“Ah, they brought the rockers”: how the informals were screwed in 2006

An employee of the International Society Memorial, historian Alexei Makarov tells how the participants of the hippie festival in Moscow were detained in 2006.

And about ours about the Soviet police,

Besides this song, not a single one ...

Venya d'rkin

In those distant times, when the police were still a police, the fines were small, and the OVD-info still did not exist, the hippies lived. In general, in the mid-2000s, informals were quite often screwed, but society was not very interested in this, and there was nothing in the press about our history.

In 2006, the organizers of the parade of soap bubbles on the Arbat decided to arrange the Maisk Tree non-festival . The part of the party was chosen by the clearing at the Botanical Garden metro (then this place was not yet fenced off, now there is the Park "Garden of the Future"). About 100 people blew the bubbles, sang, painted in smallcoves on the asphalt, danced, weaved baubles and did not break anything. That's nothing at all.

But, alas, we were not lucky-Drimflash (the so-called hippie festivals) coincided with the first attempt to hold a gay parade in Moscow. Then the phantasmagoria begins. The cops arrived. Very polite, but not explaining anything, they swore eight people, including me. The vintage principle was quite simple - young men who seem to be organizers.

I was screwed up, because I began to download the rights and ask what was happening and by what right (I already had experience - vintage of human rights activists at the anti -fascist picket “under the hooves of the horse”, that is, at the monument to Yuri Dolgoruky opposite the Moscow City Hall, November 27, 2005).

They brought it to the police department, some distant and non-trivial, now I can’t even figure out which one. Apparently, this ATS rarely dealt with informals, because while we were raised to the second floor, curious cops protruded from the corridor and commented on what was happening in the spirit of "A, they brought the rockers ...".

They closed us in a monkey, I was about to call my friends to human rights activists, but the rest persuaded me not to download my rights too much. Just a couple of minutes later, they came for us and took it to the assembly hall. There, the deputy chief of the police department spoke before us, and his short but bright speech remained in my memory forever. He said literally the following:

Everything is fine, we have no complaints about you if you want to do something in our area-contact, help. We are far from the metro, to go this and so, thanks, goodbye

Perplexing what this happens, we went out, went to the subway, returned back to the "botanical garden." It turned out that it started to rain, and everyone dispersed, and part of the hippie went to rescue us from the cop, but to another police department ...

The most logical reconstruction of events looks like this. Rumor had it that the skins would come to beat gays and the cops need to ensure that everything went quietly in the subordinate territory, so the easiest way to protect citizens is ... Correctly, to lead some citizens, the rest would understand that the buzz was broken off and dispersed, therefore, there would simply be guarded-that’s the profit. In short, it is easier to disperse hippies than to protect them from skins.