A Terrible Country by Keith Gessen

Author:Keith Gessen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

6.

OCTOBER

JUST AS I WAS starting to feel better, Sergei invited me to attend an anti-fascist protest at the Clean Ponds metro stop. It was a bitterly cold day and when I showed up there were only six other people there. But one of them was Sergei, and another was Yulia. She wore a puffy black jacket with a fur-lined hood, the kind gangster teenagers wear in New York, and underneath the hood a fur hat with earflaps. Her nose and cheeks were red from the cold and there were tears, it looked like, also from the cold, in her big green eyes.

“Hi,” I said.

She nodded.

I wanted to tell her about how I’d been sick, and my thoughts about socialism, and the dream I’d had about my mother, but it was obviously too early for that, and I tried instead to concentrate on the protest. Someone had made a big banner, which we unfurled, that said END FASCISM. We were going to stand in front of the metro station, near the entrance to the park, and hold this banner for thirty minutes, in the cold. “That’s it?” I said to Sergei. In anticipation of the protest and unaware of any fascists in Russia at this time, I went online and looked it up. It turned out there were plenty of fascists; their activities included attacking and sometimes killing Central Asian migrants and posting videos of the attacks on YouTube. They also engaged in fighting and sometimes killing anti-fascist activists, or antifa. I had gone to the event prepared for just about anything. That wasn’t the plan. “For the moment,” Sergei said, “we just need to show people we’re not afraid, and they don’t need to be, either. That’s enough.”

We took turns holding the banner. We chanted anti-fascist slogans—“No to fascism!” “Fascism will not pass!” People came out of the subway and walked past us. Most of them didn’t look at us. Nonetheless it felt like we were doing something.

Yulia didn’t pay much attention to me. But I enjoyed hearing her say that fascism wouldn’t pass.

And then we noticed a commotion at the entrance to the Clean Ponds metro. It was the pro-regime protesters, scrambling up to the roof, where they dutifully unfurled their banner urging us not to rock the boat. Our small protest had not attracted any police, but these guys were vigilant.

Sergei wasted no time. As soon as they were up with their banner, he walked closer to them and yelled, “This is an anti-fascist protest! Are you guys for fascism?”

“What do you mean?” one of them yelled back.

“Our banner says, ‘End fascism.’ Do you think the regime is fascist and that therefore saying no to fascism is going to destabilize the regime?”

“What?”

“Come down here and we’ll talk,” said Sergei.

The counterprotesters were clearly confused by this. They talked among themselves and eventually came down and joined our protest. After Sergei worked on them for a while, they even held our banner for a bit. They were just kids—college students. They admitted that they were paid five hundred rubles apiece to do these counterprotests.

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