Work Text:
The final sheet rested beneath Galina Sokolova’s left hand while the closing camera drew its red light. She did not look down at it. The paper had remained untouched through the last three items, aligned precisely with the edge of the desk, its upper corner held flat beneath one finger. Behind her, the studio wall carried the pale winter map of the Union, its republics outlined in slender silver lines beneath the newer national emblem. The lights had bleached every shadow from the desk except the narrow one beneath her chin, and in the control room beyond the glass, nobody moved except the vision mixer bringing the main camera closer by degrees.
Galina faced the lens with the composed severity she had worn throughout the broadcast. Her dark jacket was buttoned to the throat over a high cream blouse, its only ornament a small enamel pin bearing the post-1973 standard. Nothing in her clothing shifted when she breathed. Her ash-brown hair had been pinned behind her head so cleanly that not a strand caught the studio light. She had spent forty-three minutes reading casualty estimates, diplomatic departures, Iraqi troop movements around occupied Kuwait, statements from Stockholm and Washington, reports of Kurdish positions in the north, and the latest restrictions imposed upon foreign correspondents in Baghdad. Her cadence had not hurried when the material became grave, nor softened when the bulletin turned to civilians beaten during searches or families removed from districts suspected of sheltering resistance workers.
The final report had been introduced without emphasis. Iraqi state television had again broadcast public demonstrations against the approaching Soviet forces. The pictures were several days old by the time they reached Moscow, copied through three countries and softened by repeated duplication until faces bled faintly into the white sky behind them. Men in military coats crowded the foreground of a Baghdad square, thrusting their fists upward while a large red flag burned at their feet. Behind them, civilians stood within the cordon formed by uniformed officers. Some raised their hands when directed. Others watched the flames. A boy in a jacket too large for him held one edge of a second flag beside an older man whose eyes never left the officer standing beyond the camera.
The five-pointed star, hammer, and sickle remained visible between the flames.
Another piece of footage showed a woman in a dark dress striking the same flag with a wooden pole while a man beside the camera shouted instructions. She brought the pole down twice. On the third attempt, the fabric slipped across the pavement and folded beneath itself, hiding most of the yellow emblem. Someone outside the frame pushed it back into place with a boot. The woman resumed, her face fixed toward the ground.
A third sequence had been filmed before a government building. The old Soviet banner hung from a rope between two poles while young men in identical shirts threw stones at it. One stone struck the wall. Another passed through a tear already cut into the cloth. The announcer’s Arabic narration continued at a volume intended to fill every silence, while the men waited for each shouted cue before throwing again. Several smiled toward the officials beneath the awning. One looked away as soon as his arm had completed its motion.
The Iraqi pictures disappeared.
Galina allowed the silence following them to remain. The camera had now reached its closing position, near enough that the desk no longer filled the bottom of the frame. The silver outline of the Union remained visible behind her right shoulder. She looked directly into the lens for several seconds, neither preparing the audience for what followed nor granting the images from Baghdad the dignity of analysis.
Her left hand slid away from the untouched sheet. She lifted her right hand to shoulder height and made a small, almost indolent gesture toward the studio screen beside her, two fingers turning outward as though granting passage to someone who had been waiting politely beyond a door. A narrow smile touched her mouth. It did not broaden, and it did not reach her eyes.
The picture cut.
Snow covered the courtyard of an apartment block in Leningrad, packed hard along the walkways and turned grey beneath rows of boots. A red banner lay across the open lid of a metal rubbish bin. It was old enough for its folds to have retained the shape of long storage, the yellow hammer and sickle cracked where the fabric had been repeatedly bent. A retired tram driver named Sergei Antonov stood beside it in a quilted coat, one hand holding a glass jar and the other gripping the banner by its upper corner. Around him, neighbours watched from the steps and balconies. A woman leaned from a second-floor window with a cigarette between her fingers. Two boys in wool hats stood close enough to see but far enough away to satisfy their grandmother, who held both by the backs of their coats.
Sergei poured a thin stream of kerosene across the emblem. He took his time, drawing a wet line over the hammer, through the sickle, and down the red field. When the jar was empty, he set it carefully beside the bin. His neighbour handed him a matchbox. Sergei struck once, shielding the flame within his gloved hands until it caught properly, then touched it to the lower hem.
The fire crept rather than leapt. It found the kerosene and travelled upward in a wavering blue-edged seam. The old fabric contracted around the heat. The yellow star darkened, curled, and opened into a black hole. Sergei watched with his hands in his pockets. The cigarette-smoking woman above him tapped ash from the window. One of the boys pulled at his grandmother’s sleeve, and she bent so that he could speak into her ear without looking away from the fire.
The montage moved south before the banner had finished burning.
On a collective farm outside Poltava, three women had stretched another former flag over the frozen mud behind a machinery shed. Their winter scarves were tied low across their foreheads, and their heavy skirts brushed the tops of rubber boots whitened with frost. The eldest, Hanna Kovalenko, drove the blade of a long-handled spade through the centre of the yellow star. The cloth resisted on the first thrust. She placed one boot on the spade’s shoulder, pressed her weight down, and split the fabric against the earth.
The woman beside her took the next turn, bringing a mattock across the hammer and sickle until the wooden handle shuddered in her palms. The third knelt with shears used for cutting feed sacks. She opened them around one ray of the star and cut steadily inward. The metal blades made a dry rasp. Behind them, a tractor idled in the cold, its exhaust hanging like dark wool over the shed roof.
They worked without posing. The camera remained at a distance while the flag became strips, then squares, then red scraps muddied beneath their boots. Hanna gathered a handful, carried it to a rusted drum, and dropped it onto a bed of burning straw. The pieces blackened almost immediately. She warmed her palms over the flames for a moment before returning to the tractor.
A photograph replaced the moving film. A miner in Karaganda stood before a mine entrance with an obsolete Soviet flag spread beneath the front wheel of a coal lorry. The man’s face was dark with dust except where his goggles had protected the skin around his eyes. One boot rested on the bumper. He looked not at the camera but toward the driver in the cab. In the next photograph, the wheel had crossed the flag. The cloth lay pressed into coal grit, its emblem distorted beneath the tyre tracks.
Then came another photograph from the same roll. Three miners held up what remained. The banner sagged between their hands, blackened and torn, while a fourth man behind them raised a shovel as though offering to complete the work.
The next film opened in a warm kitchen in Tbilisi. Steam clouded the lower half of a window, and copper pans glowed above a tiled stove. An elderly woman sat at a table covered with newspaper. Before her lay a small USSR flag of the kind once issued for parades, its wooden stick removed and placed aside. She wore spectacles low on her nose and held a seam ripper between narrow fingers. Her name appeared briefly at the bottom of the screen: Tamara Mchedlishvili, seamstress, seventy-eight.
Tamara inserted the sharp point beneath the yellow stitching and began to unpick the emblem. Each severed thread was placed in a saucer. She worked around the curve of the sickle first, pulling the loosened strand free in one long piece. The hammer followed. The star required more patience. She rotated the cloth, brought it closer to the lamp, and removed every stitch until only faint punctures marked the place where the symbol had been.
Her granddaughter entered carrying a bucket of potatoes and set it by the stove. Tamara showed her the bare patch of cloth. The younger woman examined it, nodded, and placed a cutting board on the table. Together they folded the remaining red material several times. Tamara cut it into squares. Her granddaughter used one to wipe flour from the table, then another to lift the hot lid from a pot. The saucer of yellow thread was emptied into the stove. A brief orange flare rose behind the iron door.
In Riga, a group of dockworkers had nailed a vast old banner over the side of a derelict warehouse. The camera watched from the opposite quay as a crane hook descended through the mist. A woman in a hard hat guided it by rope while two men secured the metal point through the fabric just below the star. At her signal, the crane lifted.
The flag pulled tight against its nails. The upper seam strained first, issuing a row of quick reports as the fastenings tore free. The cloth rose unevenly, caught at one corner, and ripped diagonally through the emblem. The crane operator continued lifting until the entire banner hung above the quay in two fluttering lengths. The workers below guided it toward an industrial shredder.
Its rollers took the bottom edge. Red cloth gathered, buckled, and vanished into the machine. The star folded inward. The hammer and sickle were drawn down after it, their shapes stretching into yellow streaks before the teeth caught. The shredder shook on its mountings. From the outlet beneath, narrow ribbons poured into a steel cart.
A dockworker took off her glove and selected one strip. She tied it around the handle of a leaking oil can, twisted it tight, and returned to work.
A courtyard in Minsk appeared beneath a colourless sky. Dozens of former flags hung from washing lines between bare trees. They varied in size and age. Some had once flown above government offices; others were little more than household souvenirs, faded pink along their folds. People moved among them carrying scissors, knives, bottles, brushes, and buckets of white paint. There was no raised platform and no designated centre. The crowd had arranged itself wherever space remained.
A young father held one banner against a wooden fence while his daughter painted over the emblem with a broad house brush. White paint ran down the red cloth in thick streams. The child reached as high as she could, covering the upper rays of the star, then handed the brush to her father. He filled the places beyond her reach before returning it.
Near them, a nurse in a blue winter coat used surgical scissors to cut a hammer from another flag. She removed it cleanly and held the yellow shape between two fingers. An ambulance driver opened the lid of a portable brazier. The nurse dropped the emblem inside. She watched until its edges shrank, then passed the scissors to the next person.
At the far end of the courtyard, students had laid three flags atop one another beneath a sheet of plywood. They climbed onto it together and jumped until the boards cracked. Their boots landed out of rhythm. One slipped and caught the shoulder of another. The moment dissolved into laughter, but nobody stopped. They jumped again, harder, breaking the plywood into sections and grinding the cloth beneath it into the snow.
From Alma-Ata came grainy home video filmed in the yard of a house with a low blue gate. A family had dragged an old rug from a storage room and discovered a Soviet flag wrapped inside it. The grandmother held it up by two corners, shook dust from it, and passed it to her sons. One fetched a butcher’s cleaver. The other placed a chopping block beneath the apricot tree.
They folded the banner until the star lay uppermost. The first cleaver stroke split one side of it. The second drove the blade into the block and left it standing upright. A little girl clapped both mittens against her chest. The grandmother pulled the halves apart, refolded them, and steadied the bundle while her son struck again. When the cloth had been reduced to pieces no larger than kindling, they carried it to the outdoor stove. The little girl was permitted to add the final square. She held it at arm’s length, released it over the flames, and stepped quickly behind her grandmother’s coat.
The screen filled with a still photograph from Novosibirsk. A line of mechanics stood in an aircraft hangar beneath the open engine cowling of a transport plane. Between them and the camera, an old Soviet flag had been spread across the concrete and covered with removed engine parts. Bolts, stained filters, lengths of fuel hose, cracked seals, and a bent compressor blade pinned the emblem beneath their combined weight. One mechanic crouched at the edge, pouring used lubricant across the yellow star.
The following photograph showed the same flag bundled into a maintenance tray. The compressor blade pierced its centre.
A film from Vladivostok began with seawater breaking against black harbour stones. Sailors in work clothes carried an enormous former naval ensign down a concrete slipway. The wind seized it as soon as they left the shelter of the warehouses, snapping the cloth outward and forcing the women and men along its edges to brace against the pull. The old symbol stretched across the harbour air for a final moment.
A chief petty officer walked into the water until it reached her knees. She held a weighted chain across both forearms. Two sailors brought the centre of the flag to her and wrapped it around the links. They worked quickly, their fingers reddened by the cold. When the chain was secured, the chief petty officer gave it a shove.
The weight dragged the cloth from their hands. Red spread across the water, floated, and slowly narrowed as the chain sank. Waves folded over the star. The yellow points appeared between ridges of dark water, disappeared, surfaced once more, and then went under. The sailors remained on the slipway until the last corner vanished.
The picture cut before any of them turned away.
In a small Armenian town, a barber had hung a former flag over the back of his chair. An old man sat before the mirror while the red cloth covered his shoulders. The hammer and sickle lay upside down across his chest. Hair clippings collected over the emblem as the barber worked, first grey, then white where he trimmed around the ears. Another customer read a newspaper by the stove. Each time the barber snapped the cloth to clear it, the symbol disappeared beneath a drifting cloud of hair.
When the haircut was complete, he carried the flag to the doorway and shook it into the gutter. He then spread it across the floor beneath the chair. Muddy boots crossed it as the next customer entered.
A bakery in Samarkand had made an oven cloth from several smaller banners. The camera followed a baker’s hands as she folded the red material into a thick pad, gripped a tray, and drew rows of bread from the heat. The yellow star had been scorched brown at one point and nearly rubbed away at another. Flour filled the curve of the sickle. The baker set down the tray, dusted both hands against the cloth, and used it to wipe the oven mouth.
Her assistant carried another flag to the rear yard and draped it over a stack of wood. He split logs directly atop it. Each downward stroke of the axe drove bark and splinters into the fabric. By the time he gathered the wood, the emblem had been cut into separate pieces. He lifted the logs into his arms, leaving the ruined cloth where it lay.
A crowded workers’ club in Murmansk appeared beneath fluorescent lights. Men and women in thick jumpers had spread a massive USSR flag across a billiard table. They rolled the balls into the pockets and removed the wooden triangle. A shipyard welder placed the triangle over the star, positioned a steel punch in its centre, and raised a hammer.
The first blow made the balls tremble beneath the table. The second punched through the cloth and into the green felt. The welder lifted the triangle, examined the hole, and moved the punch to the hammer. Others came forward in turn, striking holes along the sickle’s curve and through the handle. Nobody addressed the camera. A woman waiting near the table ate sunflower seeds from a paper cone, spat the husks into one palm, and emptied them onto the flag.
When the holes had outlined the entire emblem, four workers carried the banner outside. The Arctic wind caught it violently. They held on long enough to tie it between the rear bumpers of two snowploughs parked nose to nose. The engines started. Exhaust rolled across the yard.
The vehicles drove apart.
For several seconds, the fabric stretched without tearing. The bumpers shook. One snowplough lost traction and slewed sideways, its tyres polishing the ice. The driver corrected, found purchase, and accelerated. A rip opened through the centre of the star and raced toward both edges. The halves flew loose. One struck the snow; the other wrapped around a rear wheel and was dragged beneath it.
A woman in Baku stood on the flat roof of an apartment building beside a line of laundry. The Caspian wind pressed her coat against her legs. She held an old Soviet banner by one corner and fed it into a metal washtub containing dark dye. With a wooden pole she forced the cloth beneath the surface, stirring until the water turned red around her gloves.
She lifted the flag after several minutes. The yellow emblem had become a deep, bruised brown. She lowered it again, added another packet of dye, and continued stirring. When she raised it a second time, the entire banner was nearly black. She wrung it against the rim and hung it between white bedsheets. Drops fell across the roof. The transformed cloth pulled at its pegs in the wind, the old design visible only as a variation in darkness.
On the next morning, according to the time stamped in the corner of the picture, the same woman removed it from the line and carried it downstairs. Her husband had already dismantled a motorcycle engine across the kitchen floor. She spread the blackened flag beneath the parts and knelt beside him. Oil leaked from the crankcase, forming a widening stain where the star had once been.
A classroom in Yekaterinburg had arranged rows of children around long tables. Piles of obsolete paper flags sat before them with jars of paste, scissors, rulers, and coloured pencils. Their teacher moved between the desks while the pupils cut away every state emblem. Some worked carefully around the shapes. Others sliced straight through them.
The red remnants became paper chains for a winter celebration. The yellow stars, hammers, and sickles were collected in a cardboard box beside the teacher’s desk. When the chains had been hung across the room, the teacher carried the box outside to the school furnace. Two pupils accompanied her, one holding the door and the other carrying a metal poker.
They tipped the symbols in together. Thin paper ignited at once, lifting in black-edged curls against the draught. The child with the poker pushed the last unburned star into the coals.
In a village beyond Dushanbe, the image shook as the camera operator walked toward a field. An old flag had been tied between two stakes at the edge of an irrigation ditch. Men and women stood behind a young shepherdess holding a long curved knife. Sheep moved across the slope beyond them, their bells sounding whenever the wind dropped.
The shepherdess caught the bottom edge of the banner and drew the blade upward. The cloth opened from hem to centre. She took the left side in her fist and cut again, separating the hammer from its handle. Someone passed her a second knife. She crossed the blades through the emblem and sheared until a section fell away.
The loosened piece dropped into the ditch. Water caught it, flattened it against the current, and carried it beneath a narrow footbridge. Children ran along the bank to follow. They overtook it where the channel bent and watched it snag briefly among reeds. A girl used a stick to push it free. The current took it again.
A photograph from Tallinn showed an obsolete USSR flag frozen into the surface of a public skating rink. Its red field appeared beneath cloudy ice, the emblem trapped upside down several centimetres below. Skaters crossed above it, blades leaving white cuts over the star. In another photograph, a hockey player had stopped directly atop the hammer and sickle, spraying the surface with shaved ice until the symbol was obscured.
Then came film. The rink was crowded under floodlights. Children chased one another across the buried banner while adults circled the perimeter. A woman lost her balance and slid on one knee over the emblem. Her companions pulled her upright. She brushed ice from her trousers, looked down, stamped once over the yellow star, and skated on.
At a printing works in Moscow, bundles of small propaganda flags from the old era travelled along a conveyor toward a pulping vat. Workers opened boxes marked with dates from the 1950s and 1960s. The flags had never been distributed. They remained crisp, their colours protected from light, each yellow emblem as bright as the day it had been printed.
A young press operator lifted one by its paper stick and held it beneath a lamp. She turned it over, examining the blank reverse, then tore it precisely through the centre. Both halves went into the vat. Around her, other workers emptied entire cartons. Red and yellow paper accumulated on the churning surface before the blades drew it under.
The camera moved closer to the grey slurry emerging at the far end. There was no colour left in it. A worker pressed a sample between two screens, squeezed out the water, and held up the resulting sheet. It was rough, pale, and unmarked.
In Odessa, fishermen had used a former banner to wrap a block of ice around the morning catch. Meltwater ran through the yellow star and dripped from the tailgate of a truck. A fishmonger pulled the cloth aside to expose silver bodies packed beneath. She selected three, weighed them, and wrapped them in newspaper for an elderly customer.
When the truck was empty, she dragged the flag onto the pavement and used a stiff broom to scrub away the scales. Soap turned pink around the edges. One of her colleagues came with a bucket and washed the foam into a drain. The flag followed, briefly sealing itself over the grate before the fishmonger pressed it down with the broom handle. Water pulled the fabric through piece by piece until only one red corner remained. She pushed that through as well.
The pace of the montage increased.
A Georgian vintner lowered an old flag into a barrel and trampled it beneath bare feet stained purple with grapes. A Lithuanian carpenter glued its emblem face-down beneath the broken seat of a workshop stool, then hammered new nails through it. A school caretaker in Omsk cut a banner into strips and used them to bind saplings against winter wind. A taxi cooperative in Kyiv spread three flags beneath a row of engines while mechanics drained black oil directly over the stars. A family in Ashgabat stuffed a faded banner into a gap beneath a rattling window frame and sealed it there with plaster.
A cavalrywoman in the southern Urals tied one to a training dummy before a line of mounted recruits. The first rider struck it with a wooden lance, tearing the star. The next cut through the hammer with a sabre. By the time the final horse passed, strips of red fabric clung to the dummy’s straw chest and fluttered from the churned ground beneath its feet.
At a hydroelectric station on the Volga, technicians folded a former flag into a filter screen and poured muddy water through it. Brown sediment coated the emblem. They rinsed it once, repeated the test, and finally dropped the clogged cloth into an incinerator used for contaminated waste. The door shut on the red bundle. Through the inspection window, heat whitened the yellow star before consuming it.
In a churchyard reopened after the fall of communist rule, groundskeepers used old parade flags to carry leaves. They dragged the loaded cloth between gravestones, the hammer and sickle hidden beneath wet brown heaps. At the compost pit, the corners were lifted together and the leaves rolled free. One groundskeeper shook the flag, folded it inward over the emblem, and placed it at the bottom of the pile. Wheelbarrows emptied over it until it disappeared.
Outside a mosque in Kazan, workmen had spread a large obsolete banner beneath scaffolding while restoring damaged stonework. Chips of mortar and pale dust covered the red. Worshippers stepped around ladders and crossed the cloth on their way through the entrance. When the day’s work ended, the builders gathered its corners and carried the rubble away inside it. The weight split the fabric before they reached the skip. Stones tumbled through the star. The men lifted them by hand, threw them into the container, and added the torn flag last.
A synagogue caretaker in Minsk used smaller flags to wrap tarnished lengths of guttering removed from the roof. He bound the bundle with cord wound tightly over the emblems. Two younger men carried it down the steps and loaded it onto a truck bound for scrap. The caretaker swept the place where it had lain, then closed the gate.
Across a windswept plateau in Kyrgyzstan, a woman driving a road grader lowered its blade onto an old flag spread in the path. The machine advanced. The blade rolled gravel, ice, and red cloth together, pushing the bundle into a pothole. The driver reversed, crossed it again, then continued down the road. A second vehicle followed and compacted the repair. A thin yellow corner remained visible at the surface until its rear tyre pressed it into the stone.
A factory dining hall in Perm had covered its longest table with stitched-together Soviet flags. Workers arrived carrying bowls, bread, and metal cups. They sat directly over the emblems. Soup spilled. Tea rings darkened the stars. Mustard spread across one hammer and was wiped away with the edge of a sleeve. At the end of the meal, kitchen staff gathered the cloth from both sides, trapping crumbs, bones, and cigarette ash within it. They carried the bundle through swinging doors toward the bins.
In a forest outside Arkhangelsk, loggers fastened a banner between two pines and sighted chainsaws through its centre. The first chain tore the cloth before biting into bark. Red threads wound briefly around the teeth and snapped free. When the trees came down, their trunks crossed atop the fallen emblem. Branches drove it into the snow. The loggers trimmed the wood without removing it.
In Chişinău, a fruit seller used old hand flags as markers between crates. Their yellow symbols poked above apples, onions, and cabbages until customers gradually took the produce around them. At closing, the seller collected the flags, snapped their wooden sticks across one knee, and fed both paper and splinters into a brazier beneath her kettle.
A woman in a Leningrad theatre costume department unrolled a pristine ceremonial banner across a cutting table. Chalk lines had already divided it into patterns. She pinned paper templates over the star and cut through all layers with heavy shears. The red fabric became the lining of soldiers’ coats for an anti-communist stage drama. The yellow emblem disappeared inside sleeves, collars, and pockets, cut apart so thoroughly that no audience could have reconstructed it.
In Minsk, veterans of the 1973 coup stood beneath sleet outside a former party headquarters. They had brought a flag removed from the building on the night the old government fell. For seventeen years it had remained sealed in an evidence locker, tagged and numbered. An officer cut away the label. A woman with silver hair took the upper edge while a man on crutches held the lower.
They placed it across the front steps.
The first veteran walked over it slowly. His boots left wet prints across the hammer. The second crossed the sickle. Others followed, some alone, some supporting one another by the elbow. No one saluted. No one turned toward the cameras assembled beyond the pavement. By the time the last woman reached the entrance, the flag was almost hidden beneath slush and tracked mud.
A municipal street cleaner waited until the veterans had gone inside. He lowered the rotating brush of his vehicle and drove across the steps. The bristles caught the cloth, twisted it, and pulled it beneath the machine. When the cleaner emerged at the far end, scraps of red and yellow clung to the gutter.
The montage returned to Moscow.
Night had settled over a residential square. Apartment windows surrounded it in ascending rows of pale rectangles. Hundreds of people stood beneath them, some in coats thrown over house clothes, some still carrying shopping bags or tools from work. There was no stage. Several metal drums burned along the centre of the square, their sides pierced for air. People approached from every direction carrying Soviet flags gathered from cupboards, attics, warehouses, offices, club rooms, schools, and former party buildings.
The flags did not form a uniform heap. Each arrived with its own creases and stains. One had moth holes along its edge. Another remained attached to a polished ceremonial pole. A third had been signed by members of a factory brigade in 1967. A woman unfastened that one from its clips, ran her thumb across the faded names, and passed it to the attendant at the nearest drum.
He held it out over the fire.
Flames climbed the signatures and moved toward the emblem.
A young couple fed in a pair of paper banners found behind the wardrobe of their new apartment. A former school principal brought a box of classroom flags and dropped them one after another into the same drum. A soldier on leave carried a folded standard beneath one arm. She opened it, checked the design, and let it fall across the flames without ceremony.
A man arrived with an entire roll of printed USSR bunting. He placed one end into the fire and stepped backward, allowing the linked symbols to feed themselves into the drum. Stars passed through his hands in succession. Each flashed yellow beneath the streetlamps, reached the rim, curled, and vanished. He continued until the final length burned against his glove and he released it.
Children collected unburned corners with metal tongs and returned them to the drums. Older people stood close to the heat. A woman removed her spectacles to clean soot from them. Two off-duty police officers carried another container into the square when the first drums filled with ash. A tram passed at the end of the street, its windows crowded with passengers looking out. The driver sounded the bell twice.
On the roof of the building opposite, someone had hung the current flag of the Union from a short pole. It moved in the rising heat, its design visible whenever the smoke thinned. Nobody pointed toward it. The camera held both the rooftop banner and the burning relics below within the same frame.
The television audience saw a final series of still photographs.
A grandmother in a Siberian village used a Soviet flag to line the kennel of a sleeping dog.
A young woman in Yerevan stood with one boot planted through the centre of a torn star.
Sailors aboard an Arctic patrol vessel watched strips of old red cloth vanish in the ship’s wake.
Muslim pilgrims in Central Asia had cut away the emblem and used the remaining fabric to pad crates of donated medicine.
A mechanic in Minsk wiped his hands across a hammer and sickle until grease erased both.
Three teenage girls in Moscow held scissors over the ruined remains of a banner and grinned at someone outside the frame.
A Ukrainian farmer had tied strips of one to poles among a field of winter grain, where the red cloth snapped and twisted as bird scarers.
A retired librarian placed a paper USSR flag between the jaws of a document press and tightened the wheel until the star split.
An elderly Orthodox priest dropped another into a church furnace with broken pew wood.
A group of young recruits stood before a wall papered entirely in old Soviet banners after completing rifle practice. The wall had been shredded into red fibres around hundreds of black bullet holes.
The last image remained longer than the others. It showed no people. An obsolete USSR flag lay in the snow beneath the newer flag of the Union, which flew from a building beyond. Someone had walked across the old banner and continued out of frame. The boot prints began before the hammer and sickle, crossed them without interruption, and disappeared along the pavement toward the open doors.
The studio returned without music.
Galina remained exactly as she had been before the montage, her right hand now resting beside the unread sheet. The narrow smile had faded. The camera’s framing was close enough to show the faint reflection of the studio lamps within her eyes. Behind the glass, the control room held the shot. The clock above the central monitor advanced through another second.
She looked into the lens and said, “Cowards of the palaces: you shall die just as you lived.”
Her hand closed the folder on the desk.
The screen went black.
The timeline basis reflects the post-1973 Union of Soviet Republics and the approach of the January 1991 invasion.