Below is the letter written by a secondary school pupil in Samara, industrial city on the Volga. The boy wrote it in hospital, where he was recovering after a failed suicide attempt.
His suicide note was a poem, the last line of which said, “Life in Russia is nothing but rot”. I learned about this from an article the boy’s teacher wrote for a dissident on-line magazine.
When the teacher visited him in hospital, the boy asked, “Why are intelligent people hated so much in this country?” Though not himself Jewish, he couldn’t stand casual anti-Semitism everywhere, he felt suffocated in a country waging a criminal war.
The teacher wisely advised the boy to keep silent about his thoughts on such matters, not sharing them even with his doctors. In the good tradition of Soviet psychiatry, they could confine him to a prison loony bin. Instead, he should write his thoughts down. Hence this letter:
“I began to hate Russia all the time after the start of the ‘special military operation’. It dawned on me that Russia is a country alien to me. A country of liars, in which the lying president and members of his government aren’t the worst. It’s much worse when the whole nation is mired in lies, though it’s not really a nation but a herd of imbeciles. Plebs, as the liberals call them.
“I live in a bog standard five-storey pre-fab, where my neighbours are out-and-out scum. They spit in the stairwell, talk loudly at all hours. They consider it normal to poke one in the chest when one runs into them. I’ve told them it’s rude, to which they replied, ‘Just being neighbourly’. When I found out that my teacher published on a dissident website, I realised I wasn’t alone in the view that my townsfolk have turned into rabble.
“But my teacher is an optimist. I believe that Russia is a country where the level of scum has reached the critical mass.
“I experienced a shift after the start of the ‘special military operation’. I wanted literally to run away from this concentration camp. What I want to say to Russia is ‘Begone!’.
“I’m ashamed of being a Russian. My ancestors worked diligently for the good of this country. But I walk down the street, see how people behave and feel disgust.
“My classmates are all engrossed in their mobiles, impossible to have a conversation with them. The teachers talk twaddle, mouthing ideologically correct tosh even in literature classes, where Solzhenitsyn’s works are off limits. I visit my relations on weekends, where I have to smile listening to them gushing about the war and ‘the real men who bomb and whack the Ukies’.
“I’ve often wanted to spit into the mug of my motherland which regards as the highest patriotism mindless repetition of the ideological crap streaming out of the TV set. In general, I avoid talking politics with my family: they wouldn’t understand and simply think I’m mad. Since my childhood, I’ve been an idealist, dreaming of becoming a teacher or engineer and working for my country. But looking at the scum around me, I want to have nothing to do with these people.
“I’m not political. I’ve always dreamt of acquiring a profession and working normally. But after the special military operation started I no longer want to work for this fascist state. I decided to top myself, but even that didn’t work out. And, having restored my nerves, I realised that the only way out is to leave this cesspit called Russia.
“Meanwhile, I’ll continue to despise the people of this country, with their bigotry, prison-guard habits, criminal ideology raised to the official creed. I despise them for acquiescing to the murder of Nemtsov and Navalny, Kasparov’s emigration, Yashin’s and Kara-Murza’s languishing in prison.
“I wanted to quit school and go to the Ukraine, to fight against Russia. But that’s not an option. If I did that, my family would be persecuted back home. Becoming a pro-Ukrainian saboteur within Russia is also impossible: I’m not much of an extremist and then again, Russia as such hasn’t harmed me. But I hate the people of this country; I don’t see them as my people, my country; I feel nothing in common with this rabble.
“The only thing left to do is finish school and emigrate. But how can I do it if I’m not even a Jew who could go to Israel? Ours is a regular family, there isn’t much money. But I do want to emigrate, even to the Ukraine, to say ‘Begone!’ to this land of crooks and thieves. And to pray to all gods that Russia perish as soon as possible.”
This is perhaps not the best prose I’ve ever read, but the boy wants to be an engineer when he grows up, not a writer. However, he is obviously intelligent and sensitive, and Russia has seldom been a natural home for such people, and never over the past century.
What’s good news for the country though, and rotten news for the rest of the world, is that intelligent, sensitive, cultured people have always been in an infinitesimal minority there. That’s why it’s wrong to generalise on the basis of heart-rending accounts seeping out of Russia, similar to this one.
The temptation should be resisted to suggest that such sentiments are prevalent or even widespread, and for precisely the reasons the boy outlined. The trouble with Russia has always been its people, not just its government. The former is primary, the latter secondary and derivative.
The myth of the saintly Russian peasant in direct touch with God is just that, a myth. And the best Russian writers, though not all of them, knew it perfectly well even when assisting the government in spreading that falsehood around.
The best-known mythologists were Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who were never short of emetic panegyrics for the hidden spiritual depths lurking in the breast of the Russian muzhik. Tolstoy in particular was full of gooey sentimentality, with his unerring eye of a genius artist suddenly going blind whenever he cast a glance at Russian peasantry.
But Gogol desperately tried to create a single positive Russian protagonist and burned the second volume of Dead Souls because he couldn’t. Chekhov, Bunin and Gorky didn’t even try: they described peasants, at that time over 80 per cent of the population, as feral, degenerate beasts red of tooth and claw.
Chekhov’s novella Muzhiks takes no prisoners, neither does Bunin’s book Accursed Days, while Gorky’s long 1922 essay On Russian Peasantry talks about his subjects’ ignorance, superstition and cruelty in the darkest terms. And he was writing as their social equal, not, as Tolstoy, their lord and master.
The boy who wrote the letter above lacks the mastery of those literary giants, but not their sensitivity. He grasps perceptively what has happened to the nation now formed by the descendants of the yahoos so poignantly described by Russian writers of the past.
These descendants are still semi-Asian yahoos, now clad and shod like Europeans, and operating the same gadgets, but still untouched by European civilisation, nor really any other. The small minority of good, cultured, morally perceptive people have few options at their disposal.
They can flee the country, which hundreds of thousands have done in the past few years, and millions in the past couple of decades. They can meekly go about their daily business, keeping themselves to themselves and suffering in silence. Or they can commit suicide, and I’m glad that the author of the cited letter failed in that attempt.
I hope he can get out of what he calls a concentration camp of a country and go West. We need more people like him – even if his own country doesn’t.