Assuming, as I rashly predicted, Moscow goes about its business as normal – whatever passes for normal these days – I suggested we wander down to the embankment and, queues permitting, eat Eskimo ice creams, good even in these straitened days. Something we agree we haven’t done for far too long.
An old lure with fresh bait.
We don’t need gypsy blood to read the media tealeaves. General Secretary Gorbachev’s recent three-week Crimean ‘holiday’, cut short by emergency back surgery – during which his raddled deputy acquired ominous prominence – as good as handed his enemies the keys to the Kremlin.
Some ice cream. I turn the television back on. A fearless ferret of a reporter darts in and out of the barricades being assembled on the White House Embankment, microphone bobbing. Tie askew, every strand of brushed-back chestnut hair in place. Sergey Medvedev – who would have thought? Eight years the stolid face of Vremya, faithfully parroting the official line, biding his time for this moment. Before his million-strong audience Medvedev extemporises, as though expecting transmission to be pulled any moment, lets protesters recount heroic acts big and small, dwarfed by his own. Medvedev ends the broadcast as he has always done, moistening his lips and straightening his tie.
I grab my coat and umbrella and go down the stairs. Chemistry quickens the August languor from the moment I step onto the street. Dormant forces unleashed, prodded into chain reaction, an incendiary rumour. Shaking off the paralysis induced by the news of the President under house arrest in Crimea, the sickening corollary of a lurch backwards into dictatorship, people gather on their way to Lubyanka. Bakery girls, rain streaking the flour on their overcoats, walk alongside clerks in ill-fitting suits and gym shoes, secretaries perspiring through pancake makeup. Many carry incense candles and Orthodox crosses. Others I suspect conceal icons in breast pockets. Members one and all of a clandestine organisation to which they didn’t know they belonged until finding courage to declare themselves.
Should today’s demonstrations foil the coup, help reinstate freedoms, Anna will have to concede I was right, that the movement for change wasn’t futile. Fact is, neither my motives nor my judgement stand scrutiny. Our threesome with Dzerzhinsky was to score a domestic point, the greater cause a pretext. And if that goes for me, a longstanding if minor participant, what of these neophytes? All said and done, is public protest just an alibi for private foibles?
People pour into the square, stream around the statue’s plinth, adorn it with tricolours and slogan banners, step back to watch mountaineers clambering to Dzerzhinsky’s hip. One fellow fastens a peg beneath the waist-button and shimmies higher, somehow finding footholds over slippery bronze. Uncoiling a rope, he holds up a loop, a tomahawk, and to ragged cheers, lassoes Dzerzhinsky’s neck. He wiggles to focus his aim, swings round-arm. Gasps escape as an earlobe tumbles to the ground. An old woman tenderly picks it up.
‘Saboteurs! Hooligans!’ Her shrieks are drowned out by rapturous applause.
‘Lop both ears off!’
‘Give him one for my granddad, young fellow!’
Iron Felix, all fourteen tonnes of him, stares ahead, stoic. Another swing and the axe head comes off, glances a shoulder, skips on to the cobblestones and rolls away. Hearty clapping accompanies the assailant’s descent, a well-received warm-up act.
‘Here come the professionals!’ Four Krupp cranes in line, thin-necked brontosauruses stooping to nibble dinner. Behind them Sergey Stankovich, Moscow’s young Deputy Mayor rides shotgun in a flat-bed truck, yelling ‘It will be levelled!’ through a loudspeaker. The crowd takes up the chant.
I glimpse Anna standing at the edge of the crowd. Arms folded and head cocked, she observes an experiment gone awry, helpless to intervene. We watch as the first crane fastens cables under Dzerzhinsky’s head and arms, winches the statue clean off, a brief splitting sound.
As I bustle towards Anna a siren sounds. Panic ripples through the crowd, becomes a stampede. For a moment I lose sight of her. She reappears beside me. Screams rend the air as police horses canter by. I wrap an arm around her shoulders as we chase the scrum towards the metro. When I glance around, blue uniforms pin a man to the plinth.
We run unchecked through the barrier gates. Station workers not on strike wear badges, Russia’s red, blue and white. On the platform people throw themselves against the doors of trains going in the direction of the White House. Anna wrenches my arm. Several heads turn to her thin scream. ‘Vasya, no! We’re going home.’
I cup her face with my hands. ‘Either we stand together with everyone, or we go home and wait for them to come and get us. That’s our choice. You want Nikolai to know we were there?’
That breaks her resistance. The automatic doors snatch at my shirt tail as we pile in. The mood inside the carriage, incredulous relief at cheating arrest, settles into quiet solidarity. Arms and hips pressed together we exit at Barrikadnaya. A crowd of about fifty carries a giant hand-sewn tricolour, sagging under the rain. Umbrellas unfurl, pop. Looking around, we are in the midst of a competition to carry the most outlandish objects – bricks, old TVs, speakers, street signs, fender bars – to stiffen the barricades. My money is on three kids dragging a telephone booth, its floor bumping behind. Until I overhear bystanders saying that at Manezh Square, adjacent to the Kremlin, protesters have commandeered a fleet of trolleybuses.
Hours pass as we wait for the tanks to roll up the White House steps. A firefly-forest of candles, crosses and flowers. Someone passes us an incense stick. We take turns to shield its guttering flame. Fires are lit, doused, relit and tents erected. I stoop to warm Anna’s cheek to mine. Away in the distance beyond the razorwire barrier, Kalininsky Bridge pylons throw crosshatched shadows over the chopped surface of the river. From our vantage point near the parliament entrance we watch Boris Yeltsin’s burly frame and white pompadour hoisted onto a tank strewn with roses. Earlier today he called for a general strike. He shakes hands with the surprised driver, raises his hands in a double-V salute and in his reverberating bass urges supporters to protect their White House, the peoples’ parliament from subverters of the new democracy. More speeches. ‘We are people!’ declaims Elena Bonner, widow of Andrey Sakharov, father of Russia’s hydrogen bomb turned dissident. ‘People and not just cattle.’
A bearded, bedraggled artist sketches St George slaying the dragon. The unofficial casualty count stands at three young men crushed by tanks on the Garden Ring Road. A priest in full regalia stood in their path, halted the advance.
People begin leaving the barricades. More arrive. Still others retreat into tents. Anna shivers, not just from the cool dusk. I hug her closer. One by one the baby-faced drivers stalled on Kutuzovsky Prospekt emerge from their hatches to smoke, accept rolls and other tidbits. ‘Good guys, good guys!’ calls the crowd to the protesters at the vanguard. Sixties anthems splutter from portable players. English speakers sing along to We Shall Not Be Moved. People hold transistors to their ears, tuned to Radio White House, cheer each defection from the putschists and tank regiment. Information is at this moment more precious to life than water. ‘We were the ones who stayed silent too long,’ an old woman confesses to me. ‘Forgive us, young people.’