Moscow diary

What is it like to live in the capital of the aggressor state. Explanatory note

I saw our city different: cheerful, sad, frightened, indignant, protesting, humbled. Today it seems viscous to me: it seems to be possible in it, and at the same time - as if nothing.

On November 24, in the open, a poetic evening was held to collect money to lawyers in the Tyumen case, which arose in September 2022 and about which they say that this is the “second edition of the network of the network”, referring to both torture and the ideological orientation of the prisoners - anarchist and anti -fascist.

In addition to the verses, there were different books and vegan foods-all this flew to the floor, when at about 19:20, more than twenty men in masked ballaps, with batons and black uniforms without insignia, broke into the room.

They immediately, without looking, turned the tables, all those present, 30–40 people were divided by a sexual basis: they put the girls and women on the wall in the pose “hands behind the head, not turn, do not talk”, guys and men - in the same pose were put on the floor, faces down.

It is difficult to say exactly how many hours we lay, and the people in the uniform mocked us verbally and physically, dripping with boots, but I can assume that there are four hours. Then the process of “filtering” began: they talked with everyone without a protocol in civilian clothes, reminiscent of the employees of the “E” center, everyone photographed their faces in uniforms, everyone rewrote the IMEI phones, they took everyone in the Avtozaks to the police department. There, too, there were without protocols, the detainees wrote explanatory and were released between the three and four hours in the morning. It was frosty in Moscow, I cringed in advance, imagining how I would run to the stop of the night bus and how I would bounce at this stop, but the girls called in a taxi. "Well, did you have the feeling that you have experienced a terrorist act?" I then shrugged, but now I think that it really looked like: an uncertain armed group hiding their faces and identities captured us at a completely peaceful meeting, where young poets read poetry, we humiliated us consistently, especially resting on the peculiarities of the appearance (glasses, long hair with the guys and the like), and threatened us, for many hours, no one of us understood when it turned out to be for many hours. Freedom - today, tomorrow, ten days later or in ten years.

Consciously intimidated, terrorize the inhabitants of Moscow for a long time: the new laws adopted by the State Duma, the decrees that the president signed by cruel, with the use of physical violence, the acceleration of rallies and pickets, indicative detentions on video surveillance cameras, and the allocations during the so -called “partial mobilization”, which is not visible. Why, why are we still living here, why didn’t we rebel, why didn’t we run away, at worst?

I recall the film by the French director Truffo “400 strokes”: boys 13-14 years old, who are not needed by his parents-alcohols, rotary attirates or just oak-doors who are practically not trained by anything sadists and school warders, walking the lessons, hanging around the streets, they stupidly steal, then come back, and then they finally find themselves in the arms their great homeland, in the person of special prison for difficult adolescents, a boarding school for barbed wire, where those who are trying to escape are forcibly returned every week. In the final of the picture, the protagonist dumps from this prison to the sea, which he either has never seen for a long time or at all.

We are all in Moscow now like this “difficult teenager” from the film: we must delay the mockery of a dull and cruel “system”,

The indifference or frank hostility of parents and closest relatives, we all do not understand how it happened that this is how our life turned out to be, because we just wanted to walk a little with a complete alluring surprise to the city, and maybe sometimes drive to the sea. But the choice of sea is now limited by Murmansk, Kaliningrad and Sochi. I’m not even saying about Vladivostok: who of us has money to get to the bottom? We and Sochi with Kaliningrad do not have enough. So we run away “from lessons” strictly in the area between Altufevo in the north and Domodedovo in the south, and sometimes in our free time we go to poetic evenings with a vegan treat.

In the spring, we did not run abroad, because there was no passport, visa and money, and there was no understanding of why it was we who should run from the city, because we were born here or arrived, albeit recently, but voluntarily, in search of poetry, philosophy, meaning, joy and freedom, well, yes, what kind of ruble, not as long, as we have come from. Why should we run, and not those who are proud of their uniform, with or without identification marks, and on this basis is mocking others?

In the summer it seemed to us that all this, because of which few of our friends fled in the spring, would end soon, everything seemed to go to that, as those who settled far and owned important sources of receiving and transmitting information told us. We believed the old acquaintances, listened from abroad to exh whatly speeches about the need for “quiet resistance” and waited for the “X hour”, when we all rebel or when everything will be sure. From smart YouTubes, we know that revolutions and disasters in Russia are always unpredictable, but the advantage of those who were the first to play. Remaining in place, we secretly hoped that maybe this time the Lord or Fortune would give out to us.

In the fall, when the partial unlimited was announced, many of our friends have already left, but many remained: friends, friends, poetry, philosophy, meaning, joy and some ruble. Yes, I had to simulate in social networks and instant messengers, where they distribute the summons, I had to change their place of residence, I had to abandon the detrimental habits to visit catering establishments and go to the metro, where the number of outdoor surveillance cameras would soon come close to the number of passengers. In addition, student and student postponigns, in addition, a girlfriend suggested a hut in an inconspicuous village, almost a monastery, besides a friend of her own invited her to go right on her, on the territory of the golden -headed white -stone, port of the five seas.

Remained again. But this tendency to poetry, to philosophy, to the knowledge of the history of the native land is drawn to meetings, on reading, on discussion - they are still in our city, with one of these events I began my small story. It cannot be said that faces in black uniforms, very similar to terrorists, come everywhere. We assume that we are not lucky.

We will assume that I tell you not everything that I know what I am doing and what we are all doing, Muscovites and Muscovites of 2022. We will assume that all this is our “non-unit secret”, that one of us is now writing about this poem, someone is a philosophical dissertation, and someone wipes the details and hones the work of the experimental eternal engine of optimism. We will assume that we cannot reveal all the cards, because otherwise we will take our poetry, our philosophy and our eternal engine, and then we will reward to sell for our not such a long ruble-our parents say that this was already in the eighties and nineties, and what this happened more than once in the last five to now.

I did not conduct an inventory of all detainees on November 24 (maybe in vain), so I will not say reliable that we are still in Moscow, I could not even give a generalized characteristic of us “all”. Nevertheless, they delivered us to the department at different auto -zats, I never met everyone, I did not talk to everyone. I know that someone managed to get caught up, that someone bought and read a new book, someone writes a new book, someone is preparing for the session.

And something does not suit me something. I wanted to write like a “activist’s diary” (although what the hell are we all, activists after February 24?), But something like an explanatory notes of the observer behind Russian nature-weather and ugly, so common in about a thousand years or more.

I leave you myself in the hope of changes. Tsoi, by the way, still play and sing by the subway-do not hesitate to leave. Only more and more often - in female voices.

Sometimes I think I: Eh, I am born a girl! .. But what did not happen, that didn’t happen, I won’t change this, it is much more important to change our city and homeland in the right direction. We work on this, for the sake of this, we believe me. Do not be sad there without us (and we are sad without you, what already). Write more often in your free media, we read them, look. But we will share our own here.

The walls will collapse.