Russia is a country of symbols. Major political shifts here are always accompanied by a change of outward trappings, as a graphic demonstration of a rupture with the old. In March 1917, as the Russian throne stood empty after the abdication of the last Czar, the crowned double-headed eagles — the symbols of the fallen empire — were being toppled all over the country: thrown down from the façades of government buildings, bridges, theaters, department stores, and spectacularly from the rostrum in the State Duma’s hemicycle in Petrograd. The new currency printed by the provisional government featured the eagle without the crowns or the scepter — a rare collector’s item as it only lasted a few months, until the eagle was eliminated altogether when the Bolsheviks seized power in a coup d’état later that year. Trying desperately to cling to power as the country — and the world — was changing around them, a new generation of Communist leaders attempted another coup d’état in August 1991. It seemed bound to succeed — after all, the leaders of the coup, who tried to stem a democratic tide provoked both by the half-hearted reforms of the 1980s and by the deteriorating woes of the socialist economy, held all the levers of power. The self-proclaimed “emergency committee” included the USSR’s vice president, prime minister, ministers of the interior and defense, and the chairman of the KGB — the top brass of the regime which had control of the party and state machinery, the propaganda apparatus, and all branches of the security forces, from the regular army to the secret police. And they had tanks, which they sent to occupy downtown Moscow. What they failed to account for was a changed Russian society: people who had tasted a sampling of freedom, however imperfect, were not prepared to give it up. The Muscovites who went into the streets — initially in the thousands, then in the hundreds of thousands — were not armed with anything except their dignity and a determination to defend their freedom. They came and stood in front of the tanks, and the tanks stopped and turned away. A mighty totalitarian system that had held the world in fear for decades went down in three days, defeated peacefully by its own citizens. I was a ten-year-old boy in Moscow — too young to join my father at the barricades by the White House (the seat of the Russian parliament that became the center of resistance to the coup) but certainly old enough to grasp the lesson of what was happening: that however strong a dictatorship, when enough people are willing to stand up to it they will succeed. The tanks will stop and turn away. The fall of the Soviet regime was followed, inevitably, by the overthrow of its symbols. On August 22, as the Russian republic’s president, Boris Yeltsin, who had led the opposition to the coup, addressed a huge victory rally from the White House balcony, thousands of Muscovites went over to Lubyanka Square, the site of the KGB’s headquarters, to tear down the monument to its founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky. The nineteen-foot bronze statue of the Soviet secret police chief hanging from a noose as a crane lifted it from its pedestal remains among the most enduring images of Russia’s democratic revolution. That same evening, a memorial plaque honoring Yuri Andropov was dismantled from the façade of the KGB building. Andropov was someone who had epitomized both the domestic repression and the external aggressive-ness of the Soviet system. As ambassador to Budapest, he was among those who oversaw the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. As longtime chairman of the KGB, he made a priority of targeting political dissent, setting up a special directorate to fight “anti-Soviet activities” at home and expanding the gruesome practice of punitive psychiatry in which dissidents were confined to torturous conditions of forced psychiatric “treatment.” A plaque honoring this man as a “distinguished statesman” was inconceivable in a democratic Russia. In December 1999, President Yeltsin was preparing to hand over power to a former KGB operative by the name of Vladimir Putin — a relatively obscure apparatchik who had recently been appointed prime minister and enjoyed a meteoric political rise on the back of mysterious apartment bombings blamed on Chechen terrorists and a brutal military campaign in Chechnya that culminated in his newly formed party’s victory in parliamentary elections. Much of the world media, pundits and foreign leaders everywhere, wondered who this Mr. Putin was and what they should expect from him, domestically and in the realm of foreign policy. For anyone willing to notice, however, the answer was already there. On December 20 — the anniversary of the founding of the Soviet secret police — Putin held a low-key ceremony on Lubyanka Square, attended by a few former colleagues and a handful of journalists, to unveil the restored memorial plaque to Andropov, the “distinguished statesman.” It was the same one that had been dismantled in August 1991, carefully preserved and waiting for its moment. In this country of symbols, Putin could not have chosen a more potent one to mark the start of a new political era. As if in confirmation of his intentions (if one were needed) he proceeded, in the first year of his presidency, to reinstate the Soviet-era national anthem once personally selected by Stalin. “A national anthem is a symbol,” Boris Strugatsky, a celebrated Russian science fiction novelist, wrote in 2000. “What can be symbolized by a return to the former Communist Party anthem except a return to the former times? This is frightening… It seems we are destined for a new spiral of suffering: a rejection of democracy, a return to totalitarianism and great-power games, an inevitable failure — and then another perestroika, democratization, freedom, but in the context of a total economic collapse and an impending energy crisis. I would very much like to be wrong.” Alas, he wasn’t. Symbols were followed by substance. On the fourth day
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