Сергей Лебедев: The Year of the Comet

The power of names turned out to be longer-lived than the power of stone, and the memory of the uprising, encoded in monuments and street names, responded as soon as it was hailed. Druzhinnikovskaya Street, named in honor of worker combatants, Shmitovsky Alley, named for the revolutionary factory owner, the Trekhgornaya Mills, where Lenin was elected as a deputy; the sculptures by the 1905 Street metro station—a woman catching the bridle of a Cossack’s horse—the sculpture by the White House—a worker in an apron picking up a dropped rifle; symbols of uprising, protected and multiplied, were gathered here.

Volunteers were gathering at Presnya River again, 1905 was being repeated, but on a larger scale; barricades grew around the White House, and this was an inversion of history—the House of Soviets was turning into a bastion of resistance to the Soviet regime.

But just a few hundred meters from the White House people sat in cafés, strolled, shopped; men’s shoes were delivered to the store on 1905 Street, and the line for them looked more tight-knit than the ranks of defenders of the barricades. From inside the defense rings, the White House looked like the epicenter of events, but if you moved just a bit to the side, it began to seem that the White House and everything around it was suspended in midair and taking place with no grounding whatsoever; part of the capital had plunged into a different dimension.

I found its border as I walked down the street, the ground beneath my feet was oscillating slightly, as if predicting a coming storm. In the next block there was only the trembling caused by the metro trains traveling near the surface. You could choose one or the other register of perception, but there was no smooth transition between them; an invisible line divided the city.

That night by the White House people sang songs around bonfires, and dozens like me sought something among the heaps and smoke, among the arriving crowds; men in civilian clothing with guns appeared, attentively surveying the scene—who were they, who sent them? The more people, the harder it was to understand who was one of us and who wasn’t, and whether there was an “us” and “them” or whether it was all a masquerade, a phantasmagoria, that there weren’t any foes or any clear antagonists but only the blood-raising attraction of major events.

Okunenko was in charge of building a barricade at the entrance to the White House; he was giving orders to three dozen people, most of whom were older than he was, but he was more energetic, more precise, he gave smart and accurate directions on where to put what, where to place the concrete plate, the dozen benches, the tracks; it seemed he had a special mind that could easily combine mutually exclusive objects—plates, benches, tracks, concrete flower boxes, and furniture—into a sturdy construction that would be hard to break and move.

Okunenko, matured, electrified by the events, stood on the top of his barricades, indicating “left, left, more to the left” to men dragging a lamppost knocked down by a bulldozer.

The barricade was finished; I expected Okunenko to tell his comrades to move on to the next one. But he got down, lit a cigarette, spoke with his subordinates and stepped away, and it was no longer clear whether he had commanded anyone or it just happened that the men building the barricade took him for a manager of elemental construction.

He walked among the bonfires and barricades, no longer the clever and efficient builder—he had turned into a concerned simpleton, for whom everything was new and interesting. He looked inside camping kettles, respectfully studied the armature prepared for hand-to-hand combat, stopped near people arguing, smiled to a pair of policemen with automatic guns, struck a match for a soldier’s cigarette, and gave disorganized civilians a pitying look.

Okunenko had gestures and objects for every situation, like an improvising magician; he did unnoticed work, helping, joining, supporting, advising, approving, sharing cigarettes—whatever it took to make the crowd more focused and thicker. He made several circles around the White House and later that night moved toward the Arbat; I followed him, and I saw a common thread in the patchwork of events.

Parked in the courtyards near the Arbat, which looked empty from the sidewalk, were cars with men in suits, doing nothing, and heavyset men were smoking in dark doorways; no one looked into the faces of passersby, no one stopped anyone, everyone pretended to be there by accident.

I almost lost Okunenko a few times, but his way of moving made him easy to spot. Both the military and the police—they were the ones smoking in doorways—were tense, and many must have understood that the symbols on their uniforms would soon be meaningless; they stood listening to their radios, awaiting belated orders, but Okunenko delighted in this night, he was practically dancing, sensing that there would be no orders given.

He sat inside a Moskvich car for a few minutes, then jumped out and ran back to the White House, to the intersection of Novy Arbat and the Garden Ring Road; in the quiet, well-lit courtyards where sounds seemed to fall from the sky, the distant rumble of military machines grew stronger.

The infantry vehicles came down the Garden Ring Road from the side of the zoo, along the old parade route.

The mechanical reptiles crawled along, warping the asphalt with their caterpillar tracks. They represented the ancient threat of nature, which had created shells, spines, claws, and teeth; the teeth were for opening up the shells, the spines to protect the neck from the teeth, claws to get to the soft belly, and armor plates to protect the belly; behind all that power was the narrow brain of the predator, its tiny eyes peering out from deep inside the skull.

The city rose in buildings, spread in lanes, glittered with lit shop windows, signs, kiosks, and street signs, and the armored vehicles were moving in, waiting for the order to destroy everything, to find and destroy the sources of the rebellion. The exit from the Novy Arbat tunnel was blocked by trolleybuses, as if the civilian urban technology had come out to stop its crazed relatives; the boxy blue trolleys with their snaillike antennae huddled together, blocking the tunnel’s throat; it was clear that everything would be decided here, at this intersection.

The armored vehicles drove into the tunnel and crawled out, pushing aside the trolleybuses, which the crowd had moved toward the army machines. Above on the overpass, a long-haired man was trying to light a Molotov cocktail, but the matches kept burning out; Okunenko grabbed his hand—I thought he was going to hit him, but no, he struck a match while protecting it from the wind with a graceful gesture, and the bottle flew in a basketball arc, flames shot up on the armored car into the sky and seeped into the ventilation holes. The truck swerved, another bottle was thrown from the overpass, two more armored vehicles broke through the trolleybuses; there was a mash up of men and metal and then everything stopped—someone had been crushed to death.

I lost him there by the tunnel; I went back to the spot where Okunenko came either to report or to get instructions, but the cars were gone, the courtyard empty, and there was nothing but butts in the doorways. I spent the next two days rushing around Moscow, trying to understand where the main events were taking place.

Thursday night I was on Lubyanka Square; the pedestrian flow brought me there at the moment when the mountain climber had reached the neck of the secret police boss Dzerzhinsky’s statue and was slipping a noose attached to a crane around it; I was tired and dizzy, and I thought it was all a dream—how can you hang a monument?

Next to me by the wall of the Polytechnical Museum several men, dressed identically in civilian clothes, obviously KGB officers, were smoking; they stood and watched calmly as their chief was dragged off his pedestal.