Eyewitness Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

I wrote the text that follows ten years ago. It was published at the time in Moscow’s progressive New Gazette. I had hoped that the leadership of the Moscow police would have in some way reacted to the article. A copy of the newspaper was delivered to them. But I received no reply. I did not protest further: after all, the more one makes noise, the more actively the police force defends itself by hanging entirely new crimes on the victim. I feared for the life of the unfortunate young man.

Today, nothing has changed in the conduct of the police force. Take the case of Maj. Denis Yevsyukov, who in April 2009 went on a shooting rampage in a supermarket, killing three people and wounding seven. Though he was recently sentenced to life in prison, the crime enraged citizens, who often see violent offenders in those who would be their protectors.

Recently, I was told about an unemployed person who responded to a notice for a job. He was hired as a courier and given a packet for delivery. Almost immediately, he was arrested. In the packet were small, uncut, emeralds. The police told him, “Pay $10,000 and we’ll let you go.” But the courier answered, “Let them try me, I am not guilty. I have no money.” The police were distraught, giving rise to the suspicion that they had organized the ruse, including the notice in the employment office. At the trial, the lawyer informed relatives of the defendant that one of his colleagues was party to an absolutely identical scam, but the value of the emeralds in this case made it even more absurd—they were $15 each.

Within the police force itself, officers have begun to complain that the system pressures and forces them to fabricate crimes for the sake of statistics. Maj. Alexei Dymovskiy’s wrenching appeal to the president over such practices became an Internet sensation, winning the support of many of his colleagues and ordinary people. He was later arrested on fraud charges, and is now in prison.

Much has changed since I first wrote this article: the mass media is far freer. Here, one might say that true glasnost has arrived. In the press, one article after the other flashes past about police-murderers, the insane, or about the arrests of completely innocent people who merely protested the limiting of their rights. One such instance concerns the octogenarian human rights advocate, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, who was arrested on New Year’s Eve near the Kremlin on baseless grounds. She had arrived there with friends to celebrate; all were simply standing there.

Recently, I spent three hours at a police station with friends and others who were sympathetic to the plight of a young boy, detained simply because he was standing on Red Square among a crowd of picketers.

Something must change. Here is my chronicle of an incident that took place ten years ago, but might as well have taken place yesterday.

—Dedicated to the cadets of the police academy, who were beating a man to death before my eyes.

On Friday, between seven and eight in the evening, people were pouring out of the “1905 Street” metro station. At the exit leading toward Presnenskiy Val, the crowd, for some reason, had jammed up. It wasn’t dispersing; it just stood there. From a distance came the sound of women wailing in despair, gasping: “O-ooy, what are you doing? Oy, Oy. Let go, let go!”

Young policemen scuffled with the women, pulling at them, dragging them from side to side.

One could have assumed that some elderly women pensioners, or starushki, had again been caught peddling baskets and sacks of onions and sauerkraut, and that the police were confiscating them. I happened upon such a scene here once before.

The women, at that time, were shrieking terribly, and these women now were doing the same, but in such a painfully heart-rending fashion, with their last ounce of strength. They had already been dragged out into the open, as if onto a stage.

Now it was clear what was being confiscated from these old women. It was a young man.

The policemen—young, well-built guys wearing heavy jackets—were waging war on the starushki, who were hanging onto the fellow from both sides, not allowing him to move his arms. Feverishly, the women were trying to drag their young man away. The policemen were tormenting this tightly knit family, trying to tear it apart. All of this was happening in full view of the crowd. The fellow had been beaten. His nose was already swollen. On the bridge of his nose, a wound was visible, and a white spot had formed around it. Blood flooded his mouth. Where was he being dragged off? And what on earth had happened?

There were a lot of policemen. I began asking what was going on. Three of them quickly surrounded me. One of them—a plain-clothesman, tall with kind of a crooked nose and a long face—immediately began using vulgar language with me: “What are you on about? What the fuck do you want?”

He rudely began pushing me in the direction of the metro. The police seemed to have developed some sort of tactic—to drive you back, remove you to some other location.

My question and my demand—“Who are you?” and “Show me your documents!”—were met with the sort of reaction one would expect.

But I wasn’t alone. There was shouting from the crowd. People were showing their concern. Complete strangers had surrounded us and wanted to know who else had been taken away and for what reason. Then, a man—evidently the senior officer—approached and addressed our question by asking: “And what did you expect? He struck a policeman!”

He delivered this with a particular enthusiasm and then very quickly disappeared. Someone in the crowd yelled after him:

“You need to go to Chechnya.”

He shot back: “I’ve been there.”

While the cops were dealing with us—in the process, intentionally obstructing our view of what was happening—the old women had been neutralized and were being held off to the side. The man, his arms now broken, was smashed face-first against the asphalt. The crowd groaned. Two men sat on top of him, pinning his elbows rather high behind his back. The others stood guard.

A cultured and educated-looking lady next to me was mumbling: “His arms, they broke his arms.”

The young man did not stir. It ought to be noted that, at the moment he and the starushki were being taken down, his coat was ripped from his body leaving only his half-buttoned shirt covering a huge, powerful chest. His was the image of an ancient Russian warrior—one straight from a Vasnetsov painting—with a crazed, bloodied face.

Now, he lay on his back, motionless on the ground. Everyone stood as if at a funeral or as they would after witnessing an execution. The police cadets looked as though they felt they deserved a pat on the back for a job well done. Up drove their dilapidated, official vehicle.

Policemen swung the fellow’s limp body back and forth like a battering ram and flung him facedown through the open doors of the van. The sound of his head smashing against its metal interior is impossible to convey—vskrip. Perhaps a beheading produces such a sound.

Freed at last, the starushki, like heaps of rags, mindlessly rushed toward the van, confusing it with an ambulance. They were brushed back. “Where are you taking him, where are you taking him?” they pleaded.

Some kind of purely Chechen circumstances have come to peaceful Moscow life.

One of the cops, half turning, said,

“We’re going to Pure Ponds, to the police station.” (He lied.)

There was a moment when I thought that this entire wound-up crowd was about to rally to the aid of the old women. Just consider these names—Uprising Square, 1905 Street, The Barricade—they’re all right here! These are those same historical locations. And no one knows what meaningless ruckus will spark the next universal hysteria. It’s so simple now to inspire hatred in a crowd!

The question is—what for?

What happened in 1905? The clergyman Father Gapon led a column of disgruntled workers to seek protection from the Czar. The militia of that time (the police) shot them. The aim was to display their strength to the ruling authority. And thus rebellion had begun—the revolution of 1905–07. For two years, deaths, robberies, rapes, and pogroms engulfed the country. Lenin wrote completely insane, incendiary letters to Russia:

“Dear Comrades! It is with horror, by god, sheer horror that I note the talk of bombs has been going on for more than one-half year, yet not one has been produced! The murder of policemen, bombings of police headquarters...are taking place everywhere.”

How this entire affair ended, we see all too well. The population is shrinking. We are beating each other—on the streets, in the police force, in the army.

People began writing down the license number of the vehicle, but my pen had gone missing somewhere. The only man who wore any type of badge on his chest was sitting in the cabin. I looked at the number, but he growled: “What have I got to do with this?” and closed his door.

The van was taken away. People dispersed. One worldly looking person with an impoverished appearance—clearly a man of science—said: “Now they’ll find a knife or drugs on him.”

Only a few people remained on the battlefield—the two, tormented staruskhi, relatives of the young man; the cultured and educated-looking lady; and a middle-aged man, also cultured and educated-looking. He was mumbling that he would write down the telephone number, that he would be a witness, that this matter must not be dropped. He put his small briefcase on the ground, rooted around in it, and took out an address book of some sort.

I, honestly, was so affected by this public lynching that I didn’t think to take down the telephone numbers of these people. I took from the old women only the fellow’s name: “Alexei Ilyichev.” And in two places—on a scrap of paper and in my diary—I scribbled the license number of the vehicle. It was the only opportunity to find out where these people were from.

In response to the question of what happened at the beginning, the old women explained that they had come with “Lesha” (the young fellow) to the metro to meet their sister... and didn’t understand what had happened. They didn’t understand anything at all!

It seems that I got out of the metro at the very beginning of the incident, when the young man was punched in the nose and dragged off.

Arriving home, I began calling various acquaintances from the newspapers and television.

After a while, a television crew went to the police station on Litvin-Sedoy Street. They later telephoned me back and said: “We called it off. They told us who this person is—a dangerous criminal. He’s on the wanted list. He had five knives. He wounded two policemen. They’re now in hospital undergoing operations.”

“Did you check where?”

“Yes,” they hurriedly answered me.

“Excuse us, we have a program that’s about to begin.”

For them, this had caused a significant delay. (Maybe they hadn’t checked at all).

My relative, who is close to informed circles, said: “Recently, we received a message from Petersburg. Some maniac in the metro there wounded two police officers. One of them died. He had many knives.”

“Do you think this was their response—a harsh detention?”

“Maybe.”

“He had no knives at all.”

After that, I was given some phone numbers. I spoke with many people from certain government departments. Accounts of the circumstances varied greatly: that Ilyichev, at the very beginning, had struck a police officer, “grazing him,” which is to say hit him, but not too hard; that there were two knives, no, three more materialized, as well as an opened straight-razor; then some large extended family appeared on God’s earth by a metro station that doesn’t exist in nature (evidently, this extended family was us. And just where was he supposed to be carrying these five knives—when the fellow was dragged and tossed about like a sack?); and it’s lucky for the cadets that they were wearing heavy jackets and were not wounded too badly.

A phrase: “No one expected that he would regain consciousness in the vehicle.”

Which is to say, they were certain that he wouldn’t regain consciousness. We now are no longer able to understand anything.

I saw someone who was puffed-up like a Cosmonaut, no longer in the prime of youth, aged about 33—it turns out that he is only 20.

I saw two pitiful old women who were clinging to him. But, according to police accounts, it turned out there were roughly seven relatives, all of them male, who were ready for a battle!

A person from the crowd—the scientist—it’s as if he gazed into a crystal ball about to foretell of the knives that would be discovered. But for the circumstances to have been so in sync with the incident in Petersburg, with the local maniac there! Two cops were wounded there and two here. There, they were taken to hospital; and, by this token, too, we were identical. There, a bunch of knives was found. Here, too (But five knives or two? Or was it none?)

My eldest son, sometime long ago, had two hippie friends who were hanging out on Kropotkinskaya Street, begging for money to buy food. A penknife was found on one of them, and he was put in prison. The one who had no knife got six years, the other seven. The second one returned from prison to a life that was nowhere to be found—his mother had died during those years, although she was a young woman; his apartment was gone, too. As for him personally, he returned ill with an advanced case of tuberculosis. He did his time in the infamous Uglicheskaya Tuberculosis zone. And so, he wasted away: a poor hippie, with a beard and long hair and a penknife in his pocket. Lately, he had been hoping to land a job as a boiler-room operator at a tuberculosis hospital somewhere outside of Tula.

Well, yes, we easily turn our male population into criminals. There is a term—“crime-generating situation”—i.e., one that breeds crime.

Just who breeds it?

In view of this, the government is planning to take measures to increase the population, which is declining catastrophically.

But policemen are the same as the rest of us. To them something that is not human is alien.

Someone, possibly, told them that there are words such as “provocation,” “incitement”; but this translated into Russia-speak becomes “deliberate aggravation,” meaning that any person can be driven into a state, whereby he becomes enraged and responds...all the more so if he’s been drinking. (And who hasn’t been drinking on a Friday night?)

There’s a television series: “Cops.” Kind policemen, smart, loyal, hard-working people. They don’t rob people of their money.

On the street, cops are stupid, large, and you know the rest. They extort money from migrants, especially if the migrant doesn’t have a so-called “registration”—a residence permit. With a trained eye, they identify foreigners in the metro; they detain them. They stop vehicles and openly take money from the drivers, if they’ve commited a violation.

How many times have I witnessed this from the passenger seat of a car!

A few days later, also in the evening, I dropped into a bookshop. It’s an excellent shop with my favorite items (notebooks, pens, photo albums—my childhood heaven).

And there—in step with what’s described above—a scene. A boy, aged about sixteen, disheveled, with a backpack, a snowball in his left hand, walks into the shop. Just a little piece of snow.

The guard, quite understandably, didn’t allow the boy to enter but does so in a rather crude manner. He then laid hands on the boy and began to show him the door. Already a scandal was brewing. The boy, pale, is boiling like a teakettle: “You pushed me! You’ll pay for this! You won’t be here for long!”

Further—escalation. The elderly guard, insulted: “You don’t know the kind of people who have my back. You, you don’t have the guts.”

In other words, a serious clarification of their relationship—all because of a snowball.

Listening attentively, a pair of policemen was already arriving from the rear. They warm up in the shop, evidently. Dropping in to browse the books. After all, it’s cold outside. Both are stout, tall.

Developments lead to words, attention: “Why are you punching me?” says the boy. “I’ll punch you...”

The cops become animated.

“You’re about to find out.” (The huge body of the policeman, tightly packed into a heavy jacket, slowly turns around): “Now, you’ll see. Do you know what ‘harsh detention’ means?”

Three against a disheveled, skinny, little fool. The snow in his hand still hadn’t melted. Half a minute had gone by.

But nothing happened. I loudly and politely said: “Excuse me!”

Immediately, I wedged myself into their already-deployed, semi-circular attack line, shielding the boy from them; before they could move me aside, I quickly told the lad what awaits him.

What awaits Alexei Ilyichev? Anywhere from 12 years in a maximum-security penitentiary to execution. If he’s still alive.

The two starushki will not see him again—two unraveled, tormented beings, small, with their mouths open wide, like on that placard: “The Motherland is Calling!”

I succeeded in saving the boy with the snowball. He left—pale and humiliated.

Russia hates cops.

—Translated from the Russian by Joseph Ritchey