C HAPTER 1
Another Russia
A K ILOMETER OF F REEDOM
I spent the night of November 2324, 2007, serenely. No doubts, no disturbing visions on the edge of sleep, no sleeping pills or sedatives. At the alarm, or rather, at the click that preceded the alarm, I rose, scraped my cheeks with a new Gillette, and instead of a showersince I was at my dachaI bathed in the snow. Outside, it was not yet growing light. My children were asleep.
While I was pouring myself a cup of coffee the color and strenght of diesel fuel and heaping some Faulkneresque ham and eggs onto a plate, I got a call from the young woman who was standing in for our political desk chief at the paper.
Valery, are you going to the Dissenters March today?
Sure! How could there be a Dissenters March without me?
And tomorrow, are you going to Petersburg for the Dissenters March there, too?
Absolutely, Anya!
And youll get hauled in by the police again?
That I cant promise. Should I? My effervescent pre-march excitement made me flaunt my politics, which infuriated my boss.
Why do you always have to make everything complicated?
It was too late to appear reasonable and modest, so I replied, Thats what you pay me for.
I put on two sweaters, two pairs of warm socks, a down jacket, a wool Afghan pakul brought back from Mazar-i-Sharif the year the Americans went into Afghanistan, and thick-soled boots that were once Tods but were now shapeless leather bubbles that had escaped the trash bin only by virtue of their amazing durability. I also stuck two pairs of gloves in my pockets.
When you attend rallies often, you get in the habit of dressing warmly.
All the cars were going in the opposite direction, out of town. My lane was empty. I smoked at the wheel and cranked the music up to the max and enjoyed the hell out of the mix of music, tobacco smoke, and speed. As usual on a Saturday morning, downtown Moscow was deserted, if you didnt count the army trucks and paddy wagons parked on the Garden Ring Road, Bulvarny, and the adjacent side streets. When the oil runs out and our president dies, the band DDT sang on my tape deck for all they were worth. Not only werent there any cars, there werent any people, if you didnt count the OMONthe special-purpose policehiding out for now in their buses behind tinted windows and the soldiers cordoning off block after block, frozen stiff but receiving no order to get warm or jump in place or even wipe the snot from their blue noses.
Theyve got you under their thumb, I whistled, driving by in my warm car, with a feeling of distinct superiority over the soldiers, a feeling which, at the march, would be leveled by a single blow of the truncheon.
There were still a couple of hours left until the march. But before it started I still had to go to the Shokoladnitsa Caf on Sretenka to meet up with Marina Litvinovich and Denis Bilunov, members of the United Civic Fronts political council, to exchange secret telephone numbers purchased the day before and never used and probably never tapped, and to agree on our travel to Petersburg that evening, but mainly, it seemed to me, to prolong for at least an hour this anxious anticipation of the march, which was probably going to disappoint us before it had barely begun when we saw the low turnout, the sluggishness, and the muddle of everyone at cross-purposes.
Besides us there were four others in the caf. Two young men worked as correspondents for either Dutch or Danish television; the brawny smiling guy at our table worked as Marinas guard; and the brawny glowering guy in the far corner as Marinas tail. The guard was telling jokes, the tail was looking at a book, pretending he could read, and the correspondents were talking to Denis Bilunov in broken Russian.
We want to film one day out of your life. You our hero. Whatever happens, we will ask you to stay and make comment.
Denis smiled at the image: five OMON men dragging Denis to a paddy wagon, his arms twisted behind his back, and the Danish correspondents at that very moment asking him to stick around and comment on what was happening.
When the ham sandwiches were gone, we went outside. Instead of paying, the spy assigned to us showed the waitress his ID. Marina got a text saying that all the underground passages across the Garden Ring Road had been closed on the pretext of emergency repairs. We walked down the sunny, deserted side streets. On Kostyansky Lane, or maybe it was Dayevy, the Danish journalists searched among the Mercedes and Lexuses until they found a rusty, Soviet-era Pobeda with a cracked windshield and asked Denis to record his first commentary in front of that car. Evidently they thought that in the film Moscow should look like a Havana descended upon by a glacier, the final touch on all our totalitarian misfortunes.
Broad Sakharov Avenue was blocked off on both sides by a triple police cordon. To get through it, the few thousand people who had come for the march were compelled to pass through five or six metal detectors. A line formed that was no fun to stand in. According to long tradition, the authorities drove a couple of hundred homeless to every opposition rally for the purpose of displaying the drunken riffraff who constituted Putins opponents. In exchange for participating in the countrys political life, the homeless demand vodka but not to be allowed to wash.
While I was standing in this crowd of intelligentsia, students, and bums, I told my friends a tale about how not long ago one oppositionist politician planning to run for president went to see a famous banker to ask for money for his campaign. The meeting took place in a restaurant. The banker was eating oysters. No sooner had the politician walked in than the banker said to him, as he scooped a fine de claire out of its shell, So, I guess you want to run for president? Have you really thought this over? Have you thought about the fact that your wife, Tanya, and your son, Vadik, could be abducted tomorrow and youd never find them? The politician was taken aback. He broke out in red spots, muttered something, and took his leave. And no sooner had he gone than the banker said to the intermediaries in the talks between the politician and businessman who were still at the table, So what? Hes asking for twenty million of my money, by the way. Dont I have a right to know whether hes going to piss his pants at the first attack?
My friends laughed at my tale. The line was moving slowly. In the crowd, trying not to miss a single face, systematically, like farmers plowing their field, FSBFederal Security Serviceagents were going around with video cameras. Without consulting each other, Marina and I turned to one of them.
