Chapter 2. "The Simple Solution"

After February 24th , around two or three weeks passed. During this time, I had time to discuss what was going on with many people.

Million times I heard:

"That's right, now we're going to show those Khokhlyas," or "Who are we to say anything? or "Who are we to say anything because there are smart people sitting up ‘there' and they know better than we do”.

I have noticed that there is indeed a lot of slavishness in the mentality of Russians. For some reason, they consider people of any high position to be some kind of "higher intelligence" who is always smarter and knows better, so you should not question what this "intelligence" says. When you start thinking that you are smarter than this "higher intelligence", it generally considers to be a sin and unchristian)). That's why you often hear from people, answers and questions like: "How can we know?" and then: "We don't know anything", "They know better up there", "Who are we to judge those people's decisions… ", etc. I think all this has to do with the extremely low level of education and the level of self-development. Moreover, let’s not forget the fact that people are not interested in anything else.

It's worth adding a comment about the fact that people don’t have much in life (no goals); they understand that they will never make money for themselves; there are no "lofty" dreams; everyone lives by making ends meet - this is the mentality that they have – to keep a low profile, sit quietly like everyone else, never take the initiative.

The only thing they have, as they think, is their great Russia (if you ask them what their greatness is displayed in, people have difficulty answering), as some have been repeating this on TV for decades while the audience believes it. This is also fundamental to many people's support for the war, because if Russia defeats and conquers someone, then people will have reasons to be proud of its strength (in Chapter 1 I mentioned that aggression is the norm, instilled as early as childhood). Since people hardly ever have any reason to be proud in life, they are proud of such sorts of success. In general, I noticed war supporters in the vast majority, the letter "Z" appeared on many cars. At the end of two weeks, I ended up in the hospital. It seemed to me that my heart wasn't beating properly and it gave me a great fear. When I was in the hospital with an ECG device (Holter) for 24 hours, it turned out that my heart was beating well and the whole problem was about panic attacks, which were registered as my diagnosis.

And then I realized that I can no longer be among these people because I was suffocating in such a society. We sold the car, packed things up and left the country (it was an "easy decision"). My wife supported me, the cat did not resist)). Although, it was not so easy, because we have left elderly parents there, a couple of close friends who do not want to leave but still treat the situation negatively. Our whole life was spent in Vladivostok. In fact, it was one of the most difficult decisions in my life but there was a clear understanding that it could not be any other way! We can't stay, otherwise we simply suffocate. By staying there, we would be just as useless and unable to change anything, no matter how much we wanted to. No doubts, you can try, but don’t expect a big support ,otherwise, you deal directly with the government. At that time there was no talk about mobilization because they said that the Russian army was crushing the enemy on TV. So we did not leave because we lived peacefully in Russia throughout the war but when mobilization was announced, we rushed to flee. It seems to me that this is an important point, because plenty of people who fled from mobilization now have a positive attitude towards the Russian invasion to Ukraine. They just left Russia to wait it out.

We have a completely different story and position in this regard.