After Putin's speech, the parade began. Thousands of soldiers marched with exquisite precision; some of them wore Second World War uniforms, while others were dressed in their modern army gear. A terrific growling of engines announced the arrival of military hardware: first, columns of vintage wartime vehicles, and then the best and most sinister hardware the modern Russian Army had to offer. Armoured cars, tanks, and multiple-launch rocket systems all rolled across the square; bringing up the rear were the enormous, phallic intercontinental ballistic missiles, mounted atop elongated, slow-moving trucks. A spectacular flyover completed the ceremony, dozens of planes roaring overhead in formation, the final group leaving a smoky trail in the colours of the Russian flag. The crowd went wild.
VI
A few days before that years Victory Day, I paid a visit to Evgeny Kuropatkov, a sprightly ninety-one-year-old with a moustache that was as impressively well-tended as his bushy eyebrows were unkempt. He was in the midst of packing up his apartment into boxes, with help from his daughter. His second wife had died the month before, and her son from a previous marriage wanted to take possession of the flat. 'He'll be coming to live with me now; it'll be nice to live together,' the daughter said, stoically. Most of his clothes, papers, and trinkets had already been boxed up, but his medal-laden military jacket was set to one side; he wanted to wear it with pride on Victory Day.
Evgeny had been eighteen when Nazi Germany invaded, and he was called up to the army immediately. He fought around Stalingrad, and in the defence of Leningrad, with the 196th rifle division. He was in charge of weaponry supplies for the division; his task was to ensure the men had sufficient ammunition at all times. Of the thirteen thousand men in the division at Stalingrad, just 1,658 survived, he said.
The day Evgeny went to war also marked the last time he saw his closest relations. All three men in the Kuropatkov family were sent to the front: Evgeny's twin brother Vladimir fought in an anti-tank battalion and died in Belarus in 1944. His father was also called up, though
Evgeny did not know which part of the front he ended up in. He was never heard from again. During perestroika, a television crew making a documentary helped Evgeny track down information, and he discovered his fathers entire regiment had been wiped out in the battle for Novgorod. No remains were ever found. All Evgeny had to remember his twin and father by were two passport-sized photographs, yellowed and dog-eared.
'The grass of the steppe smells of grief, Robert Rozhdestvensky wrote,' said Evgeny, quoting a Soviet poet. 'He was right. I had my face in that grass while we were retreating; I smelled that grief myself. The things I saw in Stalingrad, and in Leningrad, to see those things not in a book or a film but in real life, it's impossible to put into words what it was like.'
When Evgeny looked at twenty-year-olds today, skipping around Moscow carefree and innocent, he could not quite believe they were the same age he had been when he witnessed the horror of Stalingrad. 'Of course, a person becomes different after this, of course it changes you. I still see those things in my dreams.'
Evgeny's lines were well rehearsed. He rattled off figures and dates with the precision of someone who had told his story a thousand times before. If I had returned a month later, I suspect he would have repeated the same sentences almost verbatim, in the way that distant memories coagulate into set monologues. And yet, despite that, there was still something raw about the recollections. Every now and then, the old man's voice became rasping and he would gulp for air, as if he had surprised himself by the emotions the stories still raised, seventy years and hundreds of tellings later.
Evgeny had been invited to Red Square for the parade and planned to attend; he liked the fact that 9 May was still celebrated. But although he enjoyed wearing his army jacket, festooned with medals, and he took understandable pride in being part of the victory, his bearing and tone were very different to the official propaganda. He spoke of the war as a terrible, not a glorious, experience; of loss and violence and unspeakable imagery. I doubt he would have wanted to dress his greatgrandchildren up in Red Army uniforms, as if for a party.
Chechnya: the deal
i
When Putin took over as acting president on the eve of the millennium, the most pressing issue he faced was that of Chechnya, where the violence of the 1990s embodied the helplessness of the Russian state. For Putin, bringing order to Chechnya was the first part of his plan to reunite Russia. Just a few hours into his acting presidency, on 1 January 2000, Putin flew to Chechnya and awarded medals and hunting knives to Russian troops fighting there. 'This is not just about restoring the honour and dignity of Russia,' Putin said, in televised remarks beamed into homes across the country. 'It is about putting an end to the breakup of the Russian Federation. That is the main task. Russia is grateful to you. 1
The Chechens, a mountain warrior people who speak a guttural language with no Slavic roots, had a long history of resistance to Russian rule. In the nineteenth century, they waged guerrilla war against the tsar's army, alongside other Muslim nations from the North Caucasus, led by their spiritual and political leader, Imam Shamil.
Chechen society was based on fierce loyalties to family and clan rather than to class, and many Chechens were never fully on board with the Bolshevik project either, with its collectivization of agriculture and focus on an industrialized, proletarian future. In 1931, more than thirty- five thousand Chechens were arrested and most of them were shot, in a crackdown on religious leaders, nationalists, and kulaks.2 Nonetheless, when the Second World War came, thousands of Chechens fought and died at the front. As with the Kalmyks, this did not spare them deportation. In Operation Lentil, launched on 23 February 1944, 450,000 Chechens and Ingush (a closely related ethnic group) were rounded up just as the Kalmyks had been, by NKVD men in Studebaker trucks. Most of the Chechens were sent to the punishing, barren lands of the Kazakh steppe.
Their crime was alleged collaboration with the Nazis, though unlike Kalmykia, the vast majority of Chechen lands were never occupied by the Nazis; most Chechens had never even laid eyes on a German soldier. The punishment was more likely due to broader suspicions about whether the Chechens would ever fully acquiesce to the Soviet system. Tens of thousands of Chechens died in the early stages of the deportation, both from the icy, inhumane conditions on the train and from the difficulty of adapting to life on the Kazakh steppe. Even by the NKVD's own accounting, up to a quarter of the deported Chechens died in the first four years of exile, with child mortality rates particularly high.3 The real figure was almost certainly higher.
Khrushchev allowed the Chechens back home in 1956, but the memories were not easily erased. During the years of deportation, many villages had been destroyed and graveyards desecrated. Soviet attempts to curate historical memory had mixed success, as national legends and sometimes embellished tales of the glorious past of the Chechens remained alive, through oral storytelling traditions. They trumped the official propaganda that 1945 was a glorious date for all the Soviet people to celebrate. For the Chechens, the war had meant tragedy. Although many Chechens did become Sovietized, taking up positions as teachers, doctors, or even party officials, a spirit of resistance remained. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote that the Chechens were the only nationality in the camps who never brown-nosed the guards, and refused to resign themselves passively to their fate.