First came the word and the word was Soviet. “Soviet” is the name of a hotel that stands on the left-hand side of Leningrad Prospect in Moscow. On the other side stands a kebab house, which had long earned the nickname “Anti-Soviet”—not because its clientele or kebabs were subversive but because of its position: directly opposite the “Soviet”.

Last month the owners of the café decided to make a brand out of the Soviet-era joke and put up a sign “Anti-Soviet”. But they chose the wrong moment and inadvertently caused a political scandal which speaks volumes about Russia.

On September 7th the Moscow union of pensioners and veterans, a name that oddly unites those who fought in the war with those who served as commissars, guards in the Gulag and secret policemen, complained to the local authority about “the inappropriate political pun” and urged that the name be changed in order not to irritate those who “respect the Soviet period in our history”. The letter was signed by Vladimir Dolgikh, an 84-year-old former Communist-party boss. The local authority, in the person of Oleg Mitvol, a PR-hungry bureaucrat, got into the act, threatening the owners and making them change the anti-Soviet sign.

This Gogol-esque incident prompted a blistering article from Alexander Podrabinek, a journalist and former Soviet dissident. Mr Podrabinek, who exposed punitive psychiatry in Soviet days and had served time for “anti-Soviet propaganda”, attacked the veterans for trying to justify the Soviet past: “bloody, mendacious and shameful”, he said. Mr Podrabinek’s argument had been made by writers before, including by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago”. But after years of state-sponsored nostalgia for the Soviet past which included portraying Stalin as an effective manager, the article sounded like heresy. Much worse, it was treated as heresy by Nashi (Ours), a thuggish youth movement conceived and protected by the Kremlin. The thugs picketed Mr Podrabinek’s house, demanding that he apologise to the veterans (they had brought some along) or leave the country for good.

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