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But now things are different. It looks as though Yeltsin is physically incapable of leading, and every successor he has named he has ruined by doing so. I have never met the president or seen him in person, yet I have vivid television memories of the man as he once was -- standing atop a tank in defiance of the coup plotters of 1991, speaking to the nation in his gruff baritone, announcing the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet in 1993. His appearance and manners have been those of a working-class czar: slow-paced orations filled with pauses demonstrating power, the stiff bearing, the towering build. But after the second apartment building bombing he addressed the nation, slurring his words and apparently having trouble making out his speech on the teleprompter. This, of course, is Yeltsin as he is known to be now, but with buildings being blown to bits and heads being cut off, his apparent dementia strikes home in a way it never did before.

So the electoral field is wide open, and the stakes are high: power over the (territorially) largest country on earth. Russia has a nuclear arsenal second only to that of the United States; it's a country that despite the theft and corruption of the past decade can suffer capital flight of $2 billion a month and still remain basically solvent; whose timber, mineral and energy resources, to say nothing of its trained manpower and scientific prowess (remember, the Soviets put a man in space before the United States) accord Russia a status only the United States can surpass. Awareness of these facts figures prominently in the national psyche of Russians. If in the West it is now commonplace to regard Russia as the sick man of Europe, in the eyes of most Russians the post-1991 setbacks are temporary and can be reversed. They are probably right. Remember Churchill's observation after the death of dictator Joseph Stalin: When Stalin assumed power in 1924, Russia had the plow; when he died in 1953, it had nuclear weapons.

Dual notions of coming chaos and potential national regeneration ballast every rumor now circulating in Moscow. But let us return to facts on the ground. The Russian air force is bombing Chechnya and civilian casualties are heavy, and preparations are being made for a ground invasion. Although Russian politicians talk of NATO-like surgical strikes against "bandits" and "terrorist bases," no one can doubt that the motive is revenge, and that the Russian military will leave not a blade of grass standing in Chechnya, if it invades.

Click here to find out about health and safety when traveling in Russia.

How are Muscovites taking all this? I look in the eyes of my Russian friends and see fatigue. Even young people seem emotionally older. More cynical than their Western counterparts, they disbelieve talk of democracy and fair play. In Russia there has been no Renaissance or Reformation. Centuries of illiteracy and autocracy and seven decades of Bolshevism have made Russia fundamentally different from the West as well as from the advanced East. Stalin killed more people than Hitler, and Russians learned their lesson from that. Apart from the first few days of 1991, there has never been well-founded hope for prosperity in Russia. There is no social cohesion, no common good in a land where neighbors were taught to inform on neighbors. There is now, in short, little reason to do anything but steal -- steal IMF money, steal food aid, steal the assets of the state through rigged auctions, steal the elections by rigging them. Russians, young and old, know this, and cynicism prevails. Real reform has never taken place, and there is now no realistic hope that it will. If in the United States, the present is new and fresh, in Russia it is weary and shot through with the spirit of the gulags. Russians are used to adversity, and are able in dealing with it. They will find their way forward, but their history has no end, no plot and no climax. Forward doesn't necessarily mean better.

With the elections at hand or nearly so, Russians speak apocalyptically -- but the restaurants and nightclubs are full, and they are making the best of things. The store shelves are stocked. The war, as horrific as it is, is taking place a thousand miles to the south, and no one in the capital is on a war footing, though the television now speaks almost exclusively of battles, explosives, "bandits" and so on. Russians have seen it all before -- in this century, they have suffered World War I, revolution and civil war, an artificial famine that killed 7 million, political purges that killed perhaps 10 million, World War II (which took 27 million lives), war in Afghanistan, the collapse of their empire and the impoverishment of the country. Perusal of previous centuries reveals similar cataclysms and death tolls. Understandably, it takes an awful lot to rally Russians around a cause.

All of these misfortunes have been the deeds of men, yet they have overtaken Russians like natural disasters. There might be talk in the West of influencing Russia, of offering aid, of correct policies and erroneous ones, but certain things are clear: Russia is too big to be controlled from without, its power for destruction too great to be managed with alliances and air campaigns, its economy too off-the-books and unregistered to be fully understood, much less predicted, and its politics too secretive to be second-guessed with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Many in the West make a living by "analyzing" Russia, but it is instructive to remember that not one historian or Sovietologist predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those foreigners who live here learn a lesson of modesty, learn to appreciate all that cannot be known in Russia and that should not be supposed.

So now in Moscow, amid the swirling rumors and the talk of doom, aware of the historical precedents for mayhem and the current tragedy in the Caucasus, we ready ourselves for the future as if for a hurricane: We make the best of it. The aim is to weather the storm if it comes, to somehow keep ourselves and our loved ones safe -- and that is the best I can hope to do. In Russia, one learns to keep in mind a truth often ignored elsewhere -- we are all, regardless of our country of birth, treading on the edge, one step from the abyss.
salon.com | Oct. 2, 1999

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