by Fenek Solère
‘Sometimes wise words come from the mouths of fools. He also predicted all those years ago that “Russia can play a historic role in saving the world from the spread of Islam, from the spread of international terrorism . . . Trust me there is a long tradition of Muslim caliphs taking Christian wives, or themselves being born of a white mother. You see they were our mothers, daughters and sisters, captives from Mongol, Arab or Persian raids. That is why we must fight these hordes of Tamerlane once more, resist them unto our last breath”.’
‘His assassination was a sad day.’
‘An inevitable day. Such voices must be silenced.’
‘But your voices are not being silenced, we hear your protests as far away as London.’ Nikki grew in confidence.
‘Yes, on the fourth of November, the Feast Day of our Lady of Kazan and the anniversary of Michael Romanovs’ expulsion of the Poles from Moscow, we gather under the black, white, and yellow pennants, not only here but also in Saratov, Perm, Ulyanovsk, Cheboksary, and Murmansk.’
‘Have you been to the monuments to Minin and Pozharsky in Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow?’
‘Marina organises the dance festival in Nizhny. We all watched Alexander Dugin on programmes like Vremya and Chto de-lat.’
‘Does he make good viewing?’
‘Well, when they let him speak. He used to appear on Moment Istiny and Russkiy vzglyad, too! The Eurasianists are right about some things, like the United States and the EU wanting to establish new states ranging from Kosovo-style NATO protectorates to Islamic emirates from the Black to the Caspian Sea. That is why they sustained a military presence in Afghanistan and threatened Iran, to keep control over energy resources, while denying Russia access to the Mediterranean. The response was that we seized Crimea. By overrunning Western Ukraine, they further weaken and fragment the Russian state, challenge our dominance over the Eurasian heartland, run arms, deal in narcotics, and encourage migrants.’
‘Have you read Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory?’
‘Yes, but you know I’m unsure about some of Dugin’s positions. At first we were all very excited about the Evraziia Youth Movement. They had forty or more offices in Russia and ten or so internationally. He seemed to be influential with Putin, but all this talk of Arctogaia and Hyperborea was lost on many. Sergey Glazyev, for example, says the Eurasianist ideology amounts to one simple idea—we are all tied to a common historical fate, and we need to build a common future while respecting each other’s sovereignty and observing the principles of mutual benefit, emphasising our historical kinship. This is what differentiates us from EU expansion. The EU practises a methodology of double standards, applying force, fraud, and political technologies. Unlike both Glazyev and Dugin, I believe in a European ethnic identity and am against Russia’s multicultural imperialism.’ Tom saw how these fundamental differences troubled the young guy standing in front of him.
‘I remember an interview Dugin did in Elementi in 1995 with the former Iranian Ambassador to the Vatican, Muhammad Masjd Jamei, about how the Orthodox and Muslim worlds share common problems and common enemies. “With the fall of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Western militarists are attempting to destroy the last few remainders of national, cultural, and religious independence. From their point of view, Islam and Orthodoxy are the essence of a power bloc whose existence is incompatible with their plans. It is for this reason that such efforts are expended on the weakening or even the destruction of these two religions”.’
‘I do like Dugin’s alter ego Hans Ziver’s Tribute to the the History of the Moscow Underground and that verse from “Moscow 1982”:
Here strict pattern eyelashes,
Stings mascara,
And black darkness hangs,
In the city of the Dead Souls.’
‘Ha, have you ever read, It’s Me, Eddie, by Eduard Limonov?’
‘No, is it good?’
‘Very different. He also wrote Memoir of a Russian Punk, The Wild Girl, and The Other Russia.’
‘I’m familiar with his politics but don’t know his fiction.’
‘Then you are missing something, my friend, many of the people here tonight were on the Dissenter’s March in 2007 when he was detained by the authorities. Others fought with the Fratria Movement at the Iberian Gate in 2010. Some are White Rex activists, others are National Bolsheviks. Danila, over there is a big admirer of Tesak. Sasha, his brother, is a member of the Patriots of Russia Party, the group who took over Pionerskaya Square in 2011.’
‘And Limonov was arrested at the Dissenter’s March, right?’
‘Yes. But when he was an émigré in the States, he was heavily influenced by Lou Reed and Charles Bukowski. After a period in Paris, he returned to the Motherland and founded an incendiary political news-sheet called Limonka, you would say, hand grenade.’
‘Original!’
‘So original it was said he was disseminating illegal and immoral information!’
‘And was there any truth in the charge?’
‘Well, he was imprisoned in 2001 for terrorism and trading in illegal weapons!’
‘And would you ever do that?’
‘Do what? Organise an armed revolt in northern Kazakhstan?’
‘Get involved with armed groups, wherever?’
‘Look, Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party was banned by the Supreme Court but it changed into the Other Russia. Dugin was right when he said, “If the European New Right chooses us, that means it chooses the barbarian element . . . our people do not only go to meetings or fight at the barricades, they also go to real wars, for instance Moldova, or to Yugoslavia.” There are over sixty White Power bands in this country today. Their fan base has a lot of muscle. We are fans of Zyklon B and Bezumnye Usiliya. I saw Kolovrat’s open air concert in Bolotnaya Square. All of us attend rallies on National Unity Day.’
‘Arming the narod khoziain.’
‘The Master People.’ Nikkin was surprised. ‘I see you know some Russian.’
‘I believe in the Rossiki Natsiia.’
Nikki raised a toast. ‘To the Russkii Dom!’
‘The Russian home’, Tom echoed with a clink of his glass.
Suicide bombers kill 196 and injure 317 in sporadic attacks on the Moscow Metro;
A government report which concludes that drug remittances fund over 2 million Azers living in Russia is suppressed in the public interest;
The last Yazidis of northwestern Iraq, inheritors of ancient pre-Islamic traditions, are finally hunted down and exterminated;
Jews and Muslims come together in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock in a show of public solidarity against world-wide racism;
CIA and Mossad operatives are killed in action in eastern Ukraine;
In Baku, where medieval mosques sit side-by-side with dilapidated Soviet apartment blocks and new glass office towers, gun-running, narcotics, and human trafficking becomes the motor of the economy through Tabriz, Samarkand, and down towards Kabul;
Central Asian oil and gas producers provide free energy to Israel under terms negotiated by the World Bank.
They chatted over bliny filled with honey about a Russky Verdikt campaign to free Yevgenia Khasis from the Mordvinian camps. ‘She is our Sabine D’Orlac!’ Nikita became animated. ‘An icon for people like Vladimir Kvachkov’s People’s Liberation Front.’ Ekaterina pulled away from her crowd, introducing a young man with sky-grey eyes.
‘Vladimir is a writer’, she said. ‘But now he works for Ernst and Young.’
‘I do accounting ledgers’, he added.
Tom feigned interest to indulge Ekaterina. ‘What sort of stuff do you write?’
‘Political.’ He thrust a sheaf of papers into Tom’s hands. ‘This is an English copy. You can read if you want.’
‘You wrote all this?’
‘Katja says I write more in European taste. She helps me translate into French and British.’ Tom looked admiringly at her.
‘You must have great faith in his tal
ent?’
She blushed. ‘I have confidence’, she said, grabbing Vladimir by the arm and giving him an affectionate squeeze.
‘What’s it called?’ Tom asked before turning the cover.
‘Dog’, Vladimir replied. ‘It’s about times when I was a child.’
‘She is your muse?’ he hinted, trying to evaluate the depth of their relationship.
‘Da!’
‘Which authors influence you?’
‘I try to be like Valentin Rasputin.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘He was a writer from the Village Prose School, like Victor Astafiev and Fyodor Abramov.’
‘No clearer.’
‘He wrote Live and Remember.’
‘Sorry?’
‘He was from Siberia!’
Tom shook his head.
‘He writes like Shishkin paints’, Ekaterina interrupted.
‘So who do you like to read?’ Vladimir was nothing if not persistent.
‘Kafka!’ Tom was trying to lighten the atmosphere.
‘You like Kafka?’
‘Very much so. “Metamorphosis” is my favourite short story. But tell me, what English writers do you like?’
‘Joy Division.’
‘Ian Curtis, you mean?’
‘Did you meet him?’
‘No, I never had the pleasure. He committed suicide when I was still a kid.’ He looked towards Ekaterina. ‘I’m not really that old, you know.’ There was a plaintive tone in his voice which the Russians took for a joke, but was more of a subconscious appeal for acceptance.
‘What about Death in June?’
‘Yes, I’ve seen them several times.’
‘Have you heard Egor Letov’s Grazhdanskaia Oborona or Sergei Zharikov’s band DK?’
Tom was about to expound on the virtues of the neo-folk scene when Ekaterina put a hand to his mouth. A guitar was being strummed. The first chords of Rodina filled the room.
‘Quiet, Olga is going to sing!’
Later Nikki dimmed the lights and Marina draped a thin silk scarf over a table lamp. The guests’ faces were luminous in the flickering candlelight as they sat in armchairs, or stood, backs against the wall, sipping wine and vodka in front of a green flag bearing the image of Svantevit riding a white horse. In the middle of the room, a poltergeist of blue smoke hovered over a chocolate cake. They sang happy birthday to Viktoria, a dark-haired woman with a pinched white face and crimson lips.
As the last verse died away, she cut the cake, eyes moist with emotion, thin hands passing generous portions. Then the rock music was fired up again: Denis Maydanov’s ‘The Evil Approaches’. There was much hugging and kissing. People danced and fluted glasses were smashed in the fireplace. One young man sat on the floor, propped up by a pile of books. He was trying to sing, a tuneless monotone coming from his jerking head. A girl flung a cushion and then a shoe, telling him to be quiet. The drunk ignored her, taking a long pull on a flaring spliff.
Over in the far corner, Viktoria lay asleep by an electric fire. Her hair caught like sticky flypaper to her glistening face. Vladimir staggered across the room, an empty glass helicoptering in front of him. He kept mouthing, ‘A drink . . . do you want to drink with me?’
‘You’re dry’, Marina shouted, lifting a vodka bottle. Ekaterina reached to push it away.
‘Vlad’s had too much.’
‘Hey, you’re not his mother’, Marina exclaimed. ‘Let him enjoy himself!’
‘Da’, Vladimir said. ‘More!’ His muse shrugged in resignation. Vladimir threw back a glass and began to pour again. His eyes struggled to focus, squinting at the English Professor malevolently. ‘So you think I can’t write?’ he began to say in broken English, making a fist. ‘I bet you think I’m nothing good!’
‘Why do you always do this?’ Ekaterina pleaded.
‘Do what?’ he asked.
‘Drink and upset yourself.’ Vladimir’s finger pointed straight at Tom.
‘He thinks he’s better than me!’
‘I barely know you’, the Englishman replied defensively.
‘Oh, he knows you’, Nikki said, swooping in to guide Vladimir away to the other side of the room. ‘You’re another man to come between him and Katja.’ Marina clapped.
‘It’s true’, she said. ‘Vlad loves you!’
‘But we’re just friends’, she stammered.
‘He loves you’, Marina confirmed emphatically, ‘He confessed it to me at the festival.’
4.
I felt an abnormal, mean secret stirring of pleasure in going back home to my corner from a debauched St Petersburg night . . .—Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tom descended, his shoes beating an unhurried drumroll on chipped concrete. The roar of car engines resounded in the tenement. Mesmerised by the tadpole-like raindrops sliding over splintered glass, his cold fingers played with the slip of paper where Ekaterina had scratched her mobile number.
He pulled up his collar and stepped into the wind. In the distance, a bridge curled over the canal, office lights reflecting like koi carp in dark water, the night groaning through loose guttering.
In a direct reversal of historian Michael Khordarkovsky’s description of Russia’s relentless advance east across the steppe in the 1600s, the former colonisers become the colonised as population forecasts project that by 2030 there will be 250 million new Muslim immigrants living in Russia;
Single Chinese men are the largest demographic visiting Ukraine, ostensibly searching for wives;
Traditional village feasts along the Darya River are disrupted by rampaging Muslim youth;
Human trafficking and sex slavery, practised so openly on the Shomali Plain, spreads across eastern Russia. Unconfirmed numbers of women are reported as committing suicide while thousands of girls are shipped in open trucks to Jalalabad;
Mosques in Perm Krai, the Qosarif Mosque in Kazan, and the Central Mosque of Karachaevo-Cherkessia receive multi-million endowments from the Gulf;
Over 320,000 Muslims travel from Russia to attend the hajj in Mecca;
Al Faath veterans, formerly active as the 055 group in Bosnia, are reported to be carrying long ritual knives in order to slit throats and skin people in Khabarovsk;
Russia Today secretly films meetings in Kandahar which implicate the Pakistani government in supplying munitions to the Taliban;
Moscow’s Dormition Cathedral is bombed by Wahhabi extremists. The Head of the Union of Russian Muslims, speaking at the Imam Khatyb Madrassa, says: ‘There is only room for our faith in Russia.’
At the corner of Prospekt Bolshevikov and Ulitsa Krylenko, a group of feral Khachi youngsters wearing black scarves and bored expressions stood like sentinels. The Professor tried to walk by, acting as nonchalantly as possible, conscious they might scent his instinctive fear. For a moment, he tried to imagine himself in their shoes; a leather wallet, mobile phone, and a Western passport had real, convertible street value. It was certainly better than ABSOLYuT BANK in these uncertain times. There were no administration charges, just an exchange of goods in a dank stairwell followed by hours of drug-fuelled mayhem in the clubs. Ignorant, agitated, and high, the sight of a well-dressed foreigner walking alone on an isolated street would naturally excite their predatory appetite. They began calling to him, asking who he was.
A scooter ripped by at full throttle. Legs kicked out and a bottle smashed on the road ahead. Should he respond, or would they recognise bravado and charge? When he heard his name called, he became anxious. This was no chance encounter. They knew of him and no doubt why he was in St Petersburg. His knuckles whitened. The 250’s engine resounded off brick walls. Tom crossed the road, trying to retrace his steps. The buzz-saw sound of the scooter circled. He could just make out the hump-back silhouette of someone riding pillion, sliding off the seat as the bike skidded in a squeal of grating rubber. Then, a clenched fist stupefied his would-be assailant, sending his attacker reeling. Before Tom knew what was happening, Janssen was standing
beside him, a swift blade gleaming in starlight.
‘Get behind me!’ Janssen bellowed. Tom followed orders, hands protecting his pockets, edging to the curb. His protector swept the gap between them and the street gang with his scarab knife. For several seconds, Tom stood sweating, knowing it was only a matter of time before they rallied and moved forward en masse. Suddenly, a car pulled up and Janssen shouted for him to get in. With doors slamming and beer bottles raining down, they sped off along Shotmana towards the river.
Inside the car, Tom shook his head and breathed a sigh of relief, whilst their driver cursed about foreign kids running wild on the streets. It was better in the old days, he was saying. ‘All the stealing and the violence started when the outsiders came.’
‘Thank you’, Tom said, turning towards Janssen. ‘I never expected . . . ’
‘I was out for a walk’, Janssen joked. ‘Just happened to be coming along.’ They drove down Dalnevostochnyy, crossing the Neva at Lomonosovskya, heading for Elizarovskaya and the centre. As they turned off Ligovsky Prospect into Nevsky, Tom pointed right rather than left and said he wanted to be dropped at the Hotel Moskva. ‘Are you sure?’ Janssen asked.
‘Yes, it’ll be ok.’ Tom had remembered Anna and Oksana telling him they worked the hotel foyer. Adrenalin was better than Viagra. The Professor felt the pulse of blood to his groin. The threat of violence had scared but also excited him. He was hungry for sex and wanted to spread a woman’s legs to celebrate his close call. ‘Thanks again’, he said, hoping Janssen would not offer to accompany him. The driver looked for Janssen to give him the nod. They were circling the Alexander Nevsky monument in front of the Moskva, its red, translucent signage casting a warm arc over the motorway bridge. The road rose, spanning the narrowing Neva before heading east towards Moscow.