Swastikas in My Life

Part 1

Among my earliest experiences with the swastika was the embarrassment I felt from failing to draw it correctly.

This was at the age when many kids still forget whether it’s И or N, and the swastika is more complicated than that.

I would draw something like this:

and immediately know something’s wrong. The symbol stared back disapprovingly.

It was a challenge for all boys my age. But we all figured it out sooner or later.

We needed the swastikas to mark evil in the battle scenes that made up a big part of every boy’s drawings. Enemy tanks and helicopters carried swastikas on their sides.

I don’t remember “our” tanks having symbols on them. The Russian flag would have required colored pencils or markers, and not everybody had them. The hammer-and-sickle’s era had already ended, and anyway it was even harder to draw. We must have used stars, but it is the swastikas that I remember.

This was at the age when many of us assumed that the birthmark on Gorbachev’s head was a map of the Soviet Union, and that the spooky stone face of a man with his mouth open and a different face sticking out of his forehead, which they displayed on TV before the best shows, was Yeltsin’s¹.

My second experience with the swastika was several years later. Having graduated the kindergarten, I was now in elementary school. I could write in cursive and do arithmetics, and I was even learning some English: the first words were a cat, a bat, and a rat.

In Soviet and Russian kindergartens kids are broken up into groups, and each group gets assigned their own veranda — three walls and a roof, a sheltered outdoor environment for kids to play in while breathing fresh air.

I liked to visit my old kindergarten occasionally, to chat with the good teacher (the evil one would spank you if she caught you awake during Quiet Hour) and to look at the generation coming up after mine. On one of such visits I saw a huge black swastika spray-painted on the wall of the veranda that had been my home turf for half of my life.

It was as if the face of Satan emerged out of the wall. Evil which was being defeated in our war drawings had now claimed the territory of my childhood. It scared me.

I’m in the red sweater.

The next time, I was at the marketplace with my grandma. Marketplaces in the 1990s Russia were dirty, overcrowded, loud, and, for kids, scary. To try on new pants, one would hide from the waist down behind a piece of cardboard held by the seller, usually a brash and sad-looking woman.

In between the rows of kiosks I saw two guys in black uniforms — actual red arm-bends on their shoulders, with swastikas drawn more intricately than what I was used to — passing out newspapers. This was an outreach program of an organization called Russian National Unity, but I didn’t know that at the time.

One of the brash sad-looking women scolded the men: “You should join the army instead!” She received a polite smile in response: “Matushka, we have just gotten back.”

Everybody — even I — knew that the Russian army was a deeply rotten, dangerous institution, ruled by dedovschina, “the rule of the grandfathers” — a system of abuse of younger conscripts by older soldiers, or dedy; and every boy knew he may get conscripted after he finishes high school. I took the uniformed man’s comment to mean, “It is exactly the sorry, dysfunctional state of the Russian army that made me want to join a fascist organization and work on repairing my country.”

The interaction gave me a strange feeling. On the one hand, the swastikas on these guys’ arm-bands were even scarier than the one in the kindergarten, because they were attached to real humans, actual agents of evil, operating in the open. On the other, these agents were surprisingly friendly and put-together, and they seemed prepared to argue their side.

Russian National Unity fell apart in 2000.

In 9th grade, I spent a lot of time — during recess or waiting for a bus — playing Snake on my black-and-white Nokia 1100.

I saw the game very poetic and vaguely Buddhist. In Snake, one moves through life by chasing after pieces of food — I think it was mice in my version — and avoiding obstacles; each eaten mouse makes one’s tail grow bigger, and after a while, the tail becomes the main obstacle to worry about. Attraction, aversion, and karma.

The game’s rules consist of only 4 short sentences. “You cannot stop the snake or make it go backwards” felt poignant.

Level Four consisted of four barriers that, with the right set of eyes, looked like half of a swastika: two horizontal and two vertical lines, but no intersection in the middle. Sometimes, if the mice that the snake chased appeared in the right spots, the tail would take the shape of this intersection, and a full-blown swastika would appear out of nowhere before dissipating after a few moments.

I know now that this, too, sometimes happens in life: people go about their lives, chasing the good stuff and avoiding the bad, and a swastika simply emerges out of their collective movement.

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In the late teens, I had a falling out with one of my friend groups. We were changing in different directions. They had more anger and a harder edge than me. We drank a lot and, more and more often, our drunk conversations ended in arguments about each other’s character; at a certain point, the swastika entered them too.

The kid with the hardest edge — I remember how, back in middle school, he once barked down a pack of stray dogs that tried to attack us — joined a boxing gym and met new friends there. I think they described themselves as “nationalists,” but it was an understatement. At one of our gatherings, the TV, which would normally play music videos by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, now showed The Eternal Jew, a Nazi propaganda movie from 1940.

We drank and we argued. I could not understand how a Russian comes to adopt an ideology that considered Russians sub-human, destined for death or enslavement, and whose proponents killed some 20 to 30 million of his countrymen. My friend, now becoming a former friend, explained that Nazism should be thought of as a war trophy: Soviet soldiers used guns and vehicles they captured from Germans, and we could now similarly repurpose their ideology. Moving Slavs from the bottom to the top of the racial hierarchy was a straightforward tweak.

During one of our arguments about politics, ideology, values, and character, he suddenly shouted, “You don’t know what it’s like when you father doesn’t love you or your mom!” and then burst into tears. His parents were going through a divorce.

End of Part 1.

The one thing I remember from the movie is it compared Jews to rats and then talked about how dangerous rats are.

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I’m trying to get back into writing and making things. It’s a gradual process.

I’m also continuing to talk to subscribers on video, one-on-one. You can book a call here:

1. I want to try making a tattoo design based on this logo, which was actually modeled after a mythological Taoist teacher with a three-legged toad on his head. If you’re in the market for a spooky tattoo, let me know.