Since 2022, Russians have been in a Kind of Memorial Service for the Passing of Everything Making Them Fully Human, Kolesnikov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 28 – In an article provocatively entitled “A Panikhid for Humanity, Andrey Kolesnikov argues that since Putin began his expanded war in Ukraine five years ago, Russians have been part of a memorial service for the passing of everything that makes them fully human – morality, statehood, and a rejection of independent thinking.

            Crying for the deceased, the Russian commentator says, is where humanity begins because it makes the individual the center of life and underscores just “how important a single and unique person is on this side of the grave” (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/10/28/panikhida-po-cheloveku).

            “Totalitarian systems do not know the human self, they only know the ‘we’  in which you can dissolve, become invisible and accept for yourself “the yoke with the rattles yes scourge”. And there is only one ‘’” that equates itself with the country, the Motherland, the people, the state, society, and the mass “we” should agree with this only ‘I’ in everything.”

            That is what Stalin achieved and it is what a small group of intellectual recognized near the end of Soviet times, Kolesnikov says; now, it is what Putin and his regime have sought to recreate again, by destroying the central figure of humanity, the individual, and subordinating him to the mass, opening the way to mass crimes.

            In the 20^th century, the most horrific crimes are “mass crimes, those in which not only the victims are in the millions but the criminal is an organized mass,” he continues. What has been happening over the last five years is that that approach from which Russians had begun to turn away is being restored.

            Understanding what is going on is the first step to opposing and overcoming it, he says. “This psychology of subordination and self-justification in one group of accomplices works on the example of large communities, it explains everything in the mechanisms of conformity of the masses, besides protected from the torment of conscience and shame by distancing from the fact that violence occurs somewhere.”

            Kolesnikov continues: “Today, the semi-totalitarian system has entered a new quality: it has become much more open in demonstrating brutality: the militant dialect of the central television talk show and the logic of destroying the enemy have become the language of pro-Kremlin experts and even state policy.”

“No one will now refute Stalin’s “right”, on the contrary, state repression is justified by positive historical experience. It is no longer a legacy of late Soviet, it is the heritage of 1937, 1938, 1949 and other terrible years. Totalitarian practices of subordination and self-justification are reproduced in an impeccable way.”