I. Vector

Palace Square, Saint Petersburg, Russia

A line of helmeted protesters formed a line of shields made from wood and random objects. There were actually two lines: one standing, and one kneeling in front of them. Together, they formed a solid wall.

The police formed another line, facing the protesters. It was shortly before dusk and both groups were getting edgy. A policeman stared at the protesters and pawed the ground like a horse.

Police in Russia are called militsiya, Милиция, which means “militia”. They tried to change it to policija, Полиция (“police”) in 2011, to shake off the military connotation. No one bought it- just about everyone in Russia still calls them the militsiya.

It was shortly before dusk, and both sides wanted some kind of conclusion while there was still some light. Speaking through a PA system, one of the militsiya issued a dispersal order. No one dispersed. A chant went up from the crowd.

“Нет войны! No War! Нет Militsiya No Kops! Нет вируса! No Virus! Нет карантина! No Lockdowns!

Without warning, the police fired K-51 tear gas grenades at the protesters. These are illegal for use in war, partly because nobody knows what’s really in them. Most of the protesters pulled out face masks – they were not in short supply, due to the multiple pandemics.

Some even had welding gloves and face shields. This was the legendary – to some, notorious - black bloc, hard core activists dedicated to resisting the state. Members of this group boldly picked up live tear gas canisters and threw them right back at the police.

Then came the rubber bullets. These are actually steel bullets – they are merely coated with rubber. Some people have died after being hit with them. These were seasoned resisters; the bullets simply ricocheted off of the protesters’ protective gear. There was a lot of thump! thump! thump! but they stood their ground.

A group of soccer hooligans from out of town joined the police and moved toward the main line of protesters. No telling who bankrolled them, but they were paid. Many of them were too drunk to understand what was going on. They had chains and baseball bats. Some of them displayed swastikas.

A Molotov cocktail arced through the air, seemed to stall at the apex of its path, and then fell directly between the police and the soccer firm. They both scattered in opposite directions.

Daniila Ivanova Nikolaev had a bullhorn and was inviting the police to mutiny.

“Throw down your arms! Stop doing the dirty work of the oligarchs! Join us!”

A sniper was stationed on a building. Nikolaev was in the cross hairs. A commander, Pavel Ivanov, stood behind the sniper.

“Shoot that loudmouth, what are you waiting for!”

The sniper, Corporal Ludmila Andreev frowned. Who the fuck does he think he’s talking to?

“Shoot her!”

Maybe I should join them. Maybe I should shoot Ivanov.

Shots rang out from the main bloc of protesters. It was a blank gun, but it worked. The soccer hoodlums retreated, running down the side alleys in complete disarray. There were more shots. Then the police opened fire on the crowd, with real bullets. Shouts went out as one protester after another screamed in pain and collapsed.

Nikolaev’s son Anton was present, and he had a Nagant M1895 revolver and it was loaded. He intended to fire over the head of the police, which he did, but what he did not expect was that there were army personnel up on the rooftops. He fired all seven of his 7.62 rounds.

The last bullet went straight through Ivanov’s forehead. Corporal Andreev was shocked.

Oh fuck! They are going to say I did it.

She looked around, with a sense of desperation in her eyes. Ivanov was clearly dead.

Best to run for it. The resistance will hide me.

Someone else in the crowd fired a gun, and another Molotov flew into the police ranks. Then another.

It was all too much for them. They took off in every direction. Who could blame them? The cocktails were raining down like hellfire. The commanders shouted orders not to retreat, and were ignored. One by one most of the commanders themselves slipped away, and the crowd surrounded the few that remained.

Anton Nikolaev waved his empty revolver.

“Are you militsya, or are you Russians?”

“We are Russians.” They had their hands half raised, with big, albeit somewhat forced smiles on their faces.

“If you are true Russians, we won’t hurt you. You can join us or you can leave. Either way, we won’t harm you.”

Some of the rank and file militsya looked at one another and nodded affirmatively. A few of the older ones with bars on their sleeves looked angry and scared shitless. Those were the ones that started backing away.

“Go on. Run. Get out of here. You have five seconds and I’ll shoot...one…”

The commanders ran for their lives in their black business shoes which were so heavy with authority as to be virtually useless for running. The officers who chose not to run looked at Nikolaev with quizzical expressions.

“The rest of you, welcome to our movement. We will put the oligarchs out once and for all and with your help build a new Russia.”

Danielle Ivanova started to hug the militsya one by one. Some of the protesters hung back, eyeing the whole matter suspiciously, but no one interfered. As the hug fest proceeded, a woman dressed in an army uniform ran toward the crowd. It was Corporal Andreev.

“I wish to join you. Here is my gun. You may have it. I don’t want it anymore.”

She laid her sniper rifle down before the Nikolaevs.

“We don’t want it either. But we understand the necessity of armed struggle. None of us have any idea how to operate that thing. You keep it.”

Andreev raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. That looks like some kind of expert ordnance. It must have taken you a lot of time to learn how to shoot with that. We wouldn’t know how to take care of the thing. We need your skill on the side of the people.”

Corporal Andreev assented and grudgingly shoulder the rifle. She was fed up with the shooting of civilians, fellow Russians, as was almost the entire Russian army. It was only a matter of time before the oligarchs fell and a new Russia would be born. Everyone knew this from the lowliest private to the brigadier generals in the Kremlin. There was only one major obstacle: the virus.

***

A new virus had swept the globe and it was hitting Russia especially hard. The Kremlin imposed lock-downs at the drop of a pin, modeled on the Chinese “zero-COVID” policies. Former KGB Colonel Yuri Seminov, notorious for “interrogation” methods, was the director of the Ministry of Health. When the KGB was dissolved, its old methods were adopted by the successor agency, the Federal Security Bureau, or FSB. There, he was in charge of all “detainees”, many of whom had disappeared off the face of the earth with neither trial nor justice.

He was a great admirer of all things Chinese, and, paradoxically, American. He visited Beijing during the COVID lock-downs in 2022, to observe police methods. He was an obsequious lackey for the President and this combination of attributes earned him the nickname BFC – “Beijing Fried Chicken”.

He brought an odd souvenir back from China - a uniform of the People’s Liberation Army Medical Corps. It was properly the property of the National Museum, which was housed in Taiwan, and looked as if it had never been worn. He kept it in a glass case in his office, on a gold-plated hanger.

“The Chinese really know how to run things,” he told visitors. “They’ve been running a big country for a long, long time. If the pencil pushers in the Kremlin followed their example, we’d put an end to the horse radish that goes on with these demonstrators.”

He was in the habit of opening the display case and running his fingers along the lapels of the Chinese uniform, stroking them fondly, like pet dogs. He had the same pitch for all comers.

“The Russian Federation would be in control of Ukraine and we’d get Alaska back. We’d put an end to these pussy rioters. There would be order.”

The efficiency with which Chinese authorities suppressed dissent impressed him, and he thought the use “public health concern” as a mask for state control was sheer genius. He often said “The COVID lock-down is to China what the AK-47 was to the Soviet Union.” Nobody quite understood what he meant by this, but it was clear that he did not see public health measures through the lens of the Hippocratic Oath; he saw them as weapons.

He frequently entertained visiting officials of the Chinese Communist Party and hosted "solidarity conferences” which were closed to the public and members of the press. Throughout his tenure, he took every opportunity to impose correspondingly draconian measures throughout the Russian Federation, and he met little resistance. His opponents had much to fear; it was well known that he was an FSB man, and he retained contacts in the Federal Security Bureau – all the way up to the President.

Every time he declared a lock-down, the terms were more severe than the previous versions. A popular rebellion was spreading throughout Russian, and his “Temporary Emergency Orders” became more frequent and more widely deployed. He was a fan of drones, surveillance cameras and facial recognition software and he raised eyebrows when he negotiated a multi-million ruble contract for a Chinese company to provide the Ministry of Health with a more elaborate closed circuit TV AI system than even many security-related ministries.

Dissidents were aware that many Kremlin officials did not like Semenov and they were able to get away with targeting him for protests which would have been ruthlessly suppressed if they were directed to other bureaucrats. They often put his face on signs, dressed like Colonel Sanders, an American fast-food icon. This angered Seminov; he sent observers to all demonstrations against his policies. They hung back and videotaped everything that went on and fed it into a facial-recognition database.

His assistants were supposed to be working on public health policy, not spending hours acting as a private security detail for the minister. Other Russian officials regarded him as a power-hungry Neo-Stalinist who needed to be reined in. This worked to the advantage of protesters and journalists and thus many top secret documents were sent to news organizations, a rare event in Russia.

The Moscow Times, operating from exile, scooped a ten-part series exposing how Seminov spent funds from the Russian treasury implementing a personal vendetta, looking for protesters he didn’t like. He turned his sights on the journalists, which only elevated their antagonism. His underlings were seen stalking reporters at their homes, a discovery that provided the material for an entire episode in the ten-part series. They also discovered that Seminov would develop dossiers on his critics – including other Russian officials - and hand them over to the authorities.

There were unsubstantiated rumor that some of the less-connected individuals he referred to the police agencies were “volunteered” for unspecified “medical experiments” - experiments which Seminov personally supervised. Given his background in KGB-style interrogation, no one was eager to be “volunteered” for this work, and most of his critics feared him and kept their views to themselves.

***

The lock downs were often correlated to genuine disease outbreaks in which thousands of people fell ill and died. However, there was a lot of overlap between hospitalizations spiking and outbreaks of resistance. Many people suspected that the Kremlin was deliberately spreading the virus in places where there was resistance to the regime.

The old guard, those still loyal to the state, had their explanation: the ‘radicals’ were concentrated in the cities, and that was where the virus could spread easily. That didn’t explain the situation in small towns like Arzamas, Sortavala, Ostashkov and Suzdal. Each of these had no real outbreaks of the virus until right after they had significant protests against state policies. And there are more examples. Samizdat bulletins circulated on the underground internet, the Runet, and these mapped this phenomena with great precision. There was almost an exact match.

Daniila Ivanova Nikolaev was adept at circumventing the Runet censorship using the privacy-focused TOR browser and a virtual private net from coffee shop wireless access points. She found a study written by an American, Joanna Smythe Ph.D., which proclaimed a shocking finding. It was published in a reputable foreign affairs journal and seemed to be truthful, but, if true, it showed that the Russian state was capable of evil deeds that even she did not think were possible.

The Smythe paper examined hospital admissions in towns which had rebelled and hosted anti-government demonstrations. The incubation period of the virus was two days, so it took forty-eight hours for symptoms to develop. By day three anyone who was vulnerable and was going to get sick enough to need hospitalization would be showing it.

In regions where almost nobody was affected by the pandemic, the few pockets of people getting sick were always where there had been demonstrations. And you could set a watch by when the sick people started to flood the emergency rooms.

Of course, Nikolaev posted the article under an assumed name, and it was deleted almost as soon as she posted it. But it was too late for the censors to prevent it from going viral.

No sooner had the controversy subsided, she found another article by the same author, which alleged that the police themselves were spreading the virus at the demonstrations themselves. She again posted the article on Vkontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, under an assumed name. Again, her post was rapidly deleted by the censors, but not before hundreds and then thousands of people re-posted it.

The theory took hold and spread like wildfire. There were protests. But when physical evidence emerged that proved that this was indeed occurring, the demonstrators became angry and violent.

Activists, friends of Daniila Nikolaev, caught some infiltrators working for the police. They were posing as allies but they were seen engaged in some highly suspicious activity. They first attracted attention when they showed up wearing hazmat suits underneath street clothes. They also wore conspicuous P-100 respirators, the kind worn when painting or using hazardous chemicals. Some other protesters used those, but in Russia they were expensive and very difficult to find. How did several guys who were supposedly poor gopniks get their hands on such flashy equipment?

Once they attracted attention with this odd attire, they were closely observed by the protesters. Anton Nikolaev was among those who watched these interlopers and he was one of the crew that spotted them spreading a dry aerosol into the air just upwind of a demonstration in Moscow.

The perpetrators managed to escape, and they wore ski masks which concealed their faces. Photographs were taken, and posted on the clandestine Runet; the resistance conducted a massive doxing operation, comparing their clothing and other cues with other video clips.

Facial recognition software had been utilized by the government to track down dissidents, but activists had managed to boomerang this technology and use it to identify government agents. It turned out to be quite useful: the impostors were traced to Novosibirsk.

***

Novosibirsk is famously the location of the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, also known as Vector. Underground researchers matched cars entering the Vector facility with cars parked in the infiltrators’ driveways. Nobody doubted that they were agents of the Russian state bio-weapons unit and this disclosure made headlines on every news outlet except for Russia Today and its clones. Even the Chinese government news agency mentioned the scandal, perhaps to shift some of its shame from the zero-COVID policies which caused it so much embarrassment in the early twenties.

The protesters in Palace Square posted video of their victory and it turned out that there had been similar police surrenders and retreats in all the major cities. In Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, protesters set up tent cities in a twenty-four hour occupation, and a half-hearted police attempt to disperse them was an abject failure. In Yekaterinburg's Theater Square, the chief of police was videotaped arm-in-arm with the leaders of the protests.

The one exception was Novosibirsk is "Krasny Square”. The protests there were outnumbered by counter-protesters who claimed that the whole affair was manufactured by the Central Intelligence Agency, NATO and the Ukrainian Armed Forces. A speech was given by Kremlin spokesman Sergey Petrushechka, rumored to be in line for succession when the aging President stepped down.

“All of this is the work of nefarious foreign intelligence agencies. They have provoked riots with a piece of pure fiction pushed by CIA operatives and their proxies in NATO. Our diligent FSB agents have traced the author of this fiction to a known CIA puppet, the so-called wunderkind of biology, the female Einstein who in reality is no more than a lapdog for her imperialist handlers.”

On a large screen behind him was a picture of a woman. Two pictures, to be exact. On the left was her profile from Foreign Issues, a journal which the Russian government long held to be an instrument of the CIA. On the right was a visitor clearance pass with the same woman’s picture on it. The pass was for Fort Detrick in Maryland – the center of US bio-weapons research. Her name and affiliation were clear: Joanna Smythe, Ph. D., CIA, Langley, Virginia.

“This is the face of the hoax.” Petrushechka glanced at the screen. “Not unattractive, to those unaware of the evil that lies behind that mask. And isn’t always the case that Western imperialism puts a pretty face on its fascism and colonialism? “

He slammed his hand down on the podium.

“This woman is the temptress handpicked to deliver the forbidden knowledge, the fruit which you are not to indulge.”

His face was scarlet with rage. His aides looked at each other quizzically, as if to say “WTF?” No one knew quite what he meant – if this supposed operative was delivering forbidden knowledge, that begs the question: is what she wrote true?

These nuances were lost on the Novosibirsk crowds. They lived in a town which derived much of its’ economic status from the presence of Vector. In their eyes, no Westerner, certainly no one from the USA had any right to knowledge of bio-weapons. Those were state secrets, state secrets that kept their local economy prosperous. Petrushchka could have recited the alphabet from behind the podium and the crowd would have cheered him.

“This woman is the lead researcher in CIA-NATO biolabs. We believe it is she who has engineered this virus which is afflicting our people. It is she who has pioneered gain-of-function research – research which gives added capability to viruses and bacteria. Research that is engineered to kill Russians. Viruses which target DNA sequences prominent among Russian Slavs. This woman is an architect of genocide!”

As if on cue, someone started chanting “Zatkni yei Shut Her Up” and he repeated the chant from the podium. It took hold, and soon eight thousand people were raising their fists at the woman pictured on the screen and chanting.

Not a single one of them had the slightest idea who she was. All they knew was that they hated her. Hatred on command is like any other belief-on-command. They will stubbornly insist in their sincerity, they will swear they would rather die than deny their faith. This principle is applicable whether they profess faith out of love or out of less noble foundation. It is never true belief such as the belief one has that one loves ones’ spouse, children or pets. It is not belief such as belief that the sky is usually blue or that grass is green or that cows like to loll about in the pasture. It is an assertion of belief as an oath of allegiance to suspend independent thinking, to suspend all belief in anything at all. Believing nothing, they believe anything they are told. Like robots or computers being programmed, they would also insist that they believe Petrushchka, that they believe that this American woman is evil. Such is the nature of the true believer.

Memoir #7 They Burnt the Heretics

Memoir #5: Ship of Fools

Memoir #4: Hammer of Witches

Memoir #3: The Crusader

Memoir #2: Rendevous in Icefjord

Memoir #1: Vector

Prologue:1348, The End of Time

AUTHOR’S WEBSITE