“Let me tell you about the Russian apocalypse”. Interview with the Russian philosopher Mikhail Epstein

Mikhail Epstein was born on 21 April 1950 in Moscow. He graduated from the Faculty of Philology at Moscow State University in 1972, went on to have a long career as a researcher, received awards, and was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers, before emigrating to the United States in 1990. Today, Epstein teaches at Emory University and is one of the world’s leading scholars of Russian culture. He has written a book, "Russian Anti-World: Politics on the Verge of Apocalypse". This is his interview with Giulio Meotti.

The mystery begins precisely where political logic ends. A war that decimates the aggressor, drives away its most gifted young people, mortgages its economy to the battlefield and cuts off its elite from the very civilisation whose comforts it cannot do without — such a war is politically absurd. And when an action is politically absurd, one must ask whether it makes sense metaphysically. My answer, in short: a state that can no longer offer its citizens a future offers them an end. In the space of a single generation, history has twice threatened to come to an end. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed its ‘paradisiacal’ version: liberal democracy had survived all its rivals. Few recall a sentence from that same essay: Russian ultra-nationalists, he warned, believe passionately in their Slavophile mission, and the fascist alternative is still very much alive over there. A third of a century later, the ‘hellish’ version of the end of history has arrived, and it has chosen the letter Z – the last in the alphabet – as its emblem. This ideology paints no picture of the future; yet, armed with nuclear weapons, it can turn the whole of civilisation into the past. In April 2023, Dmitry Medvedev, the former president, declared that nuclear weapons are Russia’s skrepa — the ‘spiritual bond’ that holds the state together. We usually say that a country acquires the bomb. Here, the bomb has acquired a country. How does one get to that point? I see three stages: from the retro to the archaic to the necro. First came nostalgia for the Brezhnev years. Then the plunge went deeper: Ivan the Terrible and his oprichnina came back into vogue, and in 2008 a national television competition elected Alexander Nevsky, a 13th-century prince who helped the Golden Horde collect tribute, as the greatest figure of the nation’s past — as if, in eight centuries, no scientist, poet or composer had shone more brightly. The 2009 slogan ‘Russia, forward!’ was quietly replaced by ‘Time, back!’. I call this condition ‘uchronia’: a non-time, just as utopia is a non-place. In Russian, the word has an unintended echo: khoronit’, ‘to bury’. Uchronia is the burial of time. The final step, from the archaic to the necromantic, was taken in a literal sense. In 2016, the director of an economic institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences proposed granting the right to vote to the 27 million Soviet citizens who perished in the Second World War, with their relatives voting on their behalf; in May 2024, a senior Duma deputy from the ruling party spoke of the ‘voting rights of vanished generations’. The bureaucracy, which rarely lies about its intentions, sent the clearest signal. In December 2021, a national standard entitled ‘Urgent Burial of Corpses in Times of Peace and War’ prescribed four-layer mass graves and a quota of three hundred coffins per thousand inhabitants. It came into force on 1 February 2022, three weeks before the invasion. A state that standardises mass graves in advance has already chosen its literary genre. In the summer of 2024, the head of state himself articulated the ideology of the end. If the West seeks Russia’s “strategic defeat”, this would mean the end of a thousand years of Russian statehood — “and so the question arises: why should we be afraid? Wouldn’t it be better to go all the way, right to the end?”. Right to the end — in the name of what? Every great ideology has a telos, an end. This one has only a finis, an ending. Unable to say what it lives for, it at least knows how it will end. A state that cannot tolerate a border prefers an end to a border. This ending has its own theology. The novelist Vladimir Šarov described it with prophetic accuracy in The Kingdom of Agamemnon (2018). His characters reason as follows: those who kill the innocent send them straight to heaven and spare them the terrors of the Last Judgement; therefore, history’s great tormentors are its great benefactors. I call this ‘satanodicea’: not the justification of God in the face of evil, but the justification of evil as an instrument of salvation. That same year, the Russian president told a forum that in a nuclear exchange ‘we, as martyrs, will go to heaven, and they will simply croak’. The room laughed. Those who had read Šarov did not. Why self-destruction? Because history is the art of deferral: it is built up, accumulated, passed on, and awaited. A civilisation lives for the future. When a country fails to write the next chapter, it is tempted to write the words ‘The End’. In the 1980s, I wrote a pseudo-mythological treatise, The Great Kingdom of Owls, about a nocturnal state whose citizens revere owls as totemic ancestors. In its schools hung the slogan: ‘Be a soldier — you’ll die anyway!’. I intended it as satire. I did not expect to hear it, almost word for word, from the head of state. In November 2022, whilst meeting with carefully selected mothers of soldiers, he reminded them that every year tens of thousands of Russians die in road accidents or from vodka, without ever knowing what they had lived for; their sons, on the other hand, had not died in vain — ‘their goal had been achieved’. Death in battle as a cure for a meaningless life: this is the ideology of the end, expressed in the reassuring language of consolation.

Imitation and destruction are not two policies that alternate in Russian history; they are a single act viewed from two angles. The hand that takes and the hand that strikes belong to the same body. The most honest witness to this duality is Dostoevsky, because he did not observe it from the outside — he embodied it. In his 1880 ‘Speech on Pushkin’, he exclaimed: ‘Oh, the peoples of Europe do not know how dear they are to us!’ Yet a few years earlier, in A Writer’s Diary, he had praised the rebellious Russian soul, ‘to which European culture has always been, ever since Peter the Great himself, abhorrent’. Look closely and you will find the same word in both passages: ‘unconsciously’. Russia loved Europe unconsciously and hated it unconsciously. What it has never managed to do is become aware of both feelings at once — which is the beginning of maturity, in nations as in individuals. Freud, in his essay on Dostoevsky, called this oscillation a ‘characteristic Russian trait’: a pact with the conscience in which repentance paves the way for new sins. The same applies to Russia’s relationship with the West. Admiration is the repentance that makes the next act of aggression possible; aggression is the sin that will call for a new wave of admiration. Why the West, of all places? Because Russia has no other pole. China approaches the West as an older civilisation, with its own philosophy, writing and religion; whatever it borrows, it grafts onto its own trunk. Russia has nothing to set against the West except the West itself — its own Western borrowings turned on their head. It resembles a moon which, tired of reflecting the sun, decides to eclipse it. But even an eclipse is possible only thanks to the light of the sun. The Old Believers cursed Peter the Great as the Antichrist, the destroyer of Holy Rus’. Šarov offered a more unsettling interpretation: the schismatics were wrong. Peter went to the West not to hand Russia over to it, but to fetch the fire with which to burn it. Hence the fate of the most famous Russian metaphor. It is said that Peter ‘opened a window onto Europe’. His successors continue to turn that window into a slit. Every Russian opening — Catherine, Alexander II, the Thaw, perestroika, the 1990s — is followed by a narrowing, until the window becomes a slit barely wide enough for the barrel of a rifle. How does imitation turn into revenge? Russia imported the West’s institutions: parliaments, courts, universities, constitutions, elections. What it did not import was the foundation upon which those institutions rest: the inviolability of the individual and the sanctity of the contract. Placed on different ground, the imported forms became forms of forms, idols of idols. The Slavophile Aleksey Khomyakov celebrated ‘sobornost’, the mystical union of the faithful, which he believed to be superior to both Catholic legalism and Protestant individualism. But a unity unrestrained by either the law or personal freedom easily degenerates into what I call ‘sovornost’, from ‘vor’, meaning ‘thief’: a circle of collective complicity in breaking the law. Italian readers will recognize a distant relative of this circle: ‘omertà’. A Russian joke says it all. A general’s daughter says to her father: ‘Dad, you’re a thief!’ He replies: ‘My dear, I love the Motherland — I’m allowed to.’ Here, patriotism is not the mask of corruption but its true face. Anyone who doesn’t steal isn’t one of us. In such a society, the West is not merely a rival; it is a living rebuke. It is proof that the house can indeed stand, that a court can indeed pass judgement, that an election can indeed change a government. Consider a counterfeiter who comes to hate genuine banknotes — not because they are foreign, but because they are backed by gold, while his own are backed only by fear. This is the anatomy of resentment. Herein lies the ultimate paradox. Revenge, like imitation, is a form of dependence. Those who dream of destroying the model cannot live without it. A Russia that had truly freed itself from the West would simply stop thinking about it, just as Japan does not spend its days cursing Portugal, from which it once received its first firearms. The very obsession with the West is the best proof that Russia has not yet found itself.

Let’s start with a word. In Russian, ‘mir’ means ‘world’, but also ‘peace’, and in the old village it meant the farming community. In the 21st century, the ‘Russian mir’ has turned out to be a war against the world. That is why I speak of an anti-world, an anti-mir: a world that is, at the same time, an anti-peace. In November 2023, at the jubilee session of the World Council of the Russian People, the doctrine was given its final formulation. The president defined the Russian world as Ancient Rus’, the Muscovite Tsardom, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. He made no mention of the fact that each of these ‘hypostases’ arose from the violent negation of the one that preceded it. The Patriarch cited ‘tradition’ as the common denominator. But which tradition? The Oprichnina or the Enlightenment? The Third Rome or the Third International? The Church or militant atheism? Add up traditions that cancel each other out and you get zero — a zero that seeks only to expand. The Patriarch went further and compared the Russian world to the Pax Romana, noting with remarkable candour that such cultural expansion was often achieved ‘by military and political means’. Italian readers will appreciate the difference. The Roman peace, whatever its cruelties, brought roads, aqueducts, a common law and a citizenship to which a Gaul or a Syrian could aspire. St Paul, a Jew from Tarsus, could say "civis Romanus sum" and appeal to Caesar against a provincial court. To whom can a subject of the ‘Russian world’ appeal? Not to the law — only to the sovereign’s favour. The Pax Romana was an empire of law; the ‘Russian world’ is a law of the empire. Look at the targets of its expansion: first Georgia, then Ukraine. Neither is alien to Russia: the faith is Orthodox, the economy capitalist. Neither religious nor social motives explain the war. To understand the Russian world, therefore, one must look not at what it affirms but at what it denies. The Third Rome fought heretics; the Soviet Union fought capitalists; the Russian world simply fights — like antimatter, which does not clash with this or that particle but annihilates matter on contact. Hence the vocabulary I had to construct for the book: anti-time, anti-life, anti-morality, anti-society — and, ultimately, a war against being itself. When the Russian leadership declared in the autumn of 2022 that the West practises ‘religion in reverse — pure and simple Satanism’, official rhetoric soon added the ‘de-Satanisation’ of Ukraine to the war’s objectives. One can denazify an ideology and demilitarise an army. ‘De-satanising’ a country means waging war on its very existence. We often speak of politicians detached from reality as living in a ‘parallel world’. The geometry is wrong. Parallel lines do not meet; a parallel world would be harmless. The anti-world is a perpendicular world: it intersects reality at right angles to cut it clean through. Does the anti-world have absolutely no positive project whatsoever? It has one product, which it manufactures with great diligence: the void. I call this activity the cultivation of the void, modelled on horticulture or animal husbandry: tireless labour whose result is nothingness. Decrees that cannot be enforced, institutions that mimic institutions, a guard at the door of every chemist’s, who guards nothing from anyone. A civilisation is measured by what it adds to the world. The anti-world is measured by what it takes away — and it takes away not only what exists, but what might have existed. Its passport photograph is a negative.

Your question has three parts, and Russian literature responds to each with a different voice: Gogol and Pushkin explain passivity, Dostoevsky explains violence, and Chekhov explains the inability to attract. But let us begin with a landscape rather than a theory. In the summer of 2006, I found myself on the shores of Lake Seliger, on the upper Volga, with a dialectological expedition. A marvellous oval of water framed by dark forest, with clouds above and clouds reflected below. One might think that around such a lake there should be thriving towns, bustling quays, and wealthy, free people. But just a few steps from the shore stood a ruined church: the sky gaped where the dome had once been, and the floor was covered in cow dung. In the villages, only a few elderly women remained, along with a few hopeless drinkers. The only lively place in the area was a settlement of Tajik workers, who had already built themselves a mosque. Why is Russia so unhappy, and why does it bring unhappiness to others? The climate is not the answer; Finland lies further north and has built a peaceful, inventive, humane civilisation. My answer lies in the vastness of the landscape and the pride it engenders. Economists speak of the ‘resource curse’; I would add a territorial curse. A territory that can be neither abandoned nor truly inhabited is experienced as a void, and the void demands to be expanded rather than filled. A country seizes upon what is foreign as a perverse way of fleeing from itself: only in hostile contact with the foreign does it feel alive. Osip Mandelstam wrote: ‘We live without feeling the land beneath us’. The country does not fit the body like a garment; it swells like a blister. No one feels it is their own, and therefore no one feels responsible for it. Gogol saw this more terrifyingly than anyone else. Who is the most terrifying character in Dead Souls? Not the landowners: compared to the human types of the twentieth century, their vices are mere childish bad habits. The truly demonic figure appears in the lyrical digression, and it is Rus’ itself: ‘Why do you look at me like that, and why has everything in you turned towards me with eyes full of expectation?… I stand motionless… and my thoughts fall silent before your vastness’. It is the motionless, piercing gaze of the witch in his story Vij, before which the victim can neither move nor utter a word. Space, in Gogol, is a spell that petrifies. This is the literary root of political passivity. Pushkin’s contribution is more subtle, and has an Italian dimension. In 1836 he wrote the poem ‘From Pindemonte’, declaring that he did not attach great value to ‘noisy rights’ — freedom of the press, the right to prevent kings from waging war: ‘words, words, words’. Another, ‘better’ freedom is dear to him: not to depend on either the Tsar or the people, not to bow either one’s conscience or one’s neck. This poem established the great Russian myth of ‘secret’, inner freedom, which consoled the intelligentsia for two centuries. But look at the title. Pushkin could not sign his own thoughts: he attributed them to Ippolito Pindemonte, a Veronese poet who died in 1828. At first he had chosen Alfred de Musset, but Musset was alive and known as a champion of freedom — far too dangerous. Pushkin himself spent years trying to flee abroad, once planning to slip out in disguise, wearing a wig, as a friend’s servant. Thus, the hymn to inner freedom was written by a man who could not travel, did not dare to sign it, and never saw it in print. It only appeared after his death, and to this day every edition of Pushkin’s works publishes it under the title ‘From Pindemonte’. The mask has outlived the face: Russia’s secret freedom still bears a borrowed Italian name. In February 1921, Aleksandr Blok once again invoked Pushkin’s ‘secret freedom’. That July, the Politburo refused to allow the seriously ill poet to travel to Finland for treatment; by the time the decision was overturned and the documents ready, it was too late. Blok died on 7 August. Russian grammar adds its own commentary. One does not say ‘a grenade killed the young man’ but ‘it killed him with a grenade’, as if the grenade were wielded by an elemental force. The linguist Anna Wierzbicka argued that this abundance of impersonal constructions encourages a view of the world as a sequence of events beyond human control — like fate. It is a grammar of absolved responsibility. Not ‘we came’, but nas zaneslo, ‘we were carried there’. The writer Yuri Nagibin wrote in his diary in 1994 that the Russian people’s greatest fault is that they are always innocent in their own eyes; that neither Lenin nor Stalin would have been our destiny had we not wanted them to be. This is my answer to the question ‘Why are we in Ukraine?’. I have spoken elsewhere of the Underground Man; allow me instead to turn to his less famous brothers. Dostoevsky understood that the most seductive gift a power can offer is neither bread nor an idea. In The Demons, Pyotr Verkhovensky explains that with an open right to dishonour, it is very easy to lead a Russian astray, and Stavrogin replies: “The right to dishonour — but then everyone will rush to us; not a single one will be left behind.” In his short story "Bobok", the dead in a cemetery, in the few weeks before their consciousness abandons them, decide to feel no shame about anything any more: "Let’s strip naked!" From a decomposing body comes a meaningless syllable: "Bobok, bobok". I believe that ‘bobok’ is the name of the style of the 1910s and 1920s, just as ‘decadence’ was the name of the fin de siècle: shamelessness permitted because death will erase everything. ‘Bobok’ has lost all illusions and retained a single right — the right to dishonour. Finally, why has Russia failed to build a civilisation that others would freely join? Chekhov answered this in ‘The Man in the Case’ (1898). A provincial town trembles before the schoolmaster Belikov, who teaches a dead language, fears everything, denounces everyone and keeps repeating ‘as long as nothing happens!’. Then a new teacher arrives from Ukraine, Kovalenko, with his sister Varenka, who sings, laughs loudly and — horror of horrors! — rides a bicycle. Belikov is drawn to her, but this attraction frightens him, and he retreats even further into his case. The story ends with Varenka’s ringing laughter and Belikov’s funeral; in his coffin he almost seems content, as if glad to have finally been placed in a case from which he will never emerge. Note one detail: Kovalenko teaches history and geography — precisely the subject of today’s conflict. Civilisations attract through invitation, not through annexation. No one has ever voluntarily emigrated into Belikov’s case.

The accusation of decadence is the oldest tool in the predator’s arsenal, and Russian literature documented its logic a long time ago. In Krylov’s fable ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’ – a version of Aesop’s and La Fontaine’s tales – the wolf first seeks to ‘give the matter a legal appearance’: the lamb has muddied his water, and the lamb’s relatives once offended him. When every argument falls flat, he says frankly: ‘You are guilty simply because I am hungry.’ This is the story of Ukraine, first accused of betraying a ‘historical unity’, then of ‘Nazism’, and finally of ‘Satanism’: the accusations changed, but the appetite remained the same. But Krylov wrote a sequel, ‘The Wolf in the Kennel’. The wolf enters what he mistakes for a sheepfold and finds himself surrounded by dogs. ‘Western decadence’ is the Kremlin’s way of mistaking a kennel for a sheepfold: the belief that the West is a flock that has grown soft through comfort, too spoilt to defend itself. Whatever the West does, it is found guilty. If it is liberal, it is decadent; if it were traditionalist, it would be ‘fascist’; if strong, aggressive; if weak, contemptible. The verdict precedes the charge. It all depends on whether the wolf, once inside, will realise it has come to the wrong address. What is striking about this rhetoric is not its crudeness but its mirror-like precision. In October 2014, months after Crimea, the Russian president warned the world that ‘confidence in one’s own exceptionalism and attempts to achieve geopolitical objectives by any means, in defiance of the norms of international law, can lead to terrible consequences’. One wonders who said this — the UN Secretary-General? The Pope? A timid lie deviates from the truth by a few degrees; a bolder one by ninety; this one deviates by exactly one hundred and eighty. Umberto Eco listed fourteen traits of eternal fascism. I would add a fifteenth: fascism that presents itself as a struggle against fascism. So who is decadent? In November 2022, whilst mass protests swept young people from the streets, Moscow hosted the ‘Necropolis’ funeral industry fair. Young visitors tried on shrouds and lay down in coffins, whilst an advertising slogan promised: ‘Bury two — get the third free’. In January 2024, the country was shaken by the fate of Twix, a cat thrown from a train and later found dead; some 380,000 people signed a petition. In the same weeks, the United Nations counted more than ten thousand civilians killed in Ukraine, hundreds of whom were children. No petition — and none was possible. Compassion for a cat is permitted; compassion for children on the other side is punishable. The state decides not only who to kill but also who is worthy of compassion. Pushkin had already sketched this figure. In Dubrovsky, the blacksmith Archip locks the door of a burning estate, leaving the people inside to perish, and in the very same moment climbs onto a burning roof to save a cat — invoking God on both occasions. Archip is the archetype (the pun is irresistible) of what I call the dual soul: two souls in a single breast, the pious and the predatory, with nothing in between. Tenderness towards animals and cruelty towards people: this is not tradition. It is decadence in the strictest sense of the word, the decay of the human centre — that is, of conscience — between the saint and the beast. Decadence, after all, is a Roman word, and the West has been ‘declining’ for a long time. Since Spengler’s day, the West has witnessed the funerals of many regimes that had prophesied its end. Constantine Cavafy has the perfect poem for this, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’. The senators of a weary Rome wait all day for the barbarians, who never arrive, and the poem ends: ‘And now what shall become of us without the barbarians? Those people were a sort of solution.’ The Kremlin presents itself to the West precisely as such a solution: the barbarian who has come to punish Rome for its sins. But there is also a Russian poem on the subject, ‘Skrymtymnym’ by Andrei Voznesensky (1970), built around a dark, untranslatable word that sounds like a growl from the underworld and, strangely, contains the word ‘Crimea’. Its final lines: “But do not forget — Rome fell, / having failed to understand the greeting ‘Skrymtymnym’”. The danger for the West is not decadence but deafness: failing to understand the barbarian’s greeting. Does Putin’s Russia believe itself to be the anti-world? No anti-world has ever thought of itself in such terms. A photographic negative sees white where there is black; the anti-world is sincerely convinced that the world is the anti-world. In 2014, the then Prime Minister announced that the country was “surrounded by enemies on all sides”. A world record: within a few months, the largest country on earth had managed to surround itself with enemies. But “believing” is the wrong category. Soviet doublethink separated ends from means: one would stain one’s hands with blood for the sake of a radiant future. Today there is no future and no ends, only means that serve oneself. Doublethink has given way to Archip’s double soul. Such a soul does not believe in propaganda; it adheres to it, just as one adheres to a circle of accomplices. Repeating an obvious lie together is an oath of mutual complicity — the verbal form of sovornost’. And here, I believe, lies the strongest argument in favour of the West, the one I put forward in the book’s afterword: tell me who your enemy is, and I shall tell you who you are. The anti-world’s hatred is remarkably selective. It hates democracy and the rule of law; human rights and equal opportunities; freedom of speech and pluralism of opinion; tolerance of difference; scientific rationality; civil society. To many Westerners, these things seem so self-evident, so mundane and trivial, that they are tempted to tear down their own house in order to rebuild it from scratch. Look at them through the eyes of their enemy and you will discover that they are the West’s ‘traditional values’ — and its most precious ones. Fukuyama feared that liberal democracy would produce ‘last men’, too complacent to defend their freedom. The anti-world has offered the West a chance not to become the last men. Nor is the West’s capacity for self-criticism a sign of decline. A civilisation that can say ‘mea culpa’ is alive; one that can only say ‘it’s their fault’ is dying. Self-criticism is the West’s immune system. The danger only begins when the immune system starts to attack the body itself.

Your question contains a paradox that only the Russian language can fully express. Since ‘mir’ means both ‘world’ and ‘peace’, ‘a Russia at peace with the world’ sounds in Russian like ‘a Russia at mir with the mir’. In January 1916, in the midst of the First World War, Mandelstam wrote of the “rejected word ‘mir’ / at the dawn of a scorned era”. The word has been rejected once again. But words outlive governments. I maintain a personal calendar for this purpose. For a quarter of a century I have proposed celebrating 23 February — in Russia, Defender of the Fatherland Day, formerly Red Army Day — as that date was in ancient Rome: the Terminalia, the festival of Terminus, god of boundary stones. The Romans believed that anyone who moved a boundary stone was cursed. Ovid addresses the god in the Fasti: “Tu populos urbesque et regna ingentia finis; / omnis erit sine te litigiosus ager” — “You set the boundaries of peoples, cities and great kingdoms; without you, every field would be a matter of dispute”. A boundary is sacred because it separates. Nothing is more common to human beings than the boundaries that divide them; boundaries safeguard peace just as the Penates safeguard the hearth. On 23 February 2022, as I do every year, I published my essay on the Terminalia, this time emphasising the inviolability of boundaries. The following morning, the war began. A state that erases another’s boundary devalues the significance of its own. Russia’s own great conservative prophet understood this. In the 1970s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn urged his country to stop rounding up, with a sovereign hand, neighbours who wished to live freely; to choose self-restraint; to develop inwards rather than outwards, in depth rather than in breadth. And let me pose a simple question to your readers. Is Italy weaker because it is not India? Is Japan weaker because it is not Yakutia? Being true to oneself, growing to the measure of one’s own greatness — that is strength. A state is weak precisely when it is greater than itself by the measure of its conquests. Is such a Russia possible? I believe the problem lies less in the people than in the environment in which they live. The American demographer Nicholas Eberstadt observed that Russians, once they leave Russia, tend to thrive immediately. The drops of water that form a tsunami are chemically identical to the drops in a calm sea; it is the force acting upon the entire mass that makes them deadly. Peace with the world therefore requires a different framework: the rule of law rather than favour, moderation rather than boundlessness, local self-government rather than a vertical power structure, borders that are honoured rather than shifted — and a new distance from one’s own culture. Germany needed twelve years of totalitarian frenzy and then decades of patient self-examination. Russia does not need to erase Pushkin or Dostoevsky. It needs to erase its schoolboy-like obedience to their imperial and ‘Scythian’ motives, and to read its classics not as masters of life but as Cassandras whom Troy refused to heed. What can the West do? Nothing will come of its weariness. Peace with a perpendicular world is not achieved by bending reality to its angle. The anti-world needs barbarians at its gates: the image of the besieged fortress is its second skrepa, alongside the nuclear one. If the barbarians do not appear, and what the anti-world encounters instead is a calm, impenetrable steadfastness that does not respond to provocations, then barbarism, having nothing to do on the outside, turns inwards. Panhobia—hatred of everything—cannot remain inactive; deprived of an external target, it goes in search of internal enemies, and in a society bound by sovornost’, the internal enemy, sooner or later, is anyone and everyone. This is how an anti-society begins to devour itself: denunciations, purges, the redistribution of property, feuds between the clans of the security services. Here, the golden rule works in reverse: whoever erases another’s boundary erases their own, and every leap towards the ‘super’ ends in a fall into the ‘sub’. The anti-world becomes peaceful not when it is pacified, but when its project is exhausted — when expansion ceases to pay off even in the currency of pride. The West’s firmness is therefore not an obstacle to a future Russia at peace; it is the precondition for it. Yet I shall conclude with a hope, of a philological nature. Those of us who study Russia have become, willy-nilly, specialists in nothingness: the world peers into this abyss, whilst we look out from it. Yet anyone who has looked out from an abyss also knows where the way out lies. The Russian word *mir* has two meanings: ‘world’ and ‘peace’. Russia will attain the latter only when it renounces its claim to the former.