Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

Something else happened at hockey that I found pretty interesting. The white team, while a cohesive unit, occasionally invited some friend or client to come and play in the game. One Wednesday night they had a new guy playing, and in the warm-ups when I saw him I immediately had a strong, deeply unpleasant reaction. I couldn’t place where it was coming from and I skated by him again: he was young, blue-eyed, and had chiseled features, very familiar, and I knew I didn’t like him. I’d had this reaction a few times in New York when seeing actors on the street who played bad guys on TV. Had I seen this guy in one of the movies Yulia and I watched together? I started trying to figure out which one it might have been. On the bench once the game started I asked Anton if the guy was an actor. “An actor?” said Anton. “No. He’s just some asshole. His father’s in the Duma.”

Then I knew who it was. It was the guy who had pistol-whipped me outside of Teatr. And he was on the ice at this very moment. I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t my turn to go out but I announced that I was taking the next man off and no one argued with me. When I got on the ice, the guy was still on, and I skated right at him and slashed him in the leg. He looked up, surprised.

“Remember me?” I yelled.

He looked like he didn’t remember and didn’t care. “Fuck off,” he said.

At this I lost my mind. It was one thing for some guy to hit me with a gun for no reason. I mean, that was bad enough. But for him to show up to my hockey game, skate around like it was no big deal, and then pretend not even to care whether he knew who I was—this was too much. Without dropping my stick, I punched him hard in the back of the helmet. He fell forward onto the ice. I wanted to kick him but it wasn’t possible with skates so I dropped my stick and gloves and jumped on top of him to tear his helmet off. It wouldn’t come off so as he lay on the ice I started punching the back of his helmet—it was a little idiotic, but I don’t think it was ineffective. “All right,” I heard him say. “Enough.” By this point several of the guys from both teams had skated over and were trying to pull me away. I let them do so. The guy wasn’t fighting back. He wasn’t a strong skater, his pads were brand-new, and apparently he felt less sure of himself on the ice than he did out on the street. Whereas I felt, just then, right at home.

“Andryush, what the fuck’s going on?”

Fedya, from the white team, was in my face. He had been slipping passes by me to his linemate Alyosha for months and had never once smiled at me, or even after our first meeting acknowledged my existence, though a few weeks earlier he’d accidentally hit me in the face with his stick and apologized.

I said, “That guy hit me with a gun outside a nightclub on Clean Ponds. Without any reason. He just came up to me and hit me.”

Fedya turned to the blond, who was slowly gathering the equipment he’d dropped when I attacked him. “Alexei, is that true?”

“I don’t remember,” said the guy. “Maybe. He was talking to my girlfriend.”

“Fuck off!” I yelled. Literally, “go on a cock.” I delivered the curse with total authority. “I didn’t say a word to her. And you had a gun.”

Fedya turned to the guy and said, “Leave.”

The guy nodded and without looking at me skated off the ice, holding his gloves and stick against his chest like a little boy. I stayed. At the end of the skate, I went over to Fedya to thank him.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “You were right and he was wrong. He won’t be invited to play again.”

And that was it. The next time we played, Fedya gave no indication of being my new friend. But what happened had happened. The hockey guys were OK.

It wasn’t all triumphs and victories during this period. One night on my way home from Yulia’s, I saw a fire—it was the Azeri chicken and pastry stand. It was in flames. A group of people was standing around, and then a fire truck came and poured a bunch of water on the stand. No one was hurt, but, as I read online a few days later, it wasn’t an accident: several Azeri-owned businesses had been torched that night in Moscow in retaliation for the stabbing of a Russian teenager by an Azeri man at one of the markets. For a couple of weeks, the burned husk of the chicken stand stood there, and then it was removed. The Azeri guys didn’t come back.

Something foul was in the air. One Sunday the speakers at October’s Street University were two Italian communists—“comrades of Negri,” according to Boris, in the email announcement, meaning the legendary Italian communist and political prisoner Antonio Negri—and the location was right around the corner from us, at the Krupskaya statue. My grandmother was feeling pretty good that day, and I invited her along.

The Italians were sweet grad student types in their midthirties. They spoke in English and Boris translated, with some help from me. The Italians wanted to talk about “cognitive capitalism.” This was a concept Negri developed to deal with the fact that actual physical capitalism had done OK by workers in Europe. They received decent wages and were able to purchase property and were no longer interested in revolution. But, Negri argued, their minds were being colonized. Not just their bodies, as Marx had said; their very minds.

I liked the Italians but I couldn’t help but think that this news was, for Russia, a little premature. Here working people were still being exploited in the old-fashioned way. They did not earn decent wages; they could not afford to buy property; they had no protections. There was no need to come up with fancy new theories when the old ones were still so obviously true.

As I was thinking this a group of skinheads appeared from the far end of the boulevard and approached the Krupskaya statue. They wore combat boots and army surplus pants and jackets. There were five or six of them. I had never seen actual skinheads in the center of Moscow. Maybe, I thought, they were the good kind? Then they set up shop at the base of the statue, not fifteen feet from us, and started goofing around and taking cell phone photos of themselves with Lenin’s widow in the background. “Beat the Jews, save Russia!” they yelled. Click. And then, “Heil Hitler!” Click. These were not the good kind of skinheads. They were behind the Italians, who didn’t seem to notice and kept going on about cognitive capitalism. Boris kept dutifully translating, though he occasionally sneaked a look over his shoulder.

I sized up our group. There were seven of us: the two Italians, Boris, Vera, Yulia, me, and my grandmother. Of the seven of us, I was the only one who looked like he engaged in any regular exercise. We did not stand a chance against the skinheads.

“ Sieg heil !” yelled the skinheads.

“You know,” Boris said, turning to the Italians, “I think we should move a little farther into the park. It’ll be quieter there.”

And so we did. I thought for a moment that the skinheads would wonder what was up, or even that they had deliberately come over to our group to yell their slogans, but they didn’t pay us any mind. They were busy taking photos of their Nazi salutes. Maybe they had just redesigned their website and needed some content. We found a shady spot farther along the boulevard, and the Italians finished their lecture on cognitive capitalism. By the time my grandmother and Yulia and I went back to our place, the skinheads were gone.

A few days later, my grandmother and I were walking back together from the market when I noticed, not for the first time, the group of old ladies who sat in the children’s playground in the courtyard between our building and the market. These were the women my grandmother had dismissed to me as anti-Semites, but ever since the Vladlenna incident I wondered if she wasn’t just imagining it. And if they were a little anti-Semitic, who cared. What an opportunity! These old ladies sitting on a bench, feeding the pigeons and keeping an eye on the neighborhood, had once been a common feature of every Soviet and post-Soviet courtyard. In the center of Moscow, the era of high oil prices had all but wiped them out. And yet here, literally one courtyard away, a little pocket of resistance remained. There was still plenty of summer left; perhaps my grandmother would enjoy coming out here and sitting with her near contemporaries and discussing the problems of the day?