Maрия (Marija) Матусевич (Matusevic)

“Inwardly I wished I wasn’t there, with all that was going. You try to close your eyes, to sleep. To begin with I had a clear goal to fight, to hold on, to remember everything and everyone, to carefully observe all events. But all my strength was gone after Okrestina. In your mind you just tell yourself that it would hopefully be over soon, just to hold on until the morning. The cell was noisy. They gave us no food, only water, but it was just a single bottle for thirty forty people. Both at the police station and at the detention centre. But to be honest, I had no thought of food in the prison. As I said, I couldn’t stay there for even a minute, my strength was gone, and only one wish remained – to survive. Or the thought that, if I did die, then as a hero, as a person who protested. Various thoughts occurred to me, utterly different ones, but the most dreadful ones were of death, I was scared of it. First I thought of the others, of the boys they beat up first, that they would be invalids at best, dead at worst, and there was nothing you could do. That’s how it is in our country. And then, when they beat me, first at the police station, in the torture room, in Okrestina, then you think that it will be all over soon, definitively over. They say that before your death, you recall the loveliest moments of your life, but that wasn’t the case. All I thought of was what I might manage to do before the end, here and now.”

“And so as soon as the door closed... there were three of us plus two youngsters, they sat us down, one boy was lying on the floor. Two or three cops were sitting at the back and two at the front. As soon as they agreed to go to the police station of the Frunzyenski District RUVD, the door banged shut and the beating began. I guess we were sitting hunched up with our nose stuck between our knees. We were sitting there, crammed together. But they lifted the boys up and beat them with batons, first in the backside and the back, then with their hands at their neck and head. They lifted up and beat each of them, one after another. But the boy on the floor caught it the worst, a real kicking. A few of these rounds, no one took notice of me – until they remembered I was from Lithuania. One of the told me I was a Lithuanian after all. That we had feminism where I came from, so I’d catch it as much as the rest of them. He started pelting me straight up, although just with his hands, but he had gloves on. He hit me in the neck, the back, the head, but I covered my head with my hands, so it didn’t hurt as much. I ‘caught it’ like that for all of the blows that had missed me before. The beating continued the whole of the way in the car, again and again, while they swore at us for being such and such. I wouldn’t want to repeat the words they used.”

“They finally brought us into a gym hall [of the Frunzyenski District RUVD, police station – ed.]. The famous By_Pol video was recorded there before our arrival. Most of the detainees were still okay in the video, but they were half-dead when we arrived. We enetered the gym hall, but the riot police kept passing us around and variously taking turns on the way there. One of them pointed out a boy to me who was lying with his face to the floor, arms twisted behind his back in cuffs, trousers badly soiled around his backside. He asked: ‘You see that boy?’ I said I did. ‘He shit himself in fear, you’ll be like that too.’ When we arrived, there were almost two hundred people there, some lying on their bellies with their face to the ground, hand behind the back in cuffs or restraints, some as if kneeling with their brow resting against the floor, also with hands cuffed behind their back. They all had their hands cuffed or restrained behind their back. I had something with my leg, so they sat me down, but they had my friends kneel with their brow to the floor. Then they hand-cuffed me, I found out what it was like for the first time. How very, very heavy they are and that they leave bruises. But it’s good they weren’t zip-tie restraints because those make the hands go blue really quickly, and they hurt terribly.”

“There was lots of special equipment there, prison vans, members of the special police detachment OMON, and other police units. And there were really a lot of us, but they had all the weapons. As soon as we reached the obelisk and continued towards the Development Bank, a flash grenade was lobbed right at us; it hit me too. I was a wearing a long skirt, so it just deafened me but didn’t burn me. The explosion sent us scattering. A girl ran up who was clearly alone, I made her acquaintance so we could keep together. It turned out she had come there with two youngsters, whom we found in the end, and we stayed together the whole night, even though we had known each other such a short time. Things were calm for a bit. There were a lot of us, but we were surrounded by a circle of ‘shields’, they kept throwing grenades right into the crowd. At first we ran from them, but after a while we got used to them and stopped being afraid. Then they decided to attack us and began pushing us back. We started running again, but then the water cannon arrived. Water cannons aren’t that terrible, it’s just water, and it only hit us lightly. Finally they started attacking in earnest, pushing us back, throwing grenades. We managed to reach... There’s a crossroads there, next to the Development Bank, a resting place of sorts. We stood there a very long time. Unarmed people, even women, were kneeling down in front of riot police with shields. A few minutes later, more flash grenades came flying in, several of them. Right at them. I remember there were lots of bloodied people there, hit by the shrapnel, with burns and of course with injuries.”