Baltics on the Edge

National Review Online, September 4, 2014

Hermann Castle, Narva, Estonia (with Ivangorod Castle, Russia, in the background), March 2015 © Andrew Stuttaford

Prisoners of geology, Icelanders make it their business to understand volcanoes. Prisoners of geography, the peoples of the Baltic States do the best they can to understand the unruly, dangerous, and enigmatic superpower next door.

So, when Janis Berzins of Latvia’s National Defense Academy published a report in April titled “Russia’s New-Generation Warfare in Ukraine,” it was worth paying attention. Since then, Russia’s actions in Ukraine have evolved beyond the deployment of “little green men” and other irregulars of nominally uncertain provenance into an old-fashioned invasion, plain, simple, and bloody, but the West still needs to focus on what Berzins had to say. His subtitle — “Implications for Latvian Defense Policy” — suggests why.

With Putin seemingly set, so far as opportunity will allow, on reconstituting the “Russian World” (Russkiy Mir) that fell apart with the Soviet Union, it’s easy to imagine that Latvia and Estonia might be somewhere on the target list. They are both former Soviet republics. For two centuries, they were part of the Russian Empire. Both have large, imperfectly assimilated Russian minorities, who, Putin reckons, belong within that Russian World, a status that entitles them — lucky “compatriots” — to his “protection.” Each has a major, almost 100 percent Russian-speaking city (Daugavpils, Latvia, and Narva, Estonia) temptingly close to the Russian border.

Both countries are in NATO, and thus theoretically covered by Article V of the NATO Treaty, which provides that all the alliance’s member states “agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” But in an age in which war can proceed by half-denied incursions and bogus popular uprisings (“non-traditional combat,” in Berzins’s phrase), who is to say what an “armed attack” really is? Berzins asks what would happen if a “Crimea-like situation” were to erupt in Narva. After all, Russia would undoubtedly insist that this too was the exercise of a “democratic right of self-determination.” And that, Berzins clearly fears, would cloud the picture enough for some Western politicians to claim that Article V should not apply. If that sounds too cynical, recall the lengths that some of them went last month to avoid calling the Russian assault on Ukraine (a country without the benefit of an Article V guarantee) by its right name: invasion.

According to the (anti-Putin) Russian commentator Andrey Piontkovsky, Putin is well aware that many NATO countries would be reluctant to be drawn into conflict by Article V. And even if they did come to Estonia’s aid, “Putin [could] respond with a very limited nuclear strike and destroy for example two European capitals. Not London and not Paris, of course.” Were that to happen, Piontkovsky believes, Putin would calculate that “all progressive and even all reactionary American society” would shout “‘We do not want to die for f***ing Narva, Mr. President!’”

Far-fetched? Probably. Putin is a gambler, but he’s not reckless. That said, it is worth noting, as did Anne Applebaum in a recent article for the Washington Post, that “Vladimir Zhirinovsky — the Russian member of parliament and court jester who sometimes says things that those in power cannot — argued on television that Russia should use nuclear weapons to bomb Poland and the Baltic countries . . . and show the West who really holds power in Europe.” Zhirinovsky is not, thankfully, in a position to shape policy, but he is occasionally used by those in the Kremlin to float ideas that they would like to see in circulation. As (notes Applebaum) Putin has put it, he “gets the party going.”

That this sort of talk is even out there will, as Putin knows, encourage a good number of NATO members to define Article V as narrowly as they can. Psychological pressure has always been a part of warfare, but it has an even larger role to play in Russia’s notion of a “New Generation” war. Within that, writes Berzins, “the main battle-space is the mind. . . . The main objective is to reduce the necessity for deploying hard military power to the minimum necessary, making the opponent’s military and civil[ian] population support the attacker to the detriment of their own government and country,” a strategy (essentially what once might have been called subversion, but taken to a whole new level) peculiarly suited to some of the more fragile countries that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union. In this respect, Berzins’s account of the early months of the Russian onslaught in Ukraine makes depressing reading: “In just three weeks, and without a shot being fired, the morale of the Ukrainian military was broken [in the Crimea] and all of their 190 bases had surrendered.”

But Ukraine, I was repeatedly told during a visit to the Latvian capital, Riga, in June, was a failed state. Latvia is not. Nor is Estonia. Both have made remarkable strides since winning back their freedom from the USSR. They are members of the EU as well as NATO. Their economies have grown fast (if not smoothly), delivering a standard of living far better than that of their Russian neighbor. That is not the case in Ukraine. At their core, Latvia and Estonia have a powerful sense of national identity. Memories of their independent inter-war republics and the nearly half a century of brutal Soviet occupation that followed still sear. In 1940 they were annexed by Moscow without a fight. That would not happen again.

Nevertheless, their political structures are not yet as developed as they could be, and their economies are far from robust. There is a lot of Russian money floating around, particularly in Latvia, and their Russian-speaking populations (30 percent or so of the population in Latvia and approximately 25 percent in Estonia) are not only a cause for Putin, but a potential source of instability that the Kremlin is continually trying to exploit. This should not be overestimated: Most Latvian and Estonian Russians feel at least a degree of loyalty to those countries, and the approval that some of them show for Russian adventurism abroad (in the Crimea, for example) does not necessarily mean that they want Russian troops showing up at their front door.

Looking specifically at Latvia, Berzins cites instances of the early phases of New Generation warfare, including “supporting pseudo human-rights organizations, backing the organization of a referendum for Russian to be the second official language [it failed, but, tellingly, won a majority in Eastern Latvia], and surveying the population of the eastern border to get intelligence on their inclination to support a [Crimean-style] scenario.” Plus, adds Berzins, “in a more subtle way, Russia has been successfully influencing internal politics through some of the political parties.” That may be a reference to, amongst others, Harmony Center, Latvia’s largest, a party that draws most of its support from the country’s Russians, and that has links to Putin’s United Russia party. Its leader is the mayor of Riga, a city in which the population divides roughly evenly between Russian-speakers and ethnic Latvians.

Then throw the Russian media into the mix. It’s no secret that Russian television has become a pathway to a world of nationalist delirium, a world where two plus two does indeed equal five, a “parallel reality,” in Berzins’s words, “legitimizing . . . Russian actions in the realm of ideas.” And this is the TV that most Baltic Russians watch most of the time (local Russian programming is thin gruel). Its poison may be diluted by the fact that these viewers live in the West, but still . . .

And then there is the constant saber-rattling at the border, the incursions into Latvian or Estonian airspace, military exercises such as, most notoriously, Zapad-2013 (“West 2013”), in which some 70,000 Russian and Belarusian troops massed near the Latvian, Lithuanian, and Polish borders to war-game a scenario in which “Baltic terrorists” were the villains, an exercise designed to demonstrate who was really boss in this part of the world.

But for now, the spying, the probing, the pressing, occasional trade embargoes, cyber-attacks, dirty tricks (check out the way that Interpol was abused in the 2013 mayoral elections in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, for one example), a gnawing at the foundations is “all” that there has been. Polling the inhabitants of the border region is as close as Russia has come to crossing the line that would herald the next phase of a New Generation war — the seizing, maybe, of a building or two in Narva or Daugavpils by a bogus “people’s republic” and the arrival of those “little green men” — a phase that, for now, seems mercifully far off.

Berzins has suggestions as to how Latvia might head off that moment. These include increased funding for economic development in the poorer regions, a boost to military spending (Latvia has since committed to hike its defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, the minimum NATO target that nonetheless hardly any member states hit), and the introduction of something like Swiss-style conscription. But perhaps the most important — and the most optimistic — revolves around securing the revision of Article V to reduce the dangerous ambiguity that New Generation warfare has opened up, an ambiguity that quite a few NATO members might well prefer to keep intact.

It’s an ambiguity that comes with terrible perils — not just for Latvia and Estonia (and, quite probably, Lithuania as well: the third of the Baltic trio has a far smaller Russian-speaking population, but cuts off the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad from Moscow-friendly Belarus), but for NATO too. Standing by our Baltic allies — three democracies that have emerged from Soviet darkness — is the right thing to do, but it is a matter of self-interest too. If Putin prevails over the Baltic countries despite their NATO membership, that would, argues Piontkovsky, “mean the end of NATO, and the end of the U.S. as a world power, and the complete political dominance of Putin’s Russia not only in the area of the Russian World but in the entire European continent.” That may be overstating it, but such a blow to the prestige of Article V would at least risk an unraveling of NATO, with all the nightmares that would come in its wake.

Ambiguity can tempt the aggressor into believing that he get can get away with his next coup at little cost. This can, in turn, lead to catastrophe. Hitler was unconvinced that the British and the French would truly stand by Poland in 1939. The ambiguity over the Baltic guarantee can never be eliminated, but it can be reduced. The symbolism of Obama’s speech in Tallinn this week — and the promise to send additional U.S. Air Force units and aircraft to the Baltics — will have done no harm. The increasing presence of NATO aircraft in Baltic airspace in recent months is a good move, as is the stepped-up pace of joint NATO exercises on Baltic territory. A NATO rapid-response force of several thousand troops, capable of deployment within 48 hours, is now being proposed. Its equipment and supplies would be based in the east. Permanent manned NATO bases would be better still. As Estonia’s President Ilves remarked earlier this week, maintaining a “two-tier” NATO, divided between those countries with permanent bases and those without, sends the “wrong signal” to a “potential aggressor.” We can’t be sure that even bases would be enough to do the trick, but the more the West does now, the less likely it is that Americans will ever be asked whether they are prepared to die for Narva.

Latvia Divided

National Review, August 25, 2014

Riga, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

Riga — The cover of the British edition of Anna Arutunyan’s The Putin Mystique features a grainy, somewhat sinister image of the Russian leader, remote, mysterious, distant. In a bookstore on Riga’s Krisjana Valdemara Street, the Latvian edition is on sale; its cover shows Putin at the shooting range, a gun in his hand, a wry smile on his face, close, too close.

The key to understanding Putin, explained one Latvian official, is to think of him as a petulant and badly behaved teenager who likes to provoke, prod, and see what he can get away with. For quite some time now, that’s what Russia has been doing in the Baltic. Planes skim and sometimes cross borders. Military exercises are staged that seem intended to intimidate rather than to train. Last year saw some 70,000 Russian and Belarusian troops war-gaming a scenario in which “Baltic terrorists” were the villains.

Walk into the Latvian foreign ministry and you’ll see three large flags, Latvian, EU, and NATO. The EU is meant to secure Latvia’s economic development, NATO its safety. Article 5 of the NATO treaty provides that an armed attack on one NATO member is to be treated as an attack on all, but in a paper written in April, Janis Berzins of Latvia’s National Defense Academy wondered how NATO’s politicians would react in the event of a Crimea-like assertion of “self-determination” in Narva, an Estonian city on the Russian border where almost all the inhabitants are of Russian descent. It’s a question that’s just as easy to ask about Daugavpils, the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking capital of Latvia’s poorest, easternmost region.

Daugavpils, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

And it’s not a question that can safely be confined to Daugavpils. When Putin speaks about the plight of his “compatriots” cut off from their kin by the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is countries like insultingly independent Latvia that he has in mind. Around 26 percent of Latvia’s 2 million people are of Russian descent (and, more significantly, a higher percentage speak Russian at home). Riga itself is roughly evenly divided between Latvian and Russian speakers. The city’s mayor, Nils Usakovs, an ethnic Russian, heads up the leftish Harmony Centre, a political alliance that draws much of its support from the Russian community and, less than reassuringly, has links to Putin’s United Russia party.

But if Putin is to play his games here, he needs his “compatriots” in Latvia to be not only numerous but unhappy. Ukraine, I am frequently told, was a failed state, but Latvia is not. Latvia’s Russians are freer, and generally richer, than their counterparts in the motherland. And they know it. At the same time, there’s no denying the sense of exclusion that many of them feel, especially the nearly 300,000 who are “non-citizens,” a status that Putin has described as “shameful” and worse.

To talk to Elizabete Krivcova of the Latvian “Non-Citizens” Congress is to hear an echo of Selma, but, to add some proportion to that picture, consider that Latvia’s non-citizens have permanent residency, can travel visa-free through most of the EU and (unlike Latvians) in Russia too, and are eligible for most social benefits. They are excluded from voting and a range of jobs, most of them in the public sector, but the door to citizenship is wide open. Quotas have long since been scrapped, and the citizenship requirements (residency, a language test, some knowledge of Latvian history, and so on) have eased over the years: Some 140,000 (including Krivcova) have now been naturalized.

The House on The Corner, Riga, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

But when I suggest to one prominent Latvian politician that it might be time to lance this boil and grant citizenship to all the rest, he flinches, quickly adding that this would mean “losing Riga.” His body language says more than his reply: This is not just an expression of political calculation. In 1989, a future president of Estonia spoke of the “biological and social terror of belonging to a people that is dying out.” That’s a fear evidently shared by a good number of the 1.2 million Latvians who remain in their native land, the last of the last after half a century of Soviet occupation in which Latvians were brutalized, imprisoned, exiled, slaughtered, and denied their right to be. It was a systematic process of national obliteration, and it was reinforced by a continuous inflow of Russian settlers designed to swamp the people whose country Latvia once was.

Many local Russians supported Latvia’s bid for independence, which it finally won in 1991, and most of them thought that they should automatically become citizens of the republic in which they had lived for a good part, or maybe even all, of their lives. Latvians did not agree. From a strictly legal point of view — and during an occupation denied legal recognition by much of the West, strictly legal was all Latvians had had — the restoration of the pre–World War II Latvian republic meant that only its citizens (or their descendants) would be immediately eligible for a Latvian passport: The settlers would have to wait in line.

This bought time for Latvia to reestablish itself as a national republic, time in which the population balance shifted in a direction that favored ethnic Latvians, but not by enough to resolve the demographic impasse that history had left behind. For ethnic Latvians, the way to proceed was with a unitary state, with Latvian as its sole official language: “We are too small to be Canada.” Russian speakers would be slowly assimilated: Indeed, those under 35 can generally now manage pretty well in Latvian. Left (usually) unsaid: The problem of the non-citizens, a significant percentage of whom are elderly, would fade away as the Soviet generations died off.

Riga, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

For many Russian speakers, this will not do. What they argue for is integration rather than assimilation, perhaps not formal bilingualism but certainly increased recognition by the state of both the Russian language and a distinct Russian cultural identity. The current generation is, it is maintained, not responsible for the crimes of the past. Maybe, but too many of Latvia’s Russians are still reluctant to acknowledge the full horror of what happened here. Whatever one thinks of criminalizing speech (I’m not a fan), it is still a jolt to see the poster in Krivcova’s office mocking recent legislation banning the denial, justification, or trivialization of both Nazi and Soviet aggression against Latvia. This is not the best way to reassure Latvians nervous about the bully next door and a fifth column within.

Nevertheless, despite occasional bouts of bad feeling — such as that generated by a failed 2012 referendum to introduce Russian as a second official language — the two communities rub along well enough. The difficulty is that there is a third party — Russia — in this mix, and it seems set on contributing all the poison it can. Latvia’s NATO membership means that the likelihood of a direct attack by Russia is very small. What can be expected instead is an intensification of Russia’s longstanding attempts to subvert the country from the inside. For now, a Donetsk- or Crimea-style “uprising” is unlikely: The Russians reportedly took soundings in the Daugavpils area and found, even there, little enthusiasm for a move of that type. Meanwhile, Riga is quiet. Even the polling that showed that most Russian-speaking Latvians supported the annexation of Crimea should not be cause for too much concern: Cheering on the ancestral motherland at a safe distance is very different from wanting it to turn up on the doorstep.

Freedom Monument, Riga, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

But the potential for trouble exists, made more dangerous by the fact that a huge majority of Latvia’s Russian speakers get so much of their information from Russian TV. The Russian stations are typically more entertaining than the local offering, but they act as portals into the venomous parallel universe where Kremlin propaganda roams. The loyalty of many of Latvia’s Russians to Latvia is real, but it is not particularly deep. It’s easy to see how Russia could stir the pot. It has the resources, and Latvia’s is a divided society, history is still raw, and there is more than enough resentment to go around. Another risk is that further Russian adventurism, even if well away from the Baltic, creates a heightened climate of mutual distrust within Latvia that rapidly degenerates into something worse. And then there is the general election due in October. Best guess is that Harmony Centre will again come out on top, if less convincingly than in 2011, and will once more be kept out of power by an unwieldy coalition of the weak, often chaotic “Latvian” parties, a result that will only emphasize the divisions that Mr. Putin will undoubtedly still be looking to exploit.

Four-Ring Circus

National Review Online, February 9, 2014

Organized Fun, the Olympic Games, parades, the aesthetics of the Cirque du Soleil, fireworks (face it, they are dull), and just about anything to do with sport are about as low as it is possible to get on the list of things I enjoy. I was, therefore, a natural pick to write about the opening ceremony for the Sochi Games. Thank you, NRO!

So there I was on Friday evening, not in Sochi (thank you, NRO travel budget!), but on my sofa in New York City, watching as NBC showed America the recording of an event that everyone else had seen hours before. No matter; we had already shared in an enjoyable prelude played out through Twitter, BuzzFeed, that friend who e-mails you stupid photographs, and the rest of today’s media giants — double toilets, unfinished hotel rooms, bugged showers, the slaughter of stray dogs, epic corruption, a $51 billion price tag, and the announcement from Sochi’s mayor that there were no gays in his town — that suggested that these Olympics might be more entertaining than most. Who now remembers Albertville?

The evening began with Bob Costas chatting away in what looked like a room in a Golan-Globus Fortress of Solitude. There was an Obama interview. For those in the dark about Russia’s history, an NBC narrator described seven decades of Soviet despotism, mass murder, gulag, and evil empire as a “pivotal experiment,” a mealy-mouthed, carefully neutral description that made Walter Duranty’s infamous omelets look like a fearless exercise in speaking truth to power.

The ceremony itself opened rather nicely with a young girl running through the Cyrillic alphabet, using each letter to introduce someone or something from Russia’s past. Let’s be fair; this would not have been the moment for Russia — or any nation — to air its dirty Lenin, and Russia did not. Stalin’s C (as I said, Cyrillic) would have to wait for another night. Instead we were treated to a recital of some of the best of Russia’s heritage, including Chekhov, Malevich, Kandinsky, Nabokov (Nabokov!), and some icons of my own space-obsessed childhood, Gagarin and Lunokhod, that plucky little motorized bathtub that crawled across a small slice of the moon in 1970. More disreputably, the organizers slipped in a boast that the Russians had invented television, a claim that did not slip past half-Scottish me and would have annoyed John Logie Baird, the Scotsman whose achievement this really was.

Let Scotland’s Daily Record take up the tale:

“During a video taking viewers through Russia’s alphabet, a row of TV screens appeared next to the letter T and a picture of Russian-American inventor and engineer Vladimir Zworykin . . . Scots commentator Hazel Irvine was quick to reassure viewers that the achievement still belonged to her home country immediately after the clip finished.”

This view of history, at ease with elements of both the Soviet past and what preceded — and indeed opposed it — and happy to play fast and loose with accuracy was a foretaste of what was to come.

Yes, there were fireworks. Whatever.

The young girl was duly hoisted up for a flight across an impressive representation of Russia’s vast and varied landscape. In a remarkable display of diplomatic restraint, it did not include any stretches of landscape currently belonging to any other country.

Finally came the technical glitch (or, if you prefer, the last hurrah of determined Trotskyite wreckers) that schadenfreudians — out in force for these Olympics — had been so eagerly waiting for. One of the five giant snowflakes that were meant to flower into Olympic rings, well, flaked, although not, reportedly, on the Potemkin footage that played on Russian TV (oh come on, you knew there was going to be a reference to that village somewhere in this piece).

The athletes emerged (I think) from some underground lair into the stadium, each team led by a snow hottie topped with a kokoshnik (look it up; I did), as they sauntered in, nation after nation after nation after nation, Lithuanians in two shades of sharpie green, mighty San Marino, some euphemism for Taiwan, and, of course, USA! USA! decked out in Ralph Lauren cardigans that would have made Betsy Ross wish that she had just stuck to plain blue.

And what were the Germans wearing?

It sounded to me like the bunch from Belarus got a very big cheer and the Ukrainians, too. Russians have a very expansive definition of home team.

The centerpiece of the show was a pageant meant to represent the sweep of the latest approved version of Russian history. And some of it was very striking, even lovely, not least a giant, silvery troika, so evocative of the country’s vast, snowy landscapes, and, for that matter, the finest of all descriptions of Russia, “speeding like a troika” in Gogol’s Dead Souls, a passage that ends, a little ominously for the rest of us, like this:

Whither then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes — only the weird sound of your collar-bells. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!

Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), of course, was Ukrainian-born.

Nobody ever said that Russian history was uncomplicated, but the spectacle in Sochi was clearly designed to smooth things out a bit — no, a lot — something very much in keeping with the wider Putin project in which all of Russian history, Czarist, Soviet, and whatever it is now, is crammed into a single, supposedly unifying past in which all Russians, regardless of ideology, did the right, patriotic thing for a nation that was always a force for good.

Thus we witnessed onion domes, Cossacks, Peter the Great, the ballroom scene (beautifully done) from War and Peace, followed by glimpses of turn-of-the century technological progress cleverly used to pave the way for the passage dedicated to that “pivotal experiment.” This was presented primarily as an acceleration — continuity, you see — of the country’s drive to industrialization and modernity all drenched in red (light, not blood) and crowned by the shapes of constructivism’s bold geometry, including what looked like fragments of Tatlin’s Tower, the monument to the Third International that — like communism’s radiant future — never made it past a very rough draft.

And what was this? Two giant heads, an enormous hammer, a vast sickle, excerpted, as it were, from the sculptress Vera Mukhina’s massive, sinister and, in its way, magnificent, Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937). To look at, it was wonderful, to think about, not so much. Imagine if Germans hosting a (modern) Olympics had included some of the iconography that their countrymen had used back in Berlin the first time round. That it is unthinkable in a way that Sochi’s sexed-up Soviet design was not speaks volumes — volumes filled with nothing good.

Later there was a sequence showing the supposedly kinder, gentler, Soviet Union that evolved after the tyrant whose name was not mentioned had left the scene, a sort of Russian Graffiti with music that somehow, I suspect, was not entirely representative of the early Brezhnev years.

Speeches? Of course there were speeches. The president of the International Olympic Committee said something about the Olympics embracing diversity (well, there had already been a performance by the fake lesbian pop duo t.A.T.u.) and explained that the games were “never about erecting walls to keep people apart,” which may or may not also have been a reference to Sochi’s eccentric restroom construction. After that, some Swan Lake danced by what seemed to be electric jellyfish, and a confusing sequence involving escapees from the set of Tron.

The Olympic torch arrived on the last leg of its long relay, a tradition since, ahem, Berlin, and was handed over by Maria Sharapova to a posse that included Alina Kabaeva, holder of an Olympic gold medal in rhythmic gymnastics, holder of a Russian parliamentary seat, and, if the rumors are true, holder of Vladimir Putin too. Yes, that’s right, rhythmic gymnastics . . .

The flame itself was lit by another parliamentarian, Irina Rodnina, three-time winner of an Olympic gold medal for figure skating and the author of a racist tweet about Barack Obama.

The gold medal for trolling was awarded to Vladimir Putin

Vlad The Conservative

National Review, January 9, 2014 (January 27, 2014 issue)

Putin Pop-Up Store, East 20th St, NYC, October, 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

Back in the mid 1980s, Pat Buchanan was the communications director for the Reagan White House, and Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer in East Germany. Times change: The former Soviet secret policeman — if there is such a thing as a “former” Soviet secret policeman — is, after a bogus intermission, now serving a third term as Russia’s president, and the old Cold Warrior seems to have become something of a fan. Writing in his syndicated column in December, Buchanan wondered whether, “in the culture war for mankind’s future,” Putin was in fact “one of us.”

The immediate trigger for Buchanan’s comments was Putin’s state-of-the-nation address just a few days before. Stung, probably, by criticism of gay-bashing legislation in Russia, Putin had taken aim at “the destruction of traditional values” elsewhere in the world — by which he meant the West — and, just so there could be no doubt about what he was referring to, had thrown in a reference to “so-called tolerance, neutered and barren.” No stranger to chutzpah, Putin, an unlikely champion of the ballot box, noted that these changes to “moral values and ethical norms” had come “from above” and were “contrary to the will of the majority.” As such, they were “essentially anti-democratic.”

After years of aggressive judicial activism and dramatic social change at home, those were words likely to appeal to quite a few American conservatives, some of whom might perhaps already have found themselves in unexpected agreement with the Kremlin not so long ago. After all, it was only last summer when Republican congressmen Steve King and Dana Rohrabacher made it clear that Buchanan was by no means the only figure on the American right to be offended by what he has somewhat histrionically described as “half-naked” (by Iranian standards, perhaps) and “obscene” (not so much) protest in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior by the feminist punk-rock group Pussy Riot.

It is, of course, hardly surprising that a protest by an altar — even if brief, and largely mimed (a soundtrack was recorded later for a music video using footage from the protest) — would appall many, and not just the religious, in this country. But Pussy Riot’s critics should have taken a closer look before jumping onto Putin’s sleigh. America is not Russia, a country where an authoritarian regime has suborned the national church for its own purposes, and where that church, bribed with privilege (ask bullied Russian Baptists how that works), a degree of power, and no small amount of mammon, has for the most part gone along. That is why Pussy Riot was protesting in a cathedral. Theirs was an infinitely lesser blasphemy.

Putin may well be a Christian of sorts (the influence of his supposed dukhovnik — spiritual father — Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov is a source of much speculation), but then again so were the Borgias. Divorce and all the rest aside, Putin might even quite genuinely, if in a rather rough-and-ready fashion, be a social conservative, but his public declarations on these topics are likely more a matter of political calculation than moral conviction. Corruption, economic slowdown, and increasingly dictatorial rule have eroded Putin’s support among the intelligentsia and in the more metropolitan centers, and so, Orthodox Church in tow, he has — what’s the term these days? — “pivoted” toward Russia’s “silent majority” (Pussy Riot didn’t have too many local fans), a maneuver that the Buchanan of the Nixon White House would have both recognized and appreciated for its savvy.

It was also a move that dovetailed neatly with a longer-term theme running through the Putin years. The defining mistake of post-Communist Russia has been an unwillingness to come to terms with the reality of its Soviet past. Putin himself infamously referred to the break-up of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Historical truth — uncomfortable, divisive, and shameful — has been replaced with a patriotic confection designed to reconcile the irreconcilable and soothe the national ego. Some excesses and mistakes — too mild words, those — are included, but other horrors are downplayed or have simply gone missing. There is, however, room for both the preservation (or restoration) of Soviet iconography and a lavish biopic about Admiral Kolchak, one of the most prominent of the anti-Bolshevik commanders in the Russian Civil War. In a large national poll organized in 2008, Stolypin, the tough, authoritarian reformer who was the last czar’s most effective prime minister (significantly, Putin gave him a shout-out during his speech), was rated the second-greatest Russian of all time. Stalin (a Georgian and a mass murderer, but no matter) came in third.

It is a narrative intended to put together what history in reality has torn apart, a fable in which czar and commissar can coexist, united in their love for the motherland and a shared sense of the messianic destiny that Holy Russia — home of Moscow, the “Third Rome,” and also the birthplace of Lenin’s radiant future — has long felt is its due, a fantasy reinforced by physical as well as intellectual distance from the Enlightenment West. The fact that such ideas have proved most congenial to authoritarian rule has not escaped Putin’s notice.

Regardless of the nods to the country’s Soviet heritage, the Commies — fear not — will not be coming back anytime soon. Too much loot is being amassed by those in charge for that. Instead, the philosophy that underpins the current regime (an admission of crude self-interest wouldn’t really do the trick) looks more and more like an updated, more subtle, more capitalist variant of the “Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality” first devised as a Russian state ideology for Czar Nicholas I (1825–55) as a response to the liberal challenge at home and abroad.

Well, Orthodoxy is back, what’s left of Russia’s nascent democracy is under pressure, and “nationality” never went away. In his speech Putin acknowledged the multi-ethnic nature of the Russian Federation (albeit with a swipe at “rowdy, insolent people from certain southern Russian regions”), but he went on to emphasize “the all-encompassing, unifying role of Russian culture, history, and language,” terminology that harks back both to czarist-era Russification and to the brutal Soviet approach to “lesser” nationalities.

But as he hymned the rebirth of a strong Russian state, Putin was careful (as Buchanan noted approvingly) to stress that Russia “does not encroach on anyone’s interests . . . or try to teach others how to live their lives.” Unfortunately, the first of those claims is nonsense. To take just a few instances, Russia has been throwing its weight about in northeastern Europe, it has grabbed a slice of Georgia, it is bullying Moldova, and, in what may be Putin’s most impressive coup yet, it may just have “bought” Ukraine. Russia is on a roll, with sporadic humiliations of a directionless America — from Snowden to Syria — for added spice. Yes, Putin’s grip may well be more fragile than it looks, but when Forbes magazine recently designated him as the most powerful person in the world, it was not without reason. The recent release of two Pussy Rioters and Mikhail Khodorkovsky was a declaration of strength, not weakness.

For a retro great power to behave like a retro great power is not particularly shocking, but it is essential to remember that Russia (even more than the U.S.) is a nation that considers that it has the right to play by its own rules. Thus Putin’s insistence that his country is not interested in trying to “teach others how to live their lives” is not only a rebuke (as Buchanan correctly notes) to Western universalism, but also a reminder that Russia has no intention of yielding its sovereignty to the emerging supranationalist order. That’s a reasonable, even commendable, position, but it is no reason for those on the foreign-policy right to think that they have found a friend in Putin. There are areas where American and Russian interests overlap (something that Buchanan has also highlighted). The fault for not taking better advantage of them lies on both sides and so far as is possible should be remedied, but a degree of rivalry, sharpened by Russia’s refusal to accept its loss of empire, is inevitable, natural, and, if handled with an appropriate degree of realism, not particularly dangerous.

And (hesitant as I am to give advice to this constituency) social conservatives should be warier still. To Buchanan, Putin “is seeking to redefine the . . . world conflict of the future as one in which conservatives, traditionalists, and nationalists of all continents and countries stand up against the cultural and ideological imperialism of what he sees as a decadent west,” a piece of wishful thinking on Buchanan’s part that gives Putin’s pronouncements an international significance that they do not deserve and could not sustain.

History, Mark Twain is said to have observed, doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Almost exactly two centuries ago, the devout if possibly unhinged Czar Alexander I (1801–25) was peddling the notion of a reactionary “Holy Alliance” between the nations that had seen off Napoleon. When the czar explained this idea to Lord Castlereagh, Britain’s conservative foreign minister (the no less conservative Duke of Wellington was also in the room), the meeting did not go well. “It was not without difficulty,” wrote Castlereagh later, “that we went through the interview with becoming gravity.”

Translation: It was difficult to keep a straight face.

There’s a lesson there.

Round Two?

Edward Lucas: The New Cold War

National Review, May 5, 2008

Putin

It’s not just the fact that Edward Lucas is a quietly proud, quietly amused holder of Lithuania’s Order of Gediminas (Fifth Class) that distinguishes him from many other non-native (he’s English) commentators on Eastern Europe; it’s also the depth of his interest in, and sympathy for, this long-contested stretch of territory’s cultures and peoples, an interest and a sympathy that resonate throughout this fine, timely, and thought-provoking new book.

It’s an interest he has pursued at first hand. Lucas (whom — full disclosure — I’ve known for more than 20 years) spent time in Poland as a student, and has been covering the region as a journalist since the late 1980s in a career that has included stints in Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Tallinn, Vilnius, and Moscow. He is now the Central and East European correspondent for The Economist. It’s his sympathy for the nations once trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and his grasp of their struggles — past, present, and, quite possibly, future — that now lead him to warn of the danger that a revived Russia might represent not only to their independence but also, for that matter, to the West.

To be sure, The New Cold War is, as its title reveals, a polemic. Obviously sensitive to accusations of hyperbole, Lucas takes care to stress that today’s threat is subtler than in the days of a divided continent and Mutually Assured Destruction. Nevertheless he’s out to alarm. He describes a Russia now run by, and for, its security services, a power once again on the prowl beyond its borders. Domestically it has, he shows, reverted to a form of authoritarianism, albeit one that, Lucas readily concedes, allows far more leeway than in the grim, gray, grinding Soviet past: “Never in Russian history have so many Russians lived so well and so freely.”

This is not an unfamiliar tale (news coverage of Putin’s rule has been more critical than Lucas sometimes appears to think), but here it’s recounted with fluency, authority, and an eye for detail that, even in this book’s lighter moments (of which there are a respectable number; he is a dryly amusing writer), betray its author’s long experience of the ramshackle, turbulent, and bewildering space that is all that remains of the utopia that never was:

I went to visit a new [Georgian] finance minister . . . who was being energetically promoted by the ever-optimistic American embassy. His office was bright, modern, and computerized. We had an enjoyable chat about e-government and zero-based budgeting. . . . As I left, I used an old journalist’s trick and asked to use the restroom, saying that I would find my way out. Not only was the toilet worse than a midden, but my detour to some of the other offices produced a much more convincing picture: a warren of ill-lit and dingy offices, each filled with rickety wooden furniture. Dumpy little men in ill-fitting brown suits were engaged in chain-smoking conversation with thickset men in leather jackets. Not a computer was in sight.

Clearly Lucas retains an unromantic, often skeptical view of the states that stumbled, lurched, and strode into the murky post-Soviet dawn. He’s often their cheerleader, but he’ll heckle too. Equally, his view of Russia is more balanced than his book’s title might suggest. After witnessing the chaos, violent criminality, and, for many, penury of the Yeltsin era, he can appreciate the attraction of the (partially) restored order and increasing prosperity associated with Putin, if not their political consequences. It’s telling that mounting suspicions (in Lucas’s view, “the weight of evidence so far supports the grimmest interpretation”) that the security services were behind the “terrorist” apartment bombings that helped pave the way for Putin’s election in 2000 have done little to dent his popularity: Russians have been prepared to pay dearly for the hope that the trains might someday run on time.

This is yet another reminder that the benign “universal” values (liberty, democracy, and so on) so cherished by Lucas are far from being universal priorities. Freedom may be important to Russians but it has demonstrably mattered less than the restoration of stability, and, probably, the desire that their country be, once again, a force to be reckoned with. But if nationalism can function as a valuable social glue, it can also gum things up. Adopting an increasingly rancid notion of the national interest may play well at home, but it has proved to be better theater than policy, and it’s leading Russia in a direction that is not just destructive, but self-destructive.

Bullying small neighbors is one thing (it’s an example of derzhavnichestvo, something that great powers just tend to do — and get away with), but Putin’s diplomacy has often appeared to put petulance before realpolitik. Aiding the Iranian theocracy may be an enjoyable way to taunt the West, but it makes little strategic sense for a country with mounting Islamist problems of its own. As for Putin’s embrace of China, Lucas approvingly quotes a Russian observer who despairingly, and reasonably, depicts such a partnership (presumably designed to act as a counterweight to those wicked Americans) as “an alliance between [Russian] rabbit and [Chinese] boa constrictor.”

Similarly, there is clear evidence, repeated by Lucas, that increasing meddling (to use a mild term) by the Kremlin has held back economic development. Times have been good but they could have been better. Investment has been deterred, delayed, or distorted. The high price Russia now receives for its oil and gas has been a godsend, but the resulting bonanza has both encouraged and financed the damage that an ever more assertive state is inflicting upon a still fledgling free market. Despite this, the prospects of rich pickings from Russia’s petro-economy not only have, as Lucas demonstrates in some of the most unsettling sections of his book, dampened Western criticism of Putin’s rule, but also look likely to set in motion a process that will leave Europe unhealthily dependent on Russian energy resources. To Lucas, “the growing [Western] business lobby tied to Russia represents a powerful fifth column of a kind unseen during the last Cold War. Once it was Communist trade unions that undermined the West at the Kremlin’s behest. Now it is pro-Kremlin bankers and politicians who betray their countries for 30 silver rubles.”

That’s a tirade too far, but it inevitably brings to mind Lenin’s best, if apocryphal, jibe: the one about rope, revolutionaries, capitalists, and selling. It’s a comparison that would gain added resonance were Lucas able to prove his contention that there is, once again, an ideological element to Moscow’s rivalry with the West. I’m not convinced that he is. To be sure, some of Putin’s more intellectually enterprising acolytes have managed to cobble together a doctrine of sorts, a haphazard jumble of grandiloquent, nostalgic nonsense that goes by the name of “sovereign democracy,” but nobody appears to take it terribly seriously. Nor should they. Russia has some traditions of government that are, mercifully, all its own, but these days they are, mercifully, no longer for export. There is no ideology behind Russia’s current maneuverings abroad, merely an old-fashioned pursuit of power, influence, and wealth — legitimate aims for any nation, great or small, flawed in this case by a profound misunderstanding of where its people’s best interests really lie.

But if the Kremlin is to play these games, so must we. Lucas concludes his book with some recommendations as to how to shove back. Some are sensible (focus on energy security), some naive (would Russia really care, or even notice, if it were suspended from the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly?), and some unnecessarily antagonistic (Georgia in NATO?). The first stage in any effective response, however, is a realistic understanding of what Russia is up to. This bracing, dismaying book doesn’t tell the full story (in particular, there’s not enough discussion of the extent to which Russia’s ambitions are both hobbled and inspired by its weakness), but it’s an excellent place to start.

Conspiracies So Immense . . .

National Review, December 3, 2007

To talk to Yuri Felshtinsky is to revisit an era meant to have ended when Boris Yeltsin leapt onto a tank in Moscow. But when Dr. Felshtinsky examines photographs of that heroic August day, he sees something else. Visible just behind the Russian leader is Alexander Korzhakov (he’s the balding man in a gray suit), the bodyguard who later became chief of Yeltsin’s Presidential Security Service. “KGB,” notes Felshtinsky. So he had been.

Something similar could have been observed in St. Petersburg. The city’s mayor was a prominent opponent of the hardliners’ coup — but take a closer look at shots of his entourage, and whom do you see? Vladimir Putin, that’s who. “KGB,” says Felshtinsky. And then he smiles.

Felshtinsky is an historian, Russian-born (but now an American citizen), a graduate of Brandeis, a Ph.D. from Rutgers, and connecting the dots is what historians do. But the animated, intense, and likeable Dr. Felshtinsky doesn’t just enjoy his connections and his dots, he treasures them, and when they begin to reveal the outline of something hidden, something mysterious, something denied, ah well . . .

He is quick to regale me with fascinating tales of murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy from the Soviet epoch, tales that have, shall we say, passed most history books by. But before dismissing them all as fantasy, bear in mind that konspiratsia has been a malign feature of Russian politics since the czar’s Okhrana began its elaborate games of deception with the revolutionaries over a century ago. These were games that, in essence, continued, unchanged but for the players, into Soviet times, and if Yuri Felshtinsky is to be believed, they still do. And maybe he should be. In Russia it’s only cranks that have faith in lone gunmen. In a nation with no agreed narrative of past or present, who is to judge where paranoia ends and history begins?

This place of shadows, contradiction, and lies is where Felshtinsky and a former intelligence officer named Alexander Litvinenko researched their book, Blowing Up Russia. Since it was first published in 2002, Litvinenko has been murdered — poisoned in London last year with radioactive polonium-210 — and the book itself has been banned in Russia. The latter can’t have been a shock: Blowing Up Russia may resemble a somewhat discursive academic treatise, but it is as disturbing as it is dry. It is either a monstrous libel or a horrifying revelation. Neither would be acceptable to the Kremlin.

That’s because the book revolves around the allegation that the devastating bombings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk in September 1999 were the work not, as is usually assumed, of Chechen terrorists, but of elements within the FSB, the principal successor organization to the KGB. The bombings were, it is claimed, what the Soviets would once have called a “provocation” — a provocation of which, Felshtinsky tells me, choosing his words delicately, Putin was “aware.” According to this thesis, they were designed to provide a justification for a fresh attack on Chechnya and, with that renewed war, a political climate that would favor the election to the presidency of Putin, who had recently quit his job as head of the FSB to become prime minister and Yeltsin’s latest presumed successor. If that was indeed the plan, it worked. Russian troops reentered Chechnya in force, Yeltsin resigned in December, and in March 2000 Putin swept into the presidency.

Putin has described such allegations as “madness.” Even to consider them is “immoral,” an argument with some resonance, especially after the emergence of “Truthers” and other conspiracy theorists intent on proving what “really” happened on 9/11. Making matters muddier still, Litvinenko subsequently ruined his own credibility with a series of increasingly far-fetched tales of Putin’s wrongdoing. Felshtinsky explains this by describing his co-author as an “extremist,” a man on a mission, more interested in discrediting Putin than in the truth of the stories he was peddling.

Felshtinsky had doubts about Litvinenko from early on. For all the cooperation between the two men (including Felshtinsky’s role in Litvinenko’s escape from Russia), he leaves the clear impression that they were never particularly close: “We were not friends.” Litvinenko was former KGB/FSB: Such people, asserts Felshtinsky, can never be trusted. Felshtinsky was, he says, insistent that Litvinenko’s contributions to Blowing Up Russia were carefully checked and, where possible, backed up by documentation. He was “professionally tough” with Litvinenko: “I am a historian.”

But he’s been more than that. In 1998, he recounts, he returned to his native country to “somehow move . . . myself from history to politics.” That led him to Boris Berezovsky (then the leading oligarch, then still in Russia, and then thought by many to be the power in the land), and, through him, to Litvinenko. Felshtinsky now reckons that Berezovsky’s power was, in no small part, illusion (“a legend”), that it was really only effective when exercised on behalf of those in charge of the state. That argument may well be an exaggeration, and its logic is more than a touch circular, but it is true that it didn’t take too long before Berezovsky, an early supporter of Putin (Felshtinsky questions how important that support really was), was forced to flee. This left him as one of Putin’s fiercest — and with his billions, most formidable — opponents. Spreading the word that Putin, or his allies, had something to do with the 1999 bombings was obviously in his interest, and so, therefore, was backing the project that became Blowing Up Russia. And that is what he has done.

Litvinenko was financially supported by Berezovsky for a number of years, something that, Felshtinsky says, ended only shortly before his murder. As for his own past and present arrangements with Berezovsky, Felshtinsky is reluctant to discuss them in much detail. There is, however, a vague, and vaguely patronizing, description included by Alex Goldfarb, another Berezovsky acolyte, in his account (co-written with Litvinenko’s widow) of this saga: “In the late 1990s [Felshtinsky] became a peripheral planet in Boris’ solar system, orbiting once every few months, advising him on various matters.”

The Berezovsky camp may have been busy throwing mud at the Kremlin, but the Russian authorities have hit back hard. They have accused the oligarch, a man with a record murky even by the standards of the Yeltsin years, of involvement with Chechen terrorism (he denies the charge), and many other crimes. Allegations have also surfaced that it was Berezovsky who was responsible for arranging Litvinenko’s death in order to embarrass Putin. If there ever has been an example of konspiratsia too baroque to be believed, this is it. That doesn’t alter the awkward fact, a gift to the obsessive, that Andrei Lugovoy, the former KGB/FSB operative now charged by the British with Litvinenko’s murder, once worked in a senior role for Berezovsky and continued to have some degree of access to him even into 2006.

None of these issues, however, nor the questions they raise, is enough in itself to discredit Blowing Up Russia. Its authors make a strong case (albeit one for the prosecution) and they were (and are) not alone in their suspicions. The fates of three prominent individuals who had come to very similar conclusions are, to say the least, suggestive. There was Sergei Yushenkov, an MP for the Berezovsky-backed Liberal Russia party. He called for an investigation into what happened in that summer of 1999. He was gunned down in 2003. Not long afterward, the journalist and opposition MP Yuri Shchekochikhin, who had arranged for extracts from Blowing Up Russia to be published in Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s last remaining independent newspapers, died of an “allergic reaction.” In early 2004, presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin described the bombings as a “crime committed by the security agencies.” He later withdrew from the race after having been poisoned (it appears) by psychotropic drugs.

Felshtinsky regards both the Litvinenko murder and the September bombings as evidence of a wider trend: What counts in Russia now is what the FSB wants. In Soviet times, the security services were powerful, but those who ran them were creatures of the state they policed. Everything they had (in reality rarely that much) could be taken from them on a bureaucratic whim. By contrast, the new Russia offers them the chance of becoming, and staying, rich. It’s a chance they have taken. In Felshtinsky’s opinion, Russia has been reduced to little more than a corporate asset, and the shareholders in the corporation that controls it are, primarily, past and present members of the security services.

It’s a corporation where the shareholders will, Felshtinsky believes, feel (and be) threatened if any one of their number becomes too powerful. Thus, he thinks that Putin will soon be made to give up much of his authority. That’s an assumption that is likely to be severely battered in the next month or so. Felshtinsky is, I suspect, on more secure ground in claiming that this is a corporation with a very low degree of tolerance for any disloyalty. Alexander Litvinenko, former KGB, former FSB, not only quit the team (basically, argues Felshtinsky, as a result of a power play that backfired), but also joined up with the other side. According to Felshtinsky the consequences were inevitable. Only the polonium was a surprise.

If Felshtinsky is right, Russia’s democracy is dying. That he even could be shows how sick it already is.

++++

Courtesy of C-Span, more Yuri (and me) here. 

It's Time

National Review Online, November 29, 2004

New York City, Saturday—In Manhattan, they say, everyone wears black, but not this Saturday, not in this plaza just across from the U.N. The demonstrators, perhaps 500, perhaps more, have turned up on this briefly glorious late autumn day in orange hats, in orange scarves, in orange coats, in orange sweaters, draped in orange blankets, wearing orange ribbons; anything, however small, will do so long as it is orange. Baseball cap advertising Land Rover? No problem. If it's orange, it's fine. Sweatshirt proclaiming the virtues of Steinway pianos? Why not? It's orange. Orange flags flutter, orange balloons bob against a clear, lovely sky that matches the blue on the other flag, pale blue and yellow, which flies this day. Blue and yellow, the colors of Ukraine, and orange the color of the movement that might, maybe, finally bring the people of that country the decent government they have awaited for far too long. "Pora". "It's time." Indeed it is.

Banners, orange naturally, proclaim the loyalties of the crowd:

"Yuschenko—Yes!"

"A Criminal Should Not Be President."

"Putin, Don't Mess With Ukraine."

"Boston Ukrainians for Yuschenko."

"America and Ukraine Together."

"Kyiv, We're With You."

"Ukrainians Deserve Freedom Just Like You."

Indeed they do. In the 20th century, the people of the Ukraine, a land of two genocides, the country of Hitler's Babi Yar, and the nation of Stalin's broken, emptying starving villages, went through the worst that two totalitarian systems could do to them, the raw death toll, millions after millions after millions, supplemented by decade after decade after decade of more selective, careful purges, a cull of the best and the brightest, generation after generation after generation.

And yet, somehow, Ukraine endured.

But Putin seems to feel little or no remorse for the crimes of his Kremlin predecessors. There have been no real apologies, and no trials of those butchers who still survive. As the Russian president looks at those other far, far larger crowds in orange, the ones gathered for days in Kiev's Independence Square, he sees, doubtless, only irritants, troublemakers, hooligans, obstacles to be removed, perhaps even dupes, according to some in Moscow, of wicked Polish plotters. What he should be seeing are the countless ghosts of those that went before, victims of that Soviet past that even now he seems curiously unwilling to confront. That, however, would take a conscience.

In 1933 (wrote the writer Vasily Grossman) "horses pulled flattop carts through [Kiev], and the corpses of those who had died in the night were collected. I saw one such flattop cart with children on it. They were just as I have described them, thin, elongated faces, like those of dead birds, with sharp beaks...Some of them were still muttering, and their heads still turning. I asked the driver about them, and he just waved his hands and said: "By the time they get where they are being taken they will be silent too." There was, we should remember, more food in Kiev than anywhere else in the Ukraine that year. Five, six, seven million died in that Soviet-made famine, the Holodomor, maybe an even greater number: no one knows for sure.

Standing in that New York plaza I talk to one of the demonstrators, Marko, about what's going on. We touch on the past. "My father," he says, "survived the Holodomor." I look around at some of the older faces in the crowd, and wonder what they had heard back then, what they knew, what they had lived through.

Not inappropriately, perhaps, there is behind us a memorial to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swede who rescued thousands of Jews from wartime Budapest only to disappear into Stalin's hands. A small plaque reads that on "January 17th, 1945 Raoul Wallenberg was detained by the Soviet government. His fate remains unknown." Fate unknown. Just another ghost. Not inappropriately, perhaps, someone in the crowd is carrying a placard showing Putin in a KGB uniform.

Someone else has a sign announcing that she is from Donetsk, the city that is the heart of the Ukraine's mainly Russian-speaking east, an area that is likely to come into sharp focus in coming weeks—exaggerated it may have been, but there is no doubt that Russia's candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, has real support in that part of the country. Taras, a friend of mine who's also at the demonstration, is more optimistic. His father, from Ternopil in western Ukraine (the city where Viktor Yuschenko had studied as a young man) had just returned from Kiev. While he was there he'd talked to a few of the miners who have been shipped in from the East to rally support for Yanukovych, the second-round "winner." They were O.K. guys, he said, enjoying an all-expenses, all-vodka trip to the big city with no plans to stick around for long. We'll see.

But Saturday is not a day for such worries. The likeable crowd, mainly twenty or thirtysomethings, a blend of recent immigrants, visitors, and the diaspora, were festive, optimistic, excited, cheering the speeches, the singers, and the sentiment, pausing only to chant the only name that counted, the name of their president:

"Yushchenko, Yushchenko, Yushchenko."

He's their hero, their man, their champion, and their best hope for the true restoration of a squandered independence. In fact, like many politicians that emerged in the rougher corners of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Yuschenko is not free from awkward questions about his past, or the nature of some of his support, but this is not something that anyone wants to think about this day.

"Yushchenko, Yushchenko, Yushchenko."

An older woman points to a poster, a standard politician-and-child image, the usual fluff, and shakes her head sadly. "It's terrible what they've done to him." The man in the photograph is healthy, good-looking, fortyish. It's Yuschenko, and the picture was probably taken less than a year ago. His face looks nothing like the terrible, cratered wreck that it has become, the product, almost certainly of a poison attack, an attack that has transformed him into a martyr for the cause, the real cause, he now leads.

The crowd starts to sing a lovely, enchanting tune, verse after verse. They know the words, and they sing them smiling. "The national anthem?" I ask. "No", two women say, "It's like a pledge." "What's it called?" Thought. Pause. Embarrassed looks. "We don't know." And then they start to laugh.

It's time.