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Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 1
From: Sergei Roy <SergeiRoy@yandex.ru>
Subject: self-defense in moscow

By Sergei Roy [Former editor of Moscow News]

The funny thing was not the episode itself (not much fun about that) but what preceded it. After we'd put our weekly to bed, I usually relaxed office discipline a bit. Say, to the extent of a couple of bottles of good wine in close company. Having gone through the weekly stress of meeting the printers' deadline, we just sat around a while chewing the fat. On that particular night a chap from the Kommersant daily stopped by, and at some point he up and asked me: "Look, man, you speak this BBC English of yours, you sure can write, what the hell are you doing in this country? If I were you, I'd have long emigrated to some warm, civilized land."

file photo of MakarovThat mood was (actually, still is) fairly widespread among Moscow's intelligentsia, especially the younger sort known endearingly as office plankton. Frankly, in my weaker moments similar ideas came into my head, too, so I responded with some heat. Something to the effect that abandoning one's country when it was going through a bad patch in its history was not unlike defecating on one's forefathers' graves. Emigration was not unknown in my family, but that was after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and I knew pretty well how those emigres felt about leaving Mother Russia. They spent years in sorrow that they could not eventually be buried under a beryozka, Russia's emblematic birch-tree.

For a punch line I quoted my old friend and erstwhile second-in-command at the paper, Sergei Sossinsky. Born in France, he had lived a goodish chunk of his life in the States, had a nice place in Maine, and still he had come over here settling finally in the boondocks, in a tiny village near Kostroma. When I had asked him, "Why?", he had replied simply: "I feel warm there." That's what I told that guy from Kommersant: "I feel warm here."

Well, that night Moscow certainly showed me just how warm things could get for idealists like myself.

I lived then quite a long way from Moscow's center, about half an hour by the Metro and then a few bus stops to my apartment block. It was well past one in the morning, no buses in sight, so I decided to walk home on that fine August night.

The way I reconstructed events later, the thugs must have marked me right at the Metro station. Easy quarry, they must have thought: a solitary grey-haired intellectual-looking type, certainly not a heavyweight, with a Macintosh bag on his shoulder. As I walked past the vast dark grounds of Kuskovo estate, I spotted three of them walking some fifty yards ahead of me and another three about the same distance behind. One of them was a young woman, the others, strapping young men.

It was probably because of that woman that I had no premonition of evil at all. The other reason must have been that I had done some serious boxing in my younger years followed by more strenuous exercise in the paratroops, I still worked out nearly every day, so I had this silly idea that I could cope with any unpleasantness nocturnal Moscow might throw at me. That night I learned better, that's for sure.

The action started right in front of my home, in one of those leafy glades between apartment blocks often seen in the more distant parts of Moscow, with plenty of trees and bushes and darkness underneath. The action... Well, it's hard to describe, but there was plenty of it. One of them must have run ahead of the pack, as all of a sudden I saw before me the dark outline of a gentleman built on the lines of an outsize strongbox. He opened the proceedings with a powerful swipe at my jaw. Apparently I had got alerted by this sudden apparition, or else old fighting instincts die hard, for I reacted automatically, without thinking, punch for punch. I rolled with the blow, took a step back and a step forward and smacked a solid one to his jaw. A classic shift/punch, in fact. As he was lunging at me and I at him, the blow packed double force, and he withdrew into private life for a while. Of course, I could easily have missed the point of his chin in that dark, a thought that made me sweat each time I recalled it all later. I was definitely luckier than I deserved.

Then the affair turned into an unseemly brawl, none of the staged orderliness of Hollywood productions. The other four (no woman, she must have been posted as the lookout) rushed me from both sides, emerging from the bushes, only to get a bit of a surprise. Fact is, I just went berserk, my feet and fists going like a windmill before I was swamped by the sheer weight of the assailants. A real mess it was. I can only remember more or less clearly the more salient points, like smashing a bottle of perfectly good Bordeaux on a head, lashing out with a clasp knife (which was instantly knocked out of my hand), and taking a couple of falls, dragging each time one of the opposition on top of me as insulation against kicks, and using my knee where it counts. In the end a sneaky bastard in white pants whom I mentally ticked off as a jackal (he had kept on the outer rim of the melee) snatched the bag with the Mac notebook that had slipped off my left shoulder, and in a flash they scurried away into the dark bushes. Flew from view. Only then did I remember to yell for help, but it wasn't much use anymore.

Nothing was any use. Not the police, anyway. I had a tough job convincing the officer on duty that anything untoward had happened to me (for some reason I had come out of the fracas without a scratch, just a swollen ankle where one of the thugs, apparently trained in the martial arts, had twice knocked my feet from under me, his body parallel with the ground). At about five in the morning a couple of policemen in a Ford took me to the battle scene and poked rather absent-mindedly under the bushes. One of them found a foot-long knife there and tossed it carelessly on the floor of their car. I mildly observed there might be fingerprints on it, but he merely waved a hand: "Aw come on, you're alive, aren't you?" I could not very well deny it; so I just shut up.

You see, at that moment I too found my own knife in the grass, a cute little Japanese thing my sister once brought me from Germany. I furtively picked it up, hurriedly closed it and put it in my pocket. Police might look askance at my using a knife in a fight; the courts usually see it as "exceeding the limits of necessary self-defense," which instantly turns the victim into a criminal. I'd heard of several cases like that. This attitude is called "vestiges of Soviet practices in the application of law." Something is currently being done to overcome these "vestiges," but it will obviously take some time, and then some more time.

Subsequent proceedings at the police station are too boring to describe. I spent two whole days with a young lady, an intern or something, who diligently performed what I termed to myself an exercise in calligraphy. She painstakingly wrote down in endless detail, and in laborious longhand, what exactly had happened, who had done what and how (as if one could have more than confused memories of confused events!); how much the thugs had got away with, consulting someone on the phone regarding the current price of a used Mac notebook; calling banks to cancel my credit cards; wanting to know the particulars of my passport that I had carelessly stuck in the Mac's bag, and so on and so forth. I nearly blew my top when she came to the value of a wallet that I had had for years, a present from my very first wife. Teeth clenched, I muttered "Ten kopeks," stood up and marched home.

However, I later returned to pester the police to do something besides arithmetic, to look for the thugs who could very well have been local residents and well known to them. But those gentlemen (one of them sported for some reason a magnificent black eye) apparently had weightier matters to occupy them. Eventually a couple of plainclothes men took me, in the dead of night, to the spot under the trees where the scuffle had taken place. They asked me several times whether I remembered the place correctly, then resolutely told me that it was so dark there that, even if they traced down the perpetrators, I would never be able to identify them. The implication was crystal clear: if the thugs could not be identified, it was no use looking for them, and I had better withdraw my complaint, not to spoil their beautiful statistics on which their bonuses and things depended, for such is the way the system works. I wanted to tell them that the hard disk of that Mac held three quarters of the book I was then writing, and couldn't they please find the Mac at least, if not those unidentifiable thugs. However, I was by then so disgusted that I curtly told them to tear up my complaint and go to hell. Actually I did not say this last aloud but felt it all the more.

Now I come to a difficult part that had perhaps be better left unsaid, only other people may feel like I did in that situation, and they will understand. A lyrical digression is in order here. My childhood fell on the war years, when you were either a hero like your Dad fighting at the front or you were a despicable nothing. Then there is that Khevsuri tribesmen's admixture in the cocktail of my blood that at times (only under severe provocation, I hasten to add) tears to shreds my customary well-mannered, professorial appearance. Anyway, I was boiling with rage and hurt macho pride and spoiling for revenge, so much so that I was quite willing and ready to "exceed the limits of necessary self-defense," and how.

There are benches by the entranceways of most apartment blocks, the spot where babushkas habitually foregather to comment critically on life rolling past them, and there I overheard a couple of them whispering about some bad guys in the basement of a nearby apartment block. I pricked up my ears. It was common knowledge that such basements were often the living quarters of bomzhi, a Bureaucratese acronym for "persons of no fixed abode." Down-and-outs, mostly alcoholics and drug addicts. With some exceptions they are not inclined toward violent crime, though not averse to stealing. What little I had seen of my assailants, they had not looked to me like bomzhi at all, and still I was raring to take some action. Of course it was just my boiling blood speaking, wanting to punish someone, anyone. I guess something more sensible could be expected of a sixty-year-old intellectual, but I am telling it like it was.

I wrapped a length of pipe in a newspaper and paid a visit to the aforesaid basement. It proved quite a spacious affair where I stumbled from room to room finding nothing except filth and heating equipment. The only occupants of the place were stray cats and their fleas. These (I mean the fleas) I brought back home, they apparently settled in the rug or somewhere and I could not get rid of them for a month or so. Very crafty beasts, fleas.

This comic denouement of my basement adventure sort of brought me to my senses. I thought less of avenging myself and more of self-defense should I again get involved in a mess like that. The imbroglio under the shady trees had certainly cured me of my superman complex. Everybody I talked to told me I'd been incredibly foolish and just as incredibly lucky to have got out of the scrap with my life. Standard practice, and police advice, apparently was to hand over your valuables to the thugs and beg them to please let you go in peace. In that case they might indeed release you, with a kick or two for good measure, unless you happened to be a woman, in which case rape was indicated.

I was 61 that year, and I had learned a few things about myself by that age. I knew for certain I would never be able to adhere to the meek procedure prescribed by police wisdom. I might want to, but simply would not. I would be fighting with all I had before I had time to think of what course to take. Reprehensible and nothing to be proud of, but it had to be taken as a given.

This being so, I needed something better to rely on in a fight than luck and bare fists. Like some kind of weapon to carry at all times. A pistol would be ideal. One shot in the ground or the air, and the thugs would have scattered as they eventually had done, I was practically certain. Now, had I emigrated to the US, as that fellow from the Kommersant advised, it would have been easy to get a permit and a pistol, or so my many American friends told me.

Alas, this wasn't America. Earlier, I talked of the vestiges of the Soviet law-and-order system in today's Russia. In my view, one of the worst of these is the fear of Russia's ruling class (Czarist, communist, or capitalist) of weapons in the hands of the rank-and-file masses of which I was one very angry member.

I had to think of something effective and legal or semi-legal, something that could not be classed at a glance as a lethal weapon. I liked my length of pipe wrapped in paper but had to throw it away. It was too easy to bash someone to death in the heat of a fight with it; a clear case of "exceeding the necessary limits." Result, a longish prison term, if not life.

A knife, now. I've touched on this subject above. It was most lucky for me that that martial arts artist had knocked my Japanese toy out of my hand at the first lunge. Had I cut any of them, not at the jugular even, I'd have earned myself a long vacation at public expense, but definitely.

Among others, I recalled the case of a young woman who had apparently been raped at sixteen and since then carried a kitchen knife in her bag; years later she used it on a taxi driver who proposed to rape her; she stuck the knife in his thigh, cut an artery, the guy bled to death, and the girl got a milder than usual sentence but only because of a public outcry, with discussions on TV, etc.

Stepping right into the present, there was this case in the Tula Region the other week. Four hoods armed with knives, a pistol, and a baseball bat (curiously, no baseball is played in Russia, but baseball bats are ubiquitous) broke into the home of a local store-keeper and demanded money. They got all there was in the house, some twenty thousand rubles, but wanted more, so they started knocking about the store-owner, his wife, children and grandchildren hurting all pretty thoroughly. When one of the bastards put his pistol to a seven-month-old kid's head, the man broke away from his torturers, rushed into the kitchen, grabbed the biggest knife and killed the thug who rushed after him, then killed two more and wounded a fourth who eventually got away.

The police reaction to the episode was typical. A real beauty, actually: the shop-keeper nursing his injuries in a hospital was charged with triple murder, a crime that would send him up for life as sure as eggs is eggs. Luckily this case, too, was taken up on the Internet and TV, and the police hurriedly changed the charge to assault, robbery, illegal possession of lethal weapons, etc. against those four. They are even making efforts to find the fourth thug, or at least saying so.

Incidentally, this case started a heated public debate on the accursed issue of "exceeding the limits of necessary self-defense." What I am writing here is a sort of contribution to the debate which, in my considered opinion, will end pretty much as usual: either in nothing or in a further tightening of the screws with us poor defenseless sods on the receiving end. Amen.

But let me get back to my contemplation of some weapon of self-defense that would be both effective and more or less legal. So knives were out. Gas canisters, now. Maces and such. These are legal, and have been used to good effect, but not in confined spaces, not in windy weather, etc. In fact, they are ideal in ideal situations only. A gas can would have been very little use in my situation, against five very active assailants; might even make them mad enough to do me in, after all, instead of getting away with my notebook and stuff.

Gas pistols. These share some drawbacks with gas canisters but at least they look like pistols, they make a noise like pistols, which might scare away the less murderous thugs. However, to get a license for one of these you need a sheaf of spravkas (papers to prove you are not a minor, not a psycho, not an alcoholic or drug addict, not a criminal, not blind, not deaf, that you have a metal safe to keep the weapon in, a separate place to keep the ammo in, etc. etc.) the thickness of the New Testament, and who wants to deal with the police if one can avoid it?

I was at a loss, but soon began to wonder. With a thousand years' experience of outwitting its darling bureaucracy, is it possible that the great Russian people have failed to invent some way of circumventing the legal and quasi-legal barriers in this little matter? It just didn't figure. And wasn't I right.

Browsing through the Internet, I hit on the site of a certain club (whose name I will keep to myself, as this is not an ad) that contained that cherished phrase, "weapons without license." I contacted the club at once and was soon the proud owner of an exact replica of the Makarov pistol, and I mean exact in everything (weight, shape, material) except it's an air gun, powered by a 12-gram CO2 gas can and shooting 4.5mm steel copper-coated pellets, both the canisters and pellets obtainable at various shops and countless underpass kiosks, and fairly cheap if you value your life.

Makarovs are as recognizable as Kalashnikovs, or more so: In Russia, the police, the army, the oligarchs' bodyguards, not to mention the Mafiosi, all carry them. If you produce one, or its replica, especially in the dark, it may be enough to scare away a pack of hoodlums who are not intent on murder at all cost (if it's a contract killing, you will simply be dead before you know it, so it need not concern us). If brandishing the gun doesn't scare away the hoods, well, they will have only themselves to blame, for you have 13 pellets in your clip, and each can smash a bottle at 10 paces (the pellet's muzzle velocity is said to be up to 120 m/sec). What it can do to a human body at close range must come under the heading of grievous injury, I guess. If shooting the air gun does not work, either, you can use it as a real heavy (some 800 grams) knuckleduster, easier to handle than my length of pipe but legal; arguably so, but at least your lawyer would have a point to argue...

With that MP654K in my belt, I felt if not exactly safe, then, well, safer. Still, I was aware that, as a weapon of self-defense, it was only marginally better than nothing, a far cry from a Colt or a Beretta or even the good old 9mm Makarov that still remained an unattainable dream. If you wanted to own it legally, I mean.

Little wonder then that when our rulers, conscious that the police, though reformed and re-reformed, remained as venal and useless an instrument of protecting the citizenry as ever, permitted the sale of gas pistols capable of shooting non-lethal rubber bullets, I rushed to a weapons shop and was among the first to buy myself two such "traumatic" pistols.

One is Makarych, a non-lethal version of Makarov, the name sounding like a familiar version of the patronymic. Supposed to be funny, I guess. Like the real thing, it's also 9mm but somewhat lighter, with a different color grip. I tried it out in the woods and was at first quite satisfied: at 8 paces it smashed a bottle to dust. However, on another occasion the bottle remained untouched, I thought I'd missed but actually the rubber bullet got stuck in the barrel (there are two kind of bulges there to make shooting anything but rubber pellets impossible). So when I fired a second time the recoil numbed my arm to the elbow, and it was lucky the barrel did not blow up in my hand. In all, a nice-looking but pretty lousy weapon. Of course, you can file off those bulges inside the barrel and shoot both rubber and real bullets, with the usual prospect of being resettled in some very cold climate for a long spell.

The other pistol I now own is a four-barrel Osa (Wasp), and it's a more serious proposition. First, its caliber is 18mm, double that of Makarov or Makarych. Second, it shoots rubber bullets that are not exactly rubber bullets but steel in rubber coating. I tried it out in the woods, too. It made a noise like a cannon and the bullet tore in half a thick root of an uprooted tree. Satisfactory, as Nero Wolfe might say.

For three or four years I felt I was pretty well armed and ready for a repeat of the nocturnal brush that started me thinking seriously of these matters. I even hoped that the next move on the part of our beloved ruling "elite" (can't help using those quotes) would be the sale, under strict police supervision, of real handguns, just like in some republics of the former Soviet Union, say, Moldavia and the Baltics, which have seen a sharp drop in street violence since that move.

Well, a fat lot I knew about our ruling class, our "elite," a misnomer to beat all misnomers. Before we knew where we were, a campaign was started to severely restrict the sale of "traumatics" if not ban them altogether (this last was advocated by many "experts"). Propaganda materials were shown on TV, over and over again, meant to prove that these non-lethal guns could in fact be very lethal, and all too easily used in scenes of road rage, in night club brawls, by quarrelsome drunks, and the like.

Just as most officially inspired campaigns, it was too silly for words. No statistics were given as to the number of murders committed with non-lethal handguns as against those done with kitchen knives, axes, shotguns, illegally owned real guns, etc. You could bet any money that the former were just a tiny fraction of the latter, yet no one proposed to ban kitchen knives or axes.

There was apparently a severe lack of visual material to prop up the campaign, so a popular film actor figured in several shows talking of an eye he lost in an in-depth discussion of manners with some young gentlemen near a restaurant after a jolly night out, and all the time anyone who bothered to find out knew that the eye had been knocked out with a pellet from a freely available air gun just like my MP654, nothing to do with a Makarych, Osa, or any other "traumatic" maligned in the show.

Perhaps the most ludicrous and, frankly, repulsive aspect of those debates was the preponderance in them of strident-voiced females who clearly knew damn all about any weapons, feared them only fractionally less than they did mice, but had cast-iron opinions about the necessity to immediately ban them. (I mean guns, not mice.)

Then there were speakers who knew words like "gun culture," used in a most positive sense. There was an old, well-established culture of possession of firearms in, say, the United States, but none in Russia, they said. Give Russians handguns, and they will all murder each other, was the Leitmotif of these anti-gun harangues. The contention was that the best way to develop a proper culture of possessing guns was to take away the guns, and the culture would eventually flourish. This particular imbecility had a historical precedent that I never tire of quoting, the story of that Kaluga governor in Czarist Russia who forbade the movement of motorcars through city streets "until horses get used to them..."

Another galling aspect of the campaign was that Mr. Medvedev, at the time our liberal, progressive, and ever so eloquent president, figured prominently in it (or even initiated it, as one might suspect). Question: If he had this low opinion about the Russians' ability to comport themselves in a civilized manner, what was he doing being President of All Russians?

This, you understand, is a rhetorical question requiring no answer. What I now have to say is no rhetoric but hard-earned knowledge and a firm conviction born of a lifelong observation of and participation in Russia's life. And I mean life as it is lived by its real people, not caricatures cut out of paper by self-serving politicians and media clowns.

To begin with, I am firmly convinced that on the subject of self-defense in Russia Mr. Medvedev, whether president or premier, should just SHUT UP! So should Mr. Putin; though not as talkative on this topic as Medvedev, he too should keep his opinion on the matter to himself. So should every high official who has bodyguards to protect him and as like as not possesses a real, not "traumatic" handgun, either illegally or quite legally, for such officials have this charming custom of awarding each other these perfectly lethal toys on the slightest pretext, like birthdays. So should all oligarchs, who typically have at their disposal not just personal bodyguards but whole security services as an integral part of their companies. So should the police and other services whose members carry regulation firearms while on duty and, habitually, illegally owned ones at other times. Remember Major Yevsyukov? A couple of years ago the guy quarreled with his wife, had a drink or two, ran amok and started shooting down everyone in sight. With an illegally owned gun, as it later transpired. Not every policeman runs amok, but most of them have these fine toys to play with, you can bet your last ruble on that.

All these individuals and organizations (the list, by the way, is not complete) should stop driveling about irresponsible, anarchist, drink-loving Russians who cannot be trusted with firearms. You see, the real reason behind this drivel is FEAR. It's one thing, lording it over a people whose most potent weapon is a hunger strike, and quite another, dealing with armed masses. Just recall December 2011 and those tens of thousands of citizens enraged by the death of an unarmed young man at the hands of a gun-toting thug from the Caucasus whom an obviously bribed public prosecutor let go scot free. They gathered in Manezh Square right by the Kremlin walls and scared the you know what out of the police brass and other officials. An obviously frightened Mr. Medvedev then viciously attacked those involved in the "pogrom" on Manezhka. Now, those citizens, infuriated by glaring injustice, were not armed. Suppose they had been? Mr. Medvedev would then have a much better reason to feel and act scared.

So please don't give us this eyewash about "gun culture" and the lack thereof among Russians. They have a pretty shrewd idea about what's behind this talk.

Now, anyone even skimpily read in Russian history or literary classics will know that less than a hundred years ago Russia had such a free and easy gun culture that it was not even aware it had any. Anyone who could afford to buy a firearm was welcome to it, for how else could things be? As a teenager I asked my grandfather (born 1870) whether what I read about guns, duels and things in the classics (some of them actually his contemporaries) was really, really true. Granddad just gazed at me rather wistfully. You see, we came from different planets. On his planet, an officer and gentleman, or just a gentleman, was supposed to have, de rigueur, a beautiful case with a brace of beautiful dueling pistols, preferably by Lepage; otherwise he was a very poor sort of gentleman indeed. On that planet a schoolboy my age could save enough money (five rubles it was at the time, or thereabouts) to buy himself a pistol or revolver to run away with to Fenimore Cooper's America, like those boys in Chekhov, or commit suicide with in case of unrequited love, as in Bunin..

Then came the first Russian revolution of 1905-1907, with the proletariat shooting it out with the police, gendarmerie and the army using the Nagants, Mausers and Brownings provided in quantity by professional revolutionaries of the intelligentsia class. The revolution was suppressed, reaction set in, and that marked the start of the ruling class's fear of weapons in the hands of the common people and the policy of restricting the availability of guns.

Under paranoiac Stalin this policy reached its zenith, nadir or acme or any such word. A rusty bayonet lying buried in the attic since the war with Japan was too easily construed as preparation for the overthrow of the state system, and the Arctic Circle ahoy for its unfortunate owner. Under Khrushchev, Stalin's personality cult was denounced, and the Khrushchevian Thaw marked the easing of punishments for possession of weapons. The prohibitive laws were still in place, but in practice possession of, say, a "liberated" Walther or Parabellum clandestinely brought home after the War would now cost you just a couple of years, the sentence sometimes suspended, if you were a really good guy in the eyes of the Party. Under Blessed Brezhnev, things ran in the same groove: guns for the nomenklatura, bare hands and teeth for the rest. By that time the situation was generally seen as normal, there was no talk of the need for a gun culture or anything of the sort, most likely because violent crime levels were negligible compared with what we have had since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So what do we have now? Violent crime has increased immeasurably in the last twenty years. The police are either ineffectual or worse than the criminals they are supposed to fight, with rumors of routine torture at police stations abounding, not to mention endemic corruption. Yet the ruling class is intent on restoring the Brezhnevite status quo. The nomenklatura has changed in terms of personalia, but its mentality remained the same, bedrock elitist: the right to self-defense and, generally, protection against crime, like all the other assets and benefits, strictly for the privileged and their servants, and to hell with the less fortunate masses.

I need not go into the obvious political implications of this mentality. If the rulers do not trust the masses, say, in this little matter of the guns, why should the masses trust the bosses? No public trust, no legitimacy for the regime. The folks up top may talk all they care about their wish to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, only who will believe them? The gap merely widens as the well-protected elite aims to take away from the underprivileged even the little that has been vouchsafed them in the way of self-defense. All I can say, they do so at their own peril.

Now, it may appear from the above that I am all for "free circulation of weapons" that Mr. Medvedev objects to so fiercely, for the way things were in my grandfather's time. Nothing of the kind. God forbid. Not after the criminal revolution of the 1990s which, to all intents and purposes, is still raging on.

I quite agree that there is no proper "gun culture" in this land. I merely believe that such a culture will never emerge under the present imbecilic policy of banning ownership of ordinary, lethal handguns and further restricting access to "traumatics."

I am all for a system of measures to develop the desirable gun culture. Measures like organizing associations of gun-owners that could run training courses for prospective members, run shooting ranges, etc. Measures like setting up the institution of vouching for such a future member by, say, two card-carrying members of the association. Persons vouching for a candidate might be held legally responsible in case the vouchee commits a criminal act involving guns or any infringement of the rules and regulations. This would clearly make the gun-owner think twice before using a gun. That would be a huge improvement on the current situation where only the shooter is held responsible (that is, if he is caught and fails to bribe the proper authorities in time). Such associations would work hand in hand with the police in matters of keeping track of the guns, the owners' record, etc.

Honest, I had plenty other bright ideas about promoting a civilized attitude toward guns, a system of moves culminating in an ideal gun culture. Unfortunately, I switched on TV, and that killed the flow of inspiration dead, for there was Mr. Medvedev repeating to a bunch of journalists, with his customary smug smirk, that he was as ever against "free circulation of weapons" because the country was "not yet ready for that." The same old tripe: Russians are a pack of alkies who cannot be trusted with anything more serious than kitchen knives, and even that only when they are temporarily sober.

You see, that's the whole problem with our liberals, whether in power or out of it, and generally of the "elite": they despise the country they live in, they tell it to its face that it's just not the right sort to satisfy them, and then they wonder why it takes all that administrative resource, massive fraud and all of Vladimir Putin's shopworn charisma to get them elected anywhere, while the outsiders among them get their low single-digit percentages at the polls.

Ah well, to hell with them all. My personal problem is stark and simple: physical survival against heavy odds. A Russian is 34 times more likely to be murdered than a German, did you know this gratifying statistic (gratifying for the Germans, I mean)? When not staying at my dacha, I take my daily walks in a bomzhi-infested growth of trees along the Savelovskaya railway a few minutes from my home, and in the last ten years I came on at least three corpses there, the last one this past winter. I'd really hate to make a fourth, so I always carry my Makarych in my hip pocket. If Mr. Medvedev eventually takes it away from me, I know a friendly policeman who once offered to sell me a stray Makarov for a modest $300. If, much against my will, I will have to use it, I am sure to end up in prison. Still, ever since childhood I have deeply respected Russian folk wisdom, and it says unequivocally: Better in jail than in the grave.

Alas, that's the most practical idea on gun culture that Russia can offer right now.

Keywords: Russia, Crime, Law, Police - Russian News - Russia

 

Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 1
From: Sergei Roy <SergeiRoy@yandex.ru>
Subject: self-defense in moscow

By Sergei Roy
[Former editor of Moscow News]

The funny thing was not the episode itself (not much fun about that) but what preceded it. After we'd put our weekly to bed, I usually relaxed office discipline a bit. Say, to the extent of a couple of bottles of good wine in close company. Having gone through the weekly stress of meeting the printers' deadline, we just sat around a while chewing the fat. On that particular night a chap from the Kommersant daily stopped by, and at some point he up and asked me: "Look, man, you speak this BBC English of yours, you sure can write, what the hell are you doing in this country? If I were you, I'd have long emigrated to some warm, civilized land."

file photo of MakarovThat mood was (actually, still is) fairly widespread among Moscow's intelligentsia, especially the younger sort known endearingly as office plankton. Frankly, in my weaker moments similar ideas came into my head, too, so I responded with some heat. Something to the effect that abandoning one's country when it was going through a bad patch in its history was not unlike defecating on one's forefathers' graves. Emigration was not unknown in my family, but that was after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and I knew pretty well how those emigres felt about leaving Mother Russia. They spent years in sorrow that they could not eventually be buried under a beryozka, Russia's emblematic birch-tree.

For a punch line I quoted my old friend and erstwhile second-in-command at the paper, Sergei Sossinsky. Born in France, he had lived a goodish chunk of his life in the States, had a nice place in Maine, and still he had come over here settling finally in the boondocks, in a tiny village near Kostroma. When I had asked him, "Why?", he had replied simply: "I feel warm there." That's what I told that guy from Kommersant: "I feel warm here."

Well, that night Moscow certainly showed me just how warm things could get for idealists like myself.

I lived then quite a long way from Moscow's center, about half an hour by the Metro and then a few bus stops to my apartment block. It was well past one in the morning, no buses in sight, so I decided to walk home on that fine August night.

The way I reconstructed events later, the thugs must have marked me right at the Metro station. Easy quarry, they must have thought: a solitary grey-haired intellectual-looking type, certainly not a heavyweight, with a Macintosh bag on his shoulder. As I walked past the vast dark grounds of Kuskovo estate, I spotted three of them walking some fifty yards ahead of me and another three about the same distance behind. One of them was a young woman, the others, strapping young men.

It was probably because of that woman that I had no premonition of evil at all. The other reason must have been that I had done some serious boxing in my younger years followed by more strenuous exercise in the paratroops, I still worked out nearly every day, so I had this silly idea that I could cope with any unpleasantness nocturnal Moscow might throw at me. That night I learned better, that's for sure.

The action started right in front of my home, in one of those leafy glades between apartment blocks often seen in the more distant parts of Moscow, with plenty of trees and bushes and darkness underneath. The action... Well, it's hard to describe, but there was plenty of it. One of them must have run ahead of the pack, as all of a sudden I saw before me the dark outline of a gentleman built on the lines of an outsize strongbox. He opened the proceedings with a powerful swipe at my jaw. Apparently I had got alerted by this sudden apparition, or else old fighting instincts die hard, for I reacted automatically, without thinking, punch for punch. I rolled with the blow, took a step back and a step forward and smacked a solid one to his jaw. A classic shift/punch, in fact. As he was lunging at me and I at him, the blow packed double force, and he withdrew into private life for a while. Of course, I could easily have missed the point of his chin in that dark, a thought that made me sweat each time I recalled it all later. I was definitely luckier than I deserved.

Then the affair turned into an unseemly brawl, none of the staged orderliness of Hollywood productions. The other four (no woman, she must have been posted as the lookout) rushed me from both sides, emerging from the bushes, only to get a bit of a surprise. Fact is, I just went berserk, my feet and fists going like a windmill before I was swamped by the sheer weight of the assailants. A real mess it was. I can only remember more or less clearly the more salient points, like smashing a bottle of perfectly good Bordeaux on a head, lashing out with a clasp knife (which was instantly knocked out of my hand), and taking a couple of falls, dragging each time one of the opposition on top of me as insulation against kicks, and using my knee where it counts. In the end a sneaky bastard in white pants whom I mentally ticked off as a jackal (he had kept on the outer rim of the melee) snatched the bag with the Mac notebook that had slipped off my left shoulder, and in a flash they scurried away into the dark bushes. Flew from view. Only then did I remember to yell for help, but it wasn't much use anymore.

Nothing was any use. Not the police, anyway. I had a tough job convincing the officer on duty that anything untoward had happened to me (for some reason I had come out of the fracas without a scratch, just a swollen ankle where one of the thugs, apparently trained in the martial arts, had twice knocked my feet from under me, his body parallel with the ground). At about five in the morning a couple of policemen in a Ford took me to the battle scene and poked rather absent-mindedly under the bushes. One of them found a foot-long knife there and tossed it carelessly on the floor of their car. I mildly observed there might be fingerprints on it, but he merely waved a hand: "Aw come on, you're alive, aren't you?" I could not very well deny it; so I just shut up.

You see, at that moment I too found my own knife in the grass, a cute little Japanese thing my sister once brought me from Germany. I furtively picked it up, hurriedly closed it and put it in my pocket. Police might look askance at my using a knife in a fight; the courts usually see it as "exceeding the limits of necessary self-defense," which instantly turns the victim into a criminal. I'd heard of several cases like that. This attitude is called "vestiges of Soviet practices in the application of law." Something is currently being done to overcome these "vestiges," but it will obviously take some time, and then some more time.

Subsequent proceedings at the police station are too boring to describe. I spent two whole days with a young lady, an intern or something, who diligently performed what I termed to myself an exercise in calligraphy. She painstakingly wrote down in endless detail, and in laborious longhand, what exactly had happened, who had done what and how (as if one could have more than confused memories of confused events!); how much the thugs had got away with, consulting someone on the phone regarding the current price of a used Mac notebook; calling banks to cancel my credit cards; wanting to know the particulars of my passport that I had carelessly stuck in the Mac's bag, and so on and so forth. I nearly blew my top when she came to the value of a wallet that I had had for years, a present from my very first wife. Teeth clenched, I muttered "Ten kopeks," stood up and marched home.

However, I later returned to pester the police to do something besides arithmetic, to look for the thugs who could very well have been local residents and well known to them. But those gentlemen (one of them sported for some reason a magnificent black eye) apparently had weightier matters to occupy them. Eventually a couple of plainclothes men took me, in the dead of night, to the spot under the trees where the scuffle had taken place. They asked me several times whether I remembered the place correctly, then resolutely told me that it was so dark there that, even if they traced down the perpetrators, I would never be able to identify them. The implication was crystal clear: if the thugs could not be identified, it was no use looking for them, and I had better withdraw my complaint, not to spoil their beautiful statistics on which their bonuses and things depended, for such is the way the system works. I wanted to tell them that the hard disk of that Mac held three quarters of the book I was then writing, and couldn't they please find the Mac at least, if not those unidentifiable thugs. However, I was by then so disgusted that I curtly told them to tear up my complaint and go to hell. Actually I did not say this last aloud but felt it all the more.

Now I come to a difficult part that had perhaps be better left unsaid, only other people may feel like I did in that situation, and they will understand. A lyrical digression is in order here. My childhood fell on the war years, when you were either a hero like your Dad fighting at the front or you were a despicable nothing. Then there is that Khevsuri tribesmen's admixture in the cocktail of my blood that at times (only under severe provocation, I hasten to add) tears to shreds my customary well-mannered, professorial appearance. Anyway, I was boiling with rage and hurt macho pride and spoiling for revenge, so much so that I was quite willing and ready to "exceed the limits of necessary self-defense," and how.

There are benches by the entranceways of most apartment blocks, the spot where babushkas habitually foregather to comment critically on life rolling past them, and there I overheard a couple of them whispering about some bad guys in the basement of a nearby apartment block. I pricked up my ears. It was common knowledge that such basements were often the living quarters of bomzhi, a Bureaucratese acronym for "persons of no fixed abode." Down-and-outs, mostly alcoholics and drug addicts. With some exceptions they are not inclined toward violent crime, though not averse to stealing. What little I had seen of my assailants, they had not looked to me like bomzhi at all, and still I was raring to take some action. Of course it was just my boiling blood speaking, wanting to punish someone, anyone. I guess something more sensible could be expected of a sixty-year-old intellectual, but I am telling it like it was.

I wrapped a length of pipe in a newspaper and paid a visit to the aforesaid basement. It proved quite a spacious affair where I stumbled from room to room finding nothing except filth and heating equipment. The only occupants of the place were stray cats and their fleas. These (I mean the fleas) I brought back home, they apparently settled in the rug or somewhere and I could not get rid of them for a month or so. Very crafty beasts, fleas.

This comic denouement of my basement adventure sort of brought me to my senses. I thought less of avenging myself and more of self-defense should I again get involved in a mess like that. The imbroglio under the shady trees had certainly cured me of my superman complex. Everybody I talked to told me I'd been incredibly foolish and just as incredibly lucky to have got out of the scrap with my life. Standard practice, and police advice, apparently was to hand over your valuables to the thugs and beg them to please let you go in peace. In that case they might indeed release you, with a kick or two for good measure, unless you happened to be a woman, in which case rape was indicated.

I was 61 that year, and I had learned a few things about myself by that age. I knew for certain I would never be able to adhere to the meek procedure prescribed by police wisdom. I might want to, but simply would not. I would be fighting with all I had before I had time to think of what course to take. Reprehensible and nothing to be proud of, but it had to be taken as a given.

This being so, I needed something better to rely on in a fight than luck and bare fists. Like some kind of weapon to carry at all times. A pistol would be ideal. One shot in the ground or the air, and the thugs would have scattered as they eventually had done, I was practically certain. Now, had I emigrated to the US, as that fellow from the Kommersant advised, it would have been easy to get a permit and a pistol, or so my many American friends told me.

Alas, this wasn't America. Earlier, I talked of the vestiges of the Soviet law-and-order system in today's Russia. In my view, one of the worst of these is the fear of Russia's ruling class (Czarist, communist, or capitalist) of weapons in the hands of the rank-and-file masses of which I was one very angry member.

I had to think of something effective and legal or semi-legal, something that could not be classed at a glance as a lethal weapon. I liked my length of pipe wrapped in paper but had to throw it away. It was too easy to bash someone to death in the heat of a fight with it; a clear case of "exceeding the necessary limits." Result, a longish prison term, if not life.

A knife, now. I've touched on this subject above. It was most lucky for me that that martial arts artist had knocked my Japanese toy out of my hand at the first lunge. Had I cut any of them, not at the jugular even, I'd have earned myself a long vacation at public expense, but definitely.

Among others, I recalled the case of a young woman who had apparently been raped at sixteen and since then carried a kitchen knife in her bag; years later she used it on a taxi driver who proposed to rape her; she stuck the knife in his thigh, cut an artery, the guy bled to death, and the girl got a milder than usual sentence but only because of a public outcry, with discussions on TV, etc.

Stepping right into the present, there was this case in the Tula Region the other week. Four hoods armed with knives, a pistol, and a baseball bat (curiously, no baseball is played in Russia, but baseball bats are ubiquitous) broke into the home of a local store-keeper and demanded money. They got all there was in the house, some twenty thousand rubles, but wanted more, so they started knocking about the store-owner, his wife, children and grandchildren hurting all pretty thoroughly. When one of the bastards put his pistol to a seven-month-old kid's head, the man broke away from his torturers, rushed into the kitchen, grabbed the biggest knife and killed the thug who rushed after him, then killed two more and wounded a fourth who eventually got away.

The police reaction to the episode was typical. A real beauty, actually: the shop-keeper nursing his injuries in a hospital was charged with triple murder, a crime that would send him up for life as sure as eggs is eggs. Luckily this case, too, was taken up on the Internet and TV, and the police hurriedly changed the charge to assault, robbery, illegal possession of lethal weapons, etc. against those four. They are even making efforts to find the fourth thug, or at least saying so.

Incidentally, this case started a heated public debate on the accursed issue of "exceeding the limits of necessary self-defense." What I am writing here is a sort of contribution to the debate which, in my considered opinion, will end pretty much as usual: either in nothing or in a further tightening of the screws with us poor defenseless sods on the receiving end. Amen.

But let me get back to my contemplation of some weapon of self-defense that would be both effective and more or less legal. So knives were out. Gas canisters, now. Maces and such. These are legal, and have been used to good effect, but not in confined spaces, not in windy weather, etc. In fact, they are ideal in ideal situations only. A gas can would have been very little use in my situation, against five very active assailants; might even make them mad enough to do me in, after all, instead of getting away with my notebook and stuff.

Gas pistols. These share some drawbacks with gas canisters but at least they look like pistols, they make a noise like pistols, which might scare away the less murderous thugs. However, to get a license for one of these you need a sheaf of spravkas (papers to prove you are not a minor, not a psycho, not an alcoholic or drug addict, not a criminal, not blind, not deaf, that you have a metal safe to keep the weapon in, a separate place to keep the ammo in, etc. etc.) the thickness of the New Testament, and who wants to deal with the police if one can avoid it?

I was at a loss, but soon began to wonder. With a thousand years' experience of outwitting its darling bureaucracy, is it possible that the great Russian people have failed to invent some way of circumventing the legal and quasi-legal barriers in this little matter? It just didn't figure. And wasn't I right.

Browsing through the Internet, I hit on the site of a certain club (whose name I will keep to myself, as this is not an ad) that contained that cherished phrase, "weapons without license." I contacted the club at once and was soon the proud owner of an exact replica of the Makarov pistol, and I mean exact in everything (weight, shape, material) except it's an air gun, powered by a 12-gram CO2 gas can and shooting 4.5mm steel copper-coated pellets, both the canisters and pellets obtainable at various shops and countless underpass kiosks, and fairly cheap if you value your life.

Makarovs are as recognizable as Kalashnikovs, or more so: In Russia, the police, the army, the oligarchs' bodyguards, not to mention the Mafiosi, all carry them. If you produce one, or its replica, especially in the dark, it may be enough to scare away a pack of hoodlums who are not intent on murder at all cost (if it's a contract killing, you will simply be dead before you know it, so it need not concern us). If brandishing the gun doesn't scare away the hoods, well, they will have only themselves to blame, for you have 13 pellets in your clip, and each can smash a bottle at 10 paces (the pellet's muzzle velocity is said to be up to 120 m/sec). What it can do to a human body at close range must come under the heading of grievous injury, I guess. If shooting the air gun does not work, either, you can use it as a real heavy (some 800 grams) knuckleduster, easier to handle than my length of pipe but legal; arguably so, but at least your lawyer would have a point to argue...

With that MP654K in my belt, I felt if not exactly safe, then, well, safer. Still, I was aware that, as a weapon of self-defense, it was only marginally better than nothing, a far cry from a Colt or a Beretta or even the good old 9mm Makarov that still remained an unattainable dream. If you wanted to own it legally, I mean.

Little wonder then that when our rulers, conscious that the police, though reformed and re-reformed, remained as venal and useless an instrument of protecting the citizenry as ever, permitted the sale of gas pistols capable of shooting non-lethal rubber bullets, I rushed to a weapons shop and was among the first to buy myself two such "traumatic" pistols.

One is Makarych, a non-lethal version of Makarov, the name sounding like a familiar version of the patronymic. Supposed to be funny, I guess. Like the real thing, it's also 9mm but somewhat lighter, with a different color grip. I tried it out in the woods and was at first quite satisfied: at 8 paces it smashed a bottle to dust. However, on another occasion the bottle remained untouched, I thought I'd missed but actually the rubber bullet got stuck in the barrel (there are two kind of bulges there to make shooting anything but rubber pellets impossible). So when I fired a second time the recoil numbed my arm to the elbow, and it was lucky the barrel did not blow up in my hand. In all, a nice-looking but pretty lousy weapon. Of course, you can file off those bulges inside the barrel and shoot both rubber and real bullets, with the usual prospect of being resettled in some very cold climate for a long spell.

The other pistol I now own is a four-barrel Osa (Wasp), and it's a more serious proposition. First, its caliber is 18mm, double that of Makarov or Makarych. Second, it shoots rubber bullets that are not exactly rubber bullets but steel in rubber coating. I tried it out in the woods, too. It made a noise like a cannon and the bullet tore in half a thick root of an uprooted tree. Satisfactory, as Nero Wolfe might say.

For three or four years I felt I was pretty well armed and ready for a repeat of the nocturnal brush that started me thinking seriously of these matters. I even hoped that the next move on the part of our beloved ruling "elite" (can't help using those quotes) would be the sale, under strict police supervision, of real handguns, just like in some republics of the former Soviet Union, say, Moldavia and the Baltics, which have seen a sharp drop in street violence since that move.

Well, a fat lot I knew about our ruling class, our "elite," a misnomer to beat all misnomers. Before we knew where we were, a campaign was started to severely restrict the sale of "traumatics" if not ban them altogether (this last was advocated by many "experts"). Propaganda materials were shown on TV, over and over again, meant to prove that these non-lethal guns could in fact be very lethal, and all too easily used in scenes of road rage, in night club brawls, by quarrelsome drunks, and the like.

Just as most officially inspired campaigns, it was too silly for words. No statistics were given as to the number of murders committed with non-lethal handguns as against those done with kitchen knives, axes, shotguns, illegally owned real guns, etc. You could bet any money that the former were just a tiny fraction of the latter, yet no one proposed to ban kitchen knives or axes.

There was apparently a severe lack of visual material to prop up the campaign, so a popular film actor figured in several shows talking of an eye he lost in an in-depth discussion of manners with some young gentlemen near a restaurant after a jolly night out, and all the time anyone who bothered to find out knew that the eye had been knocked out with a pellet from a freely available air gun just like my MP654, nothing to do with a Makarych, Osa, or any other "traumatic" maligned in the show.

Perhaps the most ludicrous and, frankly, repulsive aspect of those debates was the preponderance in them of strident-voiced females who clearly knew damn all about any weapons, feared them only fractionally less than they did mice, but had cast-iron opinions about the necessity to immediately ban them. (I mean guns, not mice.)

Then there were speakers who knew words like "gun culture," used in a most positive sense. There was an old, well-established culture of possession of firearms in, say, the United States, but none in Russia, they said. Give Russians handguns, and they will all murder each other, was the Leitmotif of these anti-gun harangues. The contention was that the best way to develop a proper culture of possessing guns was to take away the guns, and the culture would eventually flourish. This particular imbecility had a historical precedent that I never tire of quoting, the story of that Kaluga governor in Czarist Russia who forbade the movement of motorcars through city streets "until horses get used to them..."

Another galling aspect of the campaign was that Mr. Medvedev, at the time our liberal, progressive, and ever so eloquent president, figured prominently in it (or even initiated it, as one might suspect). Question: If he had this low opinion about the Russians' ability to comport themselves in a civilized manner, what was he doing being President of All Russians?

This, you understand, is a rhetorical question requiring no answer. What I now have to say is no rhetoric but hard-earned knowledge and a firm conviction born of a lifelong observation of and participation in Russia's life. And I mean life as it is lived by its real people, not caricatures cut out of paper by self-serving politicians and media clowns.

To begin with, I am firmly convinced that on the subject of self-defense in Russia Mr. Medvedev, whether president or premier, should just SHUT UP! So should Mr. Putin; though not as talkative on this topic as Medvedev, he too should keep his opinion on the matter to himself. So should every high official who has bodyguards to protect him and as like as not possesses a real, not "traumatic" handgun, either illegally or quite legally, for such officials have this charming custom of awarding each other these perfectly lethal toys on the slightest pretext, like birthdays. So should all oligarchs, who typically have at their disposal not just personal bodyguards but whole security services as an integral part of their companies. So should the police and other services whose members carry regulation firearms while on duty and, habitually, illegally owned ones at other times. Remember Major Yevsyukov? A couple of years ago the guy quarreled with his wife, had a drink or two, ran amok and started shooting down everyone in sight. With an illegally owned gun, as it later transpired. Not every policeman runs amok, but most of them have these fine toys to play with, you can bet your last ruble on that.

All these individuals and organizations (the list, by the way, is not complete) should stop driveling about irresponsible, anarchist, drink-loving Russians who cannot be trusted with firearms. You see, the real reason behind this drivel is FEAR. It's one thing, lording it over a people whose most potent weapon is a hunger strike, and quite another, dealing with armed masses. Just recall December 2011 and those tens of thousands of citizens enraged by the death of an unarmed young man at the hands of a gun-toting thug from the Caucasus whom an obviously bribed public prosecutor let go scot free. They gathered in Manezh Square right by the Kremlin walls and scared the you know what out of the police brass and other officials. An obviously frightened Mr. Medvedev then viciously attacked those involved in the "pogrom" on Manezhka. Now, those citizens, infuriated by glaring injustice, were not armed. Suppose they had been? Mr. Medvedev would then have a much better reason to feel and act scared.

So please don't give us this eyewash about "gun culture" and the lack thereof among Russians. They have a pretty shrewd idea about what's behind this talk.

Now, anyone even skimpily read in Russian history or literary classics will know that less than a hundred years ago Russia had such a free and easy gun culture that it was not even aware it had any. Anyone who could afford to buy a firearm was welcome to it, for how else could things be? As a teenager I asked my grandfather (born 1870) whether what I read about guns, duels and things in the classics (some of them actually his contemporaries) was really, really true. Granddad just gazed at me rather wistfully. You see, we came from different planets. On his planet, an officer and gentleman, or just a gentleman, was supposed to have, de rigueur, a beautiful case with a brace of beautiful dueling pistols, preferably by Lepage; otherwise he was a very poor sort of gentleman indeed. On that planet a schoolboy my age could save enough money (five rubles it was at the time, or thereabouts) to buy himself a pistol or revolver to run away with to Fenimore Cooper's America, like those boys in Chekhov, or commit suicide with in case of unrequited love, as in Bunin..

Then came the first Russian revolution of 1905-1907, with the proletariat shooting it out with the police, gendarmerie and the army using the Nagants, Mausers and Brownings provided in quantity by professional revolutionaries of the intelligentsia class. The revolution was suppressed, reaction set in, and that marked the start of the ruling class's fear of weapons in the hands of the common people and the policy of restricting the availability of guns.

Under paranoiac Stalin this policy reached its zenith, nadir or acme or any such word. A rusty bayonet lying buried in the attic since the war with Japan was too easily construed as preparation for the overthrow of the state system, and the Arctic Circle ahoy for its unfortunate owner. Under Khrushchev, Stalin's personality cult was denounced, and the Khrushchevian Thaw marked the easing of punishments for possession of weapons. The prohibitive laws were still in place, but in practice possession of, say, a "liberated" Walther or Parabellum clandestinely brought home after the War would now cost you just a couple of years, the sentence sometimes suspended, if you were a really good guy in the eyes of the Party. Under Blessed Brezhnev, things ran in the same groove: guns for the nomenklatura, bare hands and teeth for the rest. By that time the situation was generally seen as normal, there was no talk of the need for a gun culture or anything of the sort, most likely because violent crime levels were negligible compared with what we have had since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So what do we have now? Violent crime has increased immeasurably in the last twenty years. The police are either ineffectual or worse than the criminals they are supposed to fight, with rumors of routine torture at police stations abounding, not to mention endemic corruption. Yet the ruling class is intent on restoring the Brezhnevite status quo. The nomenklatura has changed in terms of personalia, but its mentality remained the same, bedrock elitist: the right to self-defense and, generally, protection against crime, like all the other assets and benefits, strictly for the privileged and their servants, and to hell with the less fortunate masses.

I need not go into the obvious political implications of this mentality. If the rulers do not trust the masses, say, in this little matter of the guns, why should the masses trust the bosses? No public trust, no legitimacy for the regime. The folks up top may talk all they care about their wish to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, only who will believe them? The gap merely widens as the well-protected elite aims to take away from the underprivileged even the little that has been vouchsafed them in the way of self-defense. All I can say, they do so at their own peril.

Now, it may appear from the above that I am all for "free circulation of weapons" that Mr. Medvedev objects to so fiercely, for the way things were in my grandfather's time. Nothing of the kind. God forbid. Not after the criminal revolution of the 1990s which, to all intents and purposes, is still raging on.

I quite agree that there is no proper "gun culture" in this land. I merely believe that such a culture will never emerge under the present imbecilic policy of banning ownership of ordinary, lethal handguns and further restricting access to "traumatics."

I am all for a system of measures to develop the desirable gun culture. Measures like organizing associations of gun-owners that could run training courses for prospective members, run shooting ranges, etc. Measures like setting up the institution of vouching for such a future member by, say, two card-carrying members of the association. Persons vouching for a candidate might be held legally responsible in case the vouchee commits a criminal act involving guns or any infringement of the rules and regulations. This would clearly make the gun-owner think twice before using a gun. That would be a huge improvement on the current situation where only the shooter is held responsible (that is, if he is caught and fails to bribe the proper authorities in time). Such associations would work hand in hand with the police in matters of keeping track of the guns, the owners' record, etc.

Honest, I had plenty other bright ideas about promoting a civilized attitude toward guns, a system of moves culminating in an ideal gun culture. Unfortunately, I switched on TV, and that killed the flow of inspiration dead, for there was Mr. Medvedev repeating to a bunch of journalists, with his customary smug smirk, that he was as ever against "free circulation of weapons" because the country was "not yet ready for that." The same old tripe: Russians are a pack of alkies who cannot be trusted with anything more serious than kitchen knives, and even that only when they are temporarily sober.

You see, that's the whole problem with our liberals, whether in power or out of it, and generally of the "elite": they despise the country they live in, they tell it to its face that it's just not the right sort to satisfy them, and then they wonder why it takes all that administrative resource, massive fraud and all of Vladimir Putin's shopworn charisma to get them elected anywhere, while the outsiders among them get their low single-digit percentages at the polls.

Ah well, to hell with them all. My personal problem is stark and simple: physical survival against heavy odds. A Russian is 34 times more likely to be murdered than a German, did you know this gratifying statistic (gratifying for the Germans, I mean)? When not staying at my dacha, I take my daily walks in a bomzhi-infested growth of trees along the Savelovskaya railway a few minutes from my home, and in the last ten years I came on at least three corpses there, the last one this past winter. I'd really hate to make a fourth, so I always carry my Makarych in my hip pocket. If Mr. Medvedev eventually takes it away from me, I know a friendly policeman who once offered to sell me a stray Makarov for a modest $300. If, much against my will, I will have to use it, I am sure to end up in prison. Still, ever since childhood I have deeply respected Russian folk wisdom, and it says unequivocally: Better in jail than in the grave.

Alas, that's the most practical idea on gun culture that Russia can offer right now.

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