The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

On May 9—a month and a half after the start of the bombing campaign—Red Square saw its first Victory Day military parade in a decade. There was no heavy equipment—no tanks and rockets, like in days past, only a march of men in uniform—and they moved through the square in the opposite direction to that taken in Soviet times, before the chapel at the entrance to the square had been restored. But the four men goose-stepping in front of the procession—one leader and three young officers behind him—carried a red flag with a hammer and sickle, like the one that had been placed on the Reichstag in 1945. Yeltsin did not take the Soviet secretary-general's conventional place atop the Lenin Mausoleum, but he assumed the traditional role of overseeing the parade, from a podium set up just in front of the granite building, where the Bolshevik leader's body was still on display after seventy-five years. It was the fifty-fourth anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War, but the television voice-over pronounced that figure as though it had particular symbolism and went on to stress, "Whoever might be trying today to diminish the significance of our victory, for the people it will forever

remain great."¹⁵ There was no need to spell out that it was NATO, with its bombing campaign, that was attempting retroactively to "diminish the significance of our victory."

Yeltsin, thought Gudkov, was finally playing the card he had resisted using for so long: staking his own legitimacy on the mythology of the Great Patriotic War.

three days after the Victory Day parade, Yeltsin set in motion a parade of successors. Primakov, whom he distrusted and plainly disliked, was out. He appointed a new prime minister, forty-seven- year-old Sergei Stepashin, who had been serving as minister of the interior. A career law-enforcement officer, Stepashin had been in and out of the government for a decade, so his was a familiar face—even if he lacked the force of personality to elicit any particular emotional response. Now, by dint of being appointed prime minister, he was Yeltsin's new heir apparent.

The NATO bombing of Serbia ended in May, with a negotiated agreement that turned Kosovo into a de facto protectorate of the Western powers. Peacekeeping troops began moving into position in the area, for what would clearly be a long stay. On June 12—which happened to be Russian Independence Day—British peacekeepers were slated to secure the airport in Pristina, the capital city. But the night before, two hundred Russian peacekeepers stationed in Bosnia suddenly marched across the border to Pristina and seized the airport. The operation seemed to have no strategic objective, or even a plan—

the Russian troops had not made arrangements for supplies, and were ultimately fed by NATO troops who took pity on them. Back in Russia, the demonstration of pointless and unopposed military power played well. Masha and her friends cheered the siege of the airport in much the same way as they cheered a Russian soccer victory over Holland. After a week, Russia agreed to send about 3,600 troops to Kosovo to work alongside Western peacekeepers, effectively renewing its relationship with NATO—which had been severed when the bombing began—without accepting NATO command.—

In less than three months, Yeltsin once again changed his mind regarding his successor, fired Stepashin, and appointed another gray, unremarkable man. This time, however, the heir apparent was a virtual unknown, the colonel Yeltsin had recently chosen to run the secret police, Vladimir Putin.

That summer, before Masha's last year of high school, she went to Crimea with a friend and the friend's mother. They rented a single room in Alushta. They went to the beach and watched television. Masha read romantic poetry by Anna Akhmatova and Maximilian Voloshin. They met teenagers from Ukrainian cities—Dnepropetrovsk and Kiev—who told them that they spoke with a Moscow accent. Masha objected that she did not have an accent: they did. They laughed. They drank together, a lot. After the friend's mother left, trading places with Tatiana, they had even more freedom. They had no curfew. They drank on the piers at night. One night, a freak wave covered all of them and pulled them off the pier, but they got out and laughed.

"I'm sick of Crimea," Masha said at one point. "I want to go back to Russia. You know, birch trees, mosquitoes, the nostalgia."

Tatiana thought this was funny—who gets sick of the sea? Masha thought it was funny too. But they went to the dacha for the rest of the summer. It was early August.

"So he'll be our prime minister now?" asked Tatiana. "Weird." She had negotiated insurance contracts with this man, and she was unimpressed.