Fenek Solère: Rising

It was a magnificent diamante ballroom, covered with iconostasis. Entombed bones in white sarcophagi lay under gold crosses. Small groups of people wandered about, hands clutching guidebooks, eyes lifted toward the artworks. All the Russian emperors had been buried here before the Revolution, their tombs made of Altai jasper and hand-polished rodonite from the distant Ural Mountains. Side galleries were filled with the crypts of princes and royal relatives.

He looked around, hoping to catch someone’s eye. There were no clues in the faces of the people he met who were circling the paintings. In a small room, close to Peter and Catherine’s marble colonnade, where the last of the Romanovs had finally been laid to rest, a tall, thin woman with thick black hair stepped forward and asked his name.

‘Tom Hunter.’

‘I’m Iryna.’ She extended a hand. ‘Grigori informs me that you would like a guided tour of the citadel.’

‘Yes, very much’, he answered.

‘That is good.’ Then, with an expansive gesture, she started. ‘In here are the coffins of Nicholas, Alexander, and their murdered children. Not all of them are accounted for, which gives rise to legends that Anastasia survived the killings in Ekaterinburg.’

‘What do you think happened?’

‘I think she was raped and murdered like her sisters, but they have not yet found the body.’

‘No chance she was smuggled out of the country and her descendants are living in New York, then?’

‘They shot them, stabbed them with bayonets, and then burnt them.’

‘Makes a good story, though.’

‘So does the Loch Ness monster!’

Outside, they walked in the footsteps of hundreds of prisoners. Lichen-covered block fell away into rippling rollers that rushed to lick the feet of the fortress. Above, a smudged Sun reflected off the tall, arched windows cut deep into the high parapet.

‘Originally, the city was to be a naval base and trading centre. Peter the Great had been to Holland and wanted to match the Europeans for military and merchant power. The architecture is English, Italian, French, and Dutch. There is very little Russian style. It was a new beginning. Moscow and Slav fashions were not accepted. Noblemen were told to make their palaces here. There was a decree that nowhere else could build in stone. All the stonemakers…’ She hesitated.

‘Stonemasons’, Tom prompted. Iryna raised a smile at his gentle correction.

‘…stonemasons, came to St Petersburg. The city was planned out like Amsterdam and Venice, geometric and rectilinear. It had been this way in Europe since the Renaissance, but not in the East, which was still twisted and medieval.’

‘And the population in more recent times?’

‘I think one million by the late nineteenth century, and two million by the time of the Revolution.’

‘Much smaller than London.’

‘London’, she radiated. ‘I would love to see Buckingham Palace. You know, I always watch the BBC to see the new baby come home from hospital with Catherine and William?’ The wind picked up, Tom shuddered, and Iryna returned to her narrative. ‘They say that in the first years, the workforce in Peter’s city lost one hundred and fifty thousand lives to disease and exhaustion. Soon they had to bring labourers in from elsewhere to raise the houses. Two to one, or four to one ratios of street width to building height were used to provide balance to the rooftops. There was to be harmony in every design.’

‘Sounds so perfect!’

‘Perfect, no! The Russians were peasant people, close to the land and their animals’, Iryna insisted. ‘Like Lobanov once said, “a nation moved to a city is doomed to extinction”. Peter was trying to make us European before our time!’

‘It seems that in every age there has been an idea that has cost thousands of lives.’

‘We know all about those ideas here. Ideologies come in sachets with breakfast cereals.’ They walked in silence for a few minutes before Tom asked why she was involved in politics. ‘Because I like the music of Alexander Galich, who sang “Petersburg Romance” ’ :

‘It was a song about the defiance of the Decembrists, performed in May 2012 in front of St Isaacs.’

‘And the underground here, is it strong?’

‘There’s some splinter groups from Sergey Kurginan’s Young Guard against Orangism, and Vladimir Yermolaev’s Movement Against Illegal Immigration.’

‘Wasn’t the immigration movement banned and Yermolaev detained?’

‘During the so-called Snow-Revolution, yes. But revolutionary movements grow here like a virus. The Great Mosque’, her finger pointing over the Neva, ‘is a call to arms. Ever since the times of Pushkin and Turgenev, the city has been ripe for insurrection. Now there is also Krylov’s Russian Social Movement and Oreshkin’s Union of Right Forces.’

‘And the objectives of the movement you are involved with?’

‘To return Russia to the Russians.’

‘A worthy goal.’

‘Our aims have been generally consistent since the Society of St Cyril and St Methodius and Ivan Kireyevsky’s Society of Wisdom Lovers, Lyubomurdy, to foment Pravoslavyni , Orthodox patriotism, and to strengthen national self-consciousness, natsionalnoe samosznanie . I agree with Vladimir Skvortsov that the clergy are a dependable force with “deeply national and patriotic commitments representing supremacy in the face of the rootless and cosmopolitan intelligentsia”. Even many of the early Decembrist leaders who were imprisoned here, people like Pavel Pestel, held very strong nationalist views. Some of our historians, like Nikolai Knedamzin, argued then that every Russian should have a piece of land, even if that was at the price of serfdom, military dictatorship, or the sacrifice of human rights.’

Tom’s face balked at the idea. Iryna shrugged.

‘Personal freedoms do not feed your babies.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘Russia has always strived to develop a fundamentally non-European state structure, a fusion of Slavic autocracy and Western democracy.’

‘A difficult task?’

‘Almost impossible, as our history attests, but it has not stopped us trying!’

• Thousands of anti-austerity protestors take to the streets of St Petersburg and Moscow, clashing with Omon units on the Lomonsov bridge over the Neva and the Great Moskvoretsky Bridge, in full view of St Basil’s Cathedral;

• Russian National Unity paramilitaries begin to organise in response to President Babel’s declaration that ‘fascist reactionaries will play no part in Russia’s multicultural future’;

• Several negro, gay, and trans people are found dead in the back streets of Moscow’s Vnukkovo district following an assault on a local schoolgirl;

• Citizens’ food distribution centres open up all over the country. Those in Tverskaya Ulitsa in Moscow, Bolshaia Pokrovskaia in Nizhny Novgorod, and the Kalininsky District of St Petersburg are immediately surrounded and shut down by armed militia operating under direct orders from the Kremlin;

• Alexei Navalny and his brother Oleg, both with a string of convictions for defrauding the French cosmetic company Yves Rocher, distance themselves from earlier statements made during interviews with Russia Today where they had reminded people of their activism in the ‘Stop Feeding the Caucasus’ campaign, and described dark-skinned Caucasian immigrants as cockroaches. ‘Cockroaches can be killed with a slipper; as for humans, I recommend a pistol’;

• Yulia Navalny is interviewed about her fears for her husband, a man identified as one of the top hundred most influential thinkers by Time Magazine back in 2012. ‘He is under threat from Nazis!’ she claimed;