Love Protest on the Red Square

When I heard that the Russian government had declared the Memorial Human Rights Center a “foreign agent,” I imagined something dramatic. Police breaking down the door, searches, arrests; but it's not like that. On the surface, the work of Memorial continues as usual. The office where I worked this September was in the prestigious Tsvetnoy Bulvar district, incidentally not far from the Lubyanka—the headquarters of the Federal Security Service or FSB. Uniformed and plainclothes officers walk by the building without visibly turning up their noses. Unlike Russia Behind Bars, an NGO whose office is camouflaged by a sign that says, “Military and Patriotic Society,” the office of Memorial is clearly marked.

Nevertheless, Memorial is on the brink of closure, and the fact that it is not dramatic and obvious makes this all the more terrifying. On September 4, I went to court when Memorial Human Rights Center was charged with not writing “foreign agent” on two articles that it did not write. The organization was fined 600,000 rubles. Though only 9714.28 USD, even this small amount was significant in the context of Russia’s tottering economy. Moreover, Memorial receives grants for specific projects and therefore cannot ask for grants to pay for fines that can be piled up indefinitely. As I went out of the courthouse I was shaking. When we got back to the office, Sasha Cherkasov—the chair of Memorial’s Human Rights program—invited everyone to drink like Dostoyevsky after he had lost money gambling. I asked for some juice instead and went back to my room to write a press release. It was hard to focus.

Dictatorship creates immense psychological pressure. I saw Olga Bochvar, who arranged my internship, only once in the office over the month that I spent at Memorial. She says that she has high blood pressure, possibly a result of stress or a long-term problem that was exacerbated by her job. Perhaps it is just an excuse meant to hide other reasons she has for not coming to work. Anastasia, a friend whom I met in 2013 when I interned at the Sakharov Center, which has also now been declared a foreign agent, started taking psychiatric medication this year and has suffered two episodes of clinical depression in the past two years. When I would come into the office around ten o’clock, I was alone except for the guard finishing his overnight duty. When I am in Russia, I feel myself reaching my breaking point, too. I often ask my grandmother to turn off the radio. It is tiring to constantly be on the lookout for the lies that even Echo Moscow, the liberal radio station, may spew.

I needed to lift the veil separating me from the truth. On September 11, I went to a military festival in the Red Square. I brought a Memorial quilt I had made that depicts a bridge formed from stars, cyrillic soft signs, my graduation robe, the date of Boris Nemtsov's death, and photographs of Politkovskaya, Magnitsky, Estemirova, Litvinenko, Baburova, Markelev, my great-grandfather Abba, who spent three years in the Gulag, and my grandfather Yulian, who died five years ago. I lay down on the cobblestones in the children's section of the festival with the quilt over my head. Some people crowded around me, but I couldn't see them. One girl said, "Is that a real person?"

I don’t know how long it was before a policeman came, uncovered me, and told me to leave. I told him I had to do what I think is right and he has to do what he thinks is right. A few minutes later more police came and dragged me from the festival. They threatened to call an ambulance or take me to a psychiatric hospital. When they asked me why I wouldn't stand up I replied that Nemtsov's murder makes me sick. He asked if I was drunk. I said I had some herbal daisy tea in the morning.

Since they didn't arrest me immediately, I tried to lie back down. They surrounded me and pinned me against a chain-link fence. They held my head as a policeman or a medic—I couldn’t see—stuck a white cotton ball, covered with something that made me sleepy, in my nose. Then the policemen became friendly and even asked to take a picture with me. They arrested me, no handcuffs. I was somewhat concerned about the lack of seat belts in the police car, but the driver assured me that we would drive slowly.

I became friends with everyone at the police station. One of the officers told me that he had never been to America, and that it would be expensive for him to go because he has nowhere to stay. I gave him my cell number in America and invited him to my house in Brookline. He asked me about my copy of Erik Erikson's Gandhi's Truth, so I offered to give it to him as a gift. He said that he did not know how to read English very well. Even when my cell phone and all of my bags were confiscated, nobody dared to take my Gandhi book, as though they understood its sacredness.

When asked for my profession, I told them about Fundamentals, Professor Redfield, and how I am studying civil disobedience. I told them that that I want to be a human rights lawyer, and then, once I have experience fighting evil, a high school English teacher. The witnesses and the woman writing the protocol advised me that teaching English is the safer option. The woman sympathized with me and said that her family was persecuted in the Soviet era, too—as Kulaks. A homeless man who had  also been arrested thought he recognized me and thanked me for buying him a pirozhok, a type of pastry, the day before. I had bought someone food the day before, but it was a Big Mac, not a pirozhok.

It is important to see through the facade of normalcy and recognize the severity of what Memorial, and Russia as a whole, is going through. However, it is also important not to get stuck in the Cold War-era narrative of Russia as the land of hopeless evil. After a little over three hours of interviewing, reading, and chatting with the other people who had been arrested, the detective took a statement from me, returned my things, and let me go without pressing charges. She told me to count up my money to make sure that my thirty-eight dollars were safe. I said that I trusted her, and indeed, the money was there, neatly folded.

In his autobiography, Gandhi called his actions grand or modest "experiments.” Before coming to Russia, I had spent too many SOSC essays arguing that theory and practice are incompatible, concluding that politics is just a messy business. Through my work with Memorial, however, I came to realize the power of “experiments” like Gandhi’s. I found that making politics personal means that modest acts of kindness can have huge significance. Olga Bochvar was so happy that I actually came to volunteer at Memorial that she invited me to stop by her house for dinner anytime. The night guard, Gregory, brought me linden-flower tea, suspecting that I read Proust. Igor Gukovsky, who shared his office with me, bought me a vegetarian lunch of mushroom and potato soup when I had forgotten my wallet. This is Russian democracy.

All images featured in this article were provided by the author.