I don’t think there’s anything new I can add to the wonderful texts already written about why none of us can stay home today. From Akunin to Roizman. From Lazareva to Gelfand. From this to this. I’ll just add one highly original thought of my own: life is always about the battle between good and evil. And about the inevitable victory of good in the end. Why, just yesterday we were all celebrating Easter in memory of the greatest such victory in human history. This will pass, things will get back on track, and everything will be all right. Slaves will become free. Russians will cast off the Mongol yoke. Police collaborators serving the fascists (the predecessors of Bastrykin and Co.) will be hanged. Colonial occupiers will be driven out. Little Gerda will defeat the Snow Queen. Elektronik and Moscow schoolchildren will defeat Urri and Stump. Alisa will get the myelophone back. Russia will have an honest judiciary and an accountable government that can actually be voted out. Its natural and other riches will serve the whole population, instead of being looted by a few feudal families, as they are now. The thing is, all of us will have to pay some price for the victory of good. Before the partisans hanged the collaborators, their relatives were taken hostage and shot, while they themselves spent years living in the forest and sleeping on the snow. Oppressors executed freedom fighters, and little Gerda made a perilous journey all alone and even fell into the hands of robbers. Now for the good news: at this stage of human development, in this part of the planet, for 99.99% of us the price is no longer so high. No Roman will jab you with a spear. No one will slit the soles of your feet and stuff grass into them so you can’t run home from Karakorum (the historic capital of the Mongol Empire). You won’t be shoved into a tricky magnetic suitcase like Elektronik. But you will definitely have to pay something. You can do it right now—by moving from sympathy to action, by spending two hours of your time standing in the square with everyone else (apparently more than once or twice). Or you can pay later, twenty years from now, trying to push away the unpleasant thought: "if only I had gone out with everyone else back then, it all would have happened much faster." Or you can simply pay with your nerves and your appetite, getting angry as you read yet another article about how yet another sonny of yet another "very patriotic general" became the head of a state bank at 25, while cranes were declared foreign agents, and still do nothing about it. The more of us there are, the lighter the burden on each person. There are already enough of us that the price of good’s victory is nothing like what it was in the old heroic days. Probably now the alternative looks less like "Better to die on your feet than live on your knees," and more like "It’s*** not necessary to live on your knees, even if television teaches you that every day."*** Even so, for the victory of good and for a better life, each of us has to make our own small contribution, just as people did before us and will do after us. We have to come out and pay it.
Yekaterinburg. 6:00 p.m. Truda Square. St. Petersburg. 7:00 p.m. Marsovo Pole. Moscow. From 6:00 p.m. Bolotnaya Square.