We do not even fear a common nuclear death, do not fear a third world war (perhaps we’ll hide away in some crevice), but fear only to take a civic stance! We hope only not to stray from the herd, not to set out on our own, and risk suddenly having to make do without the white bread, the hot water heater, a Moscow residency permit. We have lost our strength, our pride, our passion. We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender up all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants-anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence. “But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.” We are approaching the brink already a universal spiritual demise is upon us a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble:

But now we write and read samizdat and, congregating in the smoking rooms of research institutes, heartily complain to each other of all they are muddling up, of all they are dragging us into! There’s that unnecessary bravado around our ventures into space, against the backdrop of ruin and poverty at home and the buttressing of distant savage regimes and the kindling of civil wars and the ill-thought-out cultivation of Mao Zedong (at our expense to boot)-in the end we’ll be the ones sent out against him, and we’ll have to go, what other option will there be? And they put whomever they want on trial, and brand the healthy as mentally ill-and it is always “they,” while we are-helpless. There was a time when we dared not rustle a whisper.

The quantum prophecy