EXPERIENCE OF EVIL - Dmitry Glukhovsky 03/13/2025
We were born in a country that in the West at that time was commonly called the “evil empire,” but we grew up in the firm and unshakable knowledge that our country – the USSR – was a country of goodness and justice.
This is quite natural: each of us is brought up from childhood with the idea that we, the protagonists of our lives, are obliged to be on the side of good – and in general we are on that side. Parents, school, the street, mass culture form this idea in us simultaneously with the criteria of what can be considered good and what must be considered evil. On the side of evil, accordingly, are our existential antagonists.
There are many definitions of evil, but I think this is exhaustive: evil consists of deliberately causing suffering to others for the sake of satisfying one's own desires and needs. Good, accordingly, can be defined as sacrificing one's own interests to the interests of others. To avoid misunderstandings, the unacceptable is clearly and concisely formulated in the Ten Biblical Commandments and specified in the Criminal Code.
The dichotomous perspective that there is a crystalline good and a distilled evil in the world seems infantile: as we grow up, we learn to see world phenomena and the manifestations of the human soul as shades of gray – not least because we ourselves commit many acts that we were forbidden to commit as children due to immorality; by forgiving ourselves for our imperfections, we judge the rest of the world more kindly.
And yet, sometimes we happen to encounter manifestations of absolute, unambiguous evil: one that, it seems to us, no one can put up with and that no one can ignore.
I remember the day I read the news about the massacre committed by Russian army soldiers in the suburbs of Kyiv, in the flourishing Bucha. I am not very impressionable, but reading the news articles about what happened, I felt a wave of suffocation and nausea.
Russia's war against Ukraine was just flaring up then, and I had not yet developed the habit of reading frontline reports. But the point was not how mercilessly and accurately the horror of war was conveyed in them.
When Russian troops entered the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin in the spring of 2022, they ordered the local population to tie white ribbons on their sleeves as a sign that they were not combatants and did not pose a threat. In the photographs from Bucha, these white ribbons were everywhere. They were on the corpses of Ukrainian cyclists, killed by Russian soldiers out of boredom. They were tied behind the backs of the hands of executed civilians, piled like sacks in the basements of houses.
I couldn't imagine that Russian soldiers, ordinary twenty-year-old guys who had never killed before, could become so brutal in just a couple of weeks that they would do such things to people who were no different from them. I was ready to attribute this brutality to the effects of amphetamine or some mystical madness, just to avoid thinking about its everyday and natural nature.
Like all of us, I grew up on films and books glorifying Soviet and Russian soldiers, and although over the years of my university studies and adult life I gradually realized how much the history of my country has been mythologized by propaganda, in the spring of 2022 I was completely unprepared for the crimes of the Russian army in Bucha and Irpen.
Something had invaded my world that could not be explained, justified, or described in any other way than by the banal word "evil." And since it was done by my fellow citizens, I felt involved in it, responsible for it. And I still cannot completely free myself from this feeling.
That day I called and wrote to my friends a lot: many shared my feelings. I stopped communicating with those who tried to argue with me for a long time – it made me so angry.
However, the majority eventually turned away and preferred to pretend that nothing had happened. Those who talked about Bucha readily bought into the propagandists’ explanations: the photos of Russian army atrocities were staged, it was all a provocation by the British secret services, it didn’t happen. The official position of the Russian authorities on Bucha became a furious denial. For covering the events in Bucha, many, including Ilya Yashin and myself (in absentia) were sentenced to eight years in prison.
The Bucha massacre was followed by countless acts of violence against civilians. The bombing of the Mariupol theater, in front of which the words "CHILDREN" were written in huge letters especially for the Russian bombers - hundreds of Ukrainian children were actually hiding there, who eventually died from a direct hit. The destruction of the Mariupol maternity hospital. The torture and execution of Ukrainian prisoners of war filmed on video...
In this war, Russia has consistently behaved as the party of undoubted evil: from the point of view of ordinary human and religious morality, from the point of view of basic education, and from the legal point of view.
The invasion of Ukraine was not provoked by it in any way and is purely predatory. The countless crimes of Russian troops are well documented. The Russian army is doing in Ukraine everything that the fascists - our stereotypical, universal image of evil - did to Russians in Soviet war films, which were intended to forever form in us an unequivocal condemnation of war and occupation.
And yet, the Russian government managed to ensure that the percentage of the population it needed supported the war, while almost everyone else stopped noticing it, suppressing in themselves both the basic principles of upbringing and the main principles of universal morality, renouncing the demands of religious teachings and rejecting the powerful national myths formed by education and decades of patriotic propaganda.
It turns out that even in such a black-and-white situation, people suffer from moral colorblindness; moreover, they consciously inoculate themselves with evil in order to live with it and not get sick.
What is happening now to Russian society has happened hundreds of times in the past in other countries. But it is happening to my generation for the first time, it is happening right before my eyes, and only now is it becoming clear to me how exactly evil manages to carry out its work. My discoveries are trivial – but for me personally they are no less surprising for that.
Firstly, it turned out that evil never admits that it is evil.
Any person, including murderers, needs to consider themselves fundamentally good in order to exist, and to justify their bad behavior, they need to turn their picture of the world inside out, so that their immoral actions appear as ethically justified or, at least, forced actions.
Secondly: to allow people to commit evil, breaking age-old taboos, it is enough to put them in a suitable emotional state. It is necessary to instill in the executioner that he is, in fact, a victim, suffering unjustly at the hands of his antagonist - and the feeling of injustice will fill him with righteous anger, on the wave of which he will be able to overcome any moral barriers.
It is enough to find such a point in the chronology of your relationships, where you allegedly suffered some kind of insult from the antagonist, and imagine it as the beginning of the conflict. This insult, often imaginary, can be inflated and combed so as to kindle a feeling of righteous anger in both subjects and the media flock, and in yourself.
No, it was not Russia that started the war of conquest in 2022. It was the West that started it forty years ago, by insidiously deceiving the Soviet Union into collapse, by accepting the Baltic countries into NATO and by bringing its troops to our borders... And it doesn't matter that it was a forgery, that the US and Europe saved Russians from starvation by sending humanitarian aid, that they flooded Russia with currency for decades, ultimately allowing Putin to arm the very army that invaded Ukraine...
The knowledge that you are engaged in forgery and manipulation is uncomfortable, but much less comfortable is the feeling of being on the side of evil: this feeling and understanding must be avoided at all costs, and self-deception here seems to be a completely acceptable price. This is my third discovery.
Just as a rapist blames his victim for the rape, reproaching her for provocative behavior, just as a street hooligan explains the attack by the fact that someone looked at him askance, so states must justify the persecution of dissenters and non-believers, repressions and wars of conquest by provocations on the part of their victims, scratching the long-healed wounds of past grievances.
These old grudges allow the antagonist to be designated as the evil side. If the antagonist has done nothing wrong, these crimes are attributed to him. The crimes, of course, must be emotionally vivid and symbolic. Sacrilege, rape, and murder of minors are ideal.
One of the myths of Russian propaganda that explained to TV viewers the need to invade Ukraine in 2014 was the story of a Russian boy crucified by Ukrainian soldiers, entirely invented by a correspondent of a Russian TV channel. This story, disseminated by propaganda, allowed the demonization of Ukrainians and became one of the justifications for the invasion of Russian proxies into Donbass. And when, as a result, Ukrainian Donetsk was captured, the occupation authorities built an “Avenue of Angels” in it - a memorial to children killed as a result of shelling of occupied Donetsk by Ukrainian troops. And this “Avenue of Angels” was used as a propaganda trope to prepare public opinion for a full-scale war in 2022.
Evil can be very sentimental about itself, it sympathizes and compassionates itself, it pities itself for any reason - exactly as much as is necessary to arouse righteous anger in itself towards the antagonist. The feeling of resentment and unfairly experienced suffering, nurtured within itself, is the basis of any aggressive revanchist regime - including the one that Vladimir Putin's regime has naturally turned into. This is fourth.
And fifthly: of course, evil explains to itself the legitimacy and naturalness of violence against its antagonists by the fact that they are not worthy of sympathy, are not full-fledged, equal people. In order not to feel and not to recognize itself as evil, in order to allow itself violence against its antagonists, evil needs to dehumanize them. This is usually done by denying the antagonist humanity, by comparing him to animals or insects, but these methods, already described in textbooks, like everything spoken out loud, lose some of their effectiveness. But mockery, public humiliation work very well - therefore, evil precedes violence and robbery by vilely mocking its antagonists, preparing to turn them into its victims.
Sixth: possessing a rare vindictiveness, evil is surprisingly indulgent towards itself. Endlessly causing suffering to others, even admitting to some “excesses” in itself, it very quickly forgets that it did something bad and believes that the injured party also did not pay any attention to its victims and suffering and probably forgot about them long ago. You read Russian pro-war Telegram channels and you are amazed at how naive they are: the image of victory in this senseless cruel war for this public is reunification with Ukraine, or rather, its absorption - and a peaceful life, where everyone has forgotten all past grievances. Where the Russians, it turns out, have forgotten that they executed, and the Ukrainians - that they were executed.
And here is the seventh, and probably the most sad discovery: you get used to evil very quickly. Since the Bucha photographs turned the world upside down, we have all seen a lot of other photos and videos from the war in Ukraine. Pictures of murdered children, mutilated women, fathers burying their entire families. Videos of soldiers in the trenches, tearfully begging a drone hovering above them for mercy or kicking their legs in their death throes. Human suffering and the senseless and merciless evil that causes it have become part of everyday life. The sense of the sharpness of evil has dulled. Its routine has seemingly normalized it.
Moreover, evil has become attractive to many. When Bucha happened, many refused to believe in the crimes of Russian soldiers because they identified with them and resisted the thought that they too would now have to feel like murderers. However, now that many justifications have been invented for murder, when indulgences have been issued to murderers, when criminals are heroized, it is becoming more difficult to resist the temptation of evil.
And evil tempts. Evil knows how to reward, and it rewards not only materially. Allowing one to earn money from murder and robbery, evil gives its adherents something else: freedom. By destroying basic taboos, evil gives those who have joined it the freedom to do whatever they want, relying solely on their strength. This feeling can intoxicate the strong, and teach the weak to be mean.
And the last thing. Those who have tasted evil once are changed forever. You can call it post-traumatic stress disorder and try to treat it, but the personal experience of joining evil is unforgettable. The genie, once out of the bottle, refuses to go back into it. Cynicism, indifference to the suffering of others and even the extraction of pleasure from it, the flexibility of moral criteria, the view of people as meat - this is an experience that remains forever with those who have partaken of evil.
The experience of coming to terms with evil, coexisting with it, is also unforgettable. The work on oneself, necessary to convince oneself of the necessity and justification of evil, the mental gymnastics necessary to change the poles of good and evil for reasons of safety or benefit, bends the moral spine of people who engage in this gymnastics, forever making it rubbery.
And I am afraid that the life of the current generation has already been poisoned. Moreover, the authorities are doing everything possible to poison the life of the next generation. In schools and even in kindergartens, so-called "Conversations about the Important" have been introduced - propaganda classes that instill in children from a very early age that they are growing up in the most just and peaceful country on Earth, which is only forced to defend itself from enemies. Attendance at these classes is mandatory, and parents who try to protect their children from being fooled are reported.
The anti-war movement inside Russia, which was based on considerations of morality and humanity, was demoralized by the end of the third year of the war and had essentially resigned itself to the situation. Of course, in today's Russia, those who participate in evil are incomparably fewer than those who simply coexist with it, trying to avoid complicity as best they can. But coexistence with evil is also a traumatic experience that teaches silence and cowardice, teaches one not to see evil, turning away from it and deliberately looking the other way - and this experience shapes a person for the rest of his life.
When millions go through the experience of direct participation in evil, and the entire country goes through the experience of coexistence with evil, this cannot help but change both the country and the people, if not forever, then at least for the life of an entire generation.
People who have made a choice in favor of evil rarely repent sincerely, although they are trained, if necessary, to easily feign the required repentance if the changed rules of the game require it.
If the war ends with the victory of the Putin regime – and, therefore, the victory of violence, fear and lies as the main forms of influence of power on society, the victory of moral relativism, one can be sure that both the current and the next generation of Russians will be spineless, and Russia's chances of becoming a free country will be negligible. However, children raised by propaganda in political and moral colorblindness will, of course, confuse the polarities of good and evil and quite sincerely believe that they live in the best country on earth.
