"The Russian Federation, united by a millennial history, preserving the memory of our ancestors who passed down to us their ideals and faith in God, as well as continuity in the development of the Russian state, recognizes the historically formed state unity."

By embedding these words into the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the group currently wielding power in our country seeks to make these provisions sacred: anyone who dares to challenge the Fundamental Law will have to deal with the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order of the FSB.

Sanctity itself is already a reliable defense against critical thinking, as Freud pointed out in his critique of religion. And if someone disrespects the sacred, dares to doubt it, then let them also dare to question the sovereign's oprichnina. That's the calculation. Let's not talk about this anymore, and that's that.

But while the new preamble has not yet been sprinkled with holy water, and while discussions about it are not yet considered an assault on the constitutional order of the Russian Federation, we can take it apart gear by gear—see what the mechanism consists of, which we will have to regard as sacred and miraculous in the future.

The millennial history that unites the Russian Federation is the history of the capture of Kazan, the conquest of Siberia, the subjugation of the Caucasus—wars to expand territory and wars to hold it. It is the history of the resource exploitation of conquered territories (furs, oil, diamonds) in exchange for the construction of transport and administrative infrastructure. The history of imposing the Russian language and culture and the gradual displacement (despite multicultural rhetoric) of local customs and dialects. It is the history of the voluntary-compulsory integration of national elites through the education of their heirs in cadet corps in St. Petersburg. And, of course, the history of suppressing any nationally-oriented uprisings, from the Basmachi to the Forest Brothers, in the most brutal manner.

Which ancestors' memory will now be preserved by the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order? Russians or Tatars, Chechens or Yakuts? Avars? Ethnic Ukrainians? What ideals did they pass on to us? And faith in which God exactly?

Probably faith in the mainstream god of our establishment, in a Jesus fattened by the Russian Orthodox Church and stuffed with sedatives by it—because he is not inclined to ask unnecessary questions. Our Church has been sworn in more than once—starting with the Schism, through the establishment of the Synod, through the Bolshevik destruction and the final redesign with the help of the NKVD and comrade Stalin, which allowed it to function successfully to this day, with the NKVD having undergone a redesign itself. And other gods, glancing at their curators from Lubyanka, also do not dispute the formulations of the preamble today, although their memory of the millennial history should not have faded so quickly.

What continuity are we talking about—with the royal family shot and the nobility eradicated, with civil war and millions perishing in camps, with tens of thousands of repressed priests and brutally suppressed uprisings in national outskirts? It seems the writer of the preamble has lost their mind, but that's not the case.

The millennial history of Russia is not the history of a federation, but of a colonial empire that changed signs, banners, gods, but never abandoned its essence and never admitted it even to itself, let alone starting this conversation with any of the colonized peoples. Territorial conquests and the unwillingness to part with them, the nature of relations between the metropolis and the colonies, whether you call them republics, regions, or national formations—this is the only continuity being discussed here.

But admitting to oneself that your country, which actively fought Western colonialism, is itself a colonial power—is impossible, it's simply unspeakable. Unlike the West, which has managed to transition into a new, post-colonial stage of its historical development, Russia cannot cope with either its past or its present—and thus puts its future at risk. The desperate cries, fist-shaking, involuntary swearing—all symptoms observed in the authorities at any attempt at an honest conversation about the past—are clear symptoms of suppressed memories, repressed into the subconscious for the simple reason that remaining a colonial power in a post-colonial world is socially unacceptable.

Instead of lying on a psychoanalyst's couch, confessing its dark inclinations, dissecting childhood traumas, and recognizing crimes committed in a state of clouded consciousness, Russia engages in hysterical denial, resorts to rationalizing its actions, tries to find excuses, but since little of this works, it resorts to the main tool: sanctifying its neuroses by inscribing them into the preamble to Putin's Constitution. Since they are now sacred, they cannot be touched, despite their absurdity, despite the fact that the entire anamnesis is succinctly laid out, and one doesn't need to be Freud to understand everything at once.

The only problem is that sanctifying neuroses does not solve the problem. The neuroses will remain, defense mechanisms will not save, magical rites and spells, rituals and all sorts of ceremonies, performed by loyal deities and criminal bureaucrats organized into phalanxes, will not save either—they will all falter in the face of historical process. Worse, a psychoanalyst will tell you that untreated neuroses can lead to obsessive-compulsive disorders; the patient may harm themselves or others. We already see the symptoms in the news, on television. The prospects are also bleak, read up on it. Or maybe you had some old lady neighbor in a communal apartment who went off like that, or a retired grandfather from the special services. That's why they want to engrave these words in Putin's farewell Constitution, because they feel: it is precisely under Putin, and precisely due to his and their unwillingness to become self-aware, that the millennial Empire is entering an era of convulsions and decline.