Arctic Flowers

There was an apartment block I used to walk past all the time in Moscow. Nothing special about it. After October 7, 2006, my eye would always drift to that building and its entrance door. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya was killed there.

 

            I had to look up the year. I remember the day and month with no prompting, but the year, no. And I’d have to look up the years for many of these grim milestones. They’ve all blurred in my memory. A long litany of murders.

 

            One of the last big murders before I left Russia was in 2015, a bleak anniversary just ten days away now. The politician Boris Nemtsov was gunned down on a bridge by the Kremlin. I often crossed that bridge too. After Nemtsov’s death, there were always flowers there, and always someone watching over them, keeping the makeshift memorial intact. The authorities would clear it all away, but the flowers and the people always came back.

 

             Alexei Navalny joins the sombre list now, his bright star extinguished up in the Arctic reaches, where flowers don’t last and people don’t pass. Extinguished because the regime feared his charisma and his moral strength, his ability to rally people and give them hope.

 

            Another politician shut out from politics, like the journalists silenced, the activists beaten into retreat or exile, a courageous man who led by example, telling people not to be afraid and returning to a homeland he knew would imprison him, probably kill him, but that was who he was, the kind of person you could raise a monument to, only that’s what’s so tragic about Russia’s history – it’s all heroes, sacrifices, martyrs, monuments.

 

            Monuments in whatever form permitted. A few shy flowers deposited at the modest memorials to the millions of lives already long since stolen and gone. In Moscow, it was a stone from the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, where the Soviet state’s gulag began. Erected on Lubyanka Square, close to the old KGB, now FSB headquarters.

 

            Shortlived flowers in the winter snow. A climate of crushing silence. The rehearsals began years ago. And after 2012, the regime took no chances. Out and about in central Moscow, you’d see everything at the ready, men and equipment, as if in a city under siege, at every rumour of a possible protest. A regime that feared its own population, a regime ready to kill and torture to ensure its own survival, even if the threat was pitifully small.

 

            I used to do some translation for a group of lawyers who represented prisoners or their families seeking justice over their treatment within the Russian prison system. Torture was rife, and you didn’t have to be an opposition politician to be subjected to those levels of hell. Denial of medical treatment too. And everyday detention conditions that were already torture in themselves.

 

            We hear about the prominent names, but how many small lives chewed up and spat out in that inhumane system, how many obscure fates we never hear about. And Navalny, he had a knack for communication, willing to talk with anyone, whether in Moscow or the provinces, whether on the streets or in prison cells. A real politician. Unlike those men in the Kremlin, for whom everything has to be staged, vetted, planned, no adversaries, no surprises, no debate.

 

            I’ve been living in Vienna these last few years, and one of the first things I noticed here was the “Stolpersteine”, small plaques laid into the ground in front of buildings. They commemorate Jewish residents killed in the Holocaust. A primarily private initiative, as far as I know, relatives and descendants keeping alive the memory of their loss, and of a dark chapter in Vienna’s life. It creates a geography of murder, a map of crime spread across the city, but you walk and look down, and think, there were people living their lives, Viennese, until others decided to send them to their deaths.

 

            Back in Russia, a similar kind of initiative had begun. Posledny Adres – Last Address. Small plaques on buildings, with the names of those who’d lived there before being arrested and swallowed by Stalin’s prisons and camps. A way of keeping historical memory alive and part of that long, hard and painful task of digesting, and learning from the past.

 

            All that halted now, of course, by a regime that has no desire to study the past, but only to force-feed its people a manipulated, simplistic version that serves its own cynical ends.

 

            Putin has no need for real maps, only for those in his head. He never spoke Navalny’s name, as if to do so would be to acknowledge that here was a rival, albeit with far fewer resources in a system rigged from the start. He tried to banish and erase Navalny from Russia’s life, and hopes now the name will soon fade, the name he could never bring himself to say out loud.

 

            Out of fear. A regime that has to kill its opponents has no legitimacy, no genuine support of the people. At best – and for many in Russia – it’s simply “the devil you know”. Fear of the unknown, fear of chaos.

 

            I’ve been to the Russian Arctic. The summers are vicious, swarms of mosquitos and gnats, but then comes a brief, kinder season when the mosquitos stop biting, worn out perhaps after their bloodthirsty frenzy, and small flowers do grow, berries, mushrooms, hiding in the tundra. And these little piles of flowers laid in the snow in various Russian cities now, paying tribute to a hero felled, they may seem so few, so timid, but flowers grow again, even under Arctic frosts.

 

            A dark and tragic hour for Russia indeed. A long night, perhaps. But no one, not the greatest tyrant, has ever yet found a way to stave off dawn forever.