Tver

Tver is a temporary refuge in the aftermath of the assault on the Moscow White House: a place where Eduard Limonov and Taras Rabko escape the immediate danger of arrest and watch the public meaning of the violence begin to shift. About a hundred miles from Moscow, it gives them distance from the streets and buildings where the crisis unfolded, but not from its consequences, which arrive through television and arguments over who counts as a democrat, a fascist, or an enemy.

Flight from Moscow

After escaping the crackdown in the park, Limonov and Rabko learn that tanks have surrounded the Moscow White House and that the resistance has collapsed. The surrender comes only in the afternoon; by then the assault has left hundreds dead and thousands injured, including passersby, older people, and children as well as insurgents. Fearing that nationalist refuges will be swept up in a wave of arrests, the two men take a train to Tver, where Rabko’s mother lives.

Two weeks indoors

They spend two weeks holed up in Rabko’s mother’s small apartment, watching television. Tver is not presented as a new political base or a place where the men organize; its immediate function is shelter. The confined stay turns the television into their window on a crisis whose official explanation is already beginning to fracture.

A contested account of the violence

As the broadcasts and commentary accumulate, the events are compared to the Paris Commune, but with the political roles reversed: the fascists occupy the place of the Communards and the democrats that of the Versaillais. The categories no longer settle who is right or wrong; the account observes that no one knows who is progressive and who reactionary. A journalist interviews Andrei Sinyavsky, the émigré intellectual and historic dissident who had once been moved by Natasha singing “The Blue Scarf” at his home in the Paris suburbs. Now, nearly in tears with anger and despair, Sinyavsky says, “The terrible thing now,” he says, “is that the truth seems to be on the side of people I’ve always thought of as my enemies.” Tver thus marks a pause in the flight from Moscow, but also a vantage point from which the political aftermath becomes harder to divide into familiar camps.