I was born in June 1979, the very month and year when the Soviet Union began its massive troop deployment in Afghanistan, marking the start of the Afghan war for our people.

The decision was made by the Politburo. It saw the strengthening of Afghan Islamists as a threat to the Soviet Union: Islamism could spread across the border to Tajikistan and other Central Asian republics.

At that time, the USSR seemed to be at the peak of its economic and military power. The secret directive by U.S. President Carter to aid the mujahideen was signed only on July 3, after the large-scale Soviet intervention had already begun. But it is unlikely that Carter even dared to dream that this directive would lead to a U.S. victory in the confrontation with the Union. The Afghan war exhausted the USSR's economy and ultimately led to its collapse, directly realizing the worst-case scenario the Politburo wanted to avoid.

The Politburo was already composed of senile old men who didn’t know what to do with a changing world and tried to forbid the world from changing through military force. And there was no one to stop them or correct the mistake: the Soviet person had been trained for three generations to silently comply, to offer their own children to the rotten-toothed maw of power for consumption, and to applaud its satisfied belch with enthusiasm.

Here I am, thirty-six. Brezhnev is dead, Yazov is dead, Andropov is dead. The Soviet Union has perished. But the Soviet person has not degenerated. And thirty-six years later, they are once again applauding as their sons go off to fight in some distant, insignificant country ruled by yet another Kremlin-backed dictator, a hereditary war criminal and thief.

While the authorities lazily cover up with one fig leaf or another, social media is filled with selfies of our soldiers in Syria. Marines, pilots, sailors — they photograph themselves with street portraits of Assad, with Syrian comrades, with Syrian women. We are stuck again. A little later, they will condescendingly explain to us about international duty and once again whisper confidentially about Judeo-Masonic geopolitics. And we will believe it again — indeed, we already believe it.

Truly blessed is the Soviet person! They do not remember the thousands upon thousands of zinc coffins that returned from another distant country not so long ago — in my childhood. The Soviet person does not remember that the same kind of adventure, intended to prevent the collapse of their empire, led precisely to its collapse. The Soviet person does not remember the queues for sausage, ration cards, hyperinflation, poverty, and chaos. The Soviet person is a mayfly. They remember nothing at all.

They do not remember Beslan, do not remember Nord-Ost, do not remember the metro bombings, do not remember and do not want to remember how the Chechen wars began and ended. They do not remember the Kremlin's cannibalism under Lenin and Stalin. They do not remember the camps, do not remember that the corpses of hundreds of thousands shot and worked to death lie right now in the permafrost of Eastern Siberia — untouched by decay, as if they died yesterday. They do not wish to remember the peasant hunger riots, suppressed with poisonous gases.

Instead of memory, they have the endless typhoid delirium of television, sticky nightmares with absurd, nonsensical plots. What today's "Solovyov" and "Tolstoy" call truth and reality is for them the undeniable truth and reality. A new day will come — and with it, a new truth. The Soviet person, hypnotized, knows nothing about their true past, understands nothing.

A good soul: they do not remember evil. They have forgiven all authorities, and will forgive everything. Again and again, they enter the familiar rabbit trance. Once more ready to be devoured.

Devour us, Moloch! Take our lands, our lives, seize our souls! We will feel nothing! We will understand nothing! We will blame everything on our enemies and glorify our leaders! We will never remember anything! We will never learn anything!

We have sclerosis, Moloch. Our lives are worth nothing. Other peoples have history, while we start each day with a blank slate.