‘Welcome our pilots!’ commanded the announcer, calling out the names of the high-flying airmen. ‘Welcome Team Commander Viktor Selutin! Wingman Ivan Osyaikin! Master Pilot Sergey Vasiliev! Applaud louder, people, so they can hear you!’
The aircraft climbed and stalled, released dazzling magnesium flares, tumbled towards the ground and then relit their engines to dive at the ecstatic, awestruck crowd. People stood on their chairs, applauding the spectacle. In the grand finale the audience touched their hearts for the national anthem and Anna repeated, ‘Beautiful’.
At the end of the show we walked away through a haze of jet fumes, along a corridor of sparkly red plastic stars, pausing at an historical display of ‘captured’ Second World War German armour.[2] At Patriot Park, as elsewhere in Russia, the victory over Nazism was sacred. Why? Because after the gulags, after the economic failure, after the humiliation of millions under the Soviet system, it was the one achievement of which all Russians could be proud.
‘We can do it again!’ read a young man’s baseball cap, the jingoistic catchphrase printed beneath the hammer and sickle that perpetrated – as it did on every military vehicle in the park – the glorious memory of the Great Patriotic War.
At the park canteen, a security goon patted me down for a concealed weapon as heavy artillery rounds flashed on the horizon. Lunch consisted of borsch, army rations and ptichye moloko marshmallow cake. Anna only wanted a coffee, saying that she had to watch her figure, and chatted at length about making one’s own way in life. The truffle hadn’t made me want to invade Germany but it had emboldened me, so – prompted by her willingness to talk – I asked about her father’s death.
‘It’s tied to my birth,’ she said, tossing her plaited hair over her shoulder with a sigh.
In 1999 Anna’s parents had lived in south-east Moscow, she told me. Her mother had worked at a local supermarket until the last week of her pregnancy. She’d had no choice as her husband hadn’t been paid for months.
In the first years after the collapse of communism, Russia’s gross domestic product had fallen by half, more than America’s during the Great Depression. Bank savings had been wiped out by inflation. Free health care ceased to exist. Male life expectancy crashed to fifty-seven years, the lowest level in the industrial world. People struggled to survive, asking if there was such a thing as right and wrong, while criminals lorded it over both their streets and the Kremlin. Anna’s parents knew that they would need every kopek to buy a good life for their first-born.
When her mother had gone into labour, her father found a taxi to run them to the hospital. But in the rush her overnight bag was left behind in the kitchen. Once she was admitted to the ward, he’d popped back to retrieve it from their apartment. He never returned.
Around midnight, the dead and dying of Guryanova Street began to arrive at the hospital, their bloody stretchers lining the white-tiled corridors. Medics and nurses swirled around the injured, stemming haemorrhages, commandeering beds. As her contractions increased, Anna’s mother had been wheeled through the gory melee towards the delivery room. She was screaming by now, both in pain and for her husband. An hour or two later Anna was hauled out of her weeping, widowed mother into an age desperate for certainty.
On that pivotal birth night, their Guryanova Street apartment building had been destroyed. Some 400 kilograms of explosives had been detonated on its ground floor and the nine-storey structure had collapsed, killing and injuring hundreds in a horror of flying glass and crumbled concrete. A charmless and little-known bureaucrat – a former FSB (Federal Security Service) head, successor of the KGB – then stepped forward to announce to the traumatised nation that the perpetrators were terrorists who had been trained in Chechnya. ‘We will pursue the terrorists everywhere,’ he declared at a news conference. ‘If they are in an airport, then in an airport and, forgive me, if we catch them in the toilet, then we’ll mochit them – rub them out – in the toilet.’
No matter that the Chechens insisted that they had nothing to do with the bombings. Overnight the Russian people had an enemy on which to focus their anger, and the popularity of the charmless bureaucrat – whose name was Vladimir Putin – soared in the wake of his televised revenge attack on Chechnya. Three months later he stood in the country’s presidential election, and won.
Anna grew up in his world, a pale and serious girl haunted by the shock of her terrible first night. Its tension – her mother’s pain – had been absorbed into her body, gripping her muscles, subjecting her to severe migraines throughout childhood. Every birthday reminded her of what she had lost. Yet she never questioned that her father had been taken by anyone other than ‘terrorists’. Russia’s new leader had said it was so, and he was too exemplary, too powerful, to be doubted.
On my travels I try to be invisible. I aim to be a kind of conduit, asking the reader not to look at me but to look with me. I want to portray the people who I meet as they are, not to try to change them, which means I tend to keep my opinions to myself. But with Anna I couldn’t stay quiet. I couldn’t let her continue to live a lie. Instead I blundered in.
In 1999 a terrible beauty had been born in Russia, I told her. In that fatal September the die had been cast for her country’s future. The Guryanova Street bombing had been one of a series of coordinated attacks on civilian targets in Moscow as well as in Buynaksk and Volgodonsk. None of them had been perpetrated by ‘terrorists’.
At the time, politicians and oligarchs alike were hated for their pillage of the country. For them to survive, faith had to be restored in the regime. The FSB was instructed to make people afraid. One of its vehicles and two employees – both of whom later died in mysterious circumstances – were even caught transporting sacks of explosives to the cellar of a sixth target, in the city of Ryazan south-east of Moscow. In addition, RDX hexogen, the key ingredient in all the bombs including at Guryanova Street, was held in facilities under the exclusive control of the FSB.
‘What? Blow up our own apartment buildings? You know, that is really… utter nonsense! It’s totally insane,’ said Putin when the facts came out, and in response to accusations of complicity. ‘No one in the Russian Special Services would be capable of such a crime against his own people.’
Then he shut down the public enquiry.
In the Patriotic Park cafe, I told Anna that the Russian apartment bombings had been the greatest political provocation on the continent since the burning of the Reichstag. It was an event – a conscious and decisive act – that obsessed me, both because of its iniquity and because of how much it had changed Europe.
When I had finished talking, she stared at me. She blinked her child-like eyes. She seemed unable to grasp my meaning as if I’d been speaking in tongues. Then she must have decided that the truffle had distorted my reason. She tossed her plait over her shoulder again and said, ‘This is not true.’
To kick off the afternoon’s entertainment, balaclava-wearing dancers in Spetsnaz SAS uniforms performed a robot ballet on the main stage. Families checked out riot-control vehicles and inflatable, full-size MiG decoys, useful to confuse enemies at times when deceit alone won’t do. In the souvenir shop knick-knack hunters bought Putin fridge magnets and bomber jackets adorned with the word ‘Victory’. A baby’s cot in the form of a Buk missile launcher was among the weekend’s specials. Nearby a child ate a hot dog beside an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of destroying an entire country.
2
In fact all the German vehicles at Patriot Park were replicas, newly made in Russian factories as there were no longer enough originals to go round. In 2018 the Kremlin had even repatriated from Laos thirty of its own vintage T-34s to star in military parades and film shoots.