What’s Up, Town Policeman?

Understand: there is the smell of revolution in our city again.

An open letter to the town policeman, a monument and a symbol.

What’s up, town policeman? You stand high, one can say, on the city wall. What do you see from this point? Well, except for the Belarusian version of Lubyanka in front of you? Or maybe you look back to the past from which you were dragged into the light of God?

Or do you see the future? Well, we’ll talk about the future later, let’s recall the past.

For fifty years of your existence, the attitude towards you has become quite definite. The town policeman has deservedly become a real symbol of the reactionary tsarist regime. The belated follower of your minister, who put you in the center of our capital, is very passionate about you for a good reason, and he is also a reactionary and also protects the local kings for the time being.

Maybe not all of you were bastards, but we remember those ones who were. Those who twisted arms of those arrested. Those who whipped people. Trampled demonstrations with horses. Broke into people’s houses in dirty boots. Helped to rake out all sorts of seditious publications during the searches, from the “Peasant's Truth” to Herzen's “Bell”. Those who search for every dissenting person with a watchful eye, every thinking person, every free person, in order to send into exile, make sure one rots in prison, hide in a stone sack or just hang.

What were you thinking about then, town policeman? You probably used to think: this is just your job, your service, it’s how it should be and it will always be this way. You were seriously wrong. You failed to see the future from you present. And it did come. The revolution came, and no one cared whether it was you who did all the mentioned above or your colleague, or the gendarme from the third division. Rivers, bridges, lights, rifles.

That’s how it was. Now let’s talk about the future.

After all, it is already here, every step we take, every decision, every word, every action create it. Take a look, listen, inhale some air. Understand: there is the smell of revolution in our city again. And your successors in the service should think about how not to repeat the fate of your colleagues. They gave a try to the method of tightening the screws and twisting arms to the fullest – it did not work. So they are facing a difficult choice, the one in which you made a mistake.

And as for you, the teenager’s slap in the face is not the worst thing that can happen to you.

Maksim Viniarski, Facebook