II Vector

Palace Square, Saint Petersburg, Russia

A line of helmeted protesters formed a line of shields made from wood and random objects. There were actually two lines: one standing, and one kneeling in front of them. Together, they formed a solid wall.

The police formed another line facing the protesters. It was shortly before dusk and both groups were getting edgy. A policeman stared at the protesters and pawed the ground like a horse.

Police in Russia are called militsiya, Милиция, which means “militia”. They tried to change that to Полиция (“police”) in 2011 but no one buys it. They are still called militsiya by just about every Russian.

It was shortly before dusk, and both sides wanted some kind of conclusion while there was still some light. Speaking through a PA system, one of the policemen issued a dispersal order. No one dispersed. A chant went up from the crowd.

“Нет вируса! Нет карантина! Нет олигархов! Нет милиции! No Virus! No Lockdowns! No Oligarchs! No Militsiya!”

Without warning, the police started firing rubber bullets but they ricocheted off of the protesters’ protective gear. Then came the tear gas. Most of the protesters pulled out face masks – they were not in short supply as the Russian Ministry of Health had distributed them free, due to the multiple pandemics. Many of the tear gas canisters were thrown back at the police.

Then a molotov cocktail arced through the air, seemed to stall at the apex of its path, and then fell directly on the police. They scattered in every direction. Daniila Ivanova Nikolaev had a bullhorn and was inviting the police to mutiny.

“Throw down your arms! Stop doing the dirty work of the oligarchs! Join us!”

A sniper was stationed on a building. Nikolaev was in his cross hairs. A commander, Pavel Ivanov, stood behind her.

“Shoot that loudmouth, what are you waiting for.”

The sniper, Corporal Ludmila Andreev frowned. Who the fuck does he think he’s talking to?

“Shoot her!”

Maybe I should join them. Maybe I should shoot Ivanov.

Down on the ground, a group of soccer hoodlums joined the police and moved toward the main line of protesters.

Shots rang out from the main bloc of protesters. The soccer hoodlums retreated, running down the side alleys in complete disarray.There were more shots. Then the police opened fire on the crowd, with real bullets. Shouts went out as one protester after another screamed in pain and collapsed.

Nikolaev’s son Anton was present, and he had a pistol. He intended to fire over the head of the police, which he did, but what he did not expect was that there were police up on the rooftops. He emptied fired all of his rounds.

The last bullet in his clip went straight through Ivanov’s forehead. Corporal Andreev was shocked. Oh fuck! They are going to say I did it.I better run for it. The resistance will hide me.

Someone else in the crowd had a gun and another molotov flew into the police ranks. And then another. It was too much for them. They split and ran for it despite the officers shouting order not to retreat. The crowd was surrounded the few remaining policemen.

Anton Nikolaev, was still holding his gun, which didn’t have any bullets left. Nevertheless, he waved it at the police officers.

“We won’t hurt you. You can join us or you can leave. We won’t harm you.”

Some of the rank and file officers looked at one another and nodded their heads affirmatively. A few of the older ones with bars on their sleeves looked angry and scared shitless. Those were the ones that started backing away.

“Go on. Run. Get out of here. You have five seconds and I’ll shoot...one…”

The commanders ran for their lives in their black business shoes which were so heavy with authority as to be virtually useless for running. The officers who chose not to run looked at Nikolaev with quizzical expressions.

“The rest of you, welcome to our movement. We will put the oligarchs once and for all and with your help build a new Russia.”

Danielle Ivanova started to hug the policemen one by one. Some of the protesters hung back, eyeing the whole matter suspiciously, but non one interfered. As the hug fest proceeded, a woman dressed in an army uniform ran toward the crowd. It was Corporal Andreev.

“I wish to join you. Here is my gun. You may have it. I don’t want it anymore.”

She laid her sniper rifle down before the Nikolaevs.

“We don’t want it either. But we understand the necessity of armed struggle. None of us have any idea how to operate that thing. You keep it.”

Andreev raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. That looks like some kind of expert ordnance. It must have taken you a lot of time to learn how to shoot with that. We need your skill on the side of the people.”

Corporal Andreev was fed up with the shooting of civilians, fellow Russians, as was almost the entire Russian army. It was only a matter of time before the oligarchs fell and a new Russia would be born.

There was only one major obstacle: the virus. A new virus had swept the globe and it was hitting Russia especially hard. The government imposed lockdowns at the drop of a pin, modeled on the Chinese “zero-covid” policies from the early 2020’s. These were often correlated to genuine outbreaks in which thousands of people fell ill and died. However, most people suspected that the Kremlin was deliberately spreading the virus in places where there was resistance to the regime.

There was a lot of overlap between hospitalizations spiking and outbreaks of resistance. The old guard, those still loyal to the state, had their explanation: the ‘radicals’ were concentrated in the cities, and that was where the virus could spread easily. That didn’t explain how it was that small towns like …. and … which had protests experienced disease outbreaks immediately thereafter. Samizdat bulletins circulated on the underground internet which mapped this with great precision. There was almost an exact match, and the hospitalizations corresponded almost to the day with the incubation period of the virus.

Danielle Nikolaev found an article attributed to a CIA-linked foreign affairs journal which alleged that the police were spreading the virus at the demonstrations themselves.That theory took hold and spread like wildfire. The protest in Palace Square was triggered when activists caught some infiltrators posing as allies who were engaged in some highly suspicious activity: they were wearing hazmat suits underneath street clothes with P-100 respirators. They were spreading a dry aerosol into the air just upwind of a demonstration in Moscow.

Photographs were posted on the clandestine Runet web and the culprits were found. Facial recognition software had been utilized by the government to track down dissidents, but activists had managed to boomerang this technology and use it to identify government agents. It turned out to be quite useful: the imposters were traced to Novosibirsk.

Novosibirsk is famously the location of the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, also known as Vector. Underground researchers matched cars entering the Vector facility with cars parked in the infiltrators’ driveways. Nobody doubted that they were agents of the Russian state bioweapons unit and this disclosure made headlines on every news outlet except for Russia Today and its clones. Even the Chinese government news agency mentioned the scandal, perhaps to shift some of its shame from the zero-covid policies which caused it so much embarassment in the early twenties.

The protesters in Palace Square posted video of their victory and it turned out that there had been similar police surrenders and retreats in all the major cities. In Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, protesters set up tent cities in a twenty-four hour occupation, and a half-hearted police attempt to disperse them was an abject failure. In Yekaterinberg’s Theatre Square, the chief of police was videotaped arm-in-arm with the leaders of the protests.

The one exception was Novosibirsk is "Krasny Square

(“Даниила Иванова Николаева" Daniella)

Next — Chapter Three: The Crusader

This is Chapter Two of Anthropocene Memoir: Ghosts of the Forgotten Snows, an installment novel by Geof Bard.

Read Chapter One here at Neocities; earlier versions of chapters 1-3 first published on Medium.