Issue #53

Abstract: Six months ago, on December 14, 2025, a significant date for Russia was celebrated — the Decembrist Uprising, which ended on the same day it began. D.S. Merezhkovsky dubbed it a standing revolution, famous for the fact that its dictator didn’t show up in the square, and no one branded him with shame.
This allowed me to pose not even a question, but the problem of how history moves through defeats and weakness. This problem itself was posed back in the 1980s by M.Ya. Gefter, when we were working together on the history of N.I. Bukharin: I translated from French Nikolai Ivanovich’s last article, “The Main Problems of Contemporary Culture” (about fascism and culture, published in the newspaper “Izvestia” and in the magazine “Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniya i tekhniki”. 1988, no. 4), and Gefter wrote “On the Threshold of Death” (published there), reading his prison letters and writings, talking with his widow, Anna Mikhailovna Larina, practically from scratch created a new anthropology and social theory that would incorporate the experience of Russian defeats and thoughts about Homo sapiens as an ontologically weak being — a Weak Man, but capable of resisting the force of things.
But at the same time, A.P. Ogurtsov longed to write not even an article, but a book about G.S. Batenkov, a prisoner of the Alekseevsky ravelin, with the goal of showing not the weakness, but — on the contrary — the strength of this very homo, who managed to overcome the horror of twenty years of solitary confinement, lose and restore speech, in order to return through thorns to his original The dream is to live peacefully, reading Humboldt’s “Cosmos,” where Humboldt “analyzes the effects of nature on man and the history of his concepts of the Universe… There is such a jumble of figures, names, and authorities that after reading, the mind cannot grasp anything and, unable to disappear on demand, is amazed that, having imagined the majesty of the world we inhabit, it suddenly plunges it into pure insignificance.” Is insignificance weakness? This is a question that time has not answered.