They massed in the suburbs and began a long march to the remains of the New Town Hall, now the centre of the Russian occupation authorities. The Lord Mayor made the occasional broadcast, but everyone knew that the Russians were pulling his strings; everyone suspected that the Russians might have even had him as a willing ally from before the war. It was easy to look for people to blame; was it the government, the skinheads, the Arabs, the…? There was no way to know for certain, although Gudrun’s father had certainly had an opinion; Gudrun considered him, at least in part, a class enemy.
She had sneaked out of the house after her father had left for his seemingly endless task of rebuilding the city’s infrastructure. The Russians had rounded up a few hundred trained workers, but they’d been massively overstretched by the scale of the disaster; the city had tilted on the brink before they had finally managed to save it from drought and starvation. Her father hadn’t known about the march; he would only have forbidden her from going. The throng welcomed her, as they welcomed everyone willing to join them; they advanced towards the New Town Hall, shouting their defiance at the Russians. Gudrun, now part of the pack, shouted too; no identification cards, Russians go home…
The marches thronged the streets, only vaguely aware of the Russian helicopters that passed over them briefly, taking careful notes. Their shadows sent gloom wherever they touched, but Gudrun was unimpressed and the gloom faded when they vanished again, perhaps having attempted to terrify the students into dispersing. They had failed.
“They can’t scare us,” a male voice shouted, and the crowd rapidly took up the chant. “Russians out, Russians out, Russians out…”
They had protested before; they had even played a role in the downfall of one German government. The crowd was almost a living thing; Gudrun could feel it as they focused their energy on the Russian guards at the end of the road, a line of Russians deploying themselves to face the crowd; they were useless, the crowd laughed at them and kept going. The wave of energy suffused them; they were unstoppable, the Russians would run, the Russians would hide from the power of the people united…
The Russians opened fire.
The noise of the heavy machine guns tore through the air, shocking the crowd; those hit by the bullets added their own noise to the racket, blood and gore splashing everywhere as the Russians fired directly into the crowd. For many, it was their first sight of blood; they fainted, or screamed, trying to run as the Russian troops waded forwards, weapons raised. Clubs came lashing down on skulls; anyone who tried to fight was gunned down mercilessly. The crowd, stung by a thousand red hot bullets, disintegrated; students and protesters tried to run, only to be herded back by more Russian soldiers, wielding clubs and shouting orders in German.
Gudrun had been one of the lucky ones; she had been knocked to the ground as soon as the shooting started, unhurt apart from bruised knees and bloody scratches on her legs. She tried to crawl away, only to be caught, secured, and thrown towards a group of her fellow female protesters, all forced to sit on the ground with their hands brutally tied behind their backs. The male protesters were rounded up as well; she caught sight of her boyfriend’s broken face as the Russians escorted the male protesters into trucks driven by German drivers, all handcuffed to the wheel. She met his eyes, one final time; they were torn with horror and despair.
She didn’t want to look at the bodies, or the blood; there were hundreds of bodies waiting for disposal as the Russian soldiers moved through them, inspecting them all, unconcerned about the blood. A handful of mortally wounded protesters were quickly shot in the head, their cries fading away as they were sent into merciful oblivion; a handful of protesters who had been playing dead were found and tossed in with the other trapped protesters. The Russians finally completed their grizzly task and barked orders; Gudrun, despite herself, wasn’t blind to the implications of separating the men from the women. Somehow, she didn’t think that their fate would be pleasant.
For the next hour, their hands were freed and their legs were shackled together, before they were given their orders; clear up the mess. Some of the girls became hysterical at the sight before them and refused; the Russians simply shot them in the head, leaving only a few hundred girls to clear up the dead bodies. Gudrun forced herself to work, picking up the remains of her friends and fellows; she forced herself not to look as the remains were dumped in the back of several garbage trucks and carted out of the city. Gudrun wasn’t religious, but she didn’t like the thought of the remains of her friends being dumped in a mass grave; she didn’t dare protest. The slightest hint of defiance was met with death. Broken, sobbing, Gudrun worked until the Russians finally pulled them out of the hellish scene, loaded them onto trucks, and sent them back out of the city.
She exchanged glances with the other girls. What was going to happen to them? They all wondered; were they going to ever see their homes again? Some of them had small injuries, others had nasty-looking wounds; some of them weren’t even properly dressed any longer. All of them were covered in blood, staining everything; she felt dirty, disgusting… helpless. Unable almost to breathe, because of the smell, Gudrun was forced out of the van by the Russians, still shackled to the others, and forced into a shower. The cold water was a shock, but it was a relief; the girls tried as best as they could to clean themselves before the Russians escorted them into the next room, and stopped.
“No,” Gudrun said, or thought; it hardly mattered now. Their fate had become all too clear; she wondered, suddenly, if the same had happened to the boys, or if they had merely been dumped into a work gang. “No…”
They were facing a horde of Russian soldiers, looking at the girls with expressions that could not be described with mere words. Some of the girls tried to protest, knowing that it would get them killed… but they weren't killed, as the Russians started to undo their trousers and consider the helpless girls. They advanced towards the young girls…
And then the screaming really started.
Interlude Five: Nightmare
It was happening all over Europe.
The Russians had known, of course, about the depth of leftist sentiment in Europe, the feeling that protesters had the right to protest about whatever they liked, without any thought as to the consequences of their actions, or even possible punishment in the future. They had counted on it, flattered it, encouraged it… and ensured that many of the leaders of the ‘left’ were either brought under their control or disappeared before they could organise pacifist resistance. Many of them were realists and accepted the new world order; many more believed what they said, and had to be removed before they could cause trouble.
The Russians also knew the key to a successful campaign of civil disobedience.
It could be summed up as ‘choose your opponent carefully;’ the theorists of the left had never grasped that point. Looking for overall examples of people power — India, Mexico, even the Moscow Coup Attempt of 1991 — they had missed the specifics; the people had moved against opponents who had consciences. The British had not mown down the Great Salt March, nor had the Russian soldiers in Moscow fired on Yeltsin and his people; they had cared about their people, or about public opinion. The Russians did not care about either, particularly people who were useless; the students and young adults who thronged the streets of Europe were useless to them.
The wave of violence started and ended quickly. In Warsaw, a sit-down protest ended with the tanks ignoring the bodies in their path and driving onwards over them; seventy died and twelve more were injured and died soon afterwards. In Berlin, students who tried to retake the remains of the centre of government found themselves fired upon, clubbed, and hauled off to detention camps. In France, protesters who had found their way to one of the Arab detention camps and protested at the detention found themselves shoved into the camp; for the young women, they had been tossed into hell. Resistance was futile…