‘We know no mercy and ask for none’ was the motto of the Special Purpose Police Squad, the OMON.
Riot police were rarely loved by the people of any country; and the OMON were no exception. Indeed, they had established a reputation for brutality above and beyond the call of duty that made them universally loathed in Russia.
Their recent excesses against petrol rioters had not been broadcast on the media but everyone in Moscow knew that half a dozen demonstrators had been beaten to death in the disturbances. After this, Krymov had ordered a strengthened force of OMON troops to be kept on standby in central Moscow.
So, as soon as Colonel Melekhov was off the phone, he was able to get his men organised fast. They poured out of their barracks in their distinctive blue and black camouflage pattern uniforms with the Cyrillic letters OMOH on the front and back, wearing their black riot helmets and carrying shields, truncheons, tear gas grenade launchers and assault rifles. A few minutes later a convoy of fifteen huge GAZ lorries and five BTR-80 armoured personnel carriers drove out of the metal gates in the grey slab-like block of the Lubyanka and headed along Ulitsa Bol Lubyanka over Sadovoye Kol’tso, the inner Moscow ring road, and then due
north on Prospekt Mira, the dual carriageway up to Ostankino.
‘The OMON are coming,’ Grigory grabbed Lara’s arm and whispered urgently in her ear, as she was laughing with someone in the after-broadcast party. The studio was still packed and buzzing with the positive atmosphere of the rally.
Lara stiffened and went pale as she looked back at him.
‘Someone saw them leaving their barracks in Lubyanka and called in on their mobile.’ He was running a text banner across the bottom of the screen, asking people to call the telethon studio with information on government troop movements.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and talk to Ilya.’
Raskolnikov was in the middle of his serious interview with the political correspondent, and Ilya was supervising the camera shots. He handed over to an assistant as Grigory came in and the three of them crowded into the small office at the end of the gallery.
‘What are we going to do?’ Ilya said with a worried frown. ‘They’ll kill us.’
Grigory nodded tensely. ‘We just have to rely on weight of numbers and peaceful protest. There’s a lot of people down there.’ He gestured down the base of the tower where a large crowd of supporters had gathered. ‘Krymov will know that the whole thing will be broadcast on TV in Russia and abroad, and that everyone is now watching, so they can’t get too heavy-handed with us or it will backfire against them. We’ll just have to make sure that we have a lot of crews out there covering it and hope that the crowds can block the roads. It’s our only protection. But we have to keep it peaceful or we’ll lose the moral high ground and give them an excuse for violence.’
Ilya and Lara nodded.
‘I’ll call the crews in town now and tell them to get their arses back here fast,’ Ilya said, and turned to go back into the gallery.
‘I’m going out there with a crew now,’ Lara said, and made to follow him.
Both Grigory and Ilya stopped and looked at her.
Grigory tried to reason with her. ‘Lara, there’s going to be a riot out there. You—’
‘Don’t fucking give me that!’ she snapped back. ‘If this whole thing goes down,
I
go down!’
She turned to Ilya. ‘Get me Anton as my cameraman. Tell him to get his stuff together and I’ll see him in reception in two minutes. I’m going to change.’ She pushed past him.
Since the broadcast had gone out, a crowd of two thousand had gathered around the base of the TV tower, despite Krymov’s attempts to stop them getting there. Metro Line 9 had been quickly closed and police units had attempted to stop the crowds on the approach roads running through north Moscow. Despite the rumours of these cordons that had spread through the crowds in town, a lot of people had just ignored them and the police, in the general atmosphere of chaos that reigned, had been unable to stop them. The fleet of vehicles that had driven the five miles from the centre of town were now parked haphazardly along the roads leading up to the tower.
A few minutes later Roman and Grigory stood up on a table that had been dragged out of the foyer at the base of the tower and put at the top of the shallow flight of steps leading up to the plate-glass wall. Lara had changed into jeans and her parka, and stood next to them with two other TV crews.
The crowd milling around in front of them was hugely mixed: some were seasoned UCO members but many were
newcomers to political protest, having been inspired by Roman’s broadcast, or simply pushed over the edge by economic conditions. They included labourers from a nearby construction site still with their hard hats on, smart office workers from the centre of town, bearded old men, babushkas with shopping bags and youths from the nearby suburban housing estates in hoodies. Blue Revolution flags with eagles on them and blue scarves were being handed out, and a sea of them was waving in front of the steps.
Roman had cut short his interview and postponed his press conference to stand on the table in front of them. Many of the journalists were gathered around the table with Dictaphones out, and several foreign TV crews had arrived. Grigory held up a megaphone next to Roman as he spoke into the mike, feedback crackled, and people who had been jostling and milling around in front of the steps turned to see what the noise was.
‘OK, everybody,’ more feedback whined, ‘can you hear me?’
A cheer went up from the crowd and blue flags waved; they were in high spirits after his speech and buoyed up by the presence of so many other supporters.
The loudhailer stabilised and Roman turned on his best captain’s voice: ‘Well, I want to thank you all for coming up here to support the Blue Revolution!’ Another cheer went up. ‘Just look at how many of us there are! Now, we know that the government is sending the OMON up…’ A huge chorus of booing and jeering broke out and a group of UCO supporters began chanting: ‘Down with fascists! Down with fascists!’
Roman had to pause before they settled down and he could speak again. ‘We have to stop them getting to the tower but we
have
to use only peaceful protest!’ He paused to let
that sink in. ‘If we start any violence then it will give them an excuse to attack us. We have the media here—’ he turned and gestured to the three Russian camera crews and four other foreign crews standing on the steps near the table—‘So, Krymov knows that the eyes of the world are on him and he won’t dare try anything too heavy-handed. So, what I want you all to do in a minute is to go across the park,’ he pointed behind him to the east, to the large area of open ground on the other side of the tower, ‘and I want you to go onto Ulitsa Akademika Korolyova and to block the road. We have to hold them there or else they’ll get to the tower. Can you do that for me?’
‘Yes!’ a ragged cheer went up.
‘OK, let’s go over to the road then!’
Roman was about to jump off the table and lead the way when Grigory grabbed his arm. ‘Roman, you can’t go! You’re our king; if we lose you we lose the game!’
Roman stopped and looked at him. He was used to leading his team from the centre forward position, not the dressing room, but he could see the sense of what Grigory was saying.
‘OK, I’ll go and then I’ll come back.’
Grigory knew that was the best he was going to get. ‘OK, let’s go.’
He helped Roman down and, with the TV crews filming them, they led the crowd round the tower and across the snowy open ground.
The TV tower was on the western side of a plot of land of about half a kilometre square, with the main road, Ulitsa Akademika Korolyova, running east-west along the northern edge of it. The OMON would be coming from the eastern end of this, so the builders and young men enthusiastically ran the five hundred metres over to the northeast corner of the plot, through a line of trees, across a car park
and out onto the main road. This was a wide, tree-lined boulevard, with a large central reservation with a few trees spaced along it.
In the director’s gallery, Ilya watched the feeds coming back in from his three crews on the ground and the one that he had put up on the roof of the TV station, three hundred and fifty metres up, where they had a bird’s-eye view of the whole process. They fed back pictures of the crowd fanning out around the tower base and moving across the snowfield to the road.
Other people had heard the call to block the street and ran off to get their vehicles. Two bus drivers had ordered their passengers off their bright yellow municipal bendy-buses and then driven both of them up to Ostankino. When they drove these down the two carriageways of the road and then swung them round to block it there was huge cheering from the crowds. Only a small gap was left for people to squeeze through in the overlap between the buses on the central reservation.
Other people were inspired by their action to drive their own cars into the gaps left by the buses on the verges of the road. They then jumped out and called on the crowd to turn them on their side. Men and women all gathered round and began bouncing an old Volga sedan until they rocked it over onto its side to the accompaniment of a huge cheer.
The barricade now effectively blocked the boulevard because its northern end stopped at the edge of the Ostanskiy Prud, a large ornamental lake right next to the road, and its southern end ran into some woods, where people parked their cars between the trees, and which then ended in a large office block complex.
Despite what Roman had said about peaceful protest, some of the crowd had other ideas. Quite a few of them had
been in the petrol riots and wanted revenge on the OMON. Others were just hyped-up, bored suburban youths who fancied the idea of a good scrap. Some had brought Molotov cocktails in rucksacks and others paused on the way through the trees to rip large branches off or began digging paving slabs up from under the snow and smashing them into pieces.
Alex and the rest of the team, in the conference room at the top of the tower, hunched round their TV set and watched all these preparations anxiously. Alex stiffened when Ilya cut to a shot of Lara with a microphone standing in the middle of the road out in front of the buses, talking to Anton, her cameraman.
‘So, citizens of Russia, you can see the preparations that are going on here at Ostankino to defend the Blue Revolution from attack by the OMON,’ she jerked her thumb behind her at the crowds milling around the buses, ‘who will shortly be coming from down the road over there.’ She pointed back behind Anton. ‘We hope that the will of the people will be respected and that the fascist forces will not resort to violence.’
‘Hmm.’ Colin made a doubtful noise and folded his arms. Alex shot an irritated glance across at him.
The soldiers of the 568th Regiment also watched the developments closely in their canteen. In the continued absence of Colonel Karenin, a confused atmosphere prevailed at the base. Men had wandered away from the canteen after Darensky had failed to rally them, but instead of going to their normal duties they hung around on the parade square in groups, smoking and discussing what had happened. When the shout went round that Lara was back on telly and that a riot was likely the canteen packed out again quickly. Men crammed into seats in front of the TV and moved tables in a circle behind them so they could stand on them and see what was happening. Darensky and his junior officers were
torn between running away before Karenin arrived and staying on to see if they did actually still have a chance. In the end they crammed into the canteen with the others.
‘Fucking OMON cunts,’ said Sergeant Platonov, as he sat in the front row of chairs in front of the TV. He chucked his cigarette butt on the floor and ground it out. Apart from the usual reasons for disliking riot police, there was a lot of inter-service rivalry in the Russian army, and the OMON were hated by the regular forces, who saw them as jumped-up policemen who thought they were hard because they could beat up civilians.
Colonel Melekhov was riding in his command APC at the front of the OMON column and led them west, off the Prospekt Mira dual carriageway, and onto Ulitsa Akademika Korolyova. As he drove down the straight boulevard he could see immediately that it was blocked off by the two yellow buses, overturned cars and a large crowd of people in front of it.
The BTR-80 he was in was an army-green-coloured vehicle, nearly eight metres long, with four massive, all-terrain tyres along each side and an armoured front that sloped down, under the vehicle. It carried a crew of three—him as commander, a driver and a gunner for the 14.5mm KPVT heavy machine gun in the small turret on the top of it. In the armoured compartment at the back of the vehicle was a squad of seven soldiers, including his two signallers.
Melekhov was a stern-faced man in his forties with an OMON black beret on his head bearing its badge of a brutal bison head on a Russian tricolour. He stood up out of the commander’s hatch at the front and spoke into his headset mike to the rest of the column on their radio net. ‘Right, halt here!’ They were a hundred metres from the line of barricades.
As soon as the OMON halted, a chorus of whistling and jeering poured out of the crowd, filling the street in front of the buses; activists had climbed up on top of them and were waving Blue Revolution flags. Some of the teenagers even ran towards the OMON; they rolled snowballs and pitched them into the air but they fell short of the commander.
Grigory was in the crowd and shouted into his loudhailer, ‘Peaceful protest only!’ but his voice was drowned out by the jeering. Roman had slipped back into the safety of the tower.
‘I want the APCs across the road alongside me! All troops debus!’ Melekhov shouted.
The huge diesel engines of the four other BTR-80s snouted and their gears ground as their drivers manoeuvred them awkwardly back and forth to get out of the convoy and drive up alongside their commander. They all poured twin spouts of grey diesel fumes into the cold morning air as they approached and formed a revving armoured phalanx across the road, three to the south of the central reservation and two on the northern carriageway.