[Extrait] In 2005, during work at the drama theater in the city of Nizhny Tagil, in the Urals, a metal plaque was found in the brick masonry: “This inscription was walled up on March 15, 1954, without an orchestra or applause from the crowd. She will tell our descendants that this theater was not built by Komsomol brigades, as the annals will later affirm, but on the blood and bones of prisoners, slaves of the 20th century. Hello to you, future generations! May your life and times not know slavery and the humiliation of man by man. With greetings, prisoners IL Kozhin, RG Sharipov, IN Nigmatullin. 03/15/1954 »
In this time capsule, Gulag prisoners sent a message to the people of the Russia of the future. The future has arrived. The year is 2026, a magic number for science fiction writers of the past century. There are no flying cars or colonies on Mars. A war is taking place in Europe, the most important after the Second World War. Russia is once again transforming before our eyes into a totalitarian state. Has the future treacherously changed to the past?
Russia has always had problems with the future. In the Moscow Rus’ of the Middle Ages, the very concept of the future which was to succeed the present and change it was absent. In the archaic consciousness of the people, time was cyclical. The rural world lived in cycles of a year, the past was in no way distinguishable from the present, because everything was repeated in people’s lives: the seasons, seasonal work, festivals. It was important to maintain the same invariability in the organization of society and the state. It has always been this way, it will always be this way. We entered the future backwards, looking back, the past defined the norm, gave a benchmark. We could not change anything about the organization of life and society, the main thing was to remain “just”, like our ancestors. The fact that this “just” referred to a pyramid of slaves, which was what Muscovite Rus was all about, bothered no one.
In ancient Egypt, during the Middle Kingdom, slavery was voluntary, because the pharaoh was a sacred figure, an intermediary between mortals and the gods, and whoever served him became acceptable to the gods. In the same way, orthodoxy gave a sacred character to the pyramid of slaves. The Tsar’s service took your body but saved your soul. An authentic Christian state must fight for a just cause, against the forces of evil. Giving one’s life for the Tsar, anointed by the Lord, and for the holy homeland, sanctuary of the only authentic faith, guaranteed, if not paradise, at least the comforting hope of such a possibility. In popular consciousness, the future did not exist as a development of the present. There was only an infinite present, with a finale in the form of the end of the world. The last judgment was to reward those who had faithfully served the sovereign and the country.
A future capable of changing the present was scary. According to popular Russian wisdom, “one should not wish for the death of a bad tsar.” We did not feel the need to reform the State, social relations, the way of life. The misfortunes, troubles, catastrophes were explained by the fact that the tsar was “false”. Under a “real” tsar, order was reestablished, and was to remain unchanged until the end of time. The only legitimacy of a Russian tsar does not come from electivity, nor from respect for the dynastic order or love of the people, but from his iron fist which triumphs over external enemies and internal troubles. A true tsar must be victorious.
All Western authors who have written about Russia have noted the fatalism of the Russians, their submission to power and their destiny. Slaves cannot influence the future, whether that of their country or their own. Building a future is the prerogative of the free man. […]
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Mikhaïl ChichkineRussian writer, published in 2025 The White Marble Boat. Essays on Russian Culture (Paris, Éditions Noir sur Blanc, translation by Maud Mabillard and Odile Demange). Its text was translated from Russian by Maud Mabillard.
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Article published in Foreign policyvol. 91, No. 2, 2026.
