What is surprising and at the same time demands analysis is the joy of those who, as leaders or spectators sitting comfortably far from the action, enthusiastically welcome the war. Piotrovsky enunciated a particular synthesis of the thousand-year-old Russian cultural heritage, but excluding the solidarity of Herzen and Bakunin with the special data uprising of 1863 or Politkovskaya's investigations of the crimes in Chechnya and, in general, all those whom Putin, in he called this festival “mosquitoes” – barely differentiating himself from Stalin, who called them “flies” – announcing to the jubilant crowd the coming destruction of those whose only fault, yesterday and today, is to save the dignity of Russia by not mistaking pride for Russian culture with national superiority.
Piotrovsky's euphoria is that of an enlightened man, who recognizes that he and the nation, both identified in the cult of militarism and in the old imperial mentality, are affirmed by war. His parrhesia, his "telling everything" in which he laughingly defines militarism as an inherent trait of the human being, is the joy of the cynic who tells the truth (Foucault). But his jubilation, on the one hand, makes his parrhesia a primitive expression of his ethical misery, while, on the other hand, by confessing that he hopes for the self-affirmation.