Twelve more years....

I went online to check the news Saturday afternoon, and saw a peculiar headline at Izvestia. It was the usual humdrum weekend layout, but the main headline read "Medvedev agrees to head United Russia Duma list." That's funny, I thought, because if he ran for Duma it would be hard to run for... oh.

Talk about burying the lede. Every western news agency got it right: "Putin to return as Russian President." All of a sudden, with unmistakeable clarity, the national political life of this country has been decided for the next 12 years. But much of the Russian media seems to have taken incredible pains to avoid spelling out the obvious, presenting the developments as just another "normal" part of the political process in this "sovereign democracy."

But it is sinking in. The past few months, you hear a lot of talk about "stagnation," reminding many of the Brezhnev era's modest economic comfort, stifling stability, and soft repression. It's understandable. Something about the way people complain about the difficulty of life in Russia has gotten more desperate, I've noticed, and I've heard some surprising people talk about how tired of it all they have become. It's hopeless, so no wonder the media is trying to downplay the reality of what just happened.

It is a rather different feeling than the last time Russia was told of a shift at the top in December 2007. I heard about it in the evening, when I was listening to the "Nachtkonzert" online, and was convinced I'd misheard the German news announcer. Could it be Putin had really picked the gentle, Western-minded legal scholar over the defense industry stooge who was considered his primary rival? There were certainly good reasons then to be queasy about how the transfer of power was conducted, but there was a possibility it could be the light at the end of the tunnel. For those that clung to that belief, this weekend's developments must be particularly hard.

This underscores the limits of the "stagnation" narrative. Under Brezhnev, the USSR was simply old and worn out. On the occasion of his death, in November 1982, Serge Schmemann of the New York Times wrote about the mood on the street:

"In the later years of Mr. Brezhnev's life, his slurred speech and obvious infirmity evinced a combination of pity, embarassment and aggravation among many Soviet people.

During his recent speech in Baku, at which he began reading the wrong text, a woman watcing on television was overheard to say, 'Poor man, why do they make him do all this at his age?' The comment was typically Soviet in the presumption taht even the General Secretary of the Communist Party is somehow manipulated by the faceless 'They.'

Among more sophisticated people, a common feeling in later months was a frustrated sense that any progress, any reform, any assault on the country's economic and social stagnation was impossible under the aged, frail Brezhnev regime.

'I don't care if it does get worse,' one economic planner recently said. 'As long as there's change.'"

There is nothing old and worn out about those in power now, and there aren't words for the feeling of finding yourself once again at the bottom of such a very large hill.

A trip to the 'Main Universal Store'

Moscow's GUM department store was built in the early 1890s, a mix of traditional Russian architectural themes with contemporary glass and iron engineering.

I went through a very distinct phase in my youth when the idea of a "shopping mall" embodied everything I thought was wrong about the world. Such commercialism! how shallow and pointless, all those people wandering around like cattle. Like, man, it's all so corporate.

But as I grew older, and my sense of irony became real instead of forced, I developed a real interest in these places, and not just because they are the emblematic structures of late 20th American public life. They belong to the world, to capitalism and modernity itself. Didn't Walter Benjamin spend his working life on vast, unfinished thought experiment about the arcades of Paris, the forerunner of the modern shopping mall?

Though to be honest, what really changed my mind was living in a small village like Williamstown, where getting to any retail center is major work (I have no idea how people lived there without the internet and Amazon). Whenever I drop off or pick up anyone at the Albany airport, I make time to wander around the Crossgates Mall of Colonie Center, usually withouth buying anything, just to look at things. There is always that weird shudder at Barnes & Noble, when I see in reality a book I've read a lot about.

In Moscow recently, I took my daughter to visit Red Square, and we did the usual things. We watched the changing of the guard at the war memorial, had lunch at Okhotny Ryad, listened for the bells of Spassky Gate.

But I also took her to GUM, the enormous 19th century shopping edifice that occupies the eastern side of the Square. I hadn't been there since my first visit in 2003, and was curious what it looked like now.

The answer, of course, is awfully elitny. The Glavnyi Universalni Magazin enjoys pride of place like no other shopping center in the world. And the inside shows it, with a painfully high-end string of boutiques filling a space that is remarkably beautiful in a very practical way.

The fountain, in the central courtyard of GUM, is decorated for the season.

A funny piece of Soviet nostalgia: the store, with its blank, descriptive name ("Gastronom No. 1") and window full of Soviet-era essentials like flour and sugar betrays its real identity. Inside, you won't find much to be nostalgic about, but lots of incredibly expensive imported wines, cheeses, truffles, and whatnots.

A map of GUM. Notice the trapezoidal shape.

This unique news kiosk reflects the interest of most GUM shoppers: glossy gossip tabs, psychology magazines, business titles, and, of course, a magazine solely about luxury wristwatches.

One more thing on Sept. 11...

Everyone has a Sept. 11 story, and on this, the tenth anniversary, it feels like most of them are being told. The events of that day are almost too large to look at with our usual tools of distance and detachment, because they fail to describe what we remember. What happened, in one way or another, wounded everyone, so to understand it, we feel an obligation to break it into manageable little stories.

I haven't even tried to read that much of what has appeared about it -- just enough to figure I might as well pitch in my thoughts as well. I've seen a lot of older writers, baby boomers, who still seem astonished that something happened in the full flush of their adulthood that shaped an entire era. And I've read a lot of recollections from kids who were in college or in high school at the time, who have lived with this as part of their life.

I don't have anything to say about the event itself, a crime of such horror and evil that words fail. So I'd take the opportunity to look at another angle of it. Perhaps one can make too much of it, but I think about this through the lens of my generation, that awkward thing between Gen X and Gen Y, that slacker, post-slacker whatever that seems to hold together mostly by coming into consciousness in the 1990s, during that profound "vacation from history."

The Space Age

I'm always going to think the "Monument to the Conquerors of Space" is pretty cool. The enormous, titanium-coated arc to the sky was completed in 1964, and mixes space age cool with socialist realist silly. The whole area around it -- the old VDNKh is next door -- is a bit like that. But it seems with each passing year it feels like the past is becoming more, well, passed.

The last time I went there was in winter 2003, during my first visit to Moscow. Back then, it was a full-blown Soviet kitsch experience. I remember the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics -- which is in the base -- back then was a small, dark, and very much like visiting a mausoleum. An extensive renovation was completed in 2009, and did quite a lot to bring it into the, well, 20th century.

But the result is still a little curious. There is a lot of hagiography, especially about Gagarin, and a good bit of red meat for techies and engineers. But unfortunately for my visit, it couldn't quite capture the attention of my four-year-old girl. She skipped right past rocket scientist Pilyagin's reading glasses, and did not share my amazement at how closely the sleeping compartment of a Soyuz capsule resembles an overnight train compartment.

I find it absolutely hilarious that for a museum that relies rather heavily on models and replicas, they have on display Belka and Strelka. The real Belka and Strelka. Right near the front, which prompted a strange conversation with my daughter about how yes, they came back safely. And went on to have long, happy dog lives. But were stuffed because they were heroes (like Lenin, I guess).

Russia's Lost Bastille Day

The memorial to the 1905 uprising. We're still waiting on the memorial for 1991.

Last month, on August 19, Russia could have celebrated its version of Bastille Day. There were some television specials and broadcasts of glasnost-era movies, but the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, the failed coup by Communist hardliners, came and went. The memory of those historic events among today's Russians is mixed, and seems to reflect that in politics, sometimes success is only managed disappointment.

The coup began on August 19, and the next day, a Monday, Russians heard the news that their leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was "ill" at his Crimean dacha and that a committee of reactionaries was now in charge. But it was clear from the start that the putsch was a farce. They issued a stream of bizarre, apocalyptic statements, and ostensible "leader" Gennady Yanayev couldn't keep his hands from shaking when he appeared on television. Within hours, a crowd had gathered around Russian President Boris Yeltsin at the Parliament building, the White House, and began throwing up barricades.

American writer Jamey Gambrell, writing in the New York Review of Books just days after the coup failed, summed up the giddy sense of confusion and excitement. "At the first mass demonstration, there was at last a feeling, which was to grow as the days passed, that Russia had taken a stand, perhaps for the first time in its history."

The coup fizzled over the next few days, as the military declined to participate in a bloodbath, and the Soviet Union quickly began to unspool. By the end of the week, the enormous statue of Felix Dzherzhinsky, the hated founder of the secret police, had been ripped from his pedestal outside KGB headquarters, which itself was covered with derisive graffiti. Emotions in those days spread, soon vented against not just the Party and the KGB, but at Gorbachev himself. By Christmas, the Soviet Union was history.

But not everyone remembers the story as an uplifting journey from oppression to freedom. A recent poll by the independent Levada Center found that only eight percent of respondents viewed the events of August 1991 as the start of a democratic revolution. About 43 percent said the coup attempt was nothing more than a struggle for power among bureaucrats. To this day, 36 percent say the collapse of the USSR was a negative thing.

A lot of that comes through the lens of hindsight, through all the shocks and traumas that Russia endured in those years. When the coup took place, Soviet citizens were already adjusting to a radical realignment of their political space. They lost an "empire" in Eastern Europe, and the splintering of the USSR into separate republics left about 25 million ethnic Russians suddenly as minorities in foreign nations. And it was unclear when the unraveling would stop, raising questions about the territorial integrity of Russia itself -- the Caucuses were already in revolt, and there was a danger that Tatarstan, in the heart of Russia, would be next.

No clear order had emerged in domestic politics either. Yeltsin may have been hero at the White House, but a little more than two years later he would bomb the same building after months of squabbling with the Congress of Peoples Deputies. The irony was lost on no one. And the appearance of free markets held little appeal. The "shock therapy" recommended by the international neoliberal elite meant that to most, instead of being robbed blind by Communist nomenklatura, they were now free to be robbed blind by elitny businessmen.

There are many ways to read all these struggles. Russophobes insist Russians, after centuries of oppression, are culturally unable to handle freedom. But Russians weren't alone in finding the Brave New Post-Socialist World more complicated and difficult than they expected. Disappointment and frustration appeared everywhere once they had moved beyond the black-and-white struggle against Communism. "We are witness to a bizarre state of affairs," lamented Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel, in April 1992. "Society has freed itself, true, but in some ways it behaves worse that when it was in chains."

There are many moving parts in politics, and success is sometimes a matter of how you organize them into a story. In Russia, the past ten years the story has been about the horrible 1990s, how Russia was rudderless and adrift and only a "strong hand on the tiller" -- like Vladimir Putin's -- could keep the ship on course. The story worked while the economy was treading water -- thanks to Russia's disproportionate reliance on the export of raw materials. But as the global economy stumbles and another round of disappointment takes shape, it is a tragedy not to have the memory of moments of courage and promise to rely on.