A Letter from the Year of Shattered Illusions

"Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." — John Donne (epigraph to E. Hemingway's novel)

An essay by a philosopher born in 1949 — the first half of the last century.

May, 2026

I am seventy-seven years old. I was born in the year the world, barely recovered from one global catastrophe and cursing war, was rapidly splitting into two halves — the year NATO was created and the first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated. My childhood unfolded amid the stories of fathers returning from the fronts of the Great War, and of mothers who had learned to wait, but, left widowed, decided through tears how to carry on.

All my life, decade after decade, I have observed the same paradox of human reason: to remember the horror of the past while briskly marching toward its repetition — only on a scale that was once unthinkable.

Today, in May of 2026, I look at Europe and Russia and see two old civilisations, bearing the full weight of culture, philosophy, and art, once again falling into a state the Romans called furor — the madness sent by the gods upon those they have resolved to destroy. But if, in the past, the gods at least left mortals the illusion of a front — a line dividing friend from foe, a space where one could show valour or cowardice — the coming war will leave no such thing. It will have no front. No rear. It will be everywhere. And it will remain without witnesses capable of telling their grandchildren about it.

The Contours of a New Era

Let us listen to the language of today's reality. Russia is conducting a special military operation — slowly, agonisingly, with deliberate self-restraint in the use of military force. This is not a triumphant blitzkrieg, nor is it a retreat. It is something else — a war of attrition, stretched out over time, like a nerve being cut with a dull scalpel by a surgeon hesitant to sever it completely. In parallel, Europe — a continent that was supposed to become a realm of reason after two world bloodbaths — is flexing its muscles like a young bully before his first fight. Budgets are ballooning, factories are being put on a war footing, exercises follow exercises, and politicians — whose names will enter history solely as epitaphs for their own peoples — Mrs. von der Leyen, Mrs. Kallas, Mr. Merz, and their fellow thinkers — casually set dates for the anticipated war with Russia: 2029, 2030, "a bit later." And they don't even hide their foolish little smiles, as if war were a timetable of commuter trains for a holiday trip.

But the most terrifying, and genuinely new, element is the disappearance of the front. Not the ideological front — that one emerged long ago. Armed with the thesis "Russia is the aggressor," Eastern Europe is digging trenches, mining fields, erecting concrete fortified areas — as if we still live in the logic of the Maginot Line, as if a "Yars" or "Topol-M" missile would be breaching defences over land, rather than falling from the sky directly onto Paris, Berlin, or London. They are preparing for the last war, which makes them doubly mad. The front will no longer be a stripe on a map. The front will be any point within reach of a strategic missile: a kindergarten in Warsaw, a library in Berlin, a cathedral in Rome. The same fate inevitably awaits Russian cities. A war without a front line means only one thing — a war without innocents.

And Russia, bogged down in its military operation, endlessly repeats: "Going to war with NATO is not in our plans." But Russia and Europe do not trust each other. Moreover, within the European Union itself, you would have to search hard to find countries that genuinely trust one another — not in words, not in ritual kisses before the cameras, but in deed.

The Language of Numbers Behind Which Man Disappears

I have had occasion to hear the calculations of military experts from various countries. Take, for instance, a "Topol-M" missile with a warhead of around 800 kilotons. On London — the instantaneous death of a million people, with two million more wounded, doomed to die without doctors, water, or light, in fire and radiation. On Paris — one and a half million at once. On Berlin — 640,000. On Warsaw — 615,000. The figures for Russian cities would be just as monstrous, and Russia, for all its vast expanses, would bathe in the same radioactive rains. These are just the first seconds. Then — firestorms devouring the oxygen. Then — radiation sickness, turning the survivors of the blast into the living dead, envying those who perished instantly. Then — the collapse of the social fabric: looting, cannibalism, the eternal silence of telephones and radio stations that will never sound again. And that is just one strike. In reality, the moment the first nuclear flash lights up the sky over some Russian city or European capital, a retaliatory salvo will begin within minutes. Such an exchange would not last a day. Within a month, the combat actions would likely cease — but not with peace, not with a treaty, but because there would be no one left to fight, nothing with which to fight, and no reason to fight. No one would even remember the new Eastern European Maginot Line.

It will be objected: this is an extreme scenario; no one desires it. But allow an old man who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 to remind you: we have stood on this threshold before. We were saved then by a miracle — the reason of Khrushchev and Kennedy, two leaders who, for all their hostility, understood what genuine, bone-chilling fear before the abyss of non-existence meant. Today, I see no figures of comparable stature on the European political stage. In their place are political managers, whose picture of the world was shaped not by trenches but by election ratings and urgent tweets. They bandy about the phrase "nuclear war" like children throwing firecrackers, not realising that one day, one of these poppers will turn out to be a real bomb.

Historical Memory and its Betrayal

Here we come to the most painful point. Russia remembers 1941. It remembers the peaceful assurances, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, sealed with oaths of non-aggression, and then — the sudden blow, the borders in flames, and the millions fallen in the very first months. Hitler's Germany, too, promised Europe a "New Order" and, on the eve of invasion, swore its peaceful intentions. Can today's Europe, with its military hysteria, its "fences on the borders," its provision of territory for launching drones against Russia, and its unrestrained rhetoric about the inevitability of collision — can it demand trust?

Can one believe a militant Europe? My life experience — the experience of a historian and philosopher — says: in politics, you can believe no one. You can only believe in interests. European elites act as if tomorrow does not exist. They pump Ukraine with weapons, push the situation toward the red line beyond which begins an uncontrollable slide into the nuclear abyss, and then immediately accuse Russia of "brinkmanship." This is classic psychological projection, familiar to any psychotherapist: one's own destructive impulses are attributed to the opponent to justify one's own aggression.

But it is not only a matter of psychology. It is a matter of the West's ontological fear of losing global dominance. The building of fences, the mining of strips, the digging of trenches — this is not preparation for an offensive, but a gesture of despair, an attempt to wall themselves off from their own fear of a history that has refused to follow their script. With dull persistence, they erect yet another Maginot Line, hoping that this time it will save them from missiles that fly not on a horizontal trajectory, but a vertical one. This is a moment of the triumph of stupidity. It is archaism dressing itself in the robes of high technology.

The Contours of a Post-Catastrophe World

If war begins, its finale will be swift and monstrous. Within a month — perhaps less — it will all be over. But it will not be peace. It will be a graveyard silence. The survivors, wrapped in rags, covered in burns and sores, will crawl out of basements into a world with no electricity, no communications, no governments, no nations. They will understand into what abyss they were led by figures whose names, just yesterday, dominated the television screens. They will curse Ursula, Kaja, Friedrich, and those like them — but it will be too late. Millions of dead will not rise again. Radioactive ruins will not transform back into residential districts. Europe, the cradle of civilisation, will become a geological layer, radioactive ash in the textbooks of the future — if, of course, there are still textbooks.

It is especially bitter to think that all this was predicted decades ago. Karl Jaspers, reflecting on the spiritual situation of the age, warned that technology, escaping the control of ethics, would become a demon. Martin Heidegger spoke of the "enframing" (Gestell) that turns the world into expendable raw material. Russian philosophers — from Fyodorov to Berdyaev — called fratricide the chief sin of civilisation. But who reads philosophers today, when factories demand an increase in the output of shells, and military departments demand reports on the number of anti-tank ditches dug?

The Lesson That Will Not Be Learned

I conclude this letter (for the word "essay" seems to me now too pretentious for a conversation about the end of the world) with a simple statement. Mankind has not learned a single lesson from its bloody history. Every generation considers itself the exception to the rules. Every generation thinks that it, at least, will not allow a catastrophe — and with this confidence, marches straight into one.

To trust a militant Europe is to ignore the experience of 1939, 1941, the experience of millennia of perfidy cloaked in diplomatic notes. But to answer blow for blow, to be drawn into this suicidal spiral of escalation, is to sign a death warrant not for individual states, but for the human species itself. Where, then, is the way out? There is no way out within the logic being imposed upon us. It lies only in a change of thinking itself, in a rejection of the language of ultimatums, in a return to politics as the art of the possible, not the art of continuous provocations.

But will I witness such a transformation in my seventy-eighth year of life? I fear not. I fear that I, like millions of other old men who survived the twentieth century, will see the beginning of the apocalypse that was foretold as far back as 1949. And then the only consolation — bitter as wormwood — will be that the survivors finally grasp the abyss of stupidity committed "by all together." They will grasp it when there is nothing left to understand, except the taste of radioactive dust on one's lips and the silence of dead cities.


P.S. And yet, despite everything written above, I end this text with words I once gleaned from a Russian poet: "But one must live. And one must believe in miracles." Because if we cease to believe in the miracle of reason, we will turn into mere statistical units in the calculations of warheads. And to be a statistical unit is the last thing a human being who remembers the taste of bread and the smell of lilac after the rain should ever agree to.