{"id":3757,"date":"2025-12-28T09:44:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T06:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nottoday.media\/en\/?p=3757"},"modified":"2025-12-28T09:46:28","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T06:46:28","slug":"there-are-more-dead-people-than-living-ones-paradoxically-the-dead-are-the-largest-social-group-interview-with-maksim-yevstropov-the-party-of-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nottoday.media\/en\/activism\/there-are-more-dead-people-than-living-ones-paradoxically-the-dead-are-the-largest-social-group-interview-with-maksim-yevstropov-the-party-of-the-dead","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThere are more dead people than living ones. Paradoxically, the dead are the largest social group.\u201d Interview with Maksim Yevstropov, the Party of the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our world, there is almost no silence in politics. But there are those who speak from the shadows\u2014those who are not heard, those called the dead. We met with Maxim Evstropov, the founder of the Party of the Dead<\/a>, and through him, we hear their voices: whispers, memories, protest. This is neither a joke nor a mere art experiment\u2014it is a performance that has become politics, and politics that has turned into ritual. Maxim is not just a conductor of these voices\u2014he also shares the music he hears himself: as if recorded on the border between worlds. This interview is an attempt to peer into that place where the boundary between the living and the dead blurs. Read and listen to what has been silenced for so long.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maxim Evstropov \u2014 Founder of the Party of the Dead<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"First Steps Through the Dust\"<\/strong><\/code><\/pre>\n
\u2014 What moment served as the starting point for creating the Party of the Dead: personal experience, political disillusionment, or the call of those who go unheard?<\/strong><\/p>\n
\u2014 The party has many starting points\u2014there\u2019s always more than one. But perhaps one of the most obvious points of departure is the abuse of the dead in politics. This is very characteristic of the political realities in the Russian Federation. Of course, this happens elsewhere, but in Russia, it reaches its most grotesque expression. The Party of the Dead arose largely as a reaction to this exploitation.<\/p>\n
By 2017, when the party appeared, political reality in the RF seemed very strange to me: the border between the living and the dead was seemingly erased, yet no one was truly living: everything happened as if in a haze of the undead, death-in-life, life-death. One day, dead voters cast ballots for a convenient candidate; the next, a dead deputy votes for a convenient law; then someone proposes granting the dead the right to vote so they can be used to vote for the “right” person without any pretense. The dead are forced into a hellish can-can, while the living are treated as if they are already dead.<\/p>\n
I watched the rise of the “Immortal Regiment” with particular horror.<\/p>\n
I saw the very beginning while I was still living in Tomsk. It seemed like a decent grassroots initiative for commemoration\u2014but something about it was wrong. I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were dragging the dead into the streets thoughtlessly, with a kind of indifference. The “Immortal Regiment” seemed to open a sluice to the underworld, from which the chthonic monster of war eventually emerged\u2014a political “non-corpse” (to use the term of the necrorealists). Many of the party’s early actions and demonstrations were parodies of the Immortal Regiment.<\/p>\n
Additionally, the Party of the Dead did not arise from a void, but from the diverse practices of the performance group {rodina}, which engaged in “experimental political art.” We had quite a lot focused on death and necropolitics. Besides, I had long wanted to make activism and protest art more “gothic” (something more gothic than heroic).<\/p>\n
\"Party
Photo from private archive<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u2014 What do you invest in the word “dead”\u2014is it a metaphor, a political category, or a concrete community?<\/strong><\/p>\n
\u2014 First of all, it is not a metaphor: the dead are any dead, truly dead. This is the fundamental meaning we start from\u2014and then various figurative meanings can be layered on top, like the “dead while living,” political corpses, etc. But the dead, the truly dead, remain the base for all these metaphors\u2014because there are more dead than living. Paradoxically, the dead are the largest social group. And life, as I see it, is a special case of a more universal non-living state.<\/p>\n
\u2014 How would you explain the Party of the Dead to someone who hears the name for the first time and thinks it\u2019s a joke?<\/strong><\/p>\n
\u2014 First, I would probably reassure them as best I could that it\u2019s not a joke. Broadly speaking, the Party of the Dead is a party that includes all the dead, as well as those living who feel the need to stand in solidarity with the dead. Since this party includes all the dead\u2014the largest social group\u2014it is, effectively, the largest party in the world. But it can hardly exist officially, as the dead do not recognize any state, and they, in turn, do not need recognition from any state.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, the dead are not only the largest social group but also the most marginalized and disenfranchised: “the largest people, the smallest.” It is, in essence, a necro-proletariat: on one hand, they are maximally excluded; on the other, the living exploit them constantly in almost everything, not expecting the dead to respond. The Party of the Dead represents precisely that response.<\/p>\n