These notes were made between April 2022 and July 2023—on Telegram, Facebook, and on my own account. I had no intention of publishing them later as a "diary." I wanted to participate in the discussions of what was happening to us and wrote down my thoughts about it, trying to translate my emotions into judgments.

These notes were started after leaving Russia, in the kitchenette of a hastily rented house on the outskirts of Yerevan. In the summer of 2023, I suddenly realized: these notes had become a kind of diary of the wartime period.

At the beginning is the text of a speech in the "Time of Everyday Life and Time of Events" series on the YouTube channel of the Russian Liberal Mission Foundation (https://youtu.be/xcFtvlEud8Y), recorded at the invitation of Irina Chechel (Varskaya) in early April 2022: it was my first attempt at a public discussion of "what happened and why."

The purpose of the notes collected in this book is to better understand this. Now they allow us to recall what was debated during the first year and a half of the Russian-Ukrainian war. I have minimally edited them for publication. Links to the referenced texts and a few other relevant comments have also been added.

Now, although not much time has passed, it is difficult to recall with certainty what exactly was experienced, what we wanted to think and talk about, say, in the fall of 2022. It's not even the topics themselves that are forgotten, but rather the reasons for them, the intonations, the atmosphere. Reasons and moods change, and those intonations are the first to disappear. That's why I decided these notes deserved to be published in this form.

We rarely spoke directly about "death" back then. But the characters in Satunovsky's poem don't discuss it either. But the conversations online and in person reflected in these notes all took place in the presence of mass murder, almost right next to it—so they truly were a self-study course in conversations about it, a course hardly anyone has fully mastered even now. My thanks to Nestor-History Publishing House. In those days, as always, my wife Anna was my most important interlocutor.