Four years have passed from the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Twelve years have passed since the capture of the Crimea and the start of war in eastern Ukraine. In 2022 it became manifestly clear that this was a war undertaken in order to destroy the entire Ukrainian nation. Its genocidal character is not concealed in the Russian media, it is emphasized: Russia cheers the decimation of Ukraine’s vital infrastructure and Russia relishes the death of Ukrainian civilians. Yet Russian society — if there actually is such a unitary thing — exists in two aggregate states simultaneously. According to the official position, the society supports the war unconditionally and stands united and ready for sacrifice. In contrast, among the cultural dissidents who consider Russian society as a countervailing force to the Russian regime, the society is against the war but cannot express its disapproval for fear of punishment. Which group is correct? What is Russian society and what does it think of Russia’s bloodletting? I think that the truth is not simply somewhere in between, not in numbers, not in the image of a society divided or oppressed or reduced to hypocrisy or coerced into mimicking the signals of loyalty desired by the authorities. Something else has happened in Russian society. The mask has grown into the face. Two Marauders There are still many liberal émigrés who say, “When the war began in 2022…” But this is historically inaccurate and morally blind: the historical changes that led Russia to its present state regarding Ukraine began in 2014, with the Crimean euphoria and the hybrid invasion in Donbas. That was the beginning of the corruption — I cannot find a better word — of the society, its acceptance of a new and unprovoked war against a neighboring sovereign state. The proxy character of the military action before the participation of the Russian army was revealed — remember the unmarked green men? — offered excuses for one’s conscience, and held out the false hope that this was just a local conflict that could be resolved without fateful consequences and that one could live with it the way one does with an unpleasant but not fatal disease. Encountering no prolonged systematic protest from opposition forces, the invasion of Ukraine did more than untie Putin’s hands for further escalation. It changed the Russian map of the world, in which the West became the grand and definite enemy of Russia. It also altered the country’s moral climate. Moral climate is difficult to measure, but it can be felt. I felt it at the military parade on May 8, 2014 — May 8, the annual Russian celebration of the victory in World War II — just a few months after the capture of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine — a military parade in a country that was at war again and pretending that it was not. I went not to watch the parade but to feel the mood of the crowd. What mood would pervade the crowds of people looking at tanks, self-propelled artillery systems, and armored personnel carriers of the same models that were being used by Russian army units secretly brought into Ukraine? What would be the spirit of this parade, the parade of the army that treacherously attacked its brothers-in-arms who had fought with them and won the victory celebrated on May 8? It was a bright but cool day, and there were crowds along the parade route: families, couples, random passersby who stopped to watch, magnetized by the anticipation of the sight of armored monsters of war obeying their drivers. Saint George ribbons fluttered here and there: yellow and black, flame and smoke, the colors of the imperial Order of St. George, which had become the official symbol of growing militarism under Putin. Children running through the crowd were handing out the ribbons, and when asked the cost, they cheerfully replied: “It’s free! This is sacred, not for sale!” They did sell straw-colored World War II Soviet infantry caps with red stars pinned on them. A lot of people were buying them and then setting them on the heads of their children and their girlfriends and their elderly parents. Men of draft age were too embarrassed to wear them, I suppose. In previous years, the grass verges of the highway and the internal police troops posted along the parade route clearly divided the military from the civilians, the street where technology and uniforms reigned from the broad sidewalks filled with viewers in profoundly civilian dress. But now the caps with stars blurred the boundary; the crowd no longer looked completely civilian. Thanks to those straw caps, whose style was recognizable from dozens of Soviet films about the Great War, the crowd seemed to be responding to the parade. Without a surge of emotion, without hysteria, but echoing it. It wasn’t out-and-out approval, but a kind of passive self-portrait: it was enough for every fifteenth or twentieth person in the crowd to wear the silly grandfather’s cap to make the multitude as a whole look different and feel different. A new mood, a new community, arose that did not yet sense itself as one: a community in which the boundary between civilian and military, between peace and war, started to become less and less distinct. That boundary began to dissolve first at the level of symbols. No one was making people buy and wear the military caps with Soviet stars or forcing the crowd to pin the St. George ribbons to their shirts. It was hard to understand: were they doing it only because a new sign of collective identity was on offer, or did they actually need it? I tried to remember how that significant ribbon first appeared in Moscow. It was at the start of the 2000s, at the peak of economic success, when Russia seemed to be searching for a visible image, a visible emblem that would express its renewed claim to superpower status. It was
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