Late Sunday, when the afternoon sunlight begins to fade over Revolution Square, Nikolai starts packing up his papers and table as his fellow comrades end their discussions and head their separate ways into the evening.
Nikolai packs everything away neatly, taking special care with the slightly faded Soviet flag that waves over his table. The flag is one of Nikolai's most treasured possessions: when he was 12, he climbed a flagpole to rescue it from Nazi troops advancing on his small village in the Kursk region. For this bit of boyhood heroism he almost lost his life, being spared only by a neighbor woman who hid him in her cellar as the Nazi soldiers searched for the "boy who stole the flag."
"I couldn't bear to see them take the flag, the symbol of the country I loved," he says, smiling as he remembers. "I am a patriot; I always have been."
About the future of his beloved land, Nikolai fears that worse is yet to come. "I think that terrible things await Russia. We need someone in control, but without arms, no one can take power. Maybe through elections, some communists can gain some control in the government, but this is not real power.
"Only a revolution would bring power back to the communists, but nobody wants war. The Russian people are tired of war. We have seen far too much of it already in this country." END