Anya is thirty. She has her own business—a small online store selling all sorts of amusing accessories. She heard about the new taxes and levies the Duma is planning to introduce and asks incredulously, "Is it true? This is the end of everything!" Sasha, who has been trying for five years to get his restaurant business off the ground in Moscow, says the same thing. They are my acquaintances.

And the entire business community went to the Minister of Finance and said incredulously, "Is it really true? Tell us you were joking!" The minister replied to the petitioners, "Your position is unconstructive, period. You were with us when we annexed Crimea! Everyone voted for Crimea."

But pay? What is there to pay for? And why us, Anya, Sasha, and the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs seem to ask.

The situation is indeed new. Previously, the frenzied state projects and the private lives of those in power were funded by sucking the black-brown sludge from the depths of the Motherland. This didn't concern the people: let them suck it out all they want, even in the best of times, we only got free education and healthcare from those depths.

And I myself don't want to get smeared with oil. It's your oil, yours! I don't need it! Drink it, eat it, splash around in it! Build Sochi and dachas, tanks and banks with it, inflate budgets tenfold, pour it into your pockets, let it slosh as you walk. You deserve it—you betrayed and fawned for it, lied to others and yourselves, forgot about honor and dignity, humiliated and destroyed. You climbed to the top of the food chain. Now it's your sacred right to do nothing but suck the black sludge and turn everything you touch into dead gold. I've never seen your oil, and I don't want to: it disgusts me.

And I think it disgusts everyone trying to start their own business in Russia.

While you were inflating your stomachs and egos with black sludge, they simply worked. They didn't build themselves a palace in Antibes or buy a football club. They don't receive the highest salaries in the world; they don't receive salaries at all: they feed themselves. Themselves, and millions of other people too. They earn their money, they don't appropriate it.

For you, they were always plankton, an indistinct, bustling swarm, useful only because it somehow manages on its own, unlike state employees who demand to be fed. As long as there was enough sludge, plankton was allowed to live. They talked about our low taxes for small businesses, but besides taxes, there were always extortions: you also left the lower-level enforcers to fend for themselves—here's your plankton to eat. Multiply and replenish. Meanwhile, we'll turn the world upside down, because everything else has become boring to us.

But something else happened: a hernia from the excessive load. The backbone seems to have cracked. We took Crimea, but it's cursed: now we'll spend our lives rolling it uphill.

And the sludge, instead of being thick and nourishing, became watery, unsatisfying; the ruble plummeted into the abyss with a whistle. Your stomachs rumbled anxiously. You swivel your heavy heads on arthritic necks, click your teeth hungrily in five rows, looking for whom to devour next. And there they are!

"Let's impose a tribute on small and medium businesses! Let them pay us for the right to breathe! Let them pay for the right to exist! Some six hundred thousand a quarter, others maybe six million! We'll decide as we please, because we are the original masters here, and this domain is ours! Here's your new social contract, serfs! And if you don't like it, we have another one: ask the one and a half million of your business minnows sitting behind bars for not wanting to make a deal with the authorities!"

In damned America, there's a different contract: there, by paying taxes, a citizen acquires the right to demand from the government and the state. There, people know what they are giving up and want to understand why. Each one calculates at the end of the year how much they owe the state. And for every penny, they ask the state for an account. There, the unwillingness to see their earnings go to wars in Asia or the Middle East ultimately stopped those wars. There, those who have made it into power are always under a microscope, always guilty, always having to justify themselves. There, all the state's money is not people's-nobody's, but people's-by-name, and it's not so easy and convenient to steal it. The same goes for all of damned Europe.

There, the "taxpayer" is above the "citizen."

Here, below. "Citizen" is at least just nonsense, an empty sound, an address in a trolleybus to an unknown man, an address by the police to a detainee. But the "taxpayer" is a notorious evader, always guilty, conditionally convicted, and therefore has no right to ask for anything in return for the money taken from him.

"Shut up and hand over your money," says the government, wiping black sludge from its lips. "It's none of your business what we spend it on.

On your-our Crimea, on insane bridges-tunnels from nowhere to nowhere for mind-boggling billions, on our nuclear submarines and strategic bombers roaming the globe, testing the nerves of Latvians, Poles, Americans, and also Japanese, Canadians, Australians—why? Just because! Because a little scare deserves a reward, right?

And generally on the bloated military budget, because since the Yalta Conference, nothing has changed in the world, because the Third World War can be won, if anything!

Pay up, suckers! Jump, jingle your change, lay it on the barrel and don't ask us why tanks and bombers, and not schools and hospitals, don't even stutter about how much we keep for ourselves for the trouble with each tax ruble—look at Magnitsky, whom we won't even spell correctly, he stuttered, and where is he? Exactly! And have you heard of the collective farm principle?! To make a cow eat less but give more milk, you need to feed it less and milk it more. So go on, mooed and be done, because your industry—it's not only dairy, but also meat!"

Sasha says: I can't take it anymore. If they introduce these new taxes, I'll fire all the staff and won't do anything here anymore. Never. Anya says: if they really make me pay, I'll close the business, rent out my apartment, and leave for India. I don't want to feed this state anymore.

The cow will die. Well, let it die. Carrion, it's not bad either, even if it's stiff. They'll gnaw it to the bones, it'll be enough to get through the winter, and the future is unknown to us, so there's no point in looking there.