Yezhovshchina

Glory to the Red Line! Long Live Comrade Moskvin!

The halls of the council chamber roared in unison as the new General Secretary strode up towards the podium to make his first address. Sasha looked to his comrades as they stood and clapped their hands together, so hard and so fervently, he wondered if their skin might split apart: Valery Andreyevich, he thought to himself - you too?

You see, not too long ago, Valery Dzerzhinsky, the Secretary for Learning and Excellence, had vocally and publicly denounced the new leader during the last election - clearly he had not anticipated that the man he had once called "a pompous windbag" would one day reign himself. Ah, Sasha thought, then. It was clear to him now. No man would risk being first to stop clapping; each one of them must make the extra effort to curry favour with the new regime.

Even in the dim confines of the underground Metro stations, the Central Committee Chamber appeared large and illustrious, like the days of Old Russia. Marble floors and curved archway ceilings supported walls adorned with magnificent murals of predecessors long deceased, their corpses atomised to dust. Sasha wondered, often, how it was that a state founded solely on Soviet socialism could prosper in this new world, where ideology mattered little compared to the pursuit of the next meal. One thing was for certain, though; when Sasha gazed upon those murals on the walls, he felt something stirring within him, and he couldn't quite place his finger on what it was. He would think of those murals, those proud and chiselled faces, when he was queuing at the ration line or scraping the lice from his bedsheets, and it no longer bothered him as much.

His train of thought was interrupted by the sudden beginning of Moskvin's speech. "Comrades!" he bellowed to the crowd, who had dutifully fallen silent. "Today marks the dawning of a new age for the Red Line! Together, we will lead our people to a prosperity never before seen in our history. We will ride forth to unite our world, and the world above, underneath the hammer and the sickle! We will take back what is ours!".

An eruption of cheering, before a sharp silence, as if they had all briefly lost their composure and then reclaimed it swiftly in embarrassment. He continues - "Our enemies gather in number. They gather in strength. They seek to undo the progress of Man by sinking us backwards into a new Dark Age, an age without science or reason, peace or security".

Cheering followed again, accompanied by a round of applause lasting at least half a minute. The dear leader then gritted his teeth, turning his plump face bright red with jingoistic fury. "Have no fear, Comrades! Our destiny is that of a victor! As my brother Andrey used to say-".

He stopped dead in his tracks, and it looked as if the entire council chamber had become a graveyard. Not a single soul uttered a word, not a single rat dared to squeak. Everybody in that room was aware of the rumours surrounding the previous leader's untimely (and suspicious) death, and the new leader's sudden stoppage all but confirmed it in their eyes. There are some truths that make it easy to tell lies, and there are those that make it impossible to all but the most skilled and ruthless of politicians - a group to which Maxim Moskvin did not belong, instead finding kinship in those to which lying is not their true business. But Sasha knew better than to mistake him for an honest man; even if Moskvin cannot tell a convincing lie, he is no stranger to deceit. It was a fact that very few knew about, at least up until this very moment, when he had all but announced his treachery to the entire Red Line, as the words which had caught in his throat so keenly demonstrated.

In an instant, his Soviet soul evaporated away like morning dew. The murals on the walls now looked simultaneously angry, ignominious and indifferent. The ceiling archways now felt cavernous, and seemed to descend lower, smothering the fledgling nation in its crib. A realisation dawned on Sasha in that moment; not of the kin-slaying at the highest echelons of government, but a deeper one, a more painful one that he was always aware of, but suppressed, as if he didn't want to believe it. He could not ignore it any longer.

The General Secretary muddled through the rest of his speech, spouting meaningless platitudes and half-hearted proclamations. He looked as if he had been whipped in the stockade. His face was devoid of colour and the fire had drained from his eyes. His voice seemed to tremble at certain intervals, as if he were going to burst into tears. He had the look of a man desperately trying to prove his innocence before a leery jury. He looked weak. And Moskvin knew it.

In the months following the address, Sasha never saw Valery Andreyevich again. Several others began to disappear too, all of them respected and prominent Party officials. New faces, younger faces, now filled the council chamber in their stead - mere shadows of what came before, much like the Red Line itself. Neighbours who used to converse for hours at the ration lines now looked at eachother with equal parts suspicion and fear, each one wondering if the other was either an enemy of the Revolution... or the Revolution's long, watchful shadow. He began to notice a shadow of his own, taking the form of invisible eyes observing him wherever he went, whatever he did, whatever he thought.

As he walked down an empty stretch of station towards his private quarters, he had noticed a new mural, one added recently, paint still wet to the touch... 

It was Comrade Moskvin, looking far stronger and prouder than his real counterpart - and decidedly more menacing. There, laid bare before him, was the real truth of it, and it made his skin blister like a radiation burn.