In the Moscow metro, a train named "Russia, Striving into the Future" has been launched. The launch of the train coincides with the opening of an exhibition of the same name at the Manege. Its carriages will be dedicated to the medicine of the future, architecture, urban planning policy, ecology, IT, and so on.

The train will run on the Circle Line. The train, "Russia, Striving into the Future," will pass, among others, through the stations Komsomolskaya, Park Kultury, Kievskaya, Krasnopresnenskaya, Oktyabrskaya, then again – Komsomolskaya, Park Kultury, Kievskaya, Krasnopresnenskaya, Oktyabrskaya. And again, and again – past tiled and oil-painted Lenins, past Rubenesque collective farm women, happy soldiers, chubby wartime children, past ears of grain and bolts, bayonets and banners, grape clusters, cannon barrels, sickles, threshers, hammers, and anvils, past imperial marble, cemetery granite, through Soviet thorns, past red stars, past, past, through fake communist antiquity, through counterfeit Stalinist Rome, through temple-like Greek columns – into the future in a circle: you cannot arrive, you can only get tired and step off – into marble, granite, cast iron, into stars and wreaths.

The metro was dug for us by our grandfathers in the clayey brown Moscow soil, the Circle Line was built around the Great Patriotic War, its stations are museums. They were dug for this purpose, decorated for this purpose, to hammer such a past into the heads of descendants – us. Retouched, censored, rewritten in clean copy. After the collapse of the Union, new stations were not built for a long time, then – under Putin – it began: first, the Park Pobedy, faithful to the spirit of Stalinist empire, the deepest of all metro stations, and then new ones, seemingly modern, but still not standing out too much from the general style: either marble-imperial or utilitarian tin, in the spirit of Khrushchev-Brezhnev economy.

The exhibition "Russia, Striving into the Future," which Putin and the Patriarch open at the Manege on the Day of National Unity, is a delight. Young technocrats drag them from one colorful stand to another, because it is necessary, because political technologists and publicists have started saying too often that Russia is retreating into the burrow of the past, grinning from it, that the youth wander to rallies because hammers and stars are aesthetically alien to them. The youth need to be fed an image of the future, say the official philosophers, they need to be pumped with pictures from science fiction: artificial intelligence, space flights, neural networks, skyscrapers, cold blue tones, trendy fonts. They need to be distracted from the feeling that the future is not about them, that all the seats in it are occupied by the children of the current elite, not to mention the driver's cabin.

The President and the Patriarch – an aging autocrat and an aging official – walk through the exhibition of the future and force a smile. They do not want to look into the future, they already know what awaits them there, without the helpful explanations of young energetic guides. On the Day of National Unity, on the synthetic holiday of November 4, invented by the undereducated director of mass theatrical performances Vladislav Surkov to wrest Moscow's streets from the communists celebrating November 7, the President and the Patriarch, with masks instead of faces, wander through the future of Russia – not even Potemkin, but holographic. Through a Russia they will not see – and no one will see. The exhibition at the Manege interests them as much as it does the ministers and heads of state corporations looming in the background, as much as it does all Russians: not at all. And, apparently knowing that ordinary visitors would have to be driven into this happy future, it was decided to at least give Muscovites and guests of the capital a ride in it. They filled the metro carriages with the cold blue future and sent them on an endless loop, not bothering with the external setting of this trip and its metaphors. The Circle Line stations are now museums. But they were built as temples, not for nothing the Doric columns, not for nothing the marble statues and other pseudo-antiquity. They were built also to, in the Union of the thirties, by circling hungry Muscovites and poor guests of the capital through this wonder of the world, make them believe in a bright wonderful tomorrow, for which it was necessary to endure the nightmare endless today. The metro was a pre-visualization of the wonderful future world, a temple meant to dazzle with its grandeur and splendor the unbelievers, to convert them to the communist faith.

The train seems to go in a circle: we pass the same stations again, we are fed old meanings in the old way, we must endure today again to be happy tomorrow. Only no one believes in the meanings, not even those who create them, and it is already a pity to waste marble on the image of the future, so it is simply printed on film, which is wrapped around the carriages, because the difficult today, which must be endured for it, is not an era, but just a couple of months, until the presidential elections. Because after them, this image will be calmly wiped away: there will be no need to flirt with the youth anymore, and they can be driven into some kind of film pioneer organization and some kind of film Komsomol, where everything about their future will be explained to them in an imperative manner.

But this is not a circle, it is a spiral, a coiled spring: the speed increases, the circles shrink, faster, faster, deeper, deeper, down. Into our present, not an imagined future.