A country of collective trauma. Russia is in dire need of psychotherapy

They are looking for someone to blame and it will always be the one who violated their comfort to live, albeit in wild, but in a way that is convenient for them.

Yekaterina Margolis, painter, writer, publicist (Italy)

Russia lost the Third World War with terrible losses - writes Sergey Medvedev. And he's right. Lately I have learned so many irreparably new things - no, not about the deep people; but about people, it would seem, of the inner thinking circle. The deformations and corruption of the entire society, alas, inevitably affected many of those whom, from old memory, we still call the intelligentsia. Paradoxically, this pandemic has highlighted the highest percentage of infection with non-free thinking, counting everything from the actions of the authorities - with a plus or minus sign is no longer so important: a truly independent mind should be indifferent for or against Yevtushenko's collective farms.

In fact, it was with the pandemic that it became clear that Russia and even its oppositional part totally do not think of themselves in the context of peace and humanity. The iron curtain in my head became especially noticeable right now. It turned out that Europe and the rest of the world were not a model, not a part of a common past and future, but just a pleasant zone of recreation and recreation. World experience remains behind the scenes. The entire pandemic, all battles take place in the minds of the mental space of Russia and its special path. Its own virus, its own covid, its doctors, its own statistics (filtered through official lies), its own (bad, as opposed to the cherished “imported) vaccinations: as if we are talking about a different biological species. The age of the Internet and the availability of any information has hardly changed anything here. In Russia, they do not think of world wars — in Russia, only the great ones of our own.

And even at the level of human biology, at the level of epidemiological measures, universal for all mankind, which, it would seem, should have been assimilated at the secondary school level. But no, again the first reaction is the reaction of traumatics to touching MY (!) Body: “masks do not help, this is not proven, but it’s hard for me (ME!) To breathe in them”, and “the vaccine is not tested”: the miracle of creating a working vaccine in such a record time is unknowing to ignorance — and here the "optimization" of schools and the appalling quality of science education have been paid for with thousands of lives. There are no experts, everyone is equal. But some are more equal - those who scream louder, not know more. Orwell and the Animal Farm in Practice.

Here, an educated person, an excellent specialist with a sharp mind, writes a post because of the closed Russian borders about the difficulties of traveling in Europe, about the "power of officials", about the terrible (and, of course, from arbitrary and meaningless) quarantines and PCR (in Russia, by the way, in two years, PCR and antigen have not yet learned to distinguish - although every child here knows this). And all the arguments about how life flourishes after mass vaccination (in Italy it is approaching 80%, while Russia occupies an honorable place between Paraguay and Honduras), as last weekend I could not push my way through a cheerful multi-lingual crowd of tourists in the center of Rome near the Trevi fountain and on the piazza di Spagna, as all the hotels in Venice are busy in October - no, these arguments from real life are not needed by traumatics. They are in denial. It hurts too much otherwise. And scary for myself.

Russia is a country of collective trauma. And he needs many years of psychotherapy. This is not a new thought. People were mutilated, killed, persecuted, evicted for so many generations that the Main formed principle: do not touch me, do not touch MY way of life, and the rest burn with a blue flame. Officials have taken away the opportunity to travel from me, and the fact that thousands are suffocating nearby, that doctors are straining, that nurses have no time to eat and go to the toilet, so I don’t see that. I don’t want to. And I probably can't.

The other day the segment of the Russian fb was shocked by the post of Lida Moniava that she found the relatives of a disabled child locked in the PNI and wrote to them that their relative, who had been declared dead at birth for convenience, turns out to be alive. Parents have already died, taking their secret with them to the grave, and Lida writes to another part of the family. It would seem that there could be more human and more natural. How many classic plots of world literature are built on the collision of a found relative.

But again, no. Thousands of denouncing comments ... denouncing not the Gulag system of boarding schools, not dehumanizing the disabled, but ... attention! - Lida, who encroached on the legacy of the Soviet "state knows and takes better care", to the sacred right of the family (parents and their descendants) to the unsolved terrible secret of the existence of a relative- a disabled person outside the walls of prison without the right of correspondence and parole. The child can be abandoned without consequences. You can declare a living person dead. You can erase the very fact of its existence from reality. The Commissioner disappears. The name of the "enemy of the people" or any inconvenient or not so or "inferior" can be deleted from life and from history. And in 2021, people will massively defend this right, and not the rights of the weaker and more vulnerable.

What is it, but again not the same collective trauma: do not touch us, do not hurt us ... we cannot bear it, we are scared. Youth took us on a saber campaign, youth threw us on the ice of Krondshtad, war horses carried us away, killed us on a wide square ... but now that's enough, just leave us alone. We have no strength for solidarity or responsibility.

"Do not touch us, and we do not touch."

The other day we wandered around the ancient Roman Ostia with the wonderful Slava Shvets. My youngest 11-year-old daughter (she even wrote about this in an essay about her Roman holidays) was most shocked by one phrase, a quote from Horace, said by Slava, in order to explain why in antiquity people attached such great importance to tombstones and epitaphs and were ready pay fabulous money to put your tombstone in the front row of the road leading to the city: "All of me will not die."

As long as only one lips read my name, I am alive. We cannot return the departed, but we can prevent them from disappearing into nothingness, where they were sent by the ruthless state, which “took care” of even the disappearance of their names. In ancient Roman jurisprudence, the worst punishment was damnatio memoriae, erasing a name from monuments, pedestals, extracting it from the text and the context of public life. The Romans knew a lot about this. That is why the action "Return of the names" of those killed, tortured, rotten in the Gulag, which traditionally should take place on October 29, is so important for Russia. So far, at least one lips ...

Homo sovieticus is a disabled person with severed ties: family, logical, temporary. This is a person, a socio-historical orphan, desperately screaming about his orphanhood with every comment in the fb. A person who is disliked, deprived of continuity and trust in the world, who does not remember and can no longer remember kinship, because he inherited it: at first it was dangerous, and then it went into oblivion. A person who is barely able to trace his ancestry for a couple of generations, while in a European person this continuity can be traced as an unbroken thread through the centuries.

Simple Lidin's logic is to do what each person does sooner or later: find out who he is and where he is from. So that the "nobody's" prisoner of the boarding school gulag could return the past, continuity, connections, return the personality to an impersonal state, and give other possibly unsuspecting relatives the opportunity to find out about its existence - he meets thousands of angry commentators, allegedly defending the rights of another family to privacy, and in fact, protecting themselves, their fear and their skeletons in the closet. Alas, often literal: people in boarding schools look like skeletons and do not live long. It would seem to write a private letter to adults who are able to make their own choice. A sick child cannot do this on his own, just as he cannot, for example, walk. Lida acts simply in his interests, leaving the competent right to decide for himself - but not at the expense of lies and ignorance, but with open eyes. And yes, it can hurt someone. And it certainly will. But in a situation of many years of lies and a person thrown out of the life of an entire family, declared dead, there can be no pain. “The pain comes back, because it has nowhere to go ...” (Galich). Noble rage overwhelms. And this, of course, is the same reaction of traumatics: do not touch, we may be in pain.

Is this not what we see in the case of Yuri Dmitriyev, the Case of Dmitriev and the "Last Address" and in general in all the resistance to the memory of the Gulag and its victims?

Lida has a special talent and vocation to get into the most painful and unhealthy points of society. Such people are always the first target. Tumbled up and accumulated over the years, like pus, shoots at the pioneer. People do not want to admit to themselves that they live at the expense of the weaker, vulnerable (and a “pretend” life, as if nothing had happened with a covid — exactly the same thing), do not want to see the problem and responsibility in themselves - they are looking for someone to blame and this there will always be someone who has violated their comfort to live, albeit in wild, but in a way that is convenient for them. Who revealed the terrible secret of a person surrendered to the state, or who introduced (or supported) restrictive measures to prevent illness and death. And all the rage, frustration, trauma of an entire society, twisted by lies and violence, hits hard on the one who got to this point. But when the abscess is opened, a new process of healing and revitalization begins. It's long, but worth it.

I was lucky to have friends, classmates, colleagues, and contemporaries. Among them is Yulia Galyamina . And I follow them with special admiration. For those who take the first blow. Who, not out of ignorance, but by vocation, continues to fight for Russia to become simply a part of humanity, because at the root of not only this word, but also the concept: man. And its absolute dignity.

It is in our power to help them be heard and understood. Read it - you can start with something very simple.

Original is here.