Rising

by Fenek Solère

  Skoz’veka I grozyty proshla!

  I siyayet solntse nad toboyu

  I sud’ba tvoya svetla!

  Above the ancient Moscow Kremlin

  waves the banner with the two-headed eagle

  and the sacred words resound:

  Be glorious, Russia – my Motherland!

  Vehicles were torched on Nevsky. Both sides faced off against the police, who met them in full riot gear, firing Tac 700 Pepperball launchers and chloroance tophenone gas into their massed ranks. Armed officers grabbed protesters in armlocks as they fled down Ulitsa Chaykovsogo. ‘We had tried to reason with both groups’, a spokesman for the police said later, when he was being interviewed on Channel 5. ‘But there was no sense to it, just chaos everywhere. We have a duty to the public to maintain law and order and that is what we did!’ Sporadic skirmishes continued in Zakharyevskaya and Tavricheskaya. Nikita was arrested on the Naberezhnaya Robespyea, trying to flee after the nationalists had successfully stormed the Left’s podium outside the university. Nikki’s head was pushed between spread knees, his hands cuffed from behind.

  ‘We are all Limonov now!’ he kept shouting as police surrounded the students in Tavrichsky Sad. In Ploschad Iskussy, Alyosha was using homemade Molotov cocktails against a police cordon. The FSB had forced VKontakte to shut down their social network. Rubber bullets whizzed. When the dogs were loosed, everyone scattered, clambering to escape. German Shepherds dragged pony-tailed girls to the ground, and boys beat the animals back with anything that came to hand.

  At 3 that afternoon Grigori, accompanied by the Rector Valentine Bondarenko, Dimitri, Alexander, and Svetlana gave a press conference on the university steps.

  ‘Although we do not condone the violence, today’s events were completely predictable. Extreme Leftist factions, given succour by anti-Russian elements, have been assaulting and harassing both ourselves and our international guests from the start of this event. Many of our young people are being told lies about their country’s past, the reasons for its current political malaise, and the options for a better future. What occurred today was a short, sharp punch in the solar plexus of our globalist masters. Let me remind you of Dmitry Dyomushkin of the Russian’s Movement’s prophetic words: “Speaking about the extinction of the Russians . . . There will be no changes for the better for you if you cannot grasp this. No chance for you, or for your children.”’

  As his voice trailed off from the agreed script, the questions came flying. ‘Do you support fascism? Do you condone Anders Breivik? Do you deny the Holocaust?’ A look of indignant contempt sailed like a gunboat across Grigori’s face.

  ‘Your questions tell me all I need to know about the spin your paymasters intend to take on today’s disturbances, as well as on the issues that confront us now and will challenge us in the future. Your adherence to an invented past will trap us into reliving our tragedies time and time again.’ And with that, the delegation withdrew behind the university’s gates. The verbal altercation was rapidly edited and transmitted to the whole country through the controlled media.

  Meanwhile, President Babel and his bodyguards had been ambushed in their armoured Chevrolet. The traffic lights on the Neva embankment had been rigged to flick to red as he moved off the bridge. Suddenly, three men opened fire with small arms, using armour-piercing bullets made from depleted uranium to riddle the convoy. Two others stepped from behind sphinx statues, aiming grenade launchers, and then there was flaring phosphorus burning everyone to death. Rumour had it that foreign security forces were responsible. Others said that Babel’s people had fallen out with the Yellow Mafia. Within hours, a bloody feud between the rival oligarchs and leading biznesmeny from the brewing, banking, printing, and electronics syndicates had led to multiple murders by sniper fire, poison, or a sharp blade between the ribs.

  The Duma holds an emergency meeting ratifying Prime Minister Viktor Akulov as Acting President;

  President Akulov immediately confirms Russia’s civil government’s continued intention to give succour to the Great Migration, quoting Sweden’s Interior Minister Gecht in a TV debate on SVT World, ‘Russia will only fulfil its geographic ambition if it can accommodate people of Asiatic origin’;

  Commentators in the World News Media start warning of the rise of Russian neo-Nazism, comparing Russia to Germany in the 1920s;

  Under the auspices of an emergency act sponsored by George Soros at the UN, the World Bank secures Russia’s re-entry into the G8 and begins to formulate the Levantine Accords to facilitate loans to restructure the Russian economy;

  The pro-liberal Radio Meduza, operating out of Riga, quadruples its programme output in support of Acting President Akulov, welcoming his efforts in following his predecessor’s policy of guiding Russia back into the family of democratic nations.

  They were rushing, fleeing violence on Nevsky, making for the sanctuary of the Alexander monastery. Ignoring the Ka-226 helicopters and the speeding police Passats, they barely escaped the crunch of Gaz Tigr 4X4s, which were ploughing down rioters at the intersection of Konnaya and Ispolkomskaya.

  Hiding in Mitropolichiy sad after they heard about the state of emergency, Ekaterina took him by the hand, marching him down Mirgorodskaya Ulitsa, then back along Telezhnaya in a wide arc to avoid the police cordons of KamAZ trucks and checkpoints manned by scarf-faced militia armed with Viyaz-SN machine pistols.

  ‘Here in Tikhvin are graves of many great people.’ Ekaterina’s eyes clouded with admiration. ‘Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov.’ Then, raising her hand, ‘Over there is resting place of Dostoevsky.’ He turned to follow her long finger, an iron gateway guarding the remains of the author of Crime and Punishment. ‘Some charnel house, no?’

  They joined the back of a queue shuffling slowly towards the entrance. The old, sick, and lonely hobbled staccato-style up the steps. Ekaterina asked, ‘Are you sure you want to go?’

  Tom nodded, the great Cathedral doors opening, swallowing them like Jonah’s whale. Inside, they were lost in deep darkness, broken only occasionally by the shimmer of tallow candles sending a warm ripple across icons. The recitation of liturgy was accompanied by the swish of dark robes brushing stone, solemn priests circling under the dome.

  He was conscious of people perpetually crossing themselves and considered following suit, but his instinctive secularism still held strong. Tom estimated there must have been two hundred people there. Old babushkas wrapped in shawls, bowing fervently, prostrated themselves before painted saints, gilded frames, pock-marked prophets, and apostles rising in a pantheon of flickering candlelight.

  Then, emerging out of the scented fog, a procession of bearded priests came walking towards the chancel. From the gallery above, a choir filled dead air with a song so heart-rending you could feel the isolation of a Siberian winter. Ekaterina stood still, staring straight ahead. Tom shifted uncomfortably from left to right. His atheist inclinations were completely overwhelmed by this ritual assault on all five senses. It was hard to imagine how the Marxists could have suppressed such outpourings of faith for so many years. Only 10 percent of the Christian churches had survived the famine years of the 1920s, when the Party seized altar gold and silver plates to melt down for bullion. Synagogues were untouched. Then there was the Kamchatka martyrdom of thousands upon thousands of the faithful. In the handful of enclaves that held out, the authorities broke up prayer meetings with squads of secret police wielding steel batons and sledgehammers.

  It seemed incredible that Lenin and his disciples could have upstaged Jesus. But, perhaps they had not. Maybe, they had only temporarily substituted for him in a failed attempt to pervert the Russian soul. The congregation responded in unison throughout the service. They queued to buy candles, kneeling and kissing icons. The Professor found the atmosphere positively medieval. Commanding huge respect, crones with wrinkled leather skin and curling yellow fingernails who were bent double moved between the flowing shawls of Byzantine priests. Ancient matriarchs performed some
special rite known to them alone, people bowing as they passed and making room for them wherever they decided to rest their legs. At the high point of the service, the triple blessing, they assumed to lead the congregation, stumbling onto their knees, shuffling on their bellies across the stone floor, foreheads lowered to the ground as the liturgy soared to its peak.

  ‘Where were you baptised?’ she asked as they moved in step.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Heathen!’ she said in so low a register that no one could hear. ‘You call yourself civilised?’ He felt her fingernails dig into his palm.

  ‘Are you offering me salvation?’

  Her voice came back in a whisper. ‘You are beyond redemption, you’d best ask the blessing of the Great Patriarch himself!’

  Standing in line, he looked on as Ekaterina kissed the hand of the priest before receiving communion. Then it was his turn, and he hesitantly stepped forward. His partner glanced back with a look of encouragement. ‘Time to make good’, she said. Tom felt frail fingertips brush his forehead as he bowed before the chalice and spoon. Looking up, four-square into the blind gaze of the old man before him, he saw rather than heard the words form on cracked lips. Syllables birthed from asthmatic lungs. Straining to understand, he moved aside, his palate burning with the after-taste of vinegar, the wraith-like sensation of this man’s Hebrew God caressing him with a cadaverous hand. The whole experience left him feeling as if a shard of glass was moving in his conscience.

  Walking back through the nave, only the old remained, clattering on sticks, sheltering in echoes. He asked if they had nowhere else to go. ‘After all, it was cold outside and they had heard about the trouble in the streets.’

  ‘No’, she said. ‘They are the raskol’niki. You say, “Old Believers”, remnants of another time and place.’ His next question was drowned out by the chant rising from a priest standing in a beam of light, black robes and runic markings shining, head thrown back, singing a hymn to an Old Testament God. You could hear the desperation in the intonation. Tom asked himself, where was this God when the serfs starved, when Stalin imprisoned people for the way they looked at him, or when the German panzers swept through the cornfields? His silence was deafening then, but he had found his voice now, now that the Wall was cracked and the whisperers were fewer in number.

  As the huge doors swung open, symbolic of the resurrection in Orthodox tradition, grey light burst forth, showering down upon them, casting elongated shadows far back into the church. White doves rose in a flurry of flapping wings and snowy feathers. The cityscape wore a gossamer sheen. At such moments, the Leningrad of the 1930s re-emerged, buildings taking on an ominous aspect, dark and overwhelming like giant stone commissars watching everything you did, listening to every word you said, Comrade Yezhov’s eyes behind every window.

  An hour later, they were stopped outside the Moscow station, at the halfway point down Nevsky. A policeman approached as they photographed the obelisk crowned with its golden star.

  ‘I need to see your papers’, he demanded.

  ‘Why?’ Ekaterina interceded.

  ‘Because it is a state of emergency, and foreigners were involved in the assassination of the President!’ said a voice from over their shoulders. Turning, they saw an older man in a green raincoat. ‘We are checking many people!’ The Professor noted the slicked back hair and cigarette dangling from his mouth. The uniformed officer reached for him, trying to get a grip on his collar. Tom stepped back, pushing his hand away. There was a brief struggle.

  ‘Resisting arrest, this is serious’, laughed the plainclothes man. ‘We have been arresting your type all day!’ He indicated for his younger colleague to stand aside. A small crowd of onlookers formed a horseshoe around them. Taxi drivers were honking horns. ‘Do you have your passport?’

  ‘No, he leaves it in a safe deposit box at the hotel!’ Ekaterina sounded exasperated.

  ‘Is this true?’ The older man asked, turning to Tom.

  ‘Yes’, he said, taking her lead.

  ‘What is your name? Where are you staying?’ Tom told him and he wrote down the details in a notebook. ‘And why are you here?’

  ‘I’m attending the conference.’

  ‘Agitator’, he smirked, then looked at Ekaterina. ‘Don’t you have pretty young women in your own country?’

  ‘I’m here for the conference!’ There was an undertow of anger in the Englishman’s tone.

  ‘So you say, and we have all heard about the trouble caused by this conference.’ He stepped up close to Tom and blew smoke directly into his face. There was a ripple of laughter from the gathering crowd. ‘Foreigners with big ideas bringing trouble to our city.’ Columns of people poured out of the station entrance. The interrogator’s younger accomplice tapped the handle of the gun at his hip. Ekaterina typed a number into her cell phone.

  ‘British Consul, please’, she said loudly in Russian. The inquisitor threw Ekaterina a hateful look and, walking away, brushed the girl aside with a stab of his elbow. His sidekick spat in Tom’s face before following his boss into the fast-moving traffic on the Ligovsky Prospekt.

  Tom glared after them. Ekaterina wiped his face with a handkerchief, kissing his cheek. ‘You look worried’, she said. ‘Don’t be scared, it’s going to happen.’

  ‘But those things he said—’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘About you!’

  ‘You already must know people think those things? Young Russian girl with a foreign man, it is in all the hotels and bars.’

  ‘I don’t think about us like that!’

  ‘Then don’t.’

  They wandered down Nevsky, checking behind them to make sure they were not being followed. A large group of Nashi youth were gathered under red and white banners at the gaping black mouth of the Mayakovskaya metro station. A clean-cut commissar was regaling the crowd outside the Nevsky Forum hotel through a megaphone. ‘Our famous patriots, the United Russia party?’ Ekaterina cursed. ‘Shit for brains!’

  ‘What’s he saying?’

  ‘No Western interference in Russian affairs . . . the honour of our people . . . ’

  ‘Sounds ominous!’

  ‘Sounds vacuous!’

  ‘You are not impressed?’

  ‘Not really. You do not need to be clairvoyant. Nashi, or Ours, are really Theirs. They are the antithesis of the old Ukrainian Pora, the Serbian Otpor, and Georgia’s Kmara movements. The original Nashi leader, Vasily Yakemenko, took $500,000 to re-invent Komsomol. What we need is another Narodnaya Volya or Mladorossitsi movement! There are groups called “the Shield” working in Moscow. They raid illegal’s barracks and work with the police to combat the Uzbeks.’

  ‘You don’t rate Putin’s legacy?’

  ‘Putin was a doorman for the oligarchs. His success rested on improving the lifestyles of the mafia. That’s why when the police clear the streets of our people, these charlatans are allowed to speak. Russian democracy is paper-thin.’

  ‘But . . .’

  She shut him down. ‘No ifs or buts. We need people like Oleg Kasin and the Russian National Unity, Rodina and A Just Russia. Read Andrei Saveliev’s Political Mythology or his The Image of the Enemy, then all will be clear to you. Personally, I refuse to be a consumer, blindly following fashions and the global trends determined by one-worldists who manage our media for their own purposes!’

  ‘Look’, he said, ‘I wanted to hit that policeman!’

  ‘That is exactly what they hoped for, an excuse to get you alone in their car, take your wallet, everything!’

  ‘What made you think of calling the Consul?’

  ‘The cats hunt the mice, and the dogs chase the cats.’

  ‘Some things never change.’ They turned onto Malaya Morskaya. Passing number 17, Ekaterina’s eyes widened, pointing up to an apartment that looked down on the street through large, clear windows.

  ‘That is where Gogol wrote his satire, The Government Inspector.’

  ‘Tr
ue irony.’

  ‘Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.’

  7.

  The cult of money-making of the consumer society, proliferation and legalisation of sexual and social vice, protection of the interests of parasitic minorities at the expense of the majority, the limitation of liberties of the creative majority, ‘cyborgisation’ of people, extreme individualism, egoism, birth rates fall, destruction of the cult of family and religion, profanation of traditional values.—Anonymous, Hook Sprava, 2008

  They reached her grandfather’s place, a block typical of its period: three storeys high, topped with pigeon-grey metal. A stone balustrade ran the length of the first floor. Balconies were balanced with trepidation, supported on varicose-veined pillars, projecting out like Neanderthals’ foreheads.

  Ekaterina punched a worn button on a rusted intercom buried in the wall. ‘We’ll be safe here’, she was saying. There was a buzz and crackle. Then she pushed the door open onto a big black belly full of foul air. The lift was out of order, twisted wire sealing the shaft. Stone stairwells were filled with the whimpering of scolded children.

  A door slammed above. The weighty smell of yesterday’s potatoes swept down the hallway. This had once been a fashionable part of the city. Now, for so many of its tenants, the bitter years since Gorbachev’s glasnost had blown away the old certainties. The familiar communal routine of bygone years was a fond memory for the older generation, but complete bullshit to the young. Spray-paint and dog excrement smeared landings. Ekaterina led him through flickering lights, electric wiring hanging loose like cat entrails. The sparks tangoing on the ceiling were reflected in the putrid pools at their feet as they moved like a modern-day Theseus and Ariadne ever deeper into the Minotaur’s lair.

  Eventually, halting in front of a dented door, she knocked hard twice. Then waited, rapping twice again, in some pre-arranged code. A moment later, Tom heard the grating grind of bolts being thrown and the rattle of a chain. Backlit by a naked bulb, a small, thin man came stooping over the doorstep. She hugged him tightly, speaking in familiar Russian. Then, gesturing to Tom, they were formally introduced. ‘Herman’, he said, handshakes exchanged before the Englishman stepped over the threshold.