My generation did not witness mass repressions and purges, did not see the show trials where an enraged public demanded the execution of traitors to the Motherland, did not live in an atmosphere of universal terror, did not learn to change its worldview overnight, to believe in the malevolence of yesterday's allies and the benevolence of yesterday's enemies at the snap of a finger, did not learn to justify fratricidal wars, and was not present at the moral and military preparations for world wars. The Soviet Union we experienced was already quite herbivorous; it no longer executed people for disbelief in its foundational systemic lie, allowing them to harbor doubts privately and in the kitchen format; nor did it demand applause when the heads of those designated as enemies of the people rolled.

Those who remembered the earlier times did not like to recall them—and now it becomes clear why. Because survival in such conditions required, first and foremost, a compromise with oneself, with one's conscience. Yes, one had to turn away, yes, one had to applaud, and some even had to execute others—whether with pleasure or not—to avoid the scaffold themselves. One does not wish to remember such things, and certainly does not wish to confess them. It took courage not only to object but even just to abstain, and it takes courage to later remember what you once—and not just once—did to divert the threat from yourself.

And now, with us, with my generation, things are happening live that seemed they should never happen again; we are gaining an astonishing experience, the opportunity to understand why our grandparents and great-grandparents remained silent and endured, how entire nations plunged into the abyss of madness, how peoples condoned tyrants who ignited world wars, how some people silently went to the scaffold, and how others agreed to chop off their heads.

Now we see with our own eyes how people are dehumanized before being devoured: through mockery, through defamation, through the distortion of their words and motives, and the denial of their very ability to feel and think as humans. We know how predation is disguised: by draping a wolf in a sheep's skin, stripped from the previous sheep it slaughtered.

We are learning to cultivate indifference to the obvious injustice happening before our eyes: after all, it doesn't concern us, and perhaps it won't touch us if we don't stick our necks out, because you can't sympathize with everyone!

We are learning not to sympathize with the victim, and at the same time to sympathize with the aggressor. If you empathize with the predator, then it's as if you are with him, beside him, as if you are one, like a remora beside a shark: it becomes less frightening, and you can peck at the crumbs from its toothy maw. We are learning not to notice the escalating madness of our rulers and to convince ourselves of their wisdom and foresight. A spoonful a day, like the officer's batman mentioned by Švejk—swallowing the excrement of our commander, until we get used to the taste and ask for more. After all, if we don't believe them, whom should we believe? Isn't it better to eat shit than to go to sleep thinking your life is in the hands of madmen? Is there even such a thing as collective madness?

Yes, we have already learned how to be silent, to turn away, not to stand out, to keep our thoughts to ourselves—but now we still have to learn to drive these thoughts away on our own. We must, so as not to live in fear, so as not to feel like cowards and not to feel like slaves, learn to sincerely believe in what we recently considered falsehood. And learn to march in step, and applaud on cue, sincerely, desperately applaud when enemies of the people are hanged, and feel honest, goosebump-inducing delight from the leader's speeches. Rejoice in wars. Welcome bloodshed. Find explanations and justifications for it, feel exhilaration from the betrayal of brothers and their punishment. Pretend not to notice and even genuinely not notice how our country is following the path of fascist dictatorships, step by step, down a road with a known destination.

We did not want to know the past because we thought it was over. It seemed we would never understand it, that the herbarium of these terrible, strange feelings would remain dead, pressed between the pages of history textbooks. But now the ghosts, having drunk their fill of grievances, permissiveness, and impunity, swell and push the paper apart, emerging from the dead yesterday into the living today. They demand blood—and they get blood. The blood of those who live now and here. Our blood, hot, red, not brown and dry.

And we will have to train ourselves to think in unison and march in step, to fear curious neighbors and night motors, to slobberingly, ostentatiously kiss icons and portraits of leaders, to fervently believe in what is declared the truth of the day by the nightingales and the fat ones, to live without sticking out, in eternal fear of not living at all: we will have to learn all this...

Or learn something else: to preserve memory and think about the future, letting go of grievances and not living solely in the past. Not to believe lies and always demand the truth. To stick out, argue, defend one's dignity and fight for it. We have still not understood anything from the experience of those who lived and died so that things would be different for us. And—therefore—we still have so much to learn ourselves.