Was There Ever a Boy?

Olga Shcheglova (Boris Bidyaga)

SOVEREIGN APOCRYPHA

WAS THERE EVER A BOY? 
A Postmodern Parable

SCENE 1. The Briefing

Four figures sit around a massive oak table, chins propped on their hands. On the wall above them hangs a giant interactive screen, glowing and flickering with a slogan about the nation’s forward march.

MISHUSTIN (tapping impatiently on the table): — Colleagues, the concept is stalling. From a physics standpoint, translational motion requires a vector. But once we digitize our current macroeconomic indicators, what we get is movement in a strictly undefined direction. Three neural networks at the Ministry of Digital Development collapsed under the weight of this task. They still can’t get the servers to cool down.

SOBYANIN (smiling smoothly):
— Mikhail Vladimirovich, you’re overcomplicating things. What difference does the direction of the vector make if the infrastructure works? Look at Moscow. Progress that moves in a circle — now that’s our perfect vector! We launch the Big Circle Line, the Moscow Central Circle, we lay paving stones along the first ring, then the second, then the Garden Ring. Everyone stays busy, the budget gets used up, the pace is breathtaking. And the fact that we keep returning to the exact same spot — well, that’s what stability is all about. With a trajectory like this, the economy is insured against ever accidentally plunging into an abyss. We have no need for your vectors. The main thing is that the curbstones get delivered on schedule.

PATRUSHEV (grumbling, without looking up from a folder stamped “Open Secret”):
— Strange thing to say, Sergei Semyonovich. Moving in circles offers no ironclad guarantee against internal and external threats. The moment a single element looks away, your whole “dynamic” will fly off at a tangent straight into the arms of our geopolitical adversaries. We need a secure perimeter. Three rows of barbed wire, watchtowers, signal jammers. That’s what lets us balance on the edge of the deepest abyss indefinitely. And whatever trajectories the movement takes inside the perimeter is of no consequence whatsoever. Security comes first.

KIRIYENKO (with a conciliatory smile):
— Colleagues, each of you is right in his own way. What we need are fresh KPIs to reframe our old objectives. Take “The Movement of the First,” for instance. Too vague. Too indefinite. It lacks punch. Let’s rebrand it as the “Sovereign Circular Dynamics of the First.” Spot on — there’s enormous untapped potential here. Don’t worry, colleagues, we’ll satisfy everyone’s needs. The technocrats get their beautiful Excel spreadsheets, Muscovites get new electric river trams with heated seats, and to the security bloc we guarantee that no one will slip past the contour’s boundaries alive. Tomorrow we launch the new propaganda campaign. High time we refreshed our weathered facade.

SCENE 2. Perpetual Motion

A vast field, trampled down to gray-yellow dust, marked with two concentric circles. The outer perimeter is tightly enclosed by three rows of barbed wire, heavy quadcopters buzzing lazily overhead. At the four corners, guards stand frozen atop tall wooden watchtowers, their faces as if carved from gray granite — menacing, heavy-jawed, unblinking. They grip their rifles, lazily spitting out sunflower-seed shells.

Inside the perimeter, life boils over. Around the vast outer circle runs a disorganized mob of adults, jostling elbows and stumbling — “important people” in sharp but rumpled suits, clutching leather briefcases. They wheeze, cut each other off at the turns, collapse in the dust, scramble up instantly, and jog on with a businesslike air, now and then accelerating to overtake a neighbor. On the run they snatch prizes from one another’s hands: shiny trinkets, plastic certificates, ration coupons for sugar, dropped down periodically by the guards. The whole roaring, frantic crowd moves at an impressive clip, kicking up dust that swallows the fence, the towers, even the sun.

Inside the large circle, safely hidden by the crowds of running adults, lies a smaller one. There, in the relative shade, the younger generation runs — all in identical tricolor sun hats, pushing and treading on each other’s heels in the same chaotic fashion.
Unlike the adults, trapped in the race all day, the children are allowed breaks. During these, in schools and kindergartens, they are treated to “Important Conversations.”

SCENE 3. “Important Conversations”

The “Little Sun” Kindergarten. A large hall, the air thick with the stubborn smell of bleach and burnt braised cabbage. The children sit on the floor in a wide semicircle. Facing them stands the teacher, clutching a tricolor flag. In the middle of the room, a toy circular railway hums quietly — a three-car train pulled by a locomotive. Every time it passes the station, it slows, the driver leans out the window, and shouts: “Cuckoo!”
The teacher waves her flag: “Children, all together! One, two, three, go!”
The pupils, joyful smiles plastered across their faces, shout back in unison: “Cock-a-doodle-doo!”

The train chugs on toward the next loop. Past the building blocks, past a dejected teddy bear with a torn ear, past a blank wall. A low hum. The station.

THE DRIVER:
— Cuckoo!

CHILDREN’S CHORUS:
— Cock-a-doodle-doo!

THE TEACHER:
— Children, why do we like it when the train goes in circles?

CHILDREN’S VOICES:
— Standability!
— Dictability!
— Security!

THE TEACHER:
— Correct. Stability, predictability, and security.

The train approaches the station once more. The driver leans out.

THE DRIVER:
— Cuckoo!

CHILDREN’S CHORUS:
— Cock-a-doodle-doo!

Only one boy, sitting in the far corner, doesn’t join the chorus. On his head sits a ridiculous, shiny little cap, folded from the foil wrapper of an Alyonka chocolate bar. While the other children stand open-mouthed, catching the invisible waves radiating from the router, the silver dome on his head vibrates, almost imperceptibly, reflecting them right back.

SCENE 4. The Tinfoil Cap vs. Sovereign Circular Dynamics

On the one hundred and twentieth loop, the train jerked and derailed, coming to a halt a mere two meters short of the station. The cheap Chinese axle on the wheelset had snapped, and a wheel from the locomotive rolled, with great ceremony, into the middle of the room.

The train was broken. The driver did not lean out the window. The “Cuckoo” never sounded.
A dead, ringing silence fell over the hall. The children froze, their faces masks of anxiety and fear. The teacher herself turned to stone, her tricolor flag frozen aloft, confusion and dread written across her face. A heavy, oppressive stupor settled over the room — as though it wasn’t the axle of a toy locomotive that had snapped, but the very axis their small, simple world turned on.

Only the boy in the tinfoil cap stayed calm and unbothered. He rose slowly to his full height. He looked around at his peers, frozen like pillars of salt. He looked at the teacher, her eyes gone glassy.
— What are you all so scared of? — the boy said, calm and certain, adjusting his cap. — They’re just messing with our heads.

He stepped forward, treading indifferently on the plastic tracks. The fragile contour snapped under his boot with a loud crunch, shattering into pieces.
The boy walked out of the kindergarten and headed straight for the training grounds.

First he cut through the crowd of children on the smaller circle. The toddlers in their bucket hats minced along, breathing hard, staring straight ahead. He squeezed through — no one noticed him, every eye fixed on the adults running the outer ring.

Out there it was hot and filthy. The “important people” in rumpled suits roared and wheezed, shoving each other with their elbows, racing to reach the prizes and coupons first. The boy pushed through the dense crowd, reeking of sweat and dust. They bumped into him without seeing him, veering around him like a minor nuisance.

Having crossed both circles at last, the boy reached the guarded perimeter. Unlike the people, the system reacted at once. The guards on the tall wooden towers sprang to life, their granite faces twisting with rage as they raised their rifles in unison and chambered rounds with a dull mechanical click. Threats blared from hidden loudspeakers across the field, along with demands that he return to the “Little Sun” Kindergarten at once.

The boy stopped at the wire. For about five minutes he studied the fence, the towers, the guards, watchful and unhurried. Then he bent down and picked up a heavy stone.
— You’re nothing but a picture, — he said, softly but clearly. He drew back his arm and hurled the stone with all his strength straight into the center of the colorful panorama.

Smash! Crack! The illusion of total control shattered into dust in an instant. The immense digital facade imploded with a deafening ring, splintering into a myriad of glass shards and sparking diodes. In a heartbeat the barbed wire, the wooden towers, the terrifying guards turned into the black, dead pixels of a broken LED screen. Through the gaping breach in the endless monitor, a gust of fresh wind rushed onto the trampled ground, followed by a flood of real, unfiltered sunlight. Behind the imaginary fence there was nothing but a boundless, wild field.

The boy stepped easily over the broken glass and, without looking back, walked off along a true, horizontal vector.

SCENE 5. Was There Ever a Boy?

The unsanctioned departure of a monitored subject jolted the teacher back to her senses. She crossed the room in quick strides, then broke into an awkward, hopping run after the boy.
But he was already far off. She called after him again and again, ordering him to come back, but he never slowed, never even turned his head.

When she reached the hole the stone had smashed in the endless monitor, what she saw struck her like a blow. What she felt was not joy, not wonder, not surprise. It was animal, primal fear. She spun on her heel and hurried back to the kindergarten.

Once inside familiar surroundings, she calmed at once. The train’s sudden breakdown no longer felt like a tragedy. She cast a stern look over the children and, calm and confident again, proposed they carry on with the lesson.
— The train’s being repaired, nothing to worry about, — she said. — While it’s being fixed, we’ll be the train ourselves. Petya, you’re the locomotive. Kolya, Misha, and Alyosha, you’re the carriages. And Senya is hereby appointed driver. All right, children — let’s go!

And once again, just as in the good old days, the eternal “Cuckoo” rang out through the room, and back came its sovereign echo: an elaborate “Cock-a-doodle-doo.”
And the teacher, watching the scene, was moved to tears, thinking: "How wonderfully, how rightly our life is arranged! As for the boy — he was just a lost sheep. Was there ever really a boy, come to think of it? Maybe there was no boy at all".

#OrthodoxMilitaryPutinism

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BACKGROUND NOTE FOR THE ENGLISH READER

* Mikhail Mishustin has been Russia’s Prime Minister since 2020. A former head of the Federal Tax Service, he’s known for a data-driven, spreadsheet-and-metrics managerial style — the archetypal technocrat who wants a “vector” for everything.

* Sergei Sobyanin has been Mayor of Moscow since 2010. His tenure is associated with constant, highly visible infrastructure projects — new transit rings, and above all the relentless re-laying of Moscow’s sidewalk paving stones and curbstones, a running joke among Muscovites about municipal spending that produces motion without progress.

* Nikolai Patrushev headed the FSB (1999–2008) and then served sixteen years as Secretary of Russia’s Security Council — long considered the most hawkish, security-obsessed figure in Putin’s inner circle. In May 2024 he was moved to the more ceremonial post of presidential aide overseeing shipbuilding, widely read as a demotion, though he’s assumed to retain influence. The character keeps his old security paranoia regardless of the new job title.

* Sergei Kiriyenko is First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration, overseeing domestic policy and propaganda — including the “Movement of the First”, a real state youth movement launched in 2022 as a spiritual successor to the Soviet Pioneers. He’s the regime’s rebranding specialist, the one who can turn any embarrassment into a shiny new slogan.

* “Was there ever a boy?” is one of the most famous lines in Russian literature, from Maxim Gorky’s novel "The Life of Klim Samgin" (1925–1936). As a child, Klim saw a boy fall through the ice. But out of fear, he didn’t try to save him. Later, to ease his pangs of conscience, he convinced himself that the incident had never actually happened. The phrase “But was there even a boy?” has since become a Russian idiom for retroactively denying that an inconvenient event ever took place.