Certainly, artists cannot put up with this humiliating half-memory, and they try to specify events, even with all possible generalisations. A chronically painful memory of the terrible documentary footage stuck in my mind. K. Corbisier painted a scene from some European ghetto, with the dark figures of soldiers advancing on a crowd of helpless women and children. S. Buban reminded about the terrible shots of the Vietnam War. But the exhibition – is not a museum. Even if we were to imagine that one day there would be created an international memorial of the battles and sacrifices of the twentieth century, I can say in advance that upon leaving the building we would mainly remember mutilated figures, remains, stumps, rubble, and fires. They are almost the same everywhere. This sameness was drawn, collected, and assembled by E. Galouzo, M. Roshnyak, and others. Cripples and corpses of all countries, unite.  Kruppel und Tote aller Lander, vereinigt euch. Karl Marx would turn over in his grave, if he heard such a slogan.

 For the new generations of artists, all of this glorious spin of extirpation and victims merges into one general panorama of the local-global, ubiquitous and multi-faceted theatre of operations, from Berlin to Hiroshima, from Guernica to Leningrad, from Cuba to Chechnya, from El Alamein to Khalkhin Gol, from Kabul to Vietnam. In the eyes of the young generation this spectacle of planetary self-destruction looks like some kind of philosophical parable. “This is the eternal battle, we can only dream of peace,” - that is what the artists seem to repeat with a variety of intonations, from bitter ones to grotesque, from play-like to stern. G. Sesia used the famous picture of mercenaries, posing in front of skulls, laid out in the foreground.  Executioners and victims are equally immersed in fog, in the faded sepia of time. Memory is powerless. We remember, we won’t forget, but we cannot do anything with these militancy rangers, Alpine riflemen, paratroopers, legionnaires and other heroes of the century. They will go somewhere else, and will do the same thing with the same results. 

A. Shchelokov depicted the eternal battle, with the same drawn fighters, indistinguishable from each other in their average uniform. They will always be fighting, against the background of a vision of Hindu gods or magical runic ornaments (nobody knows where from and why they appeared). However, when we can see deities and magical characters, they always remind us of eternity and “the next world”. Perhaps, this work is about a paradise of glorious warriors from the new Valhalla, where glorious heroes, militanti gloriosi, will be finally able to eternally relish and chop each other, to shoot at each other, never even dying from mortal wounds. Such an excellent prospect, a picture of the new world, where heroes will always be fighting against each other, and where there will be no need to remember that you killed someone yesterday, or that you yourself had been killed the day before. And there will be no point in thinking about who and how you will die tomorrow.

Academically skilful A.Rukavishnikov crowned this section of the exhibition with his museum sculptures. His fighters wear on their heads Wehrmacht helmets, something ancient, or even a turban. Or even nothing. They are fighters from all ages and nations. Their faces, like faces of fighters of the Pergamon Altar, are contorted in a grimace, in which rage is inseparable from pain and despair. These are portraits of the defeated winners. They cannot be stopped, even if they are killed.  One cannot feel sorry for them, and one cannot but feel sorry for them.  They are ready for Valhalla. 

In addition to the theme of a traumatic memory, the theme of a therapeutic memory rings out very loud in the exhibition too. This is also a kind of a bullet, but this is a special, humane bullet with a painkiller in its head part.  It will pierce, but it won’t hurt. Or we would prefer not to feel pain. Or we learned to remember without feeling pain.