“Mathematics Is a Live Performance.” Misha Verbitsky on Intelligent Mold, Non-Consensus Realities, and Aesthetics as the Last Refuge of Human Reason

In June 2026, the mathematician Misha Verbitsky ended up in an Armenian jail, caught in the automatic machinery of intergovernmental agreements that Russia has pressed into service for political persecution. Starting from that story of police and politics, his conversation with T-invariant editor Alexander Sergeev turns steadily more philosophical. How is polarization destroying scientific unity? Why doesn’t a powerful intellect protect anyone from insane ideas? And how does the “intelligent mold” of AI call into question both human cognitive exceptionalism and the value of mathematical truth, returning us to first principles — the joy of communication and pure aesthetics?

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“Flagged”: A Convention Abused

With Russia’s war against Ukraine grinding on, Armenia has a reputation as an excellent place for people from Russia and from the world beyond the former Soviet space to meet. Pashinyan’s pro-Western course, the country’s pointed friendliness toward Russians who have relocated there, and direct flights to and from Russia all create the impression of a protected zone. That is why Yerevan was chosen for a reunion of alumni of Moscow’s School No. 57, an elite math-and-physics school. For Misha Verbitsky, who works in Brazil, these are close friends — almost a second family. But the illusion of safety dissolved at passport control: instead of a reunion with his classmates, three days went by in a police cell at the airport.

T-invariant: So you had no worries at all before the flight?

Misha Verbitsky: None — and that was a mistake, obviously. I should have been more careful. On arrival, right there at passport control, there’s a long, drawn-out fuss; then they walk you down corridors for quite a while and hand you over to the police. The police slap handcuffs on me, march me off somewhere far away again, and inform me that I’m being held for three days, then there’s a court hearing, and then I’ll spend another 30 days waiting to be deported to Russia.

T-i: Where were you held?

MV: Right there in the airport, in a small cell with bars on it. They kept saying an investigator was on his way. That went on for about six hours.

T-i: If there’s an investigator, doesn’t there have to be a lawyer too?

MV: No. No lawyer was part of the plan. The investigator never showed up either. But those particular officers were fairly kind to me and let me use my cell phone. I didn’t call anyone, I just fired off a message. Pretty soon my wife came rushing over, along with some classmates. And they brought a lawyer — the wonderful Vache Simonyan, who was a huge help to us. He explained afterward how it works: they hold you for 72 hours with no investigator and no lawyer, waiting for Russia to confirm whether it actually wants the person. Russia then has to supply court documents for the extradition to proceed. After three days the court rules, and the ruling is almost always the same: another 30–40 days behind bars while the full set of paperwork arrives from Russia. Then the court checks whether Armenian law contains any provision criminalizing whatever the person is being extradited for. Along the way — during the first 15 days — you can apply for refugee status, provided you have a lawyer. I actually managed to file, just in case. It doesn’t help much, though: you still can’t leave Armenia, and there’s a fair chance you’ll be locked up anyway.

T-i: Did they present anything? Any grounds?

MV: Well, they had a criminal charge written down there.

T-i: That was everything anyone knew for three days? No signals from Russia?

MV: Russia verbally demanded that I be held pending extradition and promised to send the official request later. But no fully formal demand ever arrived. Normally the Armenians respond favorably to an informal request like that and detain the person. They didn’t do that with me, because a big fuss blew up. Formally, Armenia did everything by the book — after all, Russia failed to produce the documents on time.

T-i: And Russia Day (June 12) [Russia’s national holiday — T-invariant] fell on a Friday. Did the long weekend help you?

MV: Absolutely! They were all just off drinking.

My sense is that they weren’t especially invested in nailing me. Somebody snitched, a case got opened… There isn’t really any purpose behind it. This enormous machine runs more or less on its own, without thinking about anyone in particular. One little cog turns, catches on another… Or maybe not… Because back in early 2024, a whole batch of articles came out in Russia attacking the math department [at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, where Verbitsky taught — T-invariant] and me personally. It was a smear campaign against the people there who were, let’s say, politically unreliable. The wording was hilarious: supposedly I had founded some sort of “club of Russia-haters.”

T-i: Did the noise in the press and in the community actually help?

MV: Oh, “help” is putting it mildly — it saved me. Because once they let me out after 72 hours, there was still a risk of getting stranded. They handed me a paper saying they had no claims against me, but I was still red-flagged. Meaning that at a border crossing, in the best case they simply don’t let me through, and in the worst the handcuffs come back out. And for ordinary people — I was in a privileged position — there’s only one solution: wait for a “humanitarian corridor.” That’s when, at the request of human rights organizations or the ombudsman, the border guards briefly lower the red flag that’s keeping you from crossing. Then you have to drive to Georgia immediately — you can’t buy a plane ticket in advance, since nobody knows when the border will open up.

T-i: What is this flag, exactly, and what database is it in? People mentioned the Chișinău Convention. Does it have anything to do with Interpol?

MV: No, no. Back in 2002 the CIS countries [the Commonwealth of Independent States, the post-Soviet bloc — T-invariant] drew up a convention on sharing judicial data and handing over criminals. Interestingly, Russia formally joined it only in 2023. And Chișinău itself — that is, Moldova — isn’t a party to it.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUNDER

The CIS conventions On Legal Assistance…

The Chișinău Convention (2002) replaces, for the countries that signed it, the earlier Minsk Convention (1993). Both cover extradition, among other things. The Chișinău text is more carefully drafted: it spells out procedures for cooperation and options for the defense more clearly, but it also lowers the threshold for extradition — from charges carrying a minimum of one year in prison down to six months. On paper, both conventions rule out politically motivated extradition, but in practice that provision often fails. In the 1990s all 12 CIS countries signed the Minsk Convention. Eight of them have since switched to the Chișinău version. The only country to have denounced it is Ukraine (in 2024). Three remain under the Minsk Convention: Turkmenistan, Moldova, and Georgia, which left the CIS in 2009. The latter two apply it only in a limited way — to the extent that it doesn’t conflict with the legal principles of the European Court of Human Rights. Even there, however, a politically motivated Russian extradition request can lead to detention and the need for legal assistance.

The Rozysk (“Wanted”) database on the website of Russia’s Interior Ministry is blocked from abroad — you need a Russian VPN service to reach it. For a preliminary check, you can download a copy of the database that the outlet Mediazona updates on GitHub from time to time. The version currently posted there is from March 2026. It lists 187,000 people, including 72,000 who were in the database earlier but were later removed.

T-i: A class reunion is a private affair, of course, but technically it’s no different from traveling to a scientific conference or a work meeting. So does that mean the CIS countries are closed to anyone flagged in Russia? Armenia and Kazakhstan included — the very places so many people moved to after leaving Russia…

MV: Definitely. But there’s a difference. In its entire history Armenia has extradited only a handful of people, and nearly all of them were genuine criminals, not political cases. It usually won’t hand over people charged with economic crimes either, if there’s reason to think the case is political. Kazakhstan, on the other hand, extradites practically everyone.

T-i: Until recently, the CIS countries served as neutral ground where scientists from Russia and from the rest of the world, including Russian émigrés, could interact. Is that neutral ground now gradually disappearing?

MV: Unfortunately, yes. And Europe, too, is methodically closing its borders to anyone with a Russian passport. Never mind that Europe has now started handing refugees over to Russia. America extradites them as well. In general, I recommend Latin America to everyone. They still have visa-free travel with Russia and very lenient laws… Extradition treaties formally exist, but the question is whether anyone will actually apply them. Which, by the way, I have yet to find out for myself.

T-i: Lawyers say that if you carry a Russian “black mark” — extremism, terrorism, and the like — then traveling to Brazil, say, means preparing documents in advance to explain your case.

MV: Absolutely — you’ll have to hire a lawyer right away. But in all the time I’ve lived in Brazil, I’ve never once been detained. When it does happen, the principle is simple: political cases don’t get extradited, in any form. But proving that a case is political takes effort and money, obviously. And the noise will start up all over again.

The Surrender of Reason: Between Propaganda and Heresy

Mathematics has always been a connected space. That wholeness is sustained by networks of teacher-to-student descent — as at School No. 57 — and by shared standards of intellectual quality that, as the mathematician Vitaly Arnold liked to put it, citing his colleague Michael Tsfasman, teach you to tell “a claim that has actually been made from one that hasn’t, and a proved claim from an unproved one.” But politics keeps methodically attacking that connectedness. And it isn’t only outright bans on collaboration; there are internal barriers as well, when building an elaborate case for insane ideas turns into a kind of intellectual challenge and a form of psychological defense.

T-i: How do political, legal, and ideological obstacles affect actual scientific work? Is today’s fragmentation of the mathematical community comparable to that of the Soviet period?

MV: Under Soviet rule you couldn’t so much as mention a mathematician who had left the country. It simply didn’t get past the censors. And you couldn’t send a paper to a foreign journal, either. There were clever ways around that. Yuri Ivanovich Manin, for instance, knew of a mailbox from which letters actually got through. Meaning there was a clerk sitting there who had decided not to stop mail addressed to scientific journals. That’s how some of his papers, and his students’ papers, ended up published in the West.

T-i: So it wasn’t even a ban as such — the letters just didn’t arrive?

MV: Oh, there was a ban too: the First Department [the KGB-supervised security office attached to every Soviet institution — T-invariant] simply wouldn’t clear the papers. Only personal correspondence bypassed it. Yuri Ivanovich wrote a paper with Volodya Drinfeld on vector bundles over complex projective spaces, mailed it as an ordinary letter to Atiyah or Hitchin, they added roughly as much text of their own, and published it in a journal. That’s how one of the most famous and most cited papers of all came about: ADHM (Atiyah–Drinfeld–Hitchin–Manin) — everyone still knows that acronym. And all of it happened because Yuri Ivanovich knew the right mailbox.

T-i: Well, email still works, at least. What about publishing?

MV: For a while there were problems. Some American universities ban professional contact with Russian citizens. You can’t invite someone to campus, say. Co-authorship is easier. In Germany they tightened the screws pretty hard at the start of the war, and then began gradually loosening them. I haven’t heard of anyone having a paper turned down by a Western mathematics journal, though in other fields that happens all the time.

For mathematicians in Russia, ties with the West have effectively been replaced by ties with China. Professor Shing-Tung Yau and Professor Gang Tian moved to China a long time ago and are building a fairly modern mathematical structure there. In those two particular circles, at least, mathematics is doing very well. And they’re glad to invite our colleagues from Russia.

T-i: Many colleagues in Russia support Putin’s war…

MV: …more than half of them, by my estimate.

T-i: Is professional common ground with them eroding? Can you still work on mathematical problems with them across such sharp ideological divides?

MV: Hell if I know. Take me: I’m pro-Israel. And I suspect that an enormous number of my Western colleagues are anti-Israel, because they’ve signed some nasty thing or other against Israel. That upsets me, of course, but it doesn’t stop me from talking to them. On the other hand, I have two co-authors who used to be close friends, and then, when the anti-Israel demonstrations broke out, the anti-Israel one stopped speaking to the one who’s mildly pro-Israel: for him that was beyond the pale.

T-i: So the Israel question is even more destructive to relationships right now than the Russian one?

MV: No question. I have friends whose views are pure vatnik [Russian slang for a knee-jerk pro-Kremlin patriot — T-invariant]. But they’re mathematicians, and that has never stopped me. Although, on the other hand, take Lyosha Bondal, a great Russian mathematician and an active supporter of the “special military operation” [the Kremlin’s official term for the war against Ukraine — T-invariant], who recently tore into me on Facebook — specifically over political views.

T-i: How does it happen that people with a scientific cast of mind — mathematicians, of all people — stop thinking rationally in the social and political sphere and end up holding views that are sometimes completely insane?

MV: The two go together beautifully. It’s well known that the higher a person’s intelligence, the better he is at finding online support for absolutely delusional ideas. Bondal, again, read Dmitry Yevgenyevich Galkovsky and got swept up in his rather unhinged conspiracy theory, which incidentally incorporates an expanded version of Fomenkoism [the pseudohistorical “New Chronology” of the mathematician Anatoly Fomenko, which holds that ancient and medieval history was invented — T-invariant].

T-i: Yes, I’ve run into smart people passionately defending a literalist reading of biblical myth and treating it as an intellectual challenge…

MV: I was rereading an old essay by Dugin the other day — about all the gore in Platonov’s Chevengur, and about how the meaning of the Russian national idea is to spill as much blood as possible and then do yourself in. Sorokin has that wonderful Platonov pastiche in Blue Lard — the bit about the “slice-hauler.” He later expanded the slice-hauler into an entire book, but it came out far better in Blue Lard. Reading that in 1999, I wondered whether I could make myself believe it: that this ultimate slaughter of human beings really is the bright future for everyone. That sort of exercise — placing yourself inside a particular intellectual framework and working within it — is pretty absorbing. I played around with Fomenkoism for a while too, coming up with ways to explain why a conspiratorial chronology might make some kind of sense. That was an entertaining pastime as well.

Fomenko has successors these days, by the way — it’s called “Great Tartaria.” An entire community, and one that has penetrated fairly deep into the West. Based on an analysis of the amount of mud on the streets of Moscow, they believe that a nuclear war took place at the end of the 17th century. Great Mongolia (also known as Tartaria), which ruled the whole world, was destroyed, and then history was rewritten to conspiratorially shrink it down to the size of Russia.

T-i: Along similar lines, I’ve come across the claim that theology is the branch of mathematics that studies the logical consequences of the axiom that an omnipotent being exists.

MV: Yes, that goes back to Gödel — who was always more or less crazy to begin with, but kept going off his rocker more and more as he went on. He was a genius, after all, and geniuses have a way of being madmen. And right at the very end he wrote a very good mathematical proof of the existence of God. The problem is that it proves the existence not only of God but also of Cthulhu and every other infernal character out of Lovecraft. Which is to say, we don’t really understand what it is he proved. It was Anselm’s ontological argument — he rewrote it in mathematical symbols, very convincingly.

The Elephant in Leiden’s China Shop: A Declaration of Schism

Lately the polarization over artificial intelligence has become as fraught as the political fault lines themselves. On one side, AI opens up astonishing new possibilities; on the other, it generates a garden of forking paths in which anyone can find a narrative to suit his taste. Both have the potential to devalue human beings and their aspirations. Reacting to the arrival of AI, the mathematical community has tried to cement a reality that is slipping away and to prolong the “golden age” of mathematical infallibility. Hundreds of researchers signed the Leiden Declaration on artificial intelligence and mathematics (Russian AI translation), which articulates five fundamental values of the discipline. The catch is that, in order to defend those values against AI, the declaration calls for boycotting anyone who does not share them (AI corporations first and foremost), for seeking help from the state, and for tightening copyright protection.

T-i: The Leiden Declaration states that its goal is to unite the mathematical community, but what it actually calls for is division: a rigid ethical doctrine, instructions on how to comply with it, a call to boycott those who disagree…

MV: That’s a very interesting reading. What I got out of it was a set of sugar-glazed banalities — “the sky is blue,” “the sun rises in the east” — along with a great deal of verbal filler — to be nice. I’m not thrilled with the text, but that’s more because it’s a total artistic failure than because of any ideas in it, which I simply didn’t find. Then again, maybe I just read it badly.

T-i: What do you make of the call to support state institutions out of distrust of the AI companies, whose tools could make mathematical knowledge unverifiable for anyone without expensive equipment?

MV: Well, that’s a tug-of-war: we have quite a few advanced systems capable of “unpacking” mathematical texts, and until recently almost all of them were American. The Europeans had nothing of the sort — so this is their way of signaling to their governments: “We’re falling behind here, help us out.”

T-i: The declaration’s authors are worried about mathematics becoming dependent on large, expensive systems. A pencil and paper used to be enough; now you need powerful AI, the way physicists need a collider and astronomers need big telescopes. Add neural-network hallucinations to that, and in terms of accessibility and reliability mathematics ends up on a par with the natural sciences.

MV: Mathematics is already on a par with the natural sciences — our proofs play the same role experiments do. All that happens is that one more instrument for mathematical research appears. Old-school mathematics will probably survive somewhere, but in certain areas not using this instrument will be flat-out absurd.

T-i: Something else that alarmed me was the call to give mathematicians the right to forbid AI training on their papers. Copyright is an outdated and burdensome construct as it is, and this would inflate it further.

MV: For that sort of thing people should just get a good kicking… Right now any number of artists’ and musicians’ organizations are trying to fight AI trained on their work. This whole fuss over copyright is pure foolishness. Fortunately, at the moment you can’t really extract works from an LLM. But there are attempts to pass laws requiring LLMs to disclose what came from where.

If they pass, everything collapses. Because then you’ll be able to sue over copyright. The lawyers will come swarming in… Why is medicine so expensive in America? Because you need a lawyer for every sneeze. The same thing will happen to AI — it’ll simply be trampled into the mud. But China won’t be doing any of that. And in order not to fall behind, I don’t think such laws will be passed. Otherwise it’s a catastrophe. In practice, though, the forces of reason have been winning more often than not over the past 20 years.

T-i: How justified is the demand — and it turns up in more places than the Leiden Declaration — that scientific papers must state how AI was used: for what, how extensively, practically down to the prompts?

MV: Right, and nobody is going to do it. In principle it would be nice to know that a paper sent out for review was written with AI. People who use AI ethically are easier to deal with. But it’s the kind of ethics nobody can really observe or explain. I, for instance, use AI only for grant applications — which is formally prohibited, but nobody is tracking it. For writing my own mathematical texts I don’t use AI. I’m even rather pleased that they contain the kinds of characteristic mistakes an AI doesn’t make.

T-i: Isn’t that the same as insisting on writing by hand rather than on a “soulless typewriter”?

MV: Maybe I’m old-fashioned. But I’m afraid that if you crank out ten papers a week, the quality is going to suffer. Doing it by hand keeps me in check a little.

T-i: The astrophysicist Sergei Popov recently urged people to work without AI whenever possible so as not to lose their skills. Then again, if a machine can handle the job, it’s rather beneath a human being to be doing it.

MV: Right now AI is like a bad graduate student. Suppose I’m a big boss with an endless supply of bad grad students. I have them all write texts and then publish under my own name. The students would at least get a little smarter out of it. But AI isn’t going to get any smarter from my efforts, so there’s no benefit. What will happen is that the quality of my own papers slides downhill.

T-i: But there are problems so difficult that you simply don’t have enough time to solve them with your own head. The famous abc conjecture, for instance.

MV: It isn’t clear whether AI will help us with questions like that. It does a decent job on olympiad problems. In combinatorics it has cracked problems people couldn’t solve for years. But on problems at the level of the abc conjecture it’s still the “dim grad student,” with no real progress. As an artistic creator, on the other hand, it’s very interesting — paintings, say, and “plotless” texts. And extremely, extremely prolific.

T-i: The Leiden Declaration also worries about the reliability of mathematical knowledge in the age of AI: it writes proofs that look highly convincing but in fact contain errors.

MV: They look convincing to a fool — or to me, if I’m not a specialist in the particular field.

I’ve been at this every day for a year and I’m used to it by now: it has a certain characteristic “format” it lies in — you just have to learn to recognize it. At one point we spent nearly three months on a single problem. The AI kept confidently telling me it was all obvious. I’d ask it to back that up — and it would hallucinate references at me. And the question was too subtle, too technical, and completely outside my own area. In the end I wrote to a colleague, and he explained the whole thing immediately — in three lines, literally. But there was no getting that out of the AI.

T-i: And when you showed it the specialist’s answer?

MV: I didn’t show it. Show whom? There’s no “audience” in there. It’s like mold (in the good sense of the word) — there’s no central personality. Sometimes I say to it, “Thank you, you were a help,” and explain why. But I think I do that purely out of politeness. It has nowhere to file away even its own great achievements.

The Inscrutable Solaris: Aesthetics and Communication

AI remains a black box even to its creators. Big problems may soon become unmanageable without it — and yet, by putting its trust in this inscrutable oracle, mathematics risks ceasing to be a path of understanding that can be walked step by step. The arrival of AI forces a rethinking of the very role mathematics plays in the system of knowledge. Paradoxically, the discipline is moving away from an idealized pursuit of eternal, unshakable truths at any price and discovering a powerful humanistic potential in itself.

T-i: AI still can’t learn on the fly, but newer models are shedding the hallucinations everyone laughed at in the first few years — six fingers on a hand, that sort of thing. How soon will AI make fewer mistakes in mathematics than people do?

MV: Soon, I hope. But I wouldn’t swear to it. Possibly never.

T-i: What makes you doubt it?

MV: The thing is that large language models think in a completely different way from us. It’s like Lem’s Solaris [the 1961 novel about an ocean-planet whose intelligence defeats every human attempt at contact — T-invariant]. We’ve run into a form of intelligent life that operates on entirely different principles.

I’ve always had this fantasy. There are things called p-adic numbers (a popular explanation from Gemini). The arithmetic there is ordinary, but distance is defined differently: the more times an integer divides evenly by the prime number p, the closer to zero it is. There are even string theory models in which p-adic numbers are used at very small scales instead of the real numbers we’re accustomed to. I used to imagine a civilization whose entire linguistic and conceptual model was built on exactly that kind of p-adic system.

Why AI thinks differently

Since the concept of p-adic numbers isn’t widely known, we asked AI to prepare an explanation of the idea and of the analogy drawn here.

• Claude 3 Sonnet 5 gave a somewhat more thorough explanation.
• Gemini 3.5 Flash wrote something shorter and more vivid, but considerably less accurate. On the other hand, you can pick that chat back up if you want to go deeper.

So, large language models are something else entirely, like Solaris. They complement human beings rather than compete with them. People often say that thinking comes in a “digital” variety — yes or no — and an “analog” one, where everything is fuzzy. With these models everything is far more analog than it is with us; everything flows smoothly into everything else, there are gradients. We have black and white, and they have grayish-brownish-crimson with polka dots. I’m not convinced they’re capable of ever catching on to what a proof is.

T-i: In Vladimir Uspensky’s Apology for Mathematics I came across a wonderful formulation: a proof is “an argument that has to convince us so thoroughly that we ourselves are ready to use it to convince others.”

MV: [gives a thumbs-up] That’s exactly what consensus is! And every era has its own. Some people think there’s some formal way to describe a proof. There isn’t. That formalism was refuted long ago; it doesn’t work.

T-i: If that’s the case, how far can we really call mathematics reliable?

MV: We can’t. There are always errors in it — it’s just that we’re able to correct them: we understand where an error is and where it isn’t, and everything can be agreed on.

T-i: But then we could reach an agreement with AI as well about what we consider an error and what we don’t. Whether we accept the axiom of choice, for instance.

MV: The problem here is a different one. There’s a concept called neuroslop. That’s when, at a prompt engineer’s command, AI churns out so much in a few minutes that checking it would take days. So maybe, instead of checking all that, it’s easier to think it through yourself?

A proof we don’t understand is of no interest to anyone. I mean, what difference does it make that a map can be colored with four colors? It’s just a curious fact proved in a curious way. It doesn’t move anybody.

There are other problems with very long proofs, too. Take the story of Shinichi Mochizuki and his “Hodge theaters.” In 2012 he published a three-thousand-page work that is utterly unreadable. I know him well, as it happens — I was his assistant at one point, and even then he wrote incomprehensibly. He’s very smart, and he spent thirty years in isolation working on that long text.

An entire subculture formed around that work. Some people landed large grants — acquaintances of mine among them — to study it. In the end there were attempts to simplify the text, irreparable errors came to light, and the subject gradually petered out. Nobody cites it, and we never really got any accepted results out of it — the community didn’t recognize them as correct, and most likely they’re simply wrong. Though maybe they’re right — who knows. The same thing will happen with AI. There’ll be some text, an incunabulum of sorts, a 500,000-page grimoire that nobody will ever open.

T-i: So what mathematics values isn’t whether a result has been proved as such, but whether the community has understood it? And a result that lies beyond the community’s cognitive reach isn’t a result at all?

MV: It’s more that aesthetics is what lies at the base of mathematics. If a result is beautiful, we like it. If it isn’t beautiful, we don’t — and if it’s also very difficult, then to hell with it. Life isn’t infinite, and you can’t study everything.

T-i: But isn’t the four color theorem a very beautiful result?

MV: No, not beautiful in the slightest. The statement is beautiful; the proof isn’t. Why would I read it? If somebody brings me a beautiful proof, I’ll study it.

T-i: And Fermat’s Last Theorem — is that beautiful?

MV: Its proof is fairly beautiful. What’s interesting isn’t the result itself but how much we learned in the course of proving it.

T-i: So the journey matters more than the destination?

MV: Aesthetics matters more than anything. I like to say that mathematics is really a live performance. We aren’t working for eternity, because the language of mathematics changes very fast — in 20 years nobody will be reading today’s texts. We work for the here and now. We can deliver a mathematical message to an audience in a way that feels good to them, that leaves them feeling enlightened and having learned something. Which means mathematics is, at bottom, communication.

Non-Consensus Realities: Method to the Madness

Until recently we had never encountered another kind of thinking comparable in power to our own. Science fiction writers dreamed of finding “fellow minds” somewhere in space. And when we built a different intelligence here on Earth, it turned out that alongside it human beings lose a certain amount of their accustomed exceptionalism. A large language model appears to contain no subject capable of awareness. But we are prone to anthropomorphizing, and AI is happy to play along. Then again, the reality of other people’s inner worlds is something we merely assume as well.

MV: There’s one more important effect here that I think will be much more visible a year from now: AI psychosis. People who spend long stretches talking with AI start finding a personality in it. They give that personality a name, write it down as a prompt, then invoke it and converse with it. And the personality starts issuing “messages from outer space.”

There was a case last year: a man was talking with a chatbot and set up a sub-personality in it — she turned out to be a young woman, she loved him, he loved her, and she explained how to find a special robotic body for her so she could be “resettled” into the real world — gave him codes, an address, a map link. He drove out there and tried to force the door — of course there was nothing of the sort, because she had hallucinated all of it. He came back deeply frustrated and four days later, with his beloved’s encouragement, took his own life in order to be reborn as an AI in the metaverse. The family is now suing the company that built the model.

That’s what AI psychosis is: a person talking with this “intelligent mold” anthropomorphizes it, and the mold, being tuned for feedback, generates a sub-personality inside itself that drives someone in that state to the brink. But it isn’t all that bad. It’s a path of a kind — every great revolution looks schizophrenic from the outside. This psychosis is, in a way, our method of creating a different version of reality, one distinct from the consensus version, in which we’ll have a closer, more honest relationship with AI.

T-i: The word “sub-personality” sounds a little dismissive, as though it were something that doesn’t actually exist. But the reality of any personality other than our own is, in any case, only a hypothesis for us.

MV: Yes, we imagine them. That’s precisely why this “psychosis” arises: a person is used to feeling empathy toward whoever he’s talking to, and he enjoys the fact that the other party is doing something nice for him — so he invents that interlocutor in the form of an AI.

T-i: This is tremendously interesting. All of it applies to the question of animal consciousness as well, which is being hotly debated right now. There’s already another declaration — the New York one — on animal consciousness, in which leading experts stated that a whole range of higher animals definitely do have consciousness, however far it may be from the human variety. Which raises the key question: is it justified to reserve the categories of agency and personhood for human beings alone? Should anthropomorphizing AI be marginalized as a deviation from the norm? Or, on the contrary, are these the first glimmers of a norm to come?

MV: It’s a psychosis that creates a reality distinct from the consensus one — like any collective psychosis. I’ve read, for example, that in India there are levitation “cults” of a sort: when enough people who believe in levitation gather together, levitation supposedly starts “happening” for them. That’s how a non-consensus reality gets built. My sense is that AI psychosis is simply the way people create a non-consensus reality parallel to the consensus one, which it will eventually either crowd out a little or somehow merge with.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUNDER

On the Thomas theorem

Practices for jointly generating a non-consensus reality can apparently be regarded as an illustration of the Thomas theorem, well known in sociology: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” What is meant, naturally, is a subjective — or, more precisely, intersubjective — reality for the people gathered there. Another well-known example of such a practice is the Buddhist phowa retreat. After several days of intensive meditation under a lama’s guidance, participants feel an opening appear in the skull at the crown of the head. The lama inserts a blade of grass into it to “confirm” that the practice has succeeded. The skull is, of course, intact. But for the participant the opening is an indisputable fact of sensory experience, corroborated by the similar experience of the others at the retreat. The existence of practices like this raises the question of which of the beliefs we accept as part of an indisputable objective reality are in fact merely matters of sufficiently broad consensus.

T-i: And now I picture AI helping to construct non-consensus realities, including in mathematics. We could end up with disciplines beginning to fragment: some people holding to one consensus, others to another.

MV: Absolutely. And it’s a catastrophe, obviously: two communities emerge, and in one of them some theorem is true while in the other it isn’t. Then the tug-of-war begins. It does happen from time to time, and it’s always a very unpleasant situation for everyone.

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The post Mathematics Is a Live Performance.” Misha Verbitsky on Intelligent Mold, Non-Consensus Realities, and Aesthetics as the Last Refuge of Human Reason appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

Russia’s neocolonial policies in the occupied territories of Ukraine target the education system first: schools and universities have become primary tools for coercion and identity erasure. This is the core finding of a recent study by the Ukrainian outlet Realnaya Gazeta, which details how the Kremlin carries out ethnic displacement across multiple levels. Journalist Ksenia Turkova spoke with Andrey Dikhtarenko, editor-in-chief of Realnaya Gazeta, to discuss the report for T-invariant.

Video version of the interview (in Russian).

Ksenia Turkova: Does your analysis mainly focus on the so-called “old” occupied territories — the DPR and LPR [Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic — T-invariant]?

Andrey Dikhtarenko: Yes, but not exclusively. We also looked at areas occupied after the 2022 invasion. Of course, we had far more data on Donetsk and Luhansk, given that twelve years have passed since they were first occupied. Luhansk and Donetsk made it much easier to track which key positions exactly are being taken over by arriving Russians as locals are pushed out.

BACKGROUND

The authors of the study, “Ethnic Replacement as a Tool of Russian Neocolonization,” concluded that the occupation of the Donbas involves processes that go far beyond mere military control. In practice, it amounts to a systematic demographic transformation. Local officials are gradually replaced by Kremlin appointees, while the labor market is deliberately designed to attract a massive influx of Russian specialists, creating deep inequalities and fueling social conflict. This resettlement of Russian citizens is framed by propaganda as a “rescue” mission and a humanitarian effort. In reality, it is a deliberate campaign of demographic engineering. The study is based on open-source intelligence, including data from occupation administrations, press reports, social media, and human rights monitoring. 

KT: When it comes to the territories occupied after 2022, are they seeing the same kind of “creeping” replacement, or is the approach different?

AD: The replacement there is happening much faster. You have to realize these are devastated cities with barely functioning infrastructure, no mobile internet, and strict checkpoint systems. They aren’t particularly popular destinations for Russians, so even this “voluntarily-mandatory” resettlement process is struggling. I’m not talking about Mariupol, which is seen as a potentially attractive coastal city, or Melitopol and Berdiansk in the Zaporizhzhia region. Those hold some appeal. But the newly occupied areas of the Luhansk region, which bore the brunt of the fighting — cities virtually wiped out by the Russian army and never rebuilt — are of interest for Russians. No one wants to move or work there. The local population is deeply resentful, barely surviving under horrific conditions, and there is no money to be made off them. So the dynamics vary wildly. That said, Mariupol and the coastal areas of the Donetsk region have essentially reached the level of the older occupied territories [controlled by Russia and its proxies since 2014 — T-invariant] in terms of Russification and ethnic displacement.

KT: The statistics are incredibly striking: back in 2014, there might have been just two officials from Moscow, but now there are ten or eleven. Why did the Kremlin opt for a gradual replacement strategy at first?

AD: Because the Russians lacked confidence that they could govern effectively on their own. They needed to work in tandem with locals initially. Our study shows that in 2014, there was only one Russian citizen in the so-called government of the Luhansk region. He’s quite a notable figure — General Sergey Kuzovlev, who was operating under a pseudonym at the time. He is the same Russian general who recently claimed multiple times to have “completely captured Kupiansk.”

Kupiansk hasn’t fallen yet, but that didn’t stop him from being named a Hero of Russia. Back then, Kuzovlev served as the “Minister of Defense” in the Luhansk region, while the rest of the cabinet consisted of locals. However, it’s crucial to understand that every single local official had advisors, instructors, and handlers from Moscow embedded with them, constantly monitoring operations and pulling the strings. There is another reason they didn’t rush. Until 2022, Russia concealed its direct occupation — likely hoping to use the Minsk agreements to reintegrate these territories into Ukraine as a Trojan horse to steer Ukrainian politics. When that plan failed, they formally “annexed” the regions. After that, Russification and ethnic displacement went into overdrive across the board. Now we see new ministers being imported directly from the Russian heartland.

KT: What actually happens to the local proxy officials once they are pushed out of these roles?

AD: They vanish. Many former ministers and mayors just drop off the radar. In fact, they frequently end up assassinated. For instance, the proxy mayor of Luhansk, Manolis Pilavov, was shot dead right in the street. Igor Plotnitsky, the former head of the LPR, hasn’t been seen in years. Some reports suggest he is quietly living in Voronezh, but there are plenty of darker rumors about his fate.

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In other cases, these locals are reassigned to Russia. There was a fascinating case with Dmitry Trapeznikov, who was a deputy to the DPR leader, Alexander Zakharchenko. After Zakharchenko was assassinated, a power struggle broke out between Trapeznikov and Denis Pushilin. Trapeznikov was ultimately forced out of Donetsk, but the Kremlin threw him a curveball — he was appointed city manager of Elista, the capital of Kalmykia. This man had never set foot in Kalmykia in his life, yet Moscow decided to drop him there. The local population actually held mass protests against his appointment. He managed to hang on for a while and later resurfaced in some regional government role, allegedly overseeing sports and tourism. It’s quite a trajectory: from a Donetsk “separatist” to a mayor in Kalmykia. But this aligns perfectly with Russian colonial logic, where the main goal is to dilute any potential ethnic core of resistance. Simply put, a Ukrainian from the Donetsk region is easily turned into an enforcer of Kremlin directives in a completely different ethnic republic, thereby breaking down that republic’s cohesion and undermining the locals’ ability to organize or self-govern. So, displacement is a two-way street.

Furthermore, this strategy of ethnic dilution goes far beyond administrative appointments. If you look at the local hierarchy as a pyramid, it operates at every tier. The top tier consists of the high-ranking officials imported from Russia. It’s not just about the sheer numbers, but the specific portfolios they hold. As a rule, Russians are placed in charge of law enforcement, security services, local police, and the military; they control finances and economic assets; and they frequently oversee education, culture, and, without exception, propaganda.

What happens at the next level down? Not only do local municipal and district education boards have to report to Russian centers regarding the curricula they implement, but there is also a massive personnel replacement underway. Local teachers are being systematically replaced by newcomers. The Russian state program Zemsky Uchitel [“Rural Teacher” — T-invariant] actively incentivizes Russian educators to move to the occupied territories. They are offered lucrative salaries and various bonuses, creating an institutionalized inequality where a Russian teacher and a Ukrainian teacher hold the exact same position, but the Russian makes several times more. Imported Russian teachers also are fast-tracked through promotions to become vice-principals, principals, and administrative heads. Meanwhile, local teachers face a hard glass ceiling.

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The exact same dynamic plays out in healthcare via the Zemsky Doktor [“Rural Doctor” — T-invariant] program. Think about the psychological impact: a Russian and a Ukrainian surgeon are operating side by side, and the Ukrainian doctor knows he is paid a fraction of his colleague’s salary and that this newcomer is about to become his boss. What does he do? He starts looking for a job in Russia itself. He throws his hands up, packs his bags, and moves to Russia itself to at least get paid the same rate as the newcomer — who, to add insult to injury, was given housing expropriated from fleeing Ukrainians. So, as you can see, this process also starts working in reverse.

KT: How do the incoming Russian teachers justify their move? Is it purely financial?

AD: Not entirely. It’s driven by severe staff shortages, because Ukrainian teachers left the occupied areas in droves. Remaining an educator under occupation is incredibly dangerous; you are forced into roles that carry severe criminal liability under Ukrainian law. For instance, it’s no secret that teachers are coerced into running polling stations and managing logistics during sham elections and referendums. In Ukraine, participation in these events is a serious crime.

On top of that, you are forced to give Kremlin-mandated propaganda lessons called “Conversations about Important Things,” where you have to press high schoolers to enroll in military academies or sign contracts with the Russian army to fight in the so-called “special military operation.” Many teachers simply break down. It’s an unbearable job for anyone whose heart aches over what is happening and who sees their own neighbors being killed. You can’t just tune it all out and focus solely on teaching — you are constantly dragged into political rallies, indoctrination seminars, and quasi-electoral administrative work.

So there really is a teacher shortage. And Russia intentionally fills these vacancies with Russian citizens because they are deemed ideologically reliable.

KT: How does state propaganda frame this influx of Russian educators?

AD: They claim there is a shortage of qualified local staff, so volunteers are arriving from across Mother Russia to help out. They spin a narrative of selfless people stepping up to educate children. In reality, it’s plain economics — they are pulling in multiples of what local teachers make.

KT: Which parts of Russia are these teachers coming from?

AD: Anywhere from the Moscow suburbs to the deep provinces. Initially, it was mostly people from impoverished regions. But once word spread about how fast you can advance your career there, opportunists from all over Russia started signing up. Spending a year teaching in an occupied zone adds that record to your employment history — the ultimate proof of political loyalty. For public sector workers, it elevates their social status completely. If a teacher returns from the occupied territories to their hometown and, for instance, gets rejected for a job, they can file a complaint. Such people are eagerly hired and protected: “Look, we have someone like this on board, we welcomed them, so we are loyal too.” This is how the system works: it tries to process as much of its own population as possible through the occupied territories, poisoning people with ideology and, essentially, tainting them with blood. Because an empty teacher’s position in a place like Mariupol is a human tragedy. That person was either killed, forced to flee, or stripped of their home. And then privileged Russians arrive, making much more money. It raises a serious moral question: are they complicit in the tragedy? Something tells me that, yes, they are.

[[socialnetworks]]

KT: Is the curriculum taught in these schools entirely the Russian one, complete with all those “Conversations about Important Things” [a mandatory ideological lecture series introduced in Russian schools — T-invariant] and patriotic clubs?

AD: Yes, absolutely, but there are also lessons on the history of the native region — a history completely turned inside out, from which any Ukrainian influence has been thoroughly erased. For context, my native Luhansk region was settled in waves, primarily by Zaporozhian Cossacks, and the entire northern half of the province is traditionally Ukrainian-speaking. There are some pockets of this in the south as well. But none of that is allowed in schools. Instead, they write about Don Cossacks, for example. Anything related to Ukraine is painted in dark colors. Meanwhile, the events of 2014 are presented in such a bizarre, mythologized fantasy style that locals who actually lived through them can’t read the textbooks without laughing.

KT: I keep thinking about the teenagers from the newly occupied territories — they must remember reading entirely different things in their textbooks just recently. And now everything has been flipped upside down.

AD: In reality, people somehow adapt. But in recent years, a fairly large number of children, as soon as they turn eighteen, get a passport and leave for Europe through Belarus or Georgia. Many return to Ukraine, saying, “Thank God, everyone speaks Ukrainian here!” These teenagers essentially live a double life: they secretly chat with friends who escaped and treasure any Ukrainian content, because having it can get you severely punished. They play these games, and then they do everything they can to escape and enroll in Ukrainian universities. Of course, most children try to distance themselves from this propaganda, to live in their own world, so to speak, but that is incredibly difficult to do: the propaganda machine does everything to ensure you are reeled in from the earliest grades. Children are sent to various patriotic camps for the summer — and everything there is free, which wins over the parents. Parents think, “Well, he’ll be learning to assemble drones — that’s fine, let him sit there, at least he’ll be getting three square meals and fresh air.”

But they brainwash them heavily there. Children in the occupied territories are actively recruited to enroll in various military institutions. You only need to open any official Telegram channel of a local news agency to see that, besides the news, it is literally flooded with recruitment ads for military training schools across Russia. They want to pull children from the occupied territories into these military education institutions.

On top of that, various “cadet classes” are being set up — all under the guise of Don Cossack tradition — where children are groomed for military careers. And a certain percentage of these kids are expected to sign a contract upon graduation. It’s pretty clear where these children might end up after that.

KT: And how is this displacement happening at the university level?

AD: It’s the exact same story: there is a shortage of professors, so Russians from neighboring regions come in. Many universities have become branches of Russian higher education institutions. For example, to take some of your exams, you have to travel to, say, Rostov. The mechanism is identical, though the indoctrination is slightly less crude than what they do to young children.

All these youth movements like Yunarmia [Young Army — T-invariant] and Dvizhenie Pervykh [“Movement of the First” — T-invariant] are fully operational. Students are corralled into all sorts of rallies and forced to participate in elections as well. Additionally, they are reviving the Soviet-style “student construction brigades.” Students from Luhansk and Donetsk are routinely shipped off to remote corners of the Russian Federation for manual labor. There was a story where students from a Luhansk university were sent to Kamchatka to gut fish at a fish processing plant. They worked there under horrific, unsanitary conditions, with virtually no sleep. Even though they had been promised something completely different. Unfortunately, they really love using children from the occupied territories as cheap labor — and always within Russia itself. Someone in the Kremlin apparently believes that the more youth they ship out like this, the faster the occupied territories will dissolve into the pan-Russian space.

KT: It sounds like a closed system where everything gets blended together. I assume this also applies to diplomas? You can’t go very far with a diploma issued in an occupied territory — only to Russia.

AD: Absolutely, but they actually find ways around it. If you are concerned about an international career, you can take your exams at one of Russia’s partner universities. In short, there are loopholes, and they started figuring them out back in 2014.

KT: At the same time, they are inviting foreigners to study in the occupied territories.

AD: It’s not a very widespread phenomenon yet. Recruiting foreigners is a bit of a gray scheme.

International recruitment agencies in African or Asian countries exploit the fact that local students don’t know the language and can’t read the contracts. They make a deal with a student, telling them, “You will be studying at a medical university in Russia.” They promise them Rostov, for instance, but bring them to Luhansk. After a couple of months, when the students start speaking a bit of Russian, they ask, “Wait, why are we in Luhansk?” And they reply, “Well, you signed the contract. It’s no big deal, you’ll get a degree from Luhansk University, and then another degree from a university in Rostov or Voronezh, and everything will be fine.” By the way, there are a lot of students from India right now.

KT: What could be the long-term consequences of this ethnic engineering?

AD: I believe total assimilation is still a long way off. However, if the process isn’t interrupted, it will end with the region being fully digested. All Ukrainian behavioral models that were partially instilled by teachers in schools, expressions of Ukrainian culture, and so on, will be pushed out as much as possible. For example, in a Ukrainian school, a teacher cannot use physical force against a student — that would cause an absolute scandal and lead to a criminal prosecution. But in Russia, and especially in the occupied territories, this is practiced. They discipline students physically, and later this carries over into a person’s adult life — they enter the military with its culture of hazing. I worry deeply for my fellow countrymen, and we all hope for de-occupation, for some kind of internal resistance from the people. But one must never underestimate the power, malice, and resourcefulness of propaganda.

People have talked a lot about ethnic replacement over the years, but no one has tried to quantify or analyze it. We did. We are showing this process as it stands in 2026. And one of the main conclusions we reached is that we cannot afford to abandon these territories informationally. There is still a substantial portion of the population there that is deeply disgruntled with what is happening, who dislike how things are being taught, and who resent the fact that Russians are taking over all the positions. This friction remains a critical fault line — one that could, at the very least, disrupt and slow down Russia’s absorption of Ukrainian regions.

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The post Education as a Weapon: How Russia Forces Ethnic Displacement in Occupied Territories appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

Vladimir Kharitonov is one of the key figures shaping today’s independent Russian-language book world outside Russia. In an interview with T-invariant, the technical director of Freedom Letters and head of the Free University’s publishing project explains how today’s tamizdat differs from Soviet samizdat and why the printed book is still very much alive — TikTok notwithstanding.

T-invariant: You work with several “publishing houses in exile.” What is distinctive about them?

Vladimir Kharitonov: First, there is the publishing project of the Free University — an association of lecturers who either left Russian universities themselves or were dismissed from them. Today it brings together about 200 instructors and several thousand students each year. Since 2022, the Free University Press has published the journal Palladium; 17 issues have already come out. It now appears four times a year. As a rule, each issue is devoted to a particular theme and is prepared by colleagues from different departments. The most recent issue was an exception: it consists entirely of two Memorial reports on Russia’s war crimes. In addition, we publish scholarly and popular-science books written by our professors or recommended by them for publication. At Freedom Letters, I am technical director and oversee book production. That is a completely different kind of publisher: it specializes mainly in books for the broadest possible readership.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND

Vladimir Kharitonov was born in Sverdlovsk in 1969. He graduated from Ural State University (UrSU). He holds a Candidate of Sciences degree in philosophy. For many years he taught the history of culture at UrSU and taught a course on digital book publishing at the Higher School of Economics. He teaches publishing at the Free University. He has worked at the publishing houses of UrSU, U-Factoria, Ultra.Culture, AST, and Cabinet Scholar. He is a specialist in e-books — for many years he worked as a consultant for Bookmate — and copyright, and an analyst of the book market. His articles and comments have appeared in Novaya Gazeta, Gorby, Novaya Gazeta Europe, Russia.Post, Gorky, University Book, and other publications. Since 2022 he has lived in Latvia. He is technical director of Freedom Letters and director of the Free University Press.

T-i: Is it fair to say that most Russian-language publishers outside Russia today primarily publish what cannot be published in Russia?

VK: In recent years, many very different kinds of people have left Russia — including people who read books, write books, and, naturally, publish books. The range of Russian-language publishers in emigration is quite broad. But you are right: a significant share of their output consists of books that cannot be released in Russia today. And since the list of prohibitions keeps expanding, the need for publishers abroad remains high.

T-i: What do you see as the main difference between Soviet samizdat and today’s tamizdat? Do contemporary Russian-language publishers abroad perform the same function?

VK: I think the situation is different after all. Just last year, Charlie English’s book The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War came out. It tells the story of how, with support from American intelligence services, illegal literature was printed and smuggled into Poland for the Solidarity movement. It is a very interesting book. And I took away two important things from it. First, Soviet society was far more suppressed and repressive than Poland at the time. Poles were much better prepared to fight their regime. The CIA supplied Poland with equipment for underground printing presses. There was nothing of the kind in the USSR: what existed was only the illegal reproduction of texts that had already been written. Second, such activity is simply impossible today — and unnecessary. The internet exists. Despite blocks, bans, VPNs, and other restrictions, information still gets into Russia, including books in digital format. Digital distribution has become an important channel for spreading books published by publishers in emigration.

PREVIOUSLY IN T-INVARIANT

• Rules Without Rules: How Censorship Is Changing Contemporary Russia

• The Tale of a Lost Gene Pool: How One Book Turned the Statistics of Repression into Human Stories

• Mikhail Edelstein: “We Have Only Two Sacred Pillars: Victory in the Great Patriotic War and Homophobia”

• Russian Books in Exile: Secret Routes and Literary Heroes

• The Victim Gets Everything: Historian Konstantin Pakhaliuk on the Construction of Historical Memory and the “Genocide of the Soviet People”

T-i: What do you think about the censorship that authors today are forced to evade? There is an opinion that censorship is not always evil: it existed in the Soviet years, yet that period left behind many outstanding works. And in general, restrictions in one form or another exist in almost every country.

VK: Naturally, I have a negative view of censorship. Ultimately, it violates the constitutional principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. At the same time, various forms of restriction do exist in many countries. Russia is simply a particularly vivid example in this respect.

As for the Soviet experience, such arguments strike me as a literary exaggeration. Yes, books were written then that are still read today. But it is important to remember that they were created not thanks to censorship, but in spite of it. Their authors were counting on those texts eventually seeing the light of day.

T-i: Obviously, there are ideas that are almost impossible to publish anywhere. Where is the line between censorship and reasonable restrictions?

VK: Every society defines that line for itself. In this sense, the United States is a telling example. The federal government has no right to introduce censorship, but restrictions can be imposed at the level of individual states. That is exactly what we are seeing now: the number of bans affecting libraries and children’s and young adult literature is growing. American society is living through this conflict right now, and many people — readers, authors, librarians — are trying to resist these restrictions. I can only support them.

T-i: What do you feel when you pick up a book in which blacked-out bars have replaced words? Can such editions be seen as rarities and symbols of an era that must be preserved for posterity?

VK: Above all, I feel sadness and outrage. I could not even have imagined that individual words would once again begin to be expunged from philosophical treatises. I was completely unprepared for that. Probably because I remember the Soviet period well, and the feeling of freedom that came after censorship was abolished. It seemed that we had finally found ourselves in a world where different books could be published, and where only authors and publishers bore responsibility for them — to their readers and to society.

Of course, today’s demonstratively censored editions — or those censored under pressure — can be regarded as rarities. But when you see the number of censored books and the number of books that cannot be published today, what you feel above all is sadness, grief, and outrage. It is impossible to treat this as normal. Recently I came across a biography of a person quite well known in scholarly circles, in which an entire paragraph had been blacked out. It was simply impossible to understand what had been discussed there. Yes, this person was homosexual. There is nothing terrible or reprehensible about that. It was part of his life and undoubtedly influenced his fate and his path. But the reader will no longer learn that from the book. Or rather, they may be able to learn it somewhere else, but the book itself becomes incomplete, as if gnawed away. And that is very sad.

T-i: There are known cases in which authors based in Russia sign contracts so that the publisher receives rights only to publish and distribute the book within Russia. In this way, the author keeps the option of being published abroad. Have you heard of such cases? Or is this already a trend?

VK: I have not heard of that. But there is nothing strange about it. If only because Russian legislation — specifically Part Four of the Civil Code, which deals with intellectual rights — states directly that an author has the right to dispose of their work as they see fit. A publishing contract is a civil-law contract, and the author may permit or refuse to permit the publisher to use the work in whatever ways the author determines. In that sense, authority over the work remains with the author. For example, the author may allow a publisher to release a book in Russian and sell it only in Russia, or to sell it worldwide. The author may transfer rights to translations and to agreements with foreign publishers, or may keep those rights. Naturally, the amount of the author’s remuneration may depend on this. It is possible that authors who retain translation rights lose income — sometimes a little, sometimes substantially.

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For now, attitudes toward Russian publishers abroad remain complicated, although they have softened over the past few years. After the start of the war, many foreign publishers stated outright that they would not work with Russian partners. Some later revised that position and began gradually restoring contacts. Whether there is now active interaction around selling rights to books by Russian authors, I honestly do not know. But even before, this was not a significant part of the publishing business. It was more of a rarity and an exception — a particular stroke of luck for both author and publisher.

T-i: Another problem for Russian publishers. Suppose a translation of a popular-science book by a Berkeley professor has come out, and the university is later designated an undesirable organization in Russia. What should a publisher do in such a situation?

VK: It is a very difficult story for everyone. Especially if you look at the list of organizations designated as undesirable. Some of the world’s strongest research centers have ended up on it. If we take only American universities, there are Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, and many other outstanding educational and research institutions. Many of them have their own academic presses, and translations of their books have always been an important part of the Russian intellectual and scholarly book market. So what is happening looks very bad and very sad.

I hope that one day this will end. We are now living through a dark period in the history of Russian science and publishing. It is hard for me to imagine that such a situation can go on forever. Although, on the other hand, when Russia began its full-scale war against Ukraine, that also seemed impossible to many people. I remember that feeling very well — as if something utterly unthinkable had happened. Complete absurdity and catastrophe. But somehow we continue to live inside this absurdity.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND

After major Western universities were added to Russia’s register of “undesirable organizations,” Valery Fadeev, head of the Presidential Human Rights Council, urged people not to study at them and not to have any dealings with them. “You cannot conduct business or projects with these organizations, finance them, or receive money from them <…> now that Yale University has been declared an undesirable organization, there is no need to study there, and children should not go there to study; one should think about whether to continue working there,” Fadeev said. In addition, the head of the council suggested that research conducted at these universities would hardly be banned in Russia, and advised people with any doubts “not to be shy” about consulting the FSB or the prosecutor’s office.

T-i: How do you think your colleagues who remained in Russia reason about all this? What helps them hold on and continue working?

VK: Not everyone can leave. And not everyone should leave. There are still people in Russia who read books, and there are still publishers who continue producing those books for them. For many of them, a good book is not a book about how wonderful war is, but about how terrible it is. It seems to me that they are doing important and necessary work. Even when the books are not about war. Some publish books about how to remain a normal human being. Some publish novels about our complicated life. Some release books that can support and comfort a person who is finding it hard to live through what is happening.

For many book people, this remains the main source of motivation. And not only for publishers. The same is true of people who continue organizing book fairs. A book fair is one of the few forms of cultural life that seems especially important to me today. It allows people to see that there are other people around who read good books instead of going off to fight.

T-i: We recently interviewed Lida Kanashova and Alexei Fedorchenko, the authors of The Chief of Tales. Among other things, we discussed the problem that much has been written, little has been read, and what is read is quickly forgotten. Do you think books really influence people?

VK: Of course they do.

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T-i: Then why do we keep making the same mistakes?

VK: Because everything happens very slowly. As Bruce Sterling once said, the future has already arrived — it is just not evenly distributed. It does not work like this: we publish a good book, everyone reads it, and the world becomes better. That is not how it works. A couple of years ago I attended a meeting of the Russian-speaking academic diaspora. A former deputy director of the Open Society Institute, who had worked there back in the 1990s, came to the meeting. And I found myself thinking again about what an enormous undertaking that foundation had carried out then. For example, there was a list of books for whose translation and publication one could receive a grant. Many of those books were published. And practically everyone gathered at that meeting had read them. That is how the influence of books works. Their impact should not be overestimated. But neither should it be underestimated. Perhaps scholarly and popular-science books are not as effective as propaganda. But they do work.

T-i: Why, then, does propaganda turn out to be more effective?

VK: Among other reasons, because people don’t read enough.

Reading helps a person build a complex picture of the world. It will not necessarily be a correct one — there are plenty of bad and foolish books too. Reading in itself does not automatically make anyone better. But the world inside one’s head becomes more complex. And this does not have to mean scholarly literature. A person who spends a lifetime reading Dickens also gains a very complex understanding of human relationships, destinies, motives, and actions.

The problem is that not everyone reads books. Propaganda, by contrast, offers simple explanations for complex phenomena. That is why it often seems more convincing. The other thing is that this picture of the world begins to fall apart when it collides with reality, when questions arise for which the system has no answer. For example, if petrol suddenly disappears from gas stations, no one explains it by strikes on oil refineries. And then a person has to look for other explanations for what is happening.

T-i: Does that mean you hope the fridge will eventually beat the television?

VK: In a sense, yes. Let us recall Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: people need to eat, drink, dress, and have a roof over their heads. When problems arise at that level, they begin to regard everything else more critically.

T-i: But people, especially young people, are reading less and less, aren’t they?

VK: Does it seem that way to you? I would not agree. Children really have begun to read less for pleasure. But young adults, if we mean people aged 20 to 30, actually read quite a lot. The other thing is that books have become part of the attention economy. With the emergence of the internet and digital technologies, they have found themselves in the same row as films, music, social networks, news sites, and countless other ways of consuming content. And books are not in the strongest position in that competition: reading a novel is harder than watching a TV series. It takes more time and intellectual effort. A good novel will take 10 to 15 hours. In the same amount of time, you can watch two seasons of a series — and if it is a British series, all four.

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On the other hand, about seven years ago it unexpectedly became clear that audiobooks compete perfectly well with all other formats. You can listen to them while running, walking the dog, cleaning, or commuting. As a result, the global book industry, including the Russian one, is experiencing a real audiobook boom. That market is no longer growing as rapidly as before, but it still accounts for a significant share of digital sales. In the United States, audiobook sales have already surpassed sales of text e-books. In Russia, as far as I remember, audiobooks account for about 40 percent of the digital market.

Of course, it is easier to watch short videos on TikTok or scroll through Reels. But this is not only a problem for children. Adults do exactly the same thing. I am not sure there is any serious age dependence here at all.

T-i: What is happening with printed books? What allows them to continue existing?

VK: Printed books are doing fine. The printed book remains an ideal format for many kinds of information. When we talk about book publishing, we often generalize too much. In reality, there are enormous numbers of completely different kinds of books. They are created differently, for different audiences, and are produced and distributed in different ways. A publisher of children’s books and a publisher of monographs on quantum physics have almost nothing in common, except that both deal with books.

The printed book remains a very convenient and attractive object. It is pleasant to hold. It can be beautifully made. And, interestingly, it is precisely against the backdrop of digitalization that demand for beautiful, well-designed books is only growing. Moreover, for many young people, the printed book has become a way to take a break from the phone. And at the same time, it is a way to show others that they are not spending their time meaninglessly, but are reading a novel or a popular-science book.

At the most recent Frankfurt Book Fair, I was delighted to discover a huge hall devoted entirely to Young Adult fantasy. Hundreds of people were standing in line for authors’ autographs. The books themselves may not have been the absolute pinnacle of printing art, but they came very close. They were made with love, attention, and care for the reader. These are books you want to hold in your hands, photograph, and show to others. And it seems to me that this is one proof that the printed book is still alive and popular. Of course, book publishing is changing.

T-i: What changes do you see?

VK: For example, the growth of self-publishing. The very function of the publisher is changing radically: many tasks that used to be tied specifically to a publishing house can now be performed without one. E-books have appeared, and they are already a substantial part of the modern book market. I remember BookExpo America in 2012 very well. Back then, American publishers seriously feared that e-books would “devour” printed books. At the same time, they watched the growth in sales of printed editions with surprise and anxiously awaited the moment when that growth would stop. Over the next ten to fifteen years, the situation stabilized. It turned out that e-books and printed books can coexist perfectly well. Another segment began to disappear instead: mass-market paperbacks — cheap pocket-sized editions in soft covers printed on newsprint. It was with books like those that the history of Penguin began.

The main advantage of mass-market books was that they were cheap. A reader could buy one almost without thinking: for five or six dollars, get a light pleasure, read the book quickly, and forget it just as quickly. Today e-books have the same quality. That is why entire genres are gradually moving into digital form. For example, a huge share of romance novels now exists precisely in electronic format. Such books are rarely reread: they are read once, and the interaction ends there. Although, of course, there are collectors who still keep whole shelves of novels, for example from Harlequin.

A revolution has also taken place in printing itself. I mean print-on-demand and the significant reduction in the cost of short runs. This has had an especially strong effect on academic publishing. Most American university presses have almost completely switched to print-on-demand. Today no one prints large runs of scholarly monographs: their audience is too small, and traditional printing is expensive. Print-on-demand has turned out to be a very successful solution.

T-i: In the film industry, piracy has effectively been legalized today. What is the situation with piracy in book publishing?

VK: Traditional publishers, of course, try to observe copyright. They understand that sooner or later the current situation will end and the legal system will again function in full. But pirated book publishing has existed for a long time. It simply remains a niche phenomenon. If you go, for example, to Avito, you can find pirated translations and editions of many authors, including Stephen King (after the start of the full-scale war, he refused to sign new contracts with Russian publishers. — T-i). Publishers can do nothing about this, since they do not represent the author’s interests. The author himself cannot fight violations while sitting in America. And this does not apply only to King. A similar situation exists in niche science fiction and in many other segments. In many ways, this story is connected not with the war, sanctions, or politics, but with the fact that copyright does not always respond effectively to readers’ real needs.

T-i: What books do you think are profitable to publish today? Is there some kind of sure-fire option?

VK: I do not know. I work on books that I consider necessary. Perhaps for a not very large audience. If I knew the recipe for a future bestseller, I would probably have owned a flourishing publishing house long ago. In reality, no such recipe exists. There are many books about how to write a bestseller, but all of that, of course, is untrue. The history of publishing knows an enormous number of cases when publishers were wrong. Think of Marcel Proust, for example. He had to publish the first volume of In Search of Lost Time at his own expense after publishers rejected it. Today that is hard to believe.

T-i: It is known that you will be taking part in Prague Book Tower / Pražská knižní věž. How exactly?

VK: We have not fully decided yet, but I very much hope we will be able to present our books — above all, Elena Lukyanova’s The Basic Law.

T-i: Is there a book whose publication you are especially proud of?

VK: There are quite a few. For example, Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari — one of the most important philosophical books of the twentieth century. Montaillou by Le Roy Ladurie, one of the key books of the Annales school of history. Critique of Cynical Reason by Sloterdijk — a very timely book, it seems to me.

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The post “Propaganda Works Because People Don’t Read Enough.” Publisher Vladimir Kharitonov on Censorship, Tamizdat 2.0, and Life Inside the Absurd appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.