Then everyone starts walking: people with banners and portraits and red carnations made from construction paper swaying on long wire stems. Her mother hoists her up onto her shoulders, so now Sasha is above the people’s heads, in the midst of a forest of swaying sticks with flags, banners, and portraits, of balloons and red carnations. She squints and peers to her left, where everyone else is peering. There, five columns of people away, a group of men stands on a granite platform against the Kremlin wall. In the center is a separate dark figure in what looks like a military uniform. She knows it is Stalin, their conscience and their revolutionary glory, as the radio reminds them every morning. He is the father to all of them marching in this square and gathered around radios from here to Kamchatka, across all their eleven time zones. Only he is so far away, she can barely see him. He looks tiny and ant-like, and there is nothing glorious about him.

Riding on her mother’s shoulders, Sasha tries to lean forward to see him better through the forest of portraits and flags. She cranes her neck to peek under a rectangular slogan on two poles, and for a few seconds, the tiny, dark figure flickers between the squares of red. But all she feels is disappointment. He looks nothing like the father they all know, grand and loving and immortalized in oil.

Then the ant-like figure raises his hand, and the square explodes. Every mouth in every lane of every column splits open in one unified roar, and the forest of banners and portraits jolts and sways, as if struck by a blast of wind as strong as the one that snapped Grandpa’s oldest apple tree in half last year. It is so terrifying that Sasha screams. But the May Day demonstrators are all safely below, and she is the only one trapped in the center of the storm. The poles of the slogan on her left are rattling by her ear; the sticks with portraits aim at her head from the right. Flags shake with crimson furor and hiss like flames, as if someone has plucked her by the skin of her neck and is about to toss her into the gut of a wood-burning stove. The roar peals over the square like thunder, the mouths fusing into one howling throat, one hungry set of jaws with rows of sticks for teeth, ready to crunch and chew and spit her out.

Sasha shrieks and sobs, all in vain, because her voice cannot be heard against the roaring square. She wails and hunches over and rubs tears around her face. With arms over her head, cowering and bawling, she rides to the side street, where her mother and Katya finally hear her cries and see the snot smeared all over her face.