It is a bad sign when headlines start to get confusing. Didn’t I read this before, a couple of weeks, or maybe a month, ago? Did an underpaid hack, suffering from a hangover on a slow news day, decide to do some creative recycling? Or are news stories starting to run together in my head for some other reason — perhaps because certain things are happening over and over again?
I had that feeling of deja vu when I read about the Monday attack on National Bolshevik Party activists. As many as 30 people, armed with baseball bats and, according to some eyewitnesses, with gas pistols firing rubber bullets, attacked a meeting of opposition youth groups attended by NBP members. At least three people were seriously injured. I felt like I had read this news item a couple of times before. No wonder: well-organized thugs had already attacked NBP activists three times this year, in March and in January during their meetings and once, in February, when a group of activists was returning from a rally.
To be fair, though, the NBP story was initially reported as a bit of random street violence. Wire agencies at first cited police claims that this was a fight between a group of skinheads and a group of ethnic Azeris. Then a police source told journalists it had been a street fight. But wait; this too had happened before. In late January, there was a fight near Belorussky Station when mysterious infiltrators broke up a protest against social reforms by left wing-radical groups. In late June, about 200 people wielding metal rods and other blunt objects had it out on Granatny Pereulok in the center of Moscow. The latter incident, it appears, stemmed from a hostile takeover of a business.
But none of this was as confusing as the three different, but in essence identical, stories of Polish citizens being beaten up in Moscow. First, there was a Polish Embassy employee, who was beaten by two men in the very center of Moscow, on Ulitsa Klimashkina near the embassy compound, in broad daylight on Aug. 7. Four days later, on the same street and again in the middle of the day, the embassy’s second secretary was beaten. The following evening a Polish newspaper correspondent was beaten near his office on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The stories of all three incidents read virtually the same: the victims were approached by a stranger in a public place, knocked over, then beaten and kicked. The general assumption in the coverage of all three incidents was that they were somehow connected to the attack on three teenage sons of Russian diplomats in Warsaw, who were beaten and robbed by a gang of thugs at the end of July.
What, besides repetitiveness, ties these stories together? There are credible claims, made both by eyewitnesses and by analysts, that at least some of the attacks on the NBP and the Polish citizens were inspired by the Kremlin, and possibly carried out by members of the Nashi youth movement. That may or may not be true, but at this point it does not strike me as the most important common denominator. The most important one is this: it is violence as a way of doing business, violence as a way of settling scores, violence even as a way of conducting international relations.
The next time I scroll through the news wires and see a headline about NBP activists getting attacked, or about a Polish citizen or another non-Russian getting beaten up in broad daylight, or even about a huge gang fight in the middle of the city, I will not be very likely to click on the items: I feel like I already know these stories. And I think this is how I will remember summer 2005 in Moscow. It was when stories of violence blurred into each other and became old hat. It was the summer when violence stopped really being news.
Masha Gessen is a contributing editor at Bolshoi Gorod
Tags: embassy, Kremlin, Moscow, Nashi, NBP, Polish, skinhead, violence