New First Day

Everyone in Ukraine has a “first-day story”, a story about what they were doing when the full-scale invasion started and what happened next. People remember that day in great detail, because it was not just another story; it is an irreversible transition into a new reality. The world will never be the same as it was the night of February 23, when we went to bed.

In similar fashion, one can describe the condition of people who were summoned to the drafting station. Here, everyone has another “first-day” story: how they ran into the drafters or police. “How did you end up here?” becomes the go-to question to start a conversation with strangers: I could have turned left, could have postponed my trip to the bank until Monday, I could have parked the car five meters further.

There were more exotic cases as well. A fisherman was seized while fishing and taken to the drafting station with the fishhook in his hand and still-breathing bait. Another tried to escape on a bicycle, but they caught him anyway after ramming him with a car. A third in the drafting station was carrying a Glovo backpack, while his pizza-delivery scooter was lying in the corridor. By the way, delivery drivers now refuse to enter this area. They should know better.

First, these stories are told in wrath and hatred, with calls to kill the cops and the drafters, burn their cars, even take revenge on their families. Over time, emotions wear out. People come to terms. In the drafting station, the same stories are told with bitter irony, gradually dissolving into army routine.

Air raid sirens at four in the morning: we are taken out, supposedly to be taken to shelter. But the commanding officers are more concerned that no one escapes. We are lined up and counted one by one until the numbers match. Drones are visible in the sky; air defense is at work; explosions from intercepted missiles are heard.

Yet we — a crowd of a hundred people — remain under the open sky, waiting for the counting to end. Now I do see, with my own eyes, how a small group of uniformed can control a furious crowd.

— One needs to learn how to shoot oneself in the foot.

Politicians, activists, financiers, techno-utopians have retreated over the past decades, abandoning the real problems. What they have done instead is construct a simplistic version of the real world: to cling to power, to deprive us of the enormous capacity of materialist sensibility.

As this fake world unfolded, we followed it too, because simplicity was comforting.

Even those who believed they were against the system — radicals, environmentalists, musicians, artists, activists, and the entire counterculture — in fact became beats of one heart, repeating the same claim: that competitive relations and the market principle have no alternative.

Let the Museum of History concern itself with the history of the Museum of History. Let the House-Museum of Stepan Shahumyan become a museum to the House-Museum of Stepan Shahumyan. Let the Genocide Institute study the history of the Genocide Museum.

Let professional peace-builders refuse charter flights. Let journalists investigate the sources of funding of their own newsrooms, the connections of their editors and directors, the distribution of pay among colleagues, internal hierarchies, and injustice.

This will slow us down. There is a way out. A decisive stop. An epic braking. A sharp deceleration.

If history is a battlefield, then historians shouldn’t be regarded as agents of truth.

Confidence and truthfulness are earned by the ability to wage war against oneself.

To reject political actors: the future they invented remains in the past they falsified.

We generate ignorance, grounded in the facts we ourselves have excavated. With every fact, we expand and deepen that ignorance — developing it, making it coherent and justified. We destabilize, we provoke landslides. Slow down, and you will see how practical alternatives to the established order have been labeled utopian, placed under glass, set on pedestals, neutralized. Here is the grandeur of the possible and the misery of the present.

There are no alternatives in the past.

— They say the police get a bonus for every person delivered to the drafting station. I don’t believe it. Most likely, they are just fulfilling a quota and need to show results, so that no one even thinks of recruiting the recruiters. The fact is, they take everyone: in our barracks, there were two men with tuberculosis, four epileptics with regular seizures, drug addicts going through withdrawals, a guy with kidney stones, who would climb walls, two diagnosed schizophrenics, a homeless man who would talk to himself and rifle through the trash, former convicts nobody would accept anywhere, and a citizen of Georgia. All of them passed two medical examinations.

At least one of our roommates tried to escape but got stuck in the barbed wire. Another broke bones jumping from the third floor. A third cut his own throat. A fourth began smashing windows with a stool; they tied him up and attached him to a bed for the entire day.