Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

JUST AS I WAS starting to feel better, Sergei invited me to attend an anti-fascist protest at the Clean Ponds metro stop. It was a bitterly cold day and when I showed up there were only six other people there. But one of them was Sergei, and another was Yulia. She wore a puffy black jacket with a fur-lined hood, the kind gangster teenagers wear in New York, and underneath the hood a fur hat with earflaps. Her nose and cheeks were red from the cold and there were tears, it looked like, also from the cold, in her big green eyes.

“Hi,” I said.

She nodded.

I wanted to tell her about how I’d been sick, and my thoughts about socialism, and the dream I’d had about my mother, but it was obviously too early for that, and I tried instead to concentrate on the protest. Someone had made a big banner, which we unfurled, that said END FASCISM. We were going to stand in front of the metro station, near the entrance to the park, and hold this banner for thirty minutes, in the cold. “That’s it?” I said to Sergei. In anticipation of the protest and unaware of any fascists in Russia at this time, I went online and looked it up. It turned out there were plenty of fascists; their activities included attacking and sometimes killing Central Asian migrants and posting videos of the attacks on YouTube. They also engaged in fighting and sometimes killing anti-fascist activists, or antifa. I had gone to the event prepared for just about anything. That wasn’t the plan. “For the moment,” Sergei said, “we just need to show people we’re not afraid, and they don’t need to be, either. That’s enough.”

We took turns holding the banner. We chanted anti-fascist slogans—“No to fascism!” “Fascism will not pass!” People came out of the subway and walked past us. Most of them didn’t look at us. Nonetheless it felt like we were doing something.

Yulia didn’t pay much attention to me. But I enjoyed hearing her say that fascism wouldn’t pass.

And then we noticed a commotion at the entrance to the Clean Ponds metro. It was the pro-regime protesters, scrambling up to the roof, where they dutifully unfurled their banner urging us not to rock the boat. Our small protest had not attracted any police, but these guys were vigilant.

Sergei wasted no time. As soon as they were up with their banner, he walked closer to them and yelled, “This is an anti-fascist protest! Are you guys for fascism?”

“What do you mean?” one of them yelled back.

“Our banner says, ‘End fascism.’ Do you think the regime is fascist and that therefore saying no to fascism is going to destabilize the regime?”

“What?”

“Come down here and we’ll talk,” said Sergei.

The counterprotesters were clearly confused by this. They talked among themselves and eventually came down and joined our protest. After Sergei worked on them for a while, they even held our banner for a bit. They were just kids—college students. They admitted that they were paid five hundred rubles apiece to do these counterprotests. One of them tried to hit on Yulia. Eventually they grew bored and left, though not before taking some socialist literature Sergei had brought with him.

“You can talk to just about anybody,” Sergei said to me. “You won’t necessarily talk them into it, but the total absence of any real political discourse in the country means that there’s an openness to ideas, since people aren’t used to hearing them.”

We stayed out another fifteen minutes in the cold and then Sergei announced that it was time to get some tea and warm up. At this point Yulia excused herself. “I have a deadline tomorrow,” she said.

She started to head toward the metro entrance. It had been a week since the bookstore event and I hadn’t heard a peep from her. She may have been separated from her husband and she may not actually have liked Fishman, but that by no means indicated that she liked me. Nonetheless I stepped over to her and asked, using the polite form of “you,” when I would see her again.

She looked at me without surprise. “Soon, I think,” she said, and smiled. I saw her beautiful crooked teeth, and then she ducked her head, and she was gone. I found this encouraging. When Sergei asked if I wanted to get some tea with the rest of the protesters, I wondered if I was already becoming part of the group.

The answer, for the moment, was no. In the basement café that they took me to, part bohemian hangout, part place where middle-aged men sat grimly drinking beers though it was still relatively early in the afternoon, I was treated politely, but as a guest. Everyone decided to order cranberry vodkas instead of tea, and then the guys explained their socialism to me. In addition to Sergei there were two grad-student types—blond, skinny, handsome Misha; dark-haired, chubby, cerebral Boris—and a computer programmer named Nikolai, who had a ponytail. It turned out they knew all about Dima—they felt like they’d been arguing with him for years. “Liberals like your brother think that if we just had a functioning free market, if we just had ‘good’ capitalism, then everything would work itself out,” said Boris. “What they don’t understand is that this is capitalism. We’re in it already. And if you took the restraints off, it would get even worse.”

“But how can you say there’s capitalism when there’s no free market?” I said. “When a market is this skewed by corruption, it’s not really a market, right?”

“Yes and no,” said Boris. “You’re right that it’s not an efficiently functioning market. But you still have wage labor; you still have profits that are invested; you have companies buying up other companies. Just because a market is distorted doesn’t mean it ceases to be a market. But even if you imagined that all the corrupt bureaucrats disappeared—if they were all taken out tomorrow and shot—that money wouldn’t go into the pockets of the workers. It would go into the capitalists’ pockets. It would be used to buy yachts and foreign sports teams.”

“So what’s the solution?” I said. “Revolution?”

“Yes,” said Boris. “That’s correct. Expropriation of the capitalists. Worker councils to elect leaders. Common ownership of property.”

“That’s been tried in this country.”

“Lots of things have been tried. Capitalism has also been tried, including in this country. And it’s led to exploitation and misery and death. That doesn’t keep people from trying it again.”

“Look,” said Misha, leaning into the group. We were sitting around an old wooden table and it was cold in that basement and most everyone had kept their coats on. “The point is simply that life cannot go on as before. The oil companies are in league with the state to suppress wages, strip us of our rights, and destroy the planet. And it’s important to understand that they do this in league with the rest of the capitalist world system, whether the individual figureheads get along with one another or not. We need to fight them.”

I must have looked unconvinced, because here Sergei stepped in.

“You’re living with your grandmother, right?” he said. I nodded. “She did what in the Soviet Union?”

“She was a college professor. Her husband was a geophysicist.”

“And were they bad people? Did they lie, cheat, steal? Or did they try to build a country, despite various obstacles?”

“They tried to build a country,” I said.

“That’s how our parents were too. They were doctors and architects and engineers. They were trying to build a good place. They did what they could. And then everything they built was seized by a small cabal of people who had connections to the Yeltsin administration. That’s not right.”