Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

I worked distractedly for a couple of hours, saw that my grandmother was resting after a hearty late breakfast, and then put on three sweaters and my Gulag coat and headed out into the cold. “Civil activist Pyotr Shipalkin,” I heard on Echo of Moscow radio as I was putting on my things, “was arrested last night in front of Lubyanka as he staged a protest against political violence.” Already, he was being turned into a hero.

I arrived at our police station just after noon. There was a surprisingly large crowd, maybe fifty people, milling about outside. It looked to be broken up into three distinct groups. One was Sergei, Misha, Boris, and the rest (though not Yulia yet), in their cheap, puffy winter coats and old hats. My people. Then there was a small group of more arty-looking types, some of them in leather jackets and even leather pants, all of them stylish and in black. That must have been Mayhem. And then there was an even larger group of better-dressed people, among whom I recognized one of Dima’s friends from the night of Maxim’s birthday party, and then, holding a microphone and interviewing someone, Elena from Echo of Moscow.

She noticed me and came over. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I live near here,” I said. “What about you?”

She lifted up her microphone to indicate that she was working. “Do you know this guy?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said.

“Hmm,” said Elena, losing interest in me and scanning the crowd for likely interview subjects.

“I think that’s his crew,” I said, nodding to the Mayhem crowd.

“Oh?” said Elena. “Thank you.” And she went off toward them.

I didn’t mind. Elena’s spell had been broken, definitively, by Yulia. And for a moment I allowed myself to wonder if Yulia’s absence from this quasi-protest meant that she was having a different reaction to Shipalkin’s arrest than I had anticipated. Maybe she still thought Shipalkin was an idiot; maybe she thought it was nobler to visit one’s grandmother in the hospital than to pull stunts in front of the KGB. But then Misha told me that she was inside the building, with Shipalkin’s lawyer. I knew then that we weren’t going to be seeing each other again anytime soon. She had been trying to forget about Shipalkin and now he had made that impossible.

As Misha now told it, a drunk Shipalkin had achieved this coup by showing up the night before on Lubyanka with a canister of tomato sauce. He started flinging the sauce at the big FSB building with his hand, yelling, “Hands in sauce, hands off!” To the surprise of the Mayhem colleagues who had been observing his “action,” no one came out of the Lubyanka building to confront him; instead, a few minutes in, a police car pulled up and the officers tackled him. He had spent the night at the station. What happened next would depend on whether they believed he was primarily part of a political movement or primarily drunk. Drunk would be a lot better, in terms of getting out.

The whole thing was so stupid, I thought. Here was a regime that had systematically undermined workers’ rights; had prosecuted several nasty wars, most recently with Georgia; and had imprisoned labor activists and dissidents, and encouraged the far right. And Shipalkin was going to defeat it by throwing tomato sauce at the FSB? What a joke. Boris—and Yulia—were right.

Finally Yulia came out, with the lawyer, and went over to where Misha and I and the other October people were standing. She hugged all of us without distinction; she looked like she’d been crying. I didn’t know what to do or say.

Now the lawyer asked people to pay attention, and the three groups pulled up together to listen. He said Shipalkin was being charged with political extremism. “We’re trying to talk them down but it could be serious,” he said. “I would urge you, if possible, to be careful what you say in the next few days and weeks online and to the media. If you want Petya to be free soon, you won’t try to turn him into a political martyr.”

“What kind of martyr?” I heard myself say. “What if we say that he’s a fool with zero political analysis or sense?”

The lawyer studied me for a moment. “Well, actually, from a legal perspective, that would be fine,” he said.

But my remark had caused a commotion. “Who’s this asshole?” one of the Mayhem guys said from behind me, loudly enough so I could hear.

I began to turn around, to introduce myself, but at this moment a young police officer came out of the building. “I’m sorry,” he said politely. “You can’t all stand here. We’ll have to consider it an unsanctioned public meeting.”

“We’re leaving now,” said the lawyer. “Right, guys?”

The three groups, October and Mayhem and the liberals, which had come together to listen to the lawyer’s report, now caucused separately and briefly on this question and decided to depart. “We could go to the Coffee Grind,” someone proposed.

“That’s expensive,” one of the Mayhem people said.

“They don’t have waiters,” said Misha. “We can order one cappuccino for all of us and that’ll be enough.” The proposal was accepted. A few people gave me dirty looks before heading in the Grind’s direction, but that was it.

Without saying anything to me, Yulia headed after them.

“Hey,” I said, catching up with her. “I’m going to go back and check on my grandmother.”

“All right,” she said. She kept her gaze on the ground as she said this.

“Can I see you soon?” I asked.

She looked up at me now, and I saw she was angry. “Why did you say that about Petya?” she said.

Fairly or unfairly, I got mad again. “Anarchism is an infantile disorder!” I cried. “You used to think so too.”

Yulia looked me square in the face. “First of all,” she said, “please don’t tell me what I did or did not used to think. Second, how dare you? Whatever you and maybe I think of Petya’s politics, right now he’s in there and we’re out here. And what’s more, before too long you’ll be over there.” She pointed over her shoulder, toward America. “It’s indecent to criticize someone whose position you’ll never have to occupy,” she said.

I felt exposed. One month ago I’d had no idea that anarchism was an infantile disorder. Now I was proclaiming it to the world. And though I might claim to myself and to Dima and to my grandmother that I was staying, I also knew that eventually I would leave. I didn’t say anything.

“Well?” said Yulia, giving me an opportunity to respond. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll see you at study group.”

And that was that. She headed for the Coffee Grind. I turned around and ran into Elena. She was looking at me like she’d discovered something about me. “That was an interesting statement about the protester,” she said. “Do you want to say it on air?”

I had, by this point, lost all interest in Elena. “No,” I said, “I don’t.” And I headed home.

The next week, for some reason, the Marxist study group was moved to Wednesday, meaning that it conflicted with hockey. I called Sergei to see what he thought. “I think we play hockey,” said Sergei. “Marx isn’t going anywhere.” I agreed. As a result I didn’t see Yulia again until the week after, almost two weeks after Shipalkin’s arrest. Shipalkin was still in jail, now in Lefortovo, the special FSB prison. Part of the discussion that evening was about what could be done for him. Yulia had visited him in prison—she was able to, as they were still legally married. She said he seemed scared and upset. Our walk along Tverskaya with Boris and Nikolai was awkward; Yulia and I behaved as total strangers. How could we not? Lefortovo was serious—it’s where they put terrorists and major criminals and fallen oligarchs and other people they planned to send away for a long time. Another activist who’d been arrested for defacing a government building—he’d drawn a picture of Medvedev fellating Putin on a police station in Novosibirsk—had recently received a three-year sentence. Would Yulia be forced to wait that long? It wasn’t impossible. She looked unhappy, and there was nothing I could do.