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Title: Thinking about Mikhail Zhlobitsky Author: Mikola Dziadok Date: November 12, 2018 Language: en Topics: propaganda of the deed Source: Retrieved on 29th November 2020 from https://therussianreader.com/2018/11/18/mikola-dziadok-thinking-about-mikhail-zhlobitsky/ Notes: Translated by the Russian Reader.
It is easy to be a revolutionary and a rebel in revolutionary times. You
don’t need to do a lot. You join the crowd, and history carries you
along on its waves. It is harder to be a revolutionary when everything
that can be forbidden has been forbidden, when humiliation at the hands
of the powers that be is the rule, a rule challenged by almost no one,
and when your friends and comrades are tortured in vans and the woods by
the secret police.
During such times, the only thing that compels people to act is a sense
of self-esteem and a fierce, merciless hatred of injustice.
Unfortunately, people do not experience these feelings to the same
degree. So, in the darkest times, lone champions come to the forefront.
People are slowly forgetting Mikhail Zhlobitsky, who blew himself up at
the FSB’s Arkhangelsk office on October 31. Many other things have
happened since then, you see. Yet we know almost nothing about Mikhail.
Decent photos of him have not surfaced, his real social media page is
nowhere to be found, and we have heard nothing from his family. The
trash written by the losers at Komsomolskaya Pravda and similar outlets
(“bullied at school,” “wanted to blow up the college,” “mentally
abnormal,” etc.) does not count.
We can only guess what Mikhail was like based on what he did.
Seventeen years old. Let us try and recall what we were up to when we
were seventeen. We explored the world, made trouble, got drunk with
friends, and learned how to have relationships with the opposite sex. We
went to university and got our first jobs. If we look back, we will
discover a fair amount of time has passed between those years and now.
We lived through them. We had our share of fun, we had our share of
sorrow, we had our share of experiences. Mikhail will not have these
years to live through, because he valued two things—his sense of dignity
and hatred of injustice—more than anything else in the world, more than
individual happiness, pleasant experiences, etc. He valued them more
than his own life.
Think about it. He gave up the most precious thing he had.
We can have different opinions about whether what he did was politically
effective, talk about how he could have accomplished more if he had gone
on living, and so on. Essentially, though, he did something most of us
would be incapable of doing.
“I’m waiting until I’m 18 years old so I’m responsible for my actions,
not my parents. I don’t know what you all are waiting for,” Mikhail
wrote in a chat room.
He could not have described himself better.
The Russian cops who leaked a postmortem photo of Mikhail on their
Telegram channel, mocking him in the comments to boot, also showed us
their true faces.
In the photo, Mikhail’s face was disfigured and burned by the explosion.
I have always believed an individual’s moral strength and their inherent
sense of honor has only one dimension: a capacity for self-sacrifice. It
runs the gamut from small things, such as giving up immediate pleasures
for the sake of others, to revolutionary suicide, the deliberate
rejection of life, for the sake of high ideals. What is the point of
pretty speeches and big words if your basic need for safety and comfort
suddenly outweighs everything else when push comes to shove?
Let us recall how many times each of us, including me, has put personal
comfort above our causes. We were tired at the end of the day and did
not go the meeting. We did not go to the protest rally because we were
afraid we would be detained. We had exams coming up. We had to finish
writing our graduation thesis. It was our birthday. We had to feed the
cat. We were not feeling all that great. Take your pick. Activism is
cool, but we want other people to do it. We have more important things
to worry about: life, family, work, parents, and fun. Or we say we will
join the fight after we have done everything else we need to do. We have
to think about the future. It would be better if we could be activists
without getting into trouble, without getting expelled from university,
without paying fines, without going to jail.
I have seen many would-be activists for whom personal comfort was the
focus of their lives, although it could not be clearer that life works
in such a way that if you want something social change and freedom, you
have to give something up.
Mikhail did not talk the talk. He walked the walk. As long as we are
afraid to make sacrifices even when it comes to little things, evil will
press forward, using handcuffs, tasers, and paddy wagons to achieve its
ends. Only a fearless few put themselves in harm’s way. You do not have
blow to yourself or commit acts of violence to join their ranks. Besides
violence, there is a huge arsenal of methods for effecting change, some
of them even more dangerous. We need only remember that a willingness to
suffer hardships, albeit tiny hardships, is a prerequisite for change.
Revolutions are never comfortable.
Then today’s fearless loners will turn into groups, and the groups will
turn into multitudes, and the people who forced seventeen-year-old boys
to blow themselves up will be held to account.