[spectre] Fwd: 'The Situation of Unfreedom': final text by Ukrainian poet Konstantin Olmezov

[Andreas Broeckmann]

crossposted from nettime.

-------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht --------
Betreff: 	<nettime> 'The Situation of Unfreedom': final text by 
Ukrainian poet Konstantin Olmezov
Datum: 	Thu, 24 Mar 2022 16:08:05 -0400

Ukrainian poet and mathematician Konstantin Olmezov died by his own hand 
four days ago, following an abortive attempt to escape Russia and return 
home. This is his final text, and in my view it deserves to be widely 
read and pondered.

THE SITUATION OF UNFREEDOM

by Konstantin Olmezov

From N+1 magazine

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-situation-of-unfreedom/#fn2-24451

[The following essay contains discussions of suicide.]

[Introduction by Maya Vinokour, who also translated]

Konstantin Olmezov, a young Ukrainian mathematician and poet, died by 
suicide on March 20. He had come to Russia in 2018 to study a branch of 
mathematics—additive combinatorics—that was not well represented in his 
home country. He was a student at the elite Moscow Institute of Physics 
and Technology, whose list of alumni includes numerous Nobel Laureates. 
As his Telegram channel attests, he also wrote poetry on a large number 
of topics and in a variety of styles, meters, and moods—from moral 
tales, to ironic allegories, to sincere lyric.

Two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Olmezov tried to go home but was 
apprehended by the FSB at a Moscow bus station. He was questioned and 
detained for fifteen days on trumped-up administrative charges. The 
experience shook him deeply. Fearing being trapped in a Russia he no 
longer recognized—and isolated from a Ukraine he couldn’t save—he 
tragically took his own life.

Olmezov’s death was first reported on Telegram by his lawyer, Dmitry 
Zakhvatov, who had been actively working to put together a second, more 
effective escape route for him. Olmezov had already secured a position 
at a university in Austria and purchased a ticket to Istanbul, but 
ultimately could not bring himself to face the terrifying prospect of 
further “unfreedom” at the hands of the Russian authorities.

Olmezov had created his Telegram channel [https://t.me/s/const_poems 
<https://t.me/s/const_poems>] on March 15, shortly after his release 
from FSB detention. The vast majority of the entries are poems copied 
over from his page on VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook. Perhaps 
Olmezov, observing the wholesale destruction of Russia’s independent 
media and the blocking of platforms like Twitter and Instagram, wanted 
to preserve his art in a safer-seeming forum. Just before his suicide, 
he left a series of final entries of shattering clarity and impact, 
mostly in prose but ending with a poem.

After his death was announced, passages from these final notes went 
viral on what is left of the free Russian internet. Olmezov’s Telegram 
channel doubled its subscriber count overnight. In translating his final 
missive, I hope to transmit his message to an even wider audience. It is 
not a hopeful message, but the world is not currently an especially 
hopeful place.

Olmezov is circumspect, but his circumspection is ironic and 
contradictory. He avoids the word “suicide” just as he largely avoids 
calling Russia’s war a war, a linguistic choice he negates through 
constant bitter emphasis on the new prohibitions in Russian public 
discourse. His circumlocutions are devastating, calling screaming 
attention to the very topics they ostensibly skirt. They are part of the 
euphemistic language of shock and trauma, which cannot name the things 
that hurt the most.

—Maya Vinokour

* * *

Hello. My name is Konstantin Olmezov. As of this writing, I am of sound 
mind and memory, and if you are reading it, most likely I will never 
write anything again.

Once, a long time ago, when I was first thinking seriouslyabout 
thatwhich cannotbe named on the Russian internet, I started looking for 
self-help videos. In one such video, a psychologist says that the main 
thought that drives almost everyone who intends to do this is: “The 
world owes me and the world has not lived up to my expectations.” I took 
this idea to heart and realized that, given the situation at the time, 
such a position was inappropriate—and the problem was solved. I returned 
to life relatively quickly.

But now, I think exactly this: “The world owes me and the world has not 
lived up to my expectations.”

The world should strive to correct errors. And it doesn’t. The world 
should be comprisedof thinking, empathetic, and responsible people. And 
it isn’t. The world should permit creative freedom and freedom of 
choice. And it constantly takes them away. The world should consider 
these demands normal. And it considers them excessive.

That which began on February 24 changed certain existential positions 
within me. It is more than horrible how people who only yesterday seemed 
to be leading quite mundane lives so easily acquired all the 
characteristics I’d read about in books. I am afraid our language 
doesn’t yet have words to reflect the extreme nature of what is 
happening. It turns out that in order to start resembling characters 
from books and songs, all you have to do is not read or listen to them; 
and millions of people are capable of doing this.

I came to Russia in 2018 to study mathematics. I came because I had 
fallen in love with a type of mathematics that wasn’t represented in 
Ukraine—additive combinatorics. I fell in love for real, I was head over 
heels—the way people fall in love with people. I spent days and nights 
with it. My love wasn’t especially diligent, my mathematical 
achievements are very modest, but there’s actually no contradiction 
there, because I do even worse when it comes to regular love.

I was always critical of Russian politics and always thought Russian 
culture was on a higher plane. I thought it capableof transcendence. 
This illusion inside my head was almost unshakeable, but now it has 
dropped away, all at once and irrevocably. Vysotsky, Filatov, Shpalikov, 
Astrakhan, Tarkovsky, Mikhalkov (before his recent demonic possession) 
[1] Vinogradov, Linnik, Shkredov, Tchaikovsky, Rakhmaninov, Scriabin—I’m 
afraid that these and many other names mean absolutely nothing to the 
majority of those whose actions the majority of Russians currently 
support. They mean nothing to them to a point we can’t even imagine. But 
regardless, they support them.

It’s so ridiculous that everyone still believes that you can achieve 
everything by force. That if you break people hard enough over your 
knee, you can force them to forget what is happening right in front of 
them. That if you gag everyone, you can suffocate their thoughts, too. 
You would think these observations belong in the realm of politics or 
psychology, but no, it’s culture yet again—it’s not a strategy for 
working with reality, it’s an expression of an attitude toward the 
phenomenon of subjectivity as such. That’s what it means when “being 
determines consciousness.”

On February 26 I attempted to leave Russia. This was a somewhat stupid 
act, but only insofar as it was poorly planned. I don’t regret it, I 
only regret that I didn’t do it on the 23rd, when there was already 
every reason to do so.

I was leaving to defend my country, to defend it from those who wanted 
to take it away from me. To defend my president, whom I myself elected, 
the same way a boss feels obligated to defend a subordinate. Speaking of 
which, I didn’t vote for Zelensky in the first round of elections in 
2019. And I wouldn’t have voted for him in 2023, either. But however 
unpleasant I found him, what matters to me is freedom of choice and the 
freedom to take responsibility for that choice, responsibility up to and 
including fully experiencing the consequences. This is very difficult to 
explain to many Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians—how violent changes 
from the outside, even if they improve well-being across all possible 
parameters, might be unacceptable just by virtue of being violent and 
coming from outside. It’s a little bit like rescuing someone from their 
helicopter parents.

They arrested me as I was getting on the bus. The fault for this lies, I 
think, with my own big mouth and one person with whom I rashly shared my 
plans. Once arrested, I concluded that my freedom had been taken away 
forever, and told the FSB everything I thought about what’s going on, 
right to their faces. That was stupid, but it couldn’t have been 
otherwise. It was the last thing I could hit them with, and I lashed out 
with all my might. I was even amused at how helplessly they tried to 
answer me, how absolutely innocent their faces looked as they repeated 
the crudest propaganda clichés with total guilelessness.

Once confined to a cell, I sought only one thing—death. I made no fewer 
than ten attempts using seven different methods. In retrospect, some of 
these seem silly and obviously doomed to fail, but they were sincere 
attempts. And the only thing I dreamed of, sitting there, was to be 
released in order to gain the opportunity to make a final attempt, this 
time with a fair chance of success. (By the way, I still don’t 
understand why they released me in the end.)

To me, unfreedom is worse than death. My whole life, I’ve tried to have 
freedom of choice in everything—in food, in my profession, in my place 
of residence, in the type of soap I use to wash my hands and which party 
I vote for. I only ever ate food that tasted good to me, and if I didn’t 
have the opportunity to do so, I preferred to go hungry.

There are only two methods of fighting unfreedom—displacement and 
rejection. Displacement is when you’ve been able to choose freely all 
your life, and then, when they lock you up, you start to pick out books 
to read during your imprisonment. I can only fight unfreedom by 
rejecting it, by refusing to remain in the very situation of unfreedom. 
If I am prevented from choosing how and where to live, I prefer simply 
not to live.

I love Donetsk very much, even if it is with a strange love. [2] Despite 
my vile childhood, it’s still the city where I wrote my first computer 
program, my first poem, went onstage for the first time, earnedmy first 
paycheck. It’s the city where every little bench, every twist and turn 
of the path in every park is saturated for me with its own kind of 
rhyme, with some problem that I worked to solve there, with names, 
faces, with pleasant and terrible events. Every corner of every path.

I love Kyiv very much—it’s the city where I first attained an 
independent life, where I first endured hunger and loneliness, where I 
first fell truly in love, where I wrote my best poems. While I lived 
there, there was a period when I wrote two poems every three days, more 
than ever before. Every bridge over the RusanivskyChannel, every tree in 
the woods behind the Lisova metro station, every bench in Victory Park 
are suffused for me withtheir unique forms of pain and love.

I love Moscow very much—it’s the city where I first stood on my own two 
feet, became financially independent, where I proved my first and only 
theorems, where I really and truly started believing in my own 
abilities. Where there is Tsaritsyno! I feel pain for both sides in this 
war, but I see with my own eyes who’s defending their own land, and 
who’s trying to seize someone else’s.

I see with my own eyes who’s defending their right to be responsible for 
their own life, and who seeks to justify their own degradation.

There’s this hackneyed question: “to be or not to be.” I always tried to 
ask myself that from time to time. I feel like if a person doesn’t ask 
themselves that question on a regular basis, then the continuation of 
their life cannot be a conscious choice.

It’s a well-known question, but the author follows it up with another: 
“whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of 
outrageous fortune.” The answer to that question is unequivocal for me 
today: to be silent, to lie, to pretend that nothing is happening either 
in the world or in my soul—is indecent; to put myself in harm’s way and 
spend my whole life in prison, helpless—is indecent; to live in hiding, 
thereby bringing trouble on the heads of others, to constantly seek 
help, to fear everyone—is indecent; to act as a partisan, doing harm to 
another nation while on its territory—is doubly indecent. I’m a 
Ukrainian, a person of another culture. (I know that some will think 
this is a weakness; so be it.) I don’t see a way to continue to live 
decently.

At some point I became hopeful that my second attempt to leave would be 
successful. I am immensely grateful to the people who gave me the gift 
of that attempt and apologize for not being able to make use of it. I am 
too afraid of being imprisoned again, for real this time—I did too many 
stupid things during my first arrest.

Not to mention that I am disappointed in both individual people and 
humanity as a whole. When, in the 21st century and in the middle of the 
night, an army attacks a completely foreign country that presents no 
danger to it and every soldier understands what he is doing but pretends 
he doesn’t. When a government official says, “We didn’t attack,” and 
journalists amplify that message. And every journalist understands that 
it’s a lie but pretends not to. When millions of people look on and 
understand that what is being done will be on their conscience and their 
history, but pretend that it has nothing to do with them. When black is 
called white and softness—bitterness, and not in a conspiratorial 
whisper or with winking irony, but seemingly from the heart. When 
Zadornov’s joke about the American who says that “Russians are cruel 
because they attacked the Swedes near Poltava” ceases to be a joke and 
stops being about an American talking about Swedes. [3] When the world 
seriously considers the possibility of the very thing it has been trying 
to prevent for seventy-five years, but doesn’t consider any new models 
of prevention. When force once again claims to be the main source of 
truth, and betrayal and hypocrisy—the main source of peace.

When all of this is happening all around us, I utterly lose hope that 
humanity will take a different path. I utterly lose the desire to do 
anything for or with these people. I knew that we would backslide sooner 
or later, that the beast is incorrigible. But I couldn’t imagine that it 
would be so quick or so simple, like the flip of a switch.

Does what used to lend meaning to our lives make sense any longer? Of 
course everything will return, but it will return just as weak as 
before, and fall just as easily as soon as some thug takes a swing at it.

I can’t say I’m ashamed of my life, but I could have done better. I 
mostly didn’t have time to accomplish the things that only I can do and 
that would have improved people’s lives. But would they even be useful now?

I wanted to create an app that helps people make conscious decisions, 
that enables people to hold what I thought of as internal referenda, 
answering the same question many days in a row. This idea gave me life, 
but who needs elections and referendanow? Who is actually interested in 
even their own opinion? I wanted to “color in” Szemerédi’s theorem, 
transforming a mathematical proof into a creation at the intersection of 
the arts, into something on the scale of a film. I am certain that 
mathematics deserves as much.

I wanted to help people escape cognitive distortions and logical 
contradictions, to seek and formulate their own models of the world. I 
feel like I was good at that.

None of that matters anymore, and I’m writing about it not to arouse 
pity, but to insist on its significance.

I was unforgivably lazy and thought I had a lot of time. That was a big 
mistake.

I feel somewhat ashamed before my Ukrainian friends. Please believe that 
I never wanted or did anything to hurt Ukraine and always kept in mind 
my readiness to leave if, by chance, what is happening now were in fact 
to occur. Unfortunately, I was simply unable to do so, my approach 
wasn’t savvy enough . . . The FSB agents who detained me spoke to me as 
though I were a traitor, but on the morning of February 24 it was I who 
felt betrayed. Yes, it may seem silly—but even having acknowledged, 
rationally and out loud, that war was possible, on an emotional level it 
was a shock, to a shocking degree. I was naively certain that juridical 
tact toward Ukrainians would make it possible to escape when things came 
to a head. But I had stuck my head too deep into the tiger’s maw. That 
was the second big mistake; I’ve certainly made a few, and now I have to 
pay.

I hurt from every shell that falls onto the streets of Kyiv. Reading the 
news, I keep seeing those streets and neighborhoods in my imagination.  
 From the first day to this moment I was with you heart and soul, 
although, of course, that didn’t save any lives . . .

I am an absolute atheist. I don’t believe in hell, I’m heading into the 
void. But that void appeals to me more than a reality in which half the 
people have devolved into savagery, while the other half indulges 
them—even if they throw up their hands in collective insanity, even if 
they “evacuate” far away from the front lines. I don’t want any part of 
either.

And last but not least, a little poem:


Do Russians want NO WAR posters?

Ask the armored riot police;

Ask those diving down into the metro;

Ask the one clinging to the throne.

Do Russians want broken cities?

Ask the overstuffed trains.

Do Russians want destroyed hospitals?

Ask the dried-out eye sockets of infants.

Do Russians want to change anything at all?

Ask what few news media are left.

Do Russians want to root out Nazism?

Ask the students emblazoned with the “Z.” [4]

Your calling card will be this awful year,

You truly unwavering people,

Prepared to bathe in blood or shit,

So long as all NO WAR posters disappear.


Translated from the Russian by Maya Vinokour


[Footnotes]

1. The famous film director Nikita Mikhalkov, already a controversial 
figure, has been banned from entering Ukraine since 2015. Most recently, 
his commentary in support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led a 
Ukrainian court to arrest him in absentia. —trans.

2. Here, Olmezov is referring to Motherland by the Romantic poet Mikhail 
Lermontov, which he wrote in the year of his death. It begins with the 
line “I love my homeland/ But it is with a strange love.” —trans.

3. These lines refer to a bit by the Soviet and Russian comedian Mikhail 
Zadornov that mocks the Western view of Russians as aggressive, 
caftan-wearing barbarians. In the Battle of Poltava in 1709, it was in 
fact the Swedes who first attacked the Russians, not the other way 
around, so the joke here is that the American is comically “Russophobic” 
and ignorant. —trans.

4. The Latin letter “Z,” or “zwastika,” as some journalists have styled 
it, has become the symbol of support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 
Its meaning has not yet fully stabilized, but it could stand for “Za 
pobedu [for victory]” or “Za pravdu [for truth].” —trans.

[END]