A flag-waving veteran of the Red Army confronting an anti-communist protester in Moscow, circa 1990
I remember the veterans. They came with their medals, their heavy coats, their stories that no one wanted to hear anymore. The world was moving too fast, too violently. One moment, Lenin’s statues stood tall, the next, they were being pulled down by cranes, their heads rolling like something out of a fever dream.
He is one of them—this man in the uniform, his chest heavy with ribbons. His body, too, is heavy with time, with the weight of a country that is disappearing beneath his feet. In his hands, the flag—the old flag, red as the blood of those who never came back from Kursk, from Stalingrad, from Afghanistan. He holds onto it like an old man holds onto a photograph of his youth, convinced that if he grips it tightly enough, it will not slip away.
