A Terrible Country

by Keith Gessen

  Then we ended up moving her anyway, and it was all my fault.

  I’ll start from the beginning.

  In early August, Sergei wrote to the October email list to say that the union organizer jailed at RussOil’s behest had not yet been released and was now staging a hunger strike. There was nothing or nearly nothing about it in the papers—the pro-Putin papers suppressed it, and the liberal papers weren’t interested in worker struggles. “RussOil workers don’t use iPhones, so they don’t care,” Sergei wrote. Was there anything we could do, any action we could plan, that would bring attention to the plight of the RussOil workers and shame RussOil? Would anyone, he continued, be up for something in front of the RussOil headquarters near Clean Ponds? For example, what if we dressed up like injured oil workers and held signs that said something like RUSSOIL IS SUCKING THE BLOOD FROM THE RUSSIAN EARTH? Did people think that would be effective?

  There was some debate about the slogan on the email list: Was it anti-Semitic, given the number of oil executives who were Jewish? Was it unnecessarily nationalistic, turning Russia into a physical body whose blood could be sucked, rather than a social compact between free people, with no particular physical manifestation, or anyway not in the sense of some sacred “Russian” land? But there were also more serious, strategic objections. RussOil was one of the nastiest players on the Russian political scene—they came out of the criminal 1990s and then adapted brilliantly to the kleptocratic aughts. They were well connected to both the mob and the Kremlin and the general prosecutor. On top of that, they were still very angry about their bulldozer and it was rumored that they’d been the driving force behind the prosecution of Mayhem. “We might be walking into a shitstorm,” wrote Boris.

  People were not insensitive to this argument—maybe we should put it off, or do something less confrontational?

  But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted us to do it. I had been living for a year—and, more to the point, my grandmother had been living for years—in the shadow of that giant RussOil building. Every time she saw it she was reminded of what they’d done to her beloved husband. Fuck those guys, I thought, and for the first time ever, I wrote to the list. I told the story of my grandmother and Uncle Lev and RussOil. I said it was one of the reasons I’d joined October. I thought we should get in their faces and tell them what we think.

  I sent the email. In truth, I thought that people would express admiration for my passion and say that nonetheless I did not understand the domestic situation and that really we should proceed with caution. But that’s not what happened. My email carried the day, and we proceeded to plan the protest.

  On the day of the protest, August 7, I taped a couple of pieces of paper together and made my sign (RUSSOIL SUCKS, it said, a pun). Then I went to the pharmacy where I usually bought my grandmother’s medicines and bought some bandages. My grandmother had hurt her shoulder a few years earlier and we still had the sling in the apartment. I spent some time in the bathroom dressing myself up to look like an injured worker. My grandmother came in at one point and asked what I was doing.

  “I’m going to a protest,” I said.

  “Oh,” said my grandmother. “OK. Be careful. The police don’t like protesters.”

  And she left. A minute later she was back again.

  “Andryush, are you sure you need to go to this?” she asked. “I think it’s dangerous.”

  “It’s OK,” I said. “I will be careful. And Yulia is coming.”

  “She is?” said my grandmother. If Yulia was coming, in her book it couldn’t be too bad.

  A few minutes later, the doorbell rang and it was Yulia. She had bandaged her head and added ketchup to it. She shared some ketchup with me. We made a nice pair.

  My grandmother laughed. I kissed her on the forehead and we headed out the door. It was a hot day, dry and dusty, and the sun was out. Making our way to the RussOil building in our costumes—it was a four-minute walk, and one we’d done many times—was interesting. People stared at us, trying to determine whether we were actors or performers (there were several theaters in the neighborhood) or if we’d been in a bad accident. We smiled at everyone and kept walking.

  We all met up on the pedestrian strip across from RussOil—there were ten of us, in various costumes depicting various severities of injury. Sergei had a white T-shirt that was covered in something red that looked much more like blood than ketchup did. Misha asked him if it was blood and he said that it was beet juice. “Looks like blood,” Misha said admiringly.

  The RussOil colossus was built back from the street so that there was a plaza in front of the building, which was elevated above the sidewalk and enclosed by a transparent and probably bulletproof fence. The entrance to the plaza was tightly guarded. Employees in suits showed their badges to get in. Because the plaza was elevated, all you saw from the sidewalk were their shoes.

  “Ready?” Sergei said when we had all gathered. We were ready. We walked across the street and took up positions in a bracket shape outside the fence, thirty feet from one another, as agreed, so that technically we were not having an unpermitted public meeting, and facing outward, toward the street. Yulia and Sergei were at the hinge of the bracket, directly in front of the entrance to the plaza, with the rest of us, four in each direction, fanned out down the two intersecting streets. Our spacing meant that the last person in line was already beyond the fence, but so it goes; I decided that, as I was new to these things, I should be on the end, and so I stood 120 feet from Sergei, on Rozhdestvenskiy Boulevard.

  Around the corner was Sakharov Avenue, formerly Labor Union Avenue, renamed in 1995 for the physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner who’d tried to de-escalate the nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the West. On this street there stood the former Ministry of Trade, designed in the late 1920s by Le Corbusier himself, and one of the great monuments to the period of post-revolutionary modernism. In front of me was the 1890s shopping center that was now occupied by luxury apartments and that terrible store where my grandmother and I had failed to buy a sweater. A few hundred feet farther along was the Krupskaya statue and the spot where we’d had to flee the skinheads. Around the corner was the pharmacy where I suspected my grandmother had arranged with the pharmacist to give her poison.

  It was all so familiar to me now.

  I held my sign and looked into the faces of the people who walked past me. Most of them looked the other way, but some of them looked at us and read our signs. In general, the better dressed someone was, the more likely they were to hurry past, and the less well dressed someone was, the more likely to linger for a moment and take it in.

  We weren’t there more than ten minutes before things went south. A police car arrived quickly. Two officers approached Sergei; I couldn’t hear the conversation, but presumably he explained to them that this was a legal picket. The two policemen walked away from him and got on their phones, presumably to ask for instructions. Then more policemen arrived, and they sort of fanned out around our perimeter, keeping an eye on us.

  At this point I saw Grisha, the bald, violent defenseman from the white team, walking past me with another guy, both of them in suits. I knew Grisha worked in oil, but I didn’t know which company. He saw that I was looking at him and he looked back, and then his face took on a look of surprise. “Andryush?” he said. He was smiling. He came up to me and shook my hand. “What are you doing?” he said.

  “I’m protesting.”

  “You’re protesting us?”

  “Yes. RussOil framed a union leader out in Tyumen’ and we’re trying to bring attention to the matter.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that.” He shook his head and chuckled. “Did someone pay you to do this?”

  “No. We’ve been following this story for a while. Sergei’s down there.” I pointed to him.

  “Holy shit!” He laughed. “What are you, a communist?”

 
“Not quite. But close.”

  “All right then. I never knew. Are you coming to hockey tonight?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Ha!” he said, and shook my hand again. “I’ll see you there, international agent.”

  And with that he rejoined his friend and kept walking toward the RussOil building.

  To the left of me, Misha was looking over, as if to say, “What was that?”

  “I know him from hockey!” I said, and almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth, two policemen had grabbed me by the elbows.

  “Come with us,” they said.

  “OK,” I said. I did not try to fight them. “What happened?”

  “You talked to your friend over there. That makes this a public meeting.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Do we look like we’re kidding?” They walked me toward a small police jeep and pushed me up into the tiny back compartment, where there was a wooden bench. They slammed the door behind me and aside from a few breathing holes in the roof through which sunlight entered, I was completely in the dark.

  I leaned back on the bench and considered my situation. Just a few minutes ago I was on the street, free to do whatever I pleased, and suddenly I was trapped in this jeep. It was four o’clock. Unless they let me go right away I was going to miss dinner, but hockey wasn’t until nine, so I might still make that. If they held me very long I’d need to call my grandmother and lie to her about why I was going to be late. Those were the sorts of things I was thinking about.

  Outside I heard Sergei arguing with the police. “He’s an American citizen,” he said. “You want to pick up an American citizen for protesting against RussOil? It’s going to be in all the papers.”

  “I don’t care if he’s a citizen of Portugal!” said one of the policemen. “We have the law and we follow the law.”

  “Whatever you want,” said Sergei. “For now it’s still your country.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We’ll see,” said Sergei.

  He came up to the jeep and knocked on my door with the palm of his hand. “Andrei, it’s Sergei. How are you doing in there?”

  “OK!” I said.

  “Listen,” said Sergei. “They’ll take you to the station and have you sit for a while and try to scare you. But you’ll be out fast and then we can all get a drink, OK?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Now I heard Yulia. “Andryushik,” she said. Her voice was coming from next to Sergei’s. “Are you OK?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Don’t let them scare you,” she said. “We’re going to raise a fuss and they’ll let you out soon.”

  “OK,” I said. “Will you call my grandmother and tell her we’ll be late for dinner?”

  “Of course.”

  “Let’s go!” I heard someone say, and then two doors opened and shut up front, and the jeep’s engine started, and we began to move. They drove fast and I bounced around in back a little, but before I even figured out how best to sit so as not to get jostled against the back door, we had stopped and I heard the officers opening their doors. Then they opened mine. The first thing I saw was the Hugo Boss. I thought I must be hallucinating, and then realized they had simply taken me to the station on Sretenka. I was two minutes away from my house.

  I’ve gone over in my mind what happened next a fair amount, though maybe not as much as I should. It’s hard to tell whether what I said to the police had any bearing on what happened later to Sergei and the others, but I can’t help but feel like it did. And does.

  For a moment I thought they were just going to let me go, having put a little scare in me, but instead the two officers who’d arrested me, one a blue-eyed Slav, the other with a more Asiatic look, both of them in their midtwenties, flanked me and walked me up the stairs into the station house. I had been here that one time I lost my grandmother, and I half hoped I’d recognize the duty officer behind the desk, but it was a different guy and in any case it’s unlikely he would have remembered me. The new guy buzzed us through the turnstile into the station, and then there was a waiting room with some benches. We stopped there and at this point the Slavic officer asked me for my phone and my “documents.”

  I had brought my passport with me, in case this very thing happened, and I now took it out and handed it over. Months earlier I had purchased a little leather passport case for it, so that it wouldn’t get totally destroyed from sitting in my pocket as much as it did, and therefore the first thing the cop saw was the ordinary black passport cover with the word “Russia” on it. He hadn’t been there, apparently, when Sergei urged one of the officers to let me go because I was American, and it was only when he opened the passport that he realized I wasn’t Russian. He kept his poker face momentarily and then broke down. “American?” he said incredulously and with, I thought, some anger.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, fuck your mother.” He turned to his partner, who had ducked into a nearby door and was returning with some paper forms in his hand. “Marat, this guy’s a fucking spy.”

  “We caught a spy?” Marat said curiously.

  “I think we did, Marat.” The cop gave me a hard stare and, tucking my passport and phone into his front shirt pocket, led me by the elbow to another waiting room adjacent to this one. This one had a guy in it, definitely the worse for wear, sitting on a bench with his elbows tucked into his knees, like he had a stomachache.

  “Stay here,” said the cop, and pushed me toward a bench across from the guy.

  I soon saw that the guy was just very drunk. He wore filthy jeans and a button-down shirt and his face was red from being outdoors all the time. He started looking me up and down, and I wondered if this was the moment when I found out if I had the mettle to last in prison. But my cellmate did not make an aggressive move. Instead he said, “So they got you too, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “Fuckers,” he said loudly. “Bloodsuckers!” he yelled.

  Holy shit, I thought, it’s the dumpster guy. But no one responded, and he went back into his cocoon. We sat there awhile longer, though the door to the room—it was just an ordinary wooden door, like in any other Russian institution—opened a few times. First, two beefy, short, middle-aged men in black jeans and button-down shirts opened it and stood in the doorway. They looked at me for a while and then one of them said, with unconcealed aggression, “International agent, huh?”

  I was taken aback. “No,” I said, smiling, thinking he might have been kidding.

  He wasn’t kidding, and he soon slammed the door. These two were followed by slightly younger, taller, thinner men, in street clothes that were more expensive and better shoes. They opened the door, gave me a quick look, and then nodded politely. They looked oddly familiar. After they left I spent a few minutes trying to figure out where I knew them from—TV? Hockey? The neighborhood?—until I figured it out. The Coffee Grind! I’d seen them in the Coffee Grind. They were FSB officers. It made sense. The older guys were police detectives; the second pair were from the FSB.

  I was still unsure of what was happening—I thought I’d be cited for disturbing the peace or participating in an unsanctioned public meeting and maybe fined, but certainly let go pretty quickly. It was obvious to me what I had done, and surely it was just as obvious to them. If I was a spy it was unlikely I would have been out with a protest sign in front of RussOil. I’d have been trying to infiltrate RussOil instead. I figured it was now about five. I was going to miss dinner, but if we got this taken care of in time I’d at least make it to hockey.

  Soon my arresting officers came to get me. I left my drunk dumpster friend where I’d found him and followed them to an office where, I felt confident, we were about to clear things up.

  It was an ordinary rectangular office, with two small desks in the back and a large meeting tab
le in the middle. The two police detectives, my FSB officers from the Coffee Grind, and one older, uniformed officer were inside. They dismissed my arresting officers and asked me to sit down.

  Later on, I would think about all the books written about the interrogations of the 1930s, as well as of the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. All the ’60s and ’70s dissidents and semi-dissidents, like Brodsky, had a story of how they’d sat down with the KGB and told them off. I have no reason to doubt those stories. But that’s not how this worked out with me.

  Solzhenitsyn begins The Gulag Archipelago by listing all the tortures to which people were subjected in NKVD custody. It’s a long, impressive, inventive list. If those tortures were not enough, for whatever reason, the NKVD could and sometimes did offer to bring in family members and torture them. Under such pressure, who could resist? And yet Solzhenitsyn had some advice for the person who is suddenly seized on the street or from his home in the middle of the night and wants to survive his interrogation. Solzhenitsyn’s advice was simply this: You are now dead. You have no family, no home, no attachments. YOU ARE DEAD. If you can convince yourself of this, there will be nothing the interrogators can do or say to you that will cause you to break. “Before such a person,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “the interrogation will tremble.”

  And there I was, wondering if I might make it out in time for hockey.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Is it Androo,” the uniformed officer said, looking at my passport, “or Androov?”

  “Andrei,” I said.

  “Ah,” said the officer politely. “Andrei. Excellent. Why does it say Androo here?”

  “It’s the English equivalent. My parents changed it when we moved to the States.”

  “Understood,” said the officer. “Well, Andrei, these men are going to ask you some questions about what happened today, and what you’re doing in Russia, and what your plans are, and then we can all go home. The more help you can give them, the faster this will all go.