You may ask me: Why you? Millions lived in the same system and did not feel what you felt. They adapted. Some were even content. Why should we believe one man who could not handle what millions accepted?
I have asked myself this question many times.
First, let me be clear: I was not the only one.
Others felt what I felt. Some sensed the poison before I did. Some left before I did. Some paid a far higher price — their careers, their families, their freedom, their lives. There were dissidents and refuseniks and nameless thousands who resisted in ways large and small, many of whom are forgotten, some of whom never escaped.
I do not claim to be unique. I do not claim to have suffered the most. I do not claim extraordinary courage.
But we were few — very few — compared to the millions who stayed and compromised. I do not judge them. Survival demands compromises I was fortunate enough not to have to make.
Why was I among the few who felt it so acutely?
Perhaps because something in me was constitutionally resistant. Some children accept the world as given. I could not. From my earliest memories, I noticed discrepancies, felt injustices, and asked questions that made adults uncomfortable. This was not learned; it was wiring. My nervous system was calibrated to detect gaps between what was said and what was done.
Even before my father's illness, the Soviet system had identified me as a problem. My teachers complained to my mother: "Sonya, Misha sebya plokho vedet — on ne poslushnyi i ne usidchivyi." Misha behaves badly — he is not obedient and cannot sit still.
They were right. I could not obey. I could not sit still. I could not be what the system demanded.
Perhaps because I watched my father die in forty square meters, while the state that had declared victory and promised paradise gave us nothing.
Perhaps because my family's sacrifice gave me something to compare reality against — and the comparison was devastating.
Perhaps because I could not do what millions learned to do: separate my outer life from my inner life, comply publicly while thinking privately, live the lie without feeling it as a lie.
I do not know precisely why I felt what most did not feel. This is not false modesty — it is honest mystery. I cannot explain what made me resistant when others were not. The Soviet system had every tool to forge obedient citizens. It had me for twenty-seven years. It had total control of education, media, and the social environment. It had my mother transmitting its commands with love. Everything was in place to succeed.
It failed.
I only know that the forging did not take. And because I cannot explain what protected me, I cannot assume others will be naturally protected. This is why I built the vaccine — to deliberately create what I cannot explain in myself.
But I know this:
What I felt was REAL.
The millions who adapted were not seeing more clearly. They were seeing less. They had learned not to see. They had learned not to feel. They had learned to survive by becoming numb.
I was one of the few who could not learn this. And so, I left.
This is my story. I am one Victim. One Witness. One Defender. And I am still here to tell it.