The Voice Over

This inability to distinguish oneself from one’s grandfathers, the past from the future, is of course also a kind of unspoken convention, a common agreement with a higher power that is hardly innocent—and sometimes it looks like a game of children playing soldiers. The sudden ability to walk through the mirror and see, instead of the quiet, boring, commonplace life, a red and black reality of some kind of Elusive Avengers,

¹¹ where one can freely shoot at the enemy and protect one’s friends, and then return to a life in which trains run on time, has already been worked out in hundreds of books and movies. The difference, perhaps, lies in its scale. And also in the fact that the movement from a zone of comfort to a zone of bloody adventures happens not in secret but in front of the whole world, setting a new example. The simplest and roughest summary would be to call this a form of extreme tourism; but it is, in fact, deeper and scarier than that. More than anything these jokes with serious matters, these children’s games with elemental magic remind me of the old story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, who brought to life forces he could not control.

It seems that the difference with the secret war in Afghanistan or the covert war in Chechnya, the truth about which was squeezed into the periphery of public consciousness for years, is that the number of victims of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is not limited to the list of those dead or wounded. All you need to do to meet the victims of the information war is go to any social media website. It’s as if this war had no mere witnesses (“a war is waged somewhere, but we still see it”) or even a home front (“we are in a peaceful city, while people get killed over there”): everyone participates in it to some extent. There is no difference between the sides of the conflict: the totality of the experience engulfs actors, survivors, the people who are living through the unimaginable. And the fact that the conversation takes place hundreds of kilometers away from the events themselves does not change anything. This is a conversation of the wounded—and its intonation is a result of a trauma that is shared, collective, the same for everyone.

I want to say, very carefully, one more thing: it’s possible that the nature of that trauma is different for those who were in the battle zone and were forced not just to suffer the effects of what happened but to endure the hardships of war: to worry about themselves and their close ones, about food, heat, shelter, survival. Working to preserve your life can, in a strange way, help preserve your mind.Whereas the illusion of being there, cobbled together from a fickle understanding of the past and an incomplete knowledge of what is currently happening, can be fatal to those who experience the present entirely online.

Because “we”—the broad we, which includes not just me and my friends, not just the imaginary community of readers of this text, but everyone whose background includes the Soviet system of historical education with its microtraumas intentionally inflicted on everyone (en masse, like some kind of inoculation), its saintly child martyrs and suicidal heroes, its incantation that “the most important thing is that there be no war,” which makes war our only horizon of expectation—recognizes a certain vocabulary as native: well, here we go.

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