On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five rubles.

The line depicts compulsory public displays of loyalty under the Russian Empire, where even private households could be coerced into participating in state ritual. Antin’s emphasis on being “dragged” to the police station and the specific fine underscores how autocratic power reached into everyday life through petty regulations and punishments. The quote functions less as a neutral observation than as an indictment of a political culture that equated obedience with patriotism and used police authority to enforce symbolic conformity. In Antin’s broader immigrant narrative, such details help explain why America’s relative civic freedom and voluntary expressions of belonging felt transformative by contrast.