Here another one who wrote to me the day before yesterday. It’s a Russian I know from expeditions in the mountains - he blocked me in 2022 and now suddenly as if nothing ever happened ‘all the best, what’s up’ etc.

I politely wrote him back - life, children, work, war. ‘But no politics,’ he stipulated. Then he complained a little about the interest rates on mortgages (‘we fortunately took at 8% but now it’s 24%’). Then he wrote that in the summer they wanted to go somewhere by the sea. For Muscovites, ‘by the sea’ means Gelendzyk, Anapa and the like (because Crimea has got a bad name lately, with something burning and exploding there).

I say to him ‘well, I guess you like mazut medicinal baths’ because it’s is already all over the Azov and Black Sea coasts on the Russian side.

He replies that ‘it’s nothing, they will clean it up’. This is the kind of first-level message that every Russian keeps on the surface of consciousness for retorts in passing. I responded with this. He understood.

Then there was silence for a while, he must have searched in Yandex that they won’t ‘clean it up’ after all, because what’s on the coast is a trifle that only volunteers clean up and the administration makes theatre of, while most of the mazut has sunk to the bottom. And it will surface as it warms up.

Then he wrote without conviction: ‘there is hydrogen sulphide at the bottom, it will decompose it out’, which must be some surreal theory of the “reach over your right shoulder with your left hand and scratch your ear” (the so-called “mnogochodovki”) genre that the Russians love so much.

A few moments passed again and before I could close my mouth, open in astonishment, he wrote, ‘I think we’ll go to the Caspian after all’. And then he added, ‘I’ve always wanted to see Derbent’.

@bonkers

I talk to them because I’m genuinely curious how they explain the war to themselves. There’s a significant share of Russian society who is simply in the “kill, kill, kill” mode and these are not interesting.

But there’s also a certain share of intellectuals - and these make me curious because their ways of thinking display some extraordinary features of human mind plasticity.

It intrigued me since the Soviet times, because my brain simply rejects Marxism-Leninism due to its logical inconsistency and vagueness, but I can’t deny that there were thousands of people who made their PhD specifically in the style of “dialectical materialism” and I’m curious how their minds worked when they wrote it.

@bonkers

There’s also one guy like that I know in Russia. Interestingly, he’s 70+ and former border guard (=KGB) but all his life he’s been going to Europe for various sport events which was abruptly closed by the war, his son lives in France and he’s got many reasons in general to hate Putinism.

Hele, vím, že to není odpověď na dotaz a prosbu, ale tlačítkáč se dá koupit za 400 bez daně. V nejhorším.

alza.cz/aligator-d210-dual-sim…