make up for the absence of proper spectacle in it. They started exchanging remote blows retroactively. Kirill Martynov began it, I think, as if acting for Putin, going after Yulia to bring her down. Then one more time, it seems. Yulia couldn’t hold back either and broke out in an explanation with arcane philosophical references. This was not an explanation either (in my opinion) but an accusation, as that same Putin probably would have said.
Then the ugliest part began: organized groups of people (commentators like me right now, and also probably Kremlin bots, as they say) organized themselves into columns and ranks and began zealously siding with one or the other, cursing and slandering the other and their sympathizers in every way possible. ‘Stay where you are and shut up’, flew from both sides. Voices of common sense could be heard, too, but they pretty much drowned in the curses. Utterly unpleasant, odiose individuals rejoiced in the coming storm, as did the special services probably, whose objective is to set everyone fighting everyone and marginalize them.
It could probably not have been any different. People just can’t behave any other way. Those who left can’t suggest that those who stayed leave, and those who stayed can’t suggest that those who left return. The idea as to whether each specific aggressor can even be fended off gets lost in the pile-up of personal insults and hardships (after Remarque, what is there to say even on this topic and why should we say anything at all?).
What occurred to me as I was exiting. Is it even possible for those outside Russia to debate those inside it on sensitive political topics? I don’t think so. In any case, someone who can be imprisoned can no longer agree with his opponent and open up completely, expressing their own point of view. Someone who can’t be has to understand this and play giveaway. Both are left with hard feelings. There shouldn’t be any kind of voting here.
The question is how then to keep the continents from drifting apart, how not to let the chasm between the two parts of the thinking public become final and fatal? It seems to me that there could be debates on fairly narrow professional topics and between participants who trust each other. Between whom there is an unconditional agreement: that they reject the aggressive war. About film, about art, about urban planning (I would happily discuss prison organization with someone from ‘the other side,’ if someone so bold were to be found).
If you lack sufficient trust in the person you’re talking to, if you doubt them, if you don’t have that tacit connection-agreement between you (‘we can’t talk about that now, but we agree on what’s most important’), if you’re determined to win so that either your opponent agrees with your position or else that there be voting, then maybe it would be better to do without debates. What would their purpose be, ultimately? What truth would be found?
29 October 2025
Source: Facebook
…And now once again there are trenchant polar-opposite points of view.
Whose sacrifice and whose misfortune is greater: those who left or those who stayed?
I don’t know. I truly don’t know. Here who’s worst off: the person now forced to hide in Russia, to keep quiet, to fear arrest, to turn away from the Kafkaesque television, to see former friends and relatives turn into zombies, not to know how to talk about what’s important with their children or how they will raise THEIR children as a result, to be afraid to speak out loud on the street or with a stranger. Maybe it’s better not to talk at all? (Don’t accuse me of laying it on too thick; I’m describing the minuses specifically). Well, and one more minus—it is all almost always an inevitable compromise. The pluses are your roots, the walls of home, what you have earned through unimaginable labor, and the possibility of ‘seeing your near and dear at least sometimes’ … of keeping the light on in the window and seeing the small things.
Or is it worse for the person who could not make their peace, who could not compromise, who decided to leave or flee, who lost a lot or everything and had to start from scratch at 40 or 60, who knocked around in a foreign land in a refugee camp (for example), without language or a job, or with a hard job not in their field,
This is what fills my feed now: divorces, illnesses, fear of arrest for one’s near and dear in Russia, people who’ve lost their mind… The pluses are being able to speak the truth (true, hardly anyone listens to you for various reasons, the first being that you left), knowing your choice was right, and the fact that you’re not in prison. Yes, it’s heartwarming. Though not always.
Write and tell me what minuses and pluses I’ve forgotten. But that isn’t even the point. The point is that antiwar Russians from both groups are being crushed by what is happening, they are having a very hard time. The majority of us are not maintaining an even mental keel at this moment, when instead of sympathy we hear insults aimed at us. And they think they are preserving something. I just feel, though, how painfully I react to a few words and would rather stop arguing in an open format. Because we really are wasting our last remaining strength and nerves on a false goal. It’s impossible to achieve any sacred and inviolable truth in this condition. Not because it doesn’t exist (I don’t know about that) but because we are not in the best shape.
I apologize for repeating this. But it’s awful to see how polarized and charged everything is.
Translated by Marian Schwartz
