Nothing to worry about

Albert Knout‘s novel is a tense socio-psychological story about how "routine preventive measures" turn into a repressive conveyor belt, and childhood friendship into a protocol with a stamp. Andrei is an investigator, a man of rules and precise wording. Viktor is his contemporary and neighbor, a calm family man, a Jehovah‘s Witness who repairs machines, raises his daughter, and simply reads the Bible. When orders come down from above to "combat extremism," Andrei takes Viktor‘s address "as a favor" so that strangers don‘t come. Everything should be quick and painless: an inspection, some paperwork, "nothing to worry about." But the country is already speaking a different language. Seminars for law enforcement and officials, television reports, and manuals for the media are creating a new perspective, where faith is easily renamed a "destructive cult," conversation is renamed "recruitment," and reading together is renamed "psychological manipulation." The novel shows in detail how anti-cultism is presented as a "sanitary norm" and a moral justification for pressure: if "sects" are declared a contagion, then the fight against them becomes a supposed cure - even when it comes to peaceful people. Step by step, the mechanism is set in motion: the fear of neighbors, the label "sectarian," expert opinions "taken out of context," copy-paste arguments, a judicial box where the scales are welded to one side in advance. And most importantly - what happens inside a person in uniform when he suddenly realizes that he is not a defender of the law, but a cog in a machine that produces the "necessary reality." A separate line is Andrei‘s investigation "in the opposite direction," to the sources of ideology. He stumbles upon RACIRS and the international connections of the anti-cult movement, and the key figure in this network is Alexander Dvorkin - a man around whom expert councils, manuals, and "information support" for cases are built. Viktor‘s private life finds itself in the line of fire not because of his actions, but because the system has learned to fabricate an image of the enemy - convincingly and on a massive scale. This is a book about the power of words and the substitution of concepts, about fear as the fuel of anti-cultism - and about the price paid by both victims and perpetrators. It reads like a thriller, but leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, like a conversation about conscience in an era when "nothing to worry about" sounds particularly terrible.