In the Subway
The first thing you notice when you enter the Novoslobodskaya subway station is the brilliant mosaic adorning the wall of the subway station. Stalin’s dictatorship relied on vast public works projects, and one of the most majestic was the subway, opened in 1935. Beginning with the simple tile pillars and walls of Sokolniki and Park Kultury in 1935, the subway expanded out three years later to include the brilliant vaunted ceilings, pink and blue mosaics, and art deco architecture of Mayakovskaya. In 1941, as Nazis laid siege to Moscow, the Soviet ministers would set their offices up in Mayakovskaya, while the citizens of the city would find refuge from the bombs in other stations. The war did not halt subway construction, and Izmailovsky Park (later renamed Partisanskaya) would open in 1944, beginning a series of antifascist and anticapitalist-themed stations, such as Ploshchad Revolytsii and Pervomaiskaya (First of May) in the early 1950s.
I spent the month of January 2005 in wonder, navigating the historic and glorious Moscow underground from my home at the Russian State University of the Humanities just a few blocks away from Novoslobodskaya. It did not take long to find out what the bronze statues and painstakingly-arranged mosaics lining the workers’ palace could only warn me about. On my first day finding my train, I saw a few people with shaved heads, but did not feel particularly alarmed. One of them had a dapper leather jacket and boots, but it being January in Moscow, the person’s attire registered only marginally. Over the next week, I kept seeing young Muscovites walking the subway with shaved heads and doc martin boots, and started to sense a trend. Reporting back to my friends at the obschizhitiye (dorm), I expressed my concern.
Have any of y’all noticed that there are a lot of skinheads in this town?”
My friend and former partner Mary said nothing, and looked down at the coffee table, strewn with magazines, newspapers, and overflowing ashtrays. Our Bulgarian comrade Dilyan also could not find words. My roommate Tyler did speak up.
What are you talking about, Sasha? There are no Nazis in Moscow. Russia was ruled by a communist government for seventy years. These people hate Nazis. They lost 20 million people
Twenty million people died in the Second World War fighting Nazis.” He scoffed. Tyler was much admired by the others, since he spoke better Russian and had visited Moscow during the ruble crisis in the 1990s.
I’m not that smart, but I know a Nazi when I see one,” I replied. You’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know about the Second World War, but I’m telling you. Things are weird here. There was a lot of resentment toward the Soviet government and the ruling class. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of younger people turned into skinheads, because they resented their moms and dads, or their moms hated the Soviet government and passed it down to them. I mean, the Soviet regime was all about law and order and dictatorship. What if the skinhead movement became a way of rebelling against both Soviet communism and Putin’s regime?”
Tyler was stunned, and I, myself, had a hard time considering it. The notion seemed far-fetched to say the least. Why would a group of people who suffered under a dictatorship seek a switch to another kind of dictatorship? The values of law and order and dictatorship, while Soviet through one lens, could just as easily be ascribed to fascism through another. I broke off the conversation, realizing that I had arrived at the basic premise of the word totalitarianism” as theorized by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Carl Joachim Friedrich, and Zbigniew Brzezinsky.
I had first came across Arendt’s work in high school. She and Sartre were the two favored thinkers of a radical coterie that would form during lunch break, recite movie quotes, and dispute the appropriate feminist, ecological, and anticapitalist analyses of the weeks’ events. My favorite quote to drag out as a 15 year old was from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: I did have a test today. That wasn’t bullshit. It was on European socialism. But really
I’m not European. I don’t plan on being European. So who gives a crap if they’re socialists? They could be fascist anarchists, and it still wouldn’t change the fact that I don’t own a car.” (All these years, and I still don’t own a car.)
Dusting off my vague understanding of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism, I went to my computer and spent the next hour researching totalitarianism and fascism in the Russian Federation. I turned up a strange, cultish ideology called National Bolshevism, which draws on Stalinism, fascism, and anarchism. As the Ferris Bueller theme song flashed through my head, I realized that one doesn’t look into such things as a student in Putin’s Russia. Sure enough, the week after our discussion in the common room, the new issue of Moscow Times made its way to our obschizhitiye, and there it wasan article explicitly denying the existence of skinheads and neo-Nazis in Moscow, in spite of rumors that have been swirling.” Tyler remarked: See, Sasha. There is nothing to be afraid of. I don’t know why you’re so obsessed with Nazis. We’re in Russia.” I grinned. A wise journalist knows, don’t believe anything until it’s been officially denied. Who needs research when you’ve got the Moscow Times? I knew enough already. I was just a visitor anyway, and the last thing I wanted to do was be disrespectful.
These early impressions would prove formative in my understanding of both fascism and Soviet communism through those five months of my residency, which saw two jarring neo-Nazi skinhead attacks on a close friend. As I sought to analyze and understand the interplay of different modes of totalitarianism through my working relationship with veterans of the clandestine, samizdat media, I became unwittingly caught up in a cloak-and-dagger spy war between the UK and Russia. This is the story of my own navigation through the violent rise of fascism in Russia in 2005, which set the stage for ten years of antifascist struggle.
