Russians: The People behind the Power

12 Future Delayed

Russia has only two allies—her army and navy.

—Alexander III, reigned 1881–94

The sun was baking the Mediterranean-like landscape that stretched out below the foothills of Georgia’s Caucasus Mountains when I passed through in August of 2008. The military truck in which I was riding belonged to a Russian convoy rumbling toward Gori, the faded provincial city Moscow had occupied after Tbilisi tried to seize back its Russia-supported breakaway region South Ossetia. The truck bed’s metal sides were supposed to prevent the handful of reporters within them, who were being hosted by the Russian military, from witnessing the destruction outside, but I managed to peek through a rip in the canvas top. Chipped by tank treads, a two-lane road lined by stately rows of tall poplar trees traversed golden-brown fields. We passed burned-out Georgian military pickups and cars abandoned on the edge of the asphalt. Some were still smoldering, together with patches of fields that were sending up black smoke in the distance. Apart from an occasional elderly man or woman who stared at the invaders roaring through their empty villages, no one was visible.

The countryside seemed even more eerie because I’d traveled some of the same roads during a reporting trip barely two months earlier. Seeing the familiar landscape under such very different circumstances filled me with depression. Entering Gori, we passed bullet-riddled buildings and shop windows broken by looting South Ossetian separatists. The convoy halted on the barren main square, where Russian soldiers emerged from their personnel carriers near a statue of Stalin, who had been born there.

Wary residents jostled in a nearby line for bread handed out by Russian forces, who boasted that they’d brought security to the city. Most locals were hungry, very frightened and didn’t know what to expect. One jittery man, drunk like many others, couldn’t recall his last name for a beat. Finally remembering it with relief, Lyova Mazmishvili told me Georgians wanted to live under their former Soviet masters again. “We never should have split from Russia,” he stuttered unconvincingly, within earshot of the Russians. “We’re brothers.” Away from the main square, opinions were very different. A middle-aged woman named Dali Neberidze told me she was afraid of losing her mind. “It was a nightmare,” she told me of the Russian aerial bombardments. “The Russians just want to show their might. Look what they’ve done to our city!”

Back on the central square, the lounging soldiers seemed relaxed, as if on a lark. A swaggering colonel named Andrei Babrun shrugged and smirked when I asked how long he expected Russian forces would stay. “There has to be peace in this region!” he lectured. “We must answer Georgian force properly.” Others joked about awaiting orders to move on Tbilisi, just fifty miles away.

Fellow reporters who had covered the first war in Chechnya remarked how much better the Russian military looked now, starting with the sober, or at least not visibly drunk, privates. Still, their unwashed appearance inspired little confidence. Although Moscow’s scattering of the puny Georgian army had showcased Russia’s resurgence, the campaign revealed important weaknesses. Faulty intelligence, poor coordination and a reliance on aging Soviet equipment reflected badly on the Kremlin’s long-running effort to reform a military characterized by vicious hazing among conscripts and massive corruption in the officer corps.

The government’s ancient military doctrine was partly to blame. Moscow had to stop pretending it was a global counterweight to the West, military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer told me at the time. Only then could it start building an effective fighting force instead of trying to revive the old Soviet one. “This military is not very good for anything at all.”

It was good enough to bloody the nose of Georgia’s brash young president, Mikheil Saakashvili, however. The New York–trained lawyer had transformed his impoverished country from a nearly failed state whose capital enjoyed only intermittent electricity into a promising emerging market. He also vowed to return South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another Moscow-supported separatist region, to Georgia. Both had broken away after a bloody civil conflict in 1992 that had been largely provoked by Georgia’s nationalist former president Zviad Gamsakhurdia and halted with the introduction of Russian peacekeepers.

When I sat next to him at dinner earlier in 2008, Saakashvili spoke about his far-fetched promise—and his personal loathing of Putin—with such conviction that I was hardly surprised when the conflict broke out. The evidence suggests the Kremlin goaded him into attacking South Ossetia after many years of low-level violence and rhetorical brinkmanship. When Georgian troops stormed the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, Russia launched a massive counterattack by troops who supposedly happened to be still massed on the country’s southern border after taking part in military exercises there the previous month. Moscow had distributed passports to South Ossetians for years. Now it said it was acting to protect its own citizens from Georgian aggression.

Although it’s easy enough to dismiss Russia’s all but forgotten invasion as a comeuppance for Saakashvili, the Kremlin’s intentions were far from clear at the time. Those who feared an attack on Tbilisi included a sober foreign policy scholar in Washington whom I telephoned days after the hostilities began. When she paused after I asked what she believed might happen, it took a few seconds for me to realize she was crying on the other end of the line. Regardless of Saakashvili’s mistakes, the weeklong war marked Russia’s decision to turn its back on the West if it had to by launching a military attack on a sovereign, democratizing US ally for the first time since the end of communism. And not just an attack. While politicians thumped their chests about Russia’s international duty, state television news concocted alarmist propaganda about Georgian sabotage plots. It all sounded very Soviet-like and boded ill for the future of a country that appeared to see force as the surest means of getting its way in the world—in this case, force against a neighbor many Russians loved for its cuisine, charm and historically close ties.

Much finger-pointing followed in the ensuing weeks and months, including revisionist reports by the BBC and The New York Times that blamed Saakashvili for taking Moscow’s bait—as if the conflict had been between equals. Unfortunately, there was less talk about Russia’s longtime practice of fanning ethnic conflict for the sake of increasing its influence over the region. Or about how two decades of brainwashing South Ossetians had perpetuated a frozen conflict that reduced their economically unviable region to an impoverished dependency on Moscow. Now the Kremlin was stationing thousands of troops there in defiance of a French-brokered cease-fire, in confidence that critics would do little about it.

After Gori, I traveled to the ruined South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali, the epicenter of the recent fighting. Traffic there mainly consisted of Russian personnel carriers and army trucks. Many buildings had been destroyed and trees blown apart. Disabled Georgian tanks stood in the middle of a road where locals praised the Russians as saviors.

Violence was still taking place: outside the town, a handful of ethnic Georgian villages were being systematically destroyed. Blazing in the darkness of night, houses burned in the forest. During the day, bulldozers emerged to eradicate neighborhoods in what could only be called small-scale ethnic cleansing. In Gori, I had met a group of Georgian refugees who fled the attacks by Russian troops and their South Ossetian allies. A gray-haired woman named Manana Giashvili wept as she described how she and thirty others had hidden in a field for several days. “We were told to get out of our houses or we’d be shot,” she said. “Then they burned down the village, and now my husband is missing.”

Western countries brushed the invasion under the carpet. NATO reestablished its council with Russia after a brief hiatus, the EU resumed talks on a special partnership agreement, and even Moscow’s recognition of independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia—essentially revenge for the West’s recent recognition of Kosovo—passed with little controversy. Seeing compromise and accommodation as weakness, Moscow exulted in what it saw as a significant victory.

It also felt relief. Russia’s invasion had been partly motivated by fear of the color revolutions in former Soviet republics. Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003—which installed Saakashvili in place of longtime President Eduard Shevardnadze—was followed by Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, prompting alarm in Moscow that popular discontent could also contaminate Russia. Accusations that the West meddled in both countries by helping remove their old regimes have since become a constant trope in Russian foreign policy. Never mind that the Kremlin spent millions of dollars campaigning for the pro-Moscow candidate Viktor Yanukovych during the Ukrainian presidential election, when outrage over his victory in rigged voting prompted tens of thousands to take to the streets.

When Gazprom cut off natural gas to Ukraine after a price dispute during a bitterly cold winter the following year, Moscow said it was simply implementing a long-delayed end to Soviet-era subsidies in favor of market rates. In fact, Russia broke a five-year contract to provide gas at a very cheap price, which it had urged Ukraine to accept in 2004 in order to boost Yanukovych’s election chances.

Russian fears have since waned, at least temporarily. After Georgia’s humiliation in 2008, Yanukovych repudiated the Orange Revolution by winning the next Ukrainian presidential election in 2010, setting Moscow further at ease about its dominion over the former Soviet republics Medvedev once called part of Russia’s “special zone of influence.” However, such nineteenth-century formulations will continue stoking tensions by reinforcing the belief that being feared means being respected, a Soviet foreign policy model the Kremlin has tried to emulate.

In the 1970s, my father occasionally met with the London representatives of Novosti, the Soviet news agency that dealt with foreign correspondents while providing flimsy cover for countless KGB officers and agents. During one meeting, he wondered aloud why Moscow kept refusing permission for a handful of Russian women who had married Englishmen to join their husbands abroad. British newspapers’ periodic articles about such puzzling cruelty colored the perceptions, not at all brightly, of British people who otherwise cared very little about the Soviet Union. The answer of the Novosti men said something about Soviet bureaucracy. They said of course they knew what he was talking about, but “our bosses don’t give a fig about British readers. They only care about trying to please their bosses, who also know nothing about the West.”

Thirty-five years later, I’m often asked why Moscow savages its reputation by cutting off gas to Ukraine and threatening Europe with nuclear missiles. Rather than not caring about its image abroad, however, the Kremlin, I believe, sees bad publicity as valuable in its way. Treating Russia as an actor they see as rational—that is, led by people who make decisions based on their benefit to the country rather than to themselves—Western governments often seem to miss that about Russia. Many foreigners also fail to notice another key trait: Russians tend to believe the rest of the world functions as their country does. When American newspapers publish articles critical of Putin, for example, Russians often perceive them to be ordered by the White House because that’s how things are done, aren’t they? When Medvedev sought to explain one of Putin’s accusations that Washington wanted to overthrow his government, he suggested it was normal for the United States to seek to influence Russian domestic politics “because we also try to do that.”

In Putin’s conception, his government valiantly steered an exemplary economy through a global financial crisis that other countries foisted on Russia. Chief among them is the United States, a “parasite” on the global economy that lives beyond its means and threatens financial markets by destabilizing the dollar. Such pronouncements, usually intended for a domestic audience, catch foreigners by surprise because Russia isn’t Yemen or North Korea. The world’s biggest country in area and volume of energy resources, it has nuclear weapons, a sizable economy and seemingly every reason to engage constructively with an international community in which it still holds considerable influence. But Moscow, seeing conspiracies everywhere that reinforce its assumption that the rest of the world functions as it does, rarely responds to constructive engagement.

President Obama’s recent “reset” policy toward Russia succeeded in changing such attitudes enough to boost cooperation, which brought benefits to both sides. In addition to his main achievement in relations with Russia, a nuclear arms reduction agreement called New START, the two countries signed a long-delayed deal to cooperate on civil nuclear power technology. Moscow allowed US troops and supplies to cross Russia en route to Afghanistan, albeit for almost extortionate payment. And the Kremlin, motivated partly by its own frustration with its ally Iran, agreed to new UN sanctions against Tehran in response to its nuclear ambitions. Russia got American help to finally enter the World Trade Organization after applying for almost two decades, while the White House tacitly agreed not to directly challenge Russia’s interests in Ukraine, Belarus and other countries in what it considers its backyard.

That finally began to change in late 2012, when Hillary Clinton warned that Moscow was trying to re-create a new version of the Soviet Union under the guise of economic integration. “It’s going to be called a customs union; it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that,” she said at a news conference. “But let’s make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.”

Putin’s continued vilification of the United States nevertheless doesn’t mean Russia wants to become a pariah state by seeking armed conflict or prolonged confrontation. Many of its positions, such as its criticism of the war in Iraq and independence for Kosovo, might be dismissed as bluster. Still, its obstructionism can pose serious problems in international affairs.

Richard Pipes believes Russia’s geography makes it a major player in global politics. “She is not only the world’s largest state with the world’s longest frontier, but she dominates the Eurasian land mass, touching directly on three major regions: Europe, the Middle East and the Far East,” he wrote. “This situation enables her to exploit to her advantage crises that occur in the most populous and strategic areas of the globe.”¹

Westerners are especially confused by the Kremlin’s occasional switch to cooperative and conciliatory rhetoric. That often comes when Russia sees opportunities to use geostrategic leverage to drive hard bargains. Allowing NATO to fly supply planes over Russian territory made Moscow appear helpful. In fact, Russia has squeezed hundreds of millions of dollars from Washington, profiting handsomely by allowing the United States to tackle one of its own major security issues.

However, Moscow has other tools at its disposal. When the United States and thirteen other members of the UN Security Council voted for a resolution in 2012 calling on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down after his government had killed thousands of civilians, Russia used its veto to derail the measure. China followed Moscow’s lead, crippling the international ability to pressure Assad, who proceeded to launch military assaults that killed many tens of thousands more people in Syrian cities. Responding to Hillary Clinton’s labeling of the Russian veto as “despicable,” Russia’s stern foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called her reaction “indecent” and “almost hysterical.”

A staunch protector of failing dictatorships’ national sovereignty—no doubt because he can easily picture his own country in the same position—Putin was dismayed by NATO’s earlier bombing of Libya and blamed other countries for tricking Russia into supporting the UN resolution that opened the way for military action. Syria would be different. Moscow’s last Cold War–era ally in the Middle East provided a port for Russia’s naval ships and orders for its arms, and Damascus was even more important for the leverage it provided the Kremlin. Suddenly all diplomatic eyes were on Moscow because little could happen without its consent. Putin used the limelight to lash out at Western countries, accusing them of backing the Arab Spring to advance their commercial interests. “I can’t understand that bellicose itch,” he wrote in one of his election manifestos. Instead of promoting democracy, he said, the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya had given rise only to religious extremism.

Putin’s moment of diplomatic glory came when he stymied a Western military response to the Syrian government’s chemical weapons attack against civilians. Appealing to a U.S. administration loath to take action, the Kremlin proposed an unlikely plan to put Syrian chemical weapons under international control. After the White House agreed, Putin made it clear Russia would undermine any Security Council resolution that would back the scheme with force, and the Syrian war continued ravaging the country unabated.

Moscow also had broader geostrategic considerations concerning the Middle East’s tortured politics. Syria’s Shia leaders were backed by Russia’s longtime ally Iran. Traditionally suspicious of Tehran’s Sunni rival and Washington ally Saudi Arabia, Moscow had built a nuclear power reactor in Iran and pushed back against several American-led drives to impose sanctions in response to fears that Tehran was building nuclear weapons in secret. No doubt the Kremlin will continue to attempt to obstruct US policies in the Middle East, posing as a facilitator and peacemaker in order to punch above its weight in international relations. After its energy supplies to European countries, Moscow’s veto power in the Security Council is its most powerful foreign policy tool.

Little wonder Russian officials are frequently compelled to restate Moscow’s position that the UN is the sole appropriate forum for resolving international conflicts. During the standoff over Syria in 2012, Medvedev went so far as to warn that the principle of state sovereignty was at such risk that it threatened to destroy the world order through nuclear war. The same Medvedev also once stridently advocated a proposal for a new European security structure that was so vague few took it as anything more than an attempt to undermine NATO and other existing organizations Moscow sees as hostile.

The arrival in Russia of the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden in July of 2013 could have been seen as nothing less than a gift for Putin, who proceeded to play the fugitive American and US officials off against each other. The leader with the appalling human rights record seized the opportunity to take the moral high ground by portraying Russia as a supporter of Snowden’s civil liberties and accusing the White House of hypocrisy. When human rights activists act “under the auspices of the United States and with their financial support, information and political backing, it is comfortable enough to do,” he said, presumably about critics of the Kremlin. “But if someone is going to criticize the United States itself, it is, of course, much more complicated.” Obama’s decision to cancel a summit meeting with Putin appeared to signal the end of the reset.

Russia will no doubt remain less collected about American missile defense policy. Moscow has threatened to quit the New START pact if Washington continues its plans to deploy a missile shield over Russian objections. In late 2011, Dmitri Rogozin, the ambitious deputy prime minister in charge of the defense industry, repeated Putin’s threat to target missiles at Europe, accusing Washington of seeking the capability of delivering a nuclear first strike against Russia and citing the missile shield’s supposed ability to knock out Russia’s submarine-based warheads as evidence.

No knowledgeable observer takes such claims seriously. Were the United States to attack Russia, an early warning radar system would give Moscow plenty of time to deploy its fifteen-hundred-odd nuclear warheads for a counterstrike, a deterrent no missile shield could affect. “It is as if Rogozin, Putin and many other top officials are living in the early 1980s, when the Kremlin truly believed the United States might deliver a ‘decapitating’ nuclear first strike, undermining the mutually assured destruction theory,” wrote military expert Alexander Golts. “The irrationality of Rogozin’s and Putin’s arguments proves that Russia’s hysteria over U.S. missile defense has no relationship whatsoever to the country’s national security.”²

When the White House decided in March 2013 to abandon the part of the missile shield against which Moscow had focused its ire—the installation of long-range interceptors in Poland and Romania, over which the Kremlin had all but threatened war—Russian officials responded with a barrel of cold water, saying the change was no concession to Russia. Rogozin appeared to throw in the towel soon after, however, by pouring scorn on Washington’s plans. Moscow had “solved the issue of penetrating the missile shield,” he announced. “We regret that the United States wastes their money on missile defense and compels us to do the same,” he added. “The missile shield is nothing for us. It’s a bluff. It poses no military threat but remains a political and economic problem.”

Whether or not the matter is finally put to rest, however, officials have stuck to the view that the missile shield plans are evidence of America’s drive to attain global military supremacy. Moscow continues to link the issue to Obama’s goal of cutting both countries’ nuclear arsenals beyond New START, something Putin has further complicated by saying other nuclear powers should also be included. Columnist Yulia Latynina described Putin’s “imaginary role as the point man in the geopolitical confrontation with Washington” as virtually impossible to pierce. “Every time Western leaders tried to avoid aggravating the bully by making concessions to the Kremlin,” she wrote, “Moscow took that as a confirmation of its policy. But when the West refused to bow to Moscow’s demands, the Kremlin perceived it as a personal insult, a sign that there is an exclusive club of chosen leaders that reaches agreements on how to rule the world.”³

However, Cold War–style posturing may pale in comparison to the very real threat Russia may pose to international Internet security. The term cyberwar first drew public attention in 2007, when Internet sites in the Baltic Sea country of Estonia came under a series of attacks. They coincided with a bitter war of words between the former Soviet republic and a Kremlin furious over the relocation of a statue of a Red Army soldier from the center of the Estonian capital, Tallinn.

Seeing the bronze soldier as a symbol of Soviet occupation, most Estonians thought their government—now a member of the European Union and NATO—was well within its rights. Russia saw it differently and condemned the statue’s removal as an affront to the memory of what it calls the Soviet liberation of Estonia from Nazi control in World War II. In Moscow, the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi organized street protests against “Fascist” Estonia as the government cut off oil shipments. Then a flood of requests overwhelmed a number of Estonian Internet sites maintained by parliament, various ministries and banks, among other organizations.

Many of the so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were executed by botnets, groups of infected computers carrying out instructions from a handful of hackers. Estonia’s then-defense minister, Jaak Aaviksoo, was certain they were meant to “destabilize society and question the government’s capabilities to maintain law and order in cyberspace.” Although he told me there was little more than circumstantial evidence that the Russian government orchestrated the attacks, he nevertheless pointed to the Kremlin. “The nature of those attacks, the high level of coordination and focus,” he explained, “means there were considerable material and human resources behind them.”

Although the attacks were the most serious of their kind, they were far smaller and more disorganized than another wave that took place the following year in another former Soviet republic that had rubbed Moscow the wrong way. During Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008, DDoS attacks against the presidential administration, various ministries and private companies disrupted communications and disabled twenty sites for more than a week.

Russia has denied any involvement in either of the attacks. However, Irakli Porchkhidze, President Saakashvili’s deputy national security adviser at the time, told me the assault actually began a month before the conflict broke out and involved tens of thousands of botnets, mostly controlled by a St. Petersburg criminal group. Some of the attacks disseminated images of Saakashvili in Nazi uniform and other propaganda. The size, timing and complexity of the assault implicated the Kremlin, which Porchkhidze believes used the attacks as a weapon. “It was a new page in the history of cyberwarfare,” he said.

More recently, the arrests on piracy charges of Greenpeace activists who attempted to hang a banner on a Gazprom Arctic oil rig reflect Moscow’s hard-nose tactics in the emerging drive to stake claims to natural resources there.

Russia’s various forms of opposition to Western policies fit a general pattern of thinking that what’s good for its perceived rivals is bad for Moscow—and, conversely, what’s good for Moscow is bad for its rivals. It will probably continue to act according to that zero-sum calculus as long as Putin or one of his circle remains in power. For Westerners in general and Americans in particular, that means Russia’s perennial instability will almost certainly create problems far into the future because even more than in Western societies, its leaders’ personal needs will continue determining the direction of foreign policy. Good things rarely come from the feelings of insecurity that go together with those of inferiority. In Russia’s case, those feelings, present no matter how powerful the country’s military establishment may be—and Russia’s will long remain weak—often prompt defensive posturing and sometimes, as in the war with Georgia, dangerous aggressiveness.

Dealing with them will require the kind of tactical flexibility Obama displayed early in his presidency by attempting to integrate Russia into the international community where possible. But it will also require doing significantly more to draw lines in the sand on important issues—such as democracy in former Soviet republics—and calmly making clear that Western countries will stand up for their values. Ensuring the stability and security of Russia’s neighbors will be crucial for encouraging Moscow to alter its current path. More important, developed democracies must do far more to support the opposition and the protesters who are trying to establish democracy in their own country. One matter is essential, however: for Russia policies to work, Western countries must have no illusions about what kind of country they are dealing with.

Living in Russia often seemed to me an ongoing lesson in precisely how not to conduct politics, business and almost every other human endeavor. But although Moscow’s streets are generally dangerous in addition to being dirty and difficult to negotiate, the capital can’t be faulted for being boring. The loud and often smelly megalopolis shares something with New York in that it serves as a magnet for strivers from far and wide. Restaurants, theaters and all sorts of other establishments are constantly opening and closing, and there’s always something worthwhile to see or do—in short, the city is very much alive. I feel instantly at home arriving in Moscow because it’s exciting in its way, seething with raw human emotion. That still often appeals to me more than the museum-like qualities of many Western cities, where superficial niceties and the dull veneer of normal life conceal their own inequities and injustices.

My friend Kolya Pavlov remains typically Russian in many ways. His youthful idealism having been worn down by Moscow’s dog-eat-dog reality, much of his free time away from his work as a television producer—along with his disposable income—has gone toward respite in the form of shopping for clothes or consumer goods and visiting nightspots where prodigious amounts of vodka are downed. Although just hearing about the frenetic pace of his entertainment seeking often exhausts me, and although when I was living in Russia we sometimes didn’t see each other for weeks or more, we still share an understanding that comes from observing no formalities or pretenses. No problem was or is too embarrassing or dull to stop one from burdening the other; no plan for journalistic projects or exotic vacations too unrealistic to discuss in detail—often while luxuriating at the banya. Our friendship opened an aspect of human experience, a dimension of unquestioned camaraderie and ability to utterly relax, that I’ve rarely found in the West and that continues to attract me to Russia.

Cultural differences are much harder to reconcile in marriages, however. They were largely responsible for my parents’ divorce after twenty-five years together. My mother never lost the traits that enabled her to evade and buck communism’s restrictions, particularly her delight in defying all conventions that stood in her way, nor did she doubt she would achieve even her most improbable goals. Whereas my father, much as he loved Russians’ uninhibited natures and personal warmth, appreciated many Western practices she found superficial.

When they were still living in London in the 1970s, Serafima joined them by traveling there on a tourist visa, then applying to stay. The serious effort to obtain permission for her visit included an article George wrote for Reader’s Digest that prompted one of the many human rights demonstrations in front of the Soviet embassy, near Hyde Park. I remember a photograph from the time of demonstrators carrying signs that read FREEDOM FOR SERAFIMA LEIMER! However, that kindest and gentlest of souls, who had never really recovered from Zhora’s arrest, did not adapt to her life in the West.

Utterly dependent on her willful daughter and foreign husband, she endured regular admonitions about her overly cautious nature and various faux pas, such as dropping an occasional tissue during the walks my parents all but forced her to take for exercise. Having taken her unconditional love for granted, I’m haunted by a memory of her imploring me, when I was six years old or so, to climb down from a tree along a country road in Spain. Ignoring my order to leave, she refused to budge even after I proceeded to throw stones in her direction, stopping only after one hit the bridge of her nose. When my parents later asked why it was bleeding, she didn’t dream of telling them.

After suffering a stroke in 1985, Serafima returned to spend her last days back in Moscow. Cared for by her cousin Olga Kiva—who had taken her and Tatyana in when they had nowhere to live after they returned from Siberia at the end of World War II—she was soon diagnosed with cancer and died. Her remains are interred in a wall of Moscow’s famed Novodevichy Convent beside her beloved firstborn daughter, Natasha.

Novodevichy is on a pond in a district otherwise consisting of severe Stalin-era apartment houses. It’s one of Moscow most beautiful sights, and its onion-dome cupolas seem to dispel the sense of passing time and daily worry. The cemetery’s entertainingly ornate tombstones, with their reliefs and statuettes, read like a work of Russian history: Gogol and Chekhov are buried there, along with the composer Sergei Prokofiev, Andrei Tupolev—the airplane designer and mentor to Zhora Leimer—Khrushchev and Yeltsin. Visiting the site inevitably reminds me of my personal connection to Russia and its tragedies, reinforcing my conviction that Russians don’t have a unique soul that must forever remain a mystery to outsiders and that their great country isn’t irrevocably fated to repeat its history. Like my parents, I’ve always hoped, sometimes even trusted, that it will someday take its place among more civilized countries.

But as I’ve tried to show, Russia’s fate can no longer be ascribed to bad luck, however much of it the country has endured. Its fundamental beliefs, attitudes and ways will almost certainly remain essentially the same as long as they form the foundation of its society’s practical workings. As the Kremlin challenges almost every Western foreign policy initiative, from Darfur to South America, the importance of accepting that Russian political and social bodies work according to their own logic can’t be stressed enough. That’s my message, at least, although others may dismiss or deny it, insisting that Western logic is the only real logic.

The spectacular fizzle of the promise of 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, continues to fascinate me—I think less because I witnessed it than because it revealed just how deeply the traditional culture runs. Maybe the Russian character reflects my own in that it’s buoyed by great plans and hopes so often diminished or destroyed by insecurity about the possibility of achieving them. The much-derided but inadvertently brilliant phrase of Yeltsin’s longtime prime minister, Victor Chernomyrdin, keeps sounding in my ear: “We hoped for the best, but it turned out as it always does.” Although he was speaking about economic reform, his words have become universal for Russians.

Despite its extravagant squalor, waste, greed and indifference, Russia remains full of life, inventiveness and beauty, qualities that will continue to challenge our ideas about the country. Although many or most Americans hope or trust that it’s moving toward more openness and democracy because we tend to think such progress is ultimately inevitable—on top of it being far more exciting to hear about what we perceive as good news than that the bad old days are here to stay—Russians’ own experiences, of course, continue to shape them and set their priorities. However, as long as they keep mining their society’s deep ironies and paradoxes, they will sustain the possibility that its fundamental values may one day adapt to the postindustrial world despite the obstacles caused by all the deeply rooted factors that helped create their national character.