BETWEEN BLACK AND RED:

Victory Day, Moscow 2006: Can a Westerner understand the Russian people's love of strong leaders? (Peter Savodnik, May 14, 2006, Slate)

Last year, Victory Day was big. The 60th anniversary of the 1945 Nazi defeat gave President Vladimir Putin a chance to host a grand celebration that included, for the first time, the German chancellor. Other world leaders, including President Bush, also attended the Red Square ceremonies. The Lithuanians and Estonians stayed home—they don't believe the war really ended until the 1991 Soviet collapse—and the Latvians probably regretted that their president accepted the Kremlin's invitation. But the general tenor of the festivities was positive, if somber, injecting some staying power into a holiday that has, inevitably, lost some of its currency with the passing of the years.

This year, Victory Day's slide toward oblivion resumed. Thousands turned up for the parades, speeches, and demonstrations in central Moscow. Millions tuned in to the Soviet-era war movies that played on state-run TV stations. But there was less excitement than in 2005, and the distractions of the popular culture seemed to crowd out the state-sponsored mythologies that once shaped the public consciousness.

For 15 years, at least, a cultural-cognitive gap has been growing between the people and the state. That space is a manifestation of the public's alienation from its government. Attempts to paper over that alienation, to foist a new solidarity on an old people, are absurd. The people, especially the young people who are impervious to the old dogma, know this.

So, too, does the president, who's not a Soviet premier so much as a tsar, dispensing with ideology and reappropriating the powers of 19th-century imperialism. Whether it's single-handedly rerouting massive oil pipelines or reorganizing the federal bureaucracy, Putin has not so much resurrected a dead superstate as responded to Russians' long-festering desire for a "strong hand."

And so the day after Victory Day, the president gave his State of the Nation address and told Russians that they need to have more babies. Noting that the population has been declining—from roughly 150 million in the early 1990s to 140 million today—he mapped out a series of financial incentives for women to have more children.

Whether more Russians women will become mothers for the sake of the motherland is unknown. There is, of course, something odd about a president telling his people to make more babies—procreation tends to be a personal matter. But this is not how tsars think. And the Russian people—most of them, at least—love their tsar.

Richard Pipes couldn't figure it out either, but has written well about it in Russian Conservatism and its Critics.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 15, 2006 8:07 AM