‘Let go!’ she screeched as she was hustled to the door. The intruders never said a word, but Kate could hear Woody protesting loudly. ‘I’m an American!’ she shouted. ‘A correspondent!’ With two men holding her arms roughly, she was taken to the stairs. She jerked her body to try to free herself — kicking and screaming all three flights down to the street.
A long black limousine waited at the curb. Two more large men in dark suits stood by the open door.
‘No-o-o!’ Kate shouted — twisting and digging her heels into the pavement. Fear turned to icy dread and then to outright panic as she was shoved roughly into the car. The door slammed shut behind her.
A small man sat impassively across from Kate.
The door wouldn’t open. The car gunned its engine. Turning to the lone man, Kate’s first impression was of a police inspector. He regarded her with a pleasant smile. Facing backwards Kate saw two cars following. They were jammed, she assumed, with the brutes who had broken into her apartment. She twisted around to see through the thick glass screen that another man sat in front beside the driver.
Kate’s throat was pinched tight, and no words would come out of her mouth. She tried her best to calm her jangled nerves. The man opposite her wore an expensive pinstriped suit and patent leather formal shoes at the ends of short legs crossed in feminine fashion. His most distinctive feature was his round, black-rimmed eyeglasses which stood perched on his bald head. On second thought, the man looked less like a policeman and more like a professor. She swallowed and cleared her throat. ‘Who are you?’ Kate asked finally through a throat dry with fright.
The man chuckled. There were gaps in his front teeth that gave him a faintly unpolished look. His manner Was altogether unthreatening. ‘You are a good reporter, Miss Dunn. Don’t you know who I am?’
Had Kate not already been in a state of semi-shock, her realization would have terrified her. ‘Valentin Kartsev?’ she said quietly.
‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’
Kate dug her elbows into her sides to ward off the chill from the air conditioning. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘We each have our interests. And I believe that our interests in one subject just happen to coincide.’
‘What… subject is that?’ she asked as the motorcade sped down the empty road.
‘Me. Or, more aptly stated, your reportage on me.’
He spoke English well — his accent mild and his manner cultured. Kate drew a deep breath before speaking, then blurted out, ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘On a tour of the most interesting country in the world,’ Kartsev replied. His eyes turned to the window. The passing landscape reflected off the round lenses of his glasses as if projected onto a screen before his eyes. ‘You do think that, don’t you? That Russia is the most interesting country in the world?’
Kate was too concerned with drawing air into her lungs to respond. But she turned to look at the dreary Stalin-era apartment complexes that rose from the bare soil around Moscow like mushrooms. They were dirty and dingy. Bed linen and drying laundry hung from open windows and crumbling balconies. The buildings rose high into the air, despite being surrounded by empty, unused land, in a seemingly intentionally haphazard manner. Here and there the cars passed black clumps of charred vehicles. They stood like monuments to the savage fighting now radiating outward from Moscow. She turned her mind to Kartsev’s question — trying to shut out her fears and worries.
‘This is the world’s kitchen. Or, perhaps better put, its laboratory. We Russians are not the Japanese. We’ve never been content merely to copy the West. We have always seen it to be our destiny to improve upon your ways. Perhaps it is that we knew deep down we could never really surpass you by mere imitation. Or perhaps it is a hopelessly romantic, Quixotic vision of ourselves as social pioneers. Regardless, we Russians have always thought we were destined for great things. An incubator for grand strains of revolutionary social thought.’
‘You’re talking about the past now, right? About Communism?’
Kartsev shrugged, looking out through the fleeting images reflected off his glasses. ‘The past, the future… I’m really just talking about Russia. Or, more precisely, Russians. Do you see that?’ He waggled a bony finger back and forth — pointing. ‘That little village?’
Kate looked down the hill beside the empty highway along which the limousine raced. There was a small collection of shacks. Faded and peeling blue and green paint adorned the otherwise pitiful structures. ‘“Izbas” we call those little houses in Russian. One room kept warm by a single woodbuming stove.’ The main boulevard through the middle of the village was twin ruts in the dirt. ‘Here we are, not twenty kilometers outside of the capital of Russia, and those people know nothing of what is happening in Moscow’s streets.’
An old babushka switched at a horse to drive it alongside the paved highway. She wore a black dress and a shawl over her head. Her lips sank in around a toothless, wrinkled mouth. The horse pulled up the hill a flat-bed cart that looked as if it could’ve been built centuries earlier but for its big rubber tires.
‘The czars came and went. The Revolution, Civil War, collectivization, the purges. I know that little village down there. Hitler’s troops were stopped right there. Those little houses were in “No Man’s Land” between two great armies. And there they stand fifty years later following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Democracy. Free markets. Hyperinflation. Industrial collapse. Mass unemployment. The interesting thing is that none of that changed those people at all. The Great Patriotic War rolled fire and death over their little izbas. Their men were drafted into the Army and killed. But none of it fundamentally altered the lives of those villagers one iota.’ He smiled and shook his head. ‘It’s truly remarkable, Miss Dunn.’ Kate shrugged. ‘And this village is just outside Moscow. What do you think it’s like over the great expanses of our country? Far, far away from the two great cities of Moscow and St Petersburg?’
She didn’t answer. ‘Do you think your Anarchist Movement will be different? It will somehow affect the Russian people like those down there?’
‘No.’ The answer was not what Kate had expected. ‘It is in the cities where anarchy’s effects will be felt. And not just the cities of Russia.’
‘So… how? How will an anarchist society work?’ Kate asked.
‘Miss Dunn,’ Kartsev said with a brief laugh, ‘asking how an anarchist society will work is a very “archist” question. Archism esteems control as its highest value. Anarchism is not an ideology or a prescribed set of values. We are to the state as atheists are to God. We are simply “anti-archist.” ’
‘But what is it that your movement stands for? What are you trying to accomplish?’
‘If you want programs and platforms, Miss Dunn, you should interview a Republican or a Democrat. We are engaged in an experiment. We are attempting to establish the world’s first advanced, non-statist society. We reject all the various claims to governmental legitimacy. Mandates from heaven. The will of the majority. Racial superiority. Government arises from a voluntary communal exchange of autonomy for order. People trade their freedom for punctual railroads. The government they get in return is invariably based on coercion and force. If you don’t believe me, just try disobeying the government. Quit paying your taxes. Build a walled compound and tell the sheriff to go away when he comes calling. The government you’ve spumed will not only take your property away. They will attack with paramilitary force, lock you up, kill you — even in your country. We simply reject the historical social trade which gave rise to government in the first place. We claim autonomy and a relief from that threat of governmental violence in exchange for the social disorder that will necessarily ensue.’