You can be outraged. You can demand justice. You can shout.

Truck drivers, businessmen, doctors, soldiers' mothers and draft dodgers, pensioners—and then all of you other anemic citizens, from whom a state, growing savage from unfamiliar hunger, will squeeze out liquid ichor drop by drop. And it will squeeze you—and you will shout.

And you will be heard. Heard, but not a brow will be raised.

Because the current state is made up of a pyramid of people who owe you, the anemic, nothing. They owe everything only to their immediate superiors. Because it was not you who chose them, but they who chose each other. It was not you who shielded them with your body in difficult times, but their bosses. And if their bosses were to suddenly vanish, they would be doomed. But if you, anemic citizens, were to suddenly disappear, they wouldn't even notice right away.

You are governed by appointees. Creatures, as they are called in political science. That is, characters who are not independent, created by the skilled hands of senior comrades.

Everything comes from the top. The President began as an appointee of the previous president, his family, and once-close oligarchs. And so, his first decade in power was mainly spent ridding himself of their influence and obligations to them. This was the essence of his policy: how to eliminate this or that official or oligarch, and how to deftly replace them with a loyal person. And those were not bad times by today's standards: back then, it wasn't clear what the point of all this personnel reshuffling, called "strengthening the vertical of power," was. Now that the vertical has been built and fossilized, it's clear, but too late to protest.

The President is often criticized for lacking strategic thinking, but in personnel matters, he proved himself a true strategist. To all positions of any significance, people were appointed who were completely non-independent, representing absolutely nothing by themselves, tied to the President by a shared childhood, dacha, sports clubs, joint studies, and service. It was they, these gray mediocrities, who were deliberately turned into boyars, ministers, oligarchs, heads of state corporations, and security agencies. The country rested on their unprepared, average shoulders. Lenin's dream came true, and the ruling elite became entirely composed of cooks.

Creatures have no other virtues than loyalty to their creator. But they also have no faults: even if they were three times thieves and murderers, not to mention lesser sins like corruption—it would not hinder their career, but only help, because their sinfulness makes them even more dependent on their creators.

Who are the Rotenbergs without Putin? Who are the Kovalchuks? Who is Chaika, who is Bastrykin? Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, the appointee of an appointee—who is he? If Putin leaves, what will happen to all of them? They will be devoured.

Do the creatures understand the temporariness and randomness of their position at the top? Do they sense the illusory nature of their billions, as if in a magical dream, appearing without any significant effort in their suddenly acquired Swiss and British Virgin Islands accounts? Do they understand that they have not earned this, feel that it all could dissipate like morning mist at any moment? I think they do. They understand and feel it, but it's a very unpleasant, oppressive feeling. They want to smooth it over, to get rid of it.

We reproach them for their thousand-meter castles and palaces on hectares of sacred Rublyovka land. Why such excess? Europeans and Americans manage without all this. But the creatures convince themselves that all this is truly theirs, that they won't have to wake up back in their miserable nineties, from which an incredible play of statistical accidents catapulted them to the pinnacle of power of a great empire. And the yachts, islands, and watches are for this. To prove to themselves that it's all real.

We scold them for their greed: you already have railways and steamships, banks and oil, why turn public highways into your fiefdom, why take more from the poor, you are already rich? But they have no sense of the reality of their wealth, no sense of the reality of what is happening. It's a dream, and in a dream, anything is possible.

We doubt their sincerity when they beat their foreheads in churches, the honesty of their intentions when they establish all sorts of Orthodox funds, take photos with patriarchs. But they do it out of desperation: not even impostors, just random people trying to get a blessing for their reign from the patriarchs, trying to recharge with their holiness to remove questions about where their, the creatures', power comes from: from God, as in the times of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. Only they forget that our patriarchs today are also appointed, so their holiness is zero.

And the creatures surround themselves with creatures, creating them, following the example of higher instances, in their own image and likeness. The incompetent breed the incompetent, the corrupt breed the corrupt, the undeserving breed the undeserving. And so from top to bottom. They need only loyal people around them, who will never betray them, who can go on reconnaissance with them, who without them are nothing; who in principle are nothing.

Creatures listen exclusively to those who created them. And they demand from their own creatures that they obey them unconditionally. This is how castes are formed. This is how sects are built. This is how phalanxes are recruited. And there is nothing outside the caste and phalanx, nothing matters—and no one. Even if the rest of the people are out there.

In this system, elections cannot be allowed. It makes no sense to reward merit. In it, criticism is betrayal. And only for betrayal can one be punished in it, and therefore such a system cannot renew itself. It cannot develop, cannot respond to challenges, and all it can do in difficult times is strengthen the ranks in the phalanx. And if this phalanx marches into the abyss—well, nothing can be done.

Instead of the instinct for self-preservation, there is a herd instinct. Instead of the fear of death, there is almost anticipation: the dream is about to end. We are about to wake up.

And you, the anemic? And you, nothing. You graze, finishing off the withered grass of the crisis autumn. Somehow they will sort it out themselves, without us. Why interfere? Well, if one is removed, someone else will be appointed. We keep silent, you think, maybe it will pass.

But even if you shouted.