The Other Russia

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“The mountains are clothed in gardens. Narrow valleys, broad plains between the mountains. “These mountains were naked rocks before,” the older sister says. “Now they are covered with a thick layer of soil, and groves of the highest trees grow on them between the gardens; below in the moist hollows are coffee tree plantations; above – date palms, fig-trees, vineyards are mixed with sugar cane plantations; on the fields there is wheat as well, but more of rice.”

“So what is this land?”

“Let’s rise higher for a minute, you will see its borders…”

“But we are in the middle of a desert? Says Vera Pavlovna, surprised.

“Yes, in the middle of a former desert, – this side is called New Russia”

“This is where Odessa and Kherson are?”

“Once they were, and now, look, here is where the New Russia is.”

N. G. Chernichevsky “What to do?”

Petropavloskaya fortress, 1862

I almost forgot that I have written the book “Disciplinary Sanatorium” where I reflected on the arrangement of modern society. Today this came to my mind as I received a letter in which a guy from Siberia keeps asking what do we, the NBP, want, what society do we want to build. In the West a monotone and long life by the standards of the Western civilization is considered to be happy. That is no hard work, some function related to papers, an uninterrupted career during the whole life, then the pension age and then the comfortable existence of a pensioner and death in the deep debility of the old age. The governments of Western countries subjugate the person, leaving him only one permitted autonomous activity – the chase after females. In all the rest the Western man is extremely limited in his life by laws. Man was enslaved and domesticated.

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