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By Paul Starobin, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, July 7, 2006

A Russian businessman once offered me his view of the Russian national character. It went like this: "Russians are like small children. Generally they are sweet and lovable and innocent -- but now and then, without warning, without provocation, without any discernable reason, they bite you on the neck. Don't even ask them to explain why -- they would have no idea themselves; the question would be meaningless." He chuckled. "Yes, they've done this to me," he admitted.

The search for a Russian national type, for any kind of "national character," is probably fruitless -- a nation is not a single personality, for one thing. Nevertheless, it says something about the Russians that anecdotes like this one are common; I've heard many variations in a dozen-odd years of travels in and about the country. Whether Russians lend themselves to such essentialist interpretations is beside the point -- the point is, Russians feel themselves to be something quite distinct. And such sentiments create a hard reality of their own.

And indeed, as the cradle of a rich language using an alphabet created by a Byzantine missionary, as a centuries-old guardian of Orthodox Christian religious culture, as a vast country with a proud if often tortured past, Russia can be viewed not merely as a state but, like America or China, as a repository of distinctive ideas and traditions -- something like a civilization. Westerners are occasionally possessed of the odd idea that Russia can be plastic to the touch. But those, including Washington policy makers, who underestimate Russia's sense of separateness, its determination to be itself, are doomed to get Russia wrong.

My most recent visit, in May, came as the West and Russia seemed to be especially out of sorts with each other. The foul mood had several proximate causes: European resentment of Russian manipulation of gas exports; Russian resentment of Western (especially American) lectures about backsliding on democracy and human rights; tactical disagreements over how to address Iran's nuclear ambitions; a feeling in the West that Russian President Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB colonel, did not quite deserve the prestige of his new station as president of the G-8, a post entitling him to host a summit of world leaders in St. Petersburg in mid-July.

But underneath these immediate reasons for disharmony lies a deeper source of tension. Unlike Russia in the 1990s -- an awful decade for that country -- today's Russia is stronger, and more confident, and therefore a bigger problem for the West. Today's Russia is more willing to stand up for its own interests. Today's Russia, flush with energy reserves at a time of $70 per barrel oil, has what a major Western investor in Russia, using crude Wall Street vernacular, calls "fuck-you money."

And whenever Russia feels cocky, Westerners get alarmed. Even cosmopolitan Western liberals, who pride themselves on their receptiveness to other cultures, tend to view a powerful Russia with a certain primitive fear. "In dealing with the Russians," the U.S. scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer said in a 1951 speech, early in the Cold War, "we are coping with a barbarous, backward people who are hardly loyal to their own rulers." Nobody likes to be called backward, but this staple image, of the "wild Russian," is one in which many Russians -- men and women -- actually take some delight. The Russians are, after all, the people that neither Napoleon nor Hitler could conquer. And as Oppenheimer grasped, the Russians have had, in fact, an uneasy relationship with their tradition of autocracy, sometimes violently rebelling against efforts to subdue them.

Washington's conventional wisdom is that Putin, Russia's czar-like president, is dramatically reshaping Russian society. That's not the case. The process by which Russia is reorienting itself under Putin is organic, arising from deep and perhaps immutable Russian traditions. "Putin's Russia" is not the construction or possession of its autocratic leader -- in fact, an important reason for his steady 70 percent approval rating, six years into his reign, is his knack for aligning himself with ground-level currents that are not of his fashioning. Nor is this emerging edifice original -- it is, rather, a society's willful return to old architectural patterns, in shades largely of White. "It's a revival of Russian identity," an aide to the president told me in an interview at the Kremlin. "This is not something new," the aide said of the features of today's Russia, "because we carry the genes of our whole Russian history."

To gain a better sense of this revival and its meaning for Russia and the world beyond, I visited a southern heartland province, Rostov, through which the mighty Don River courses. I was in search of the legendary Don Cossacks -- the warrior-protectors of Russia's borders against the Turks, the Chechens, and other infidels. The Don Cossacks were making a comeback, I had been told. I was told right.

Of Cossacks, Priests And Ballerinas
It is "last-bell day" -- graduation time -- for the young cadets of the Aksaisky Military School, a rapidly expanding secondary boarding school operated by the Don Cossacks, with funding from the Rostov regional administration. The academy is 20 miles outside of the province's largest city, Rostov-on-Don. In the lobby is inscribed the Cossacks' motto -- "Surrender life to motherland, soul to God, and honor to nobody!"

Outside, on a sunbaked field bordered by poplars, 100 pupils, outfitted in their wide-brimmed hats and formal regimental uniforms (navy blue for most of them, cream with red piping for the drummers), sweat through a procession of speeches. Their Orthodox chaplain, Father Michael, calls on them "to be devoted believers."

Although Cossacks sometimes talk about themselves as if they were an ethnic group or even a nation, they can be more accurately thought of as a type of martial brotherhood or community, sharing a heritage and certain ideals and values. These values include, not least, an institution that the West has largely shucked off: Patriarchy. The male, at least nominally, is an elevated figure in Cossack culture.

The Aksaisky school illustrates what Cossacks are about. Education in the Russian Orthodox faith -- also a patriarchal institution and the only accepted religious belief for Cossacks -- is a core part of the curriculum. The cadets, who are exclusively male, participate in ballroom dancing (with girls from a local school), choir singing of patriotic tunes, and target practice. The school is popular -- 900 applicants for 42 slots last year. All applicants must have a recommendation from their local ataman, the elected leader of a Cossack band. About three-quarters of the pupils come from orphanages or other vulnerable circumstances, and pay no money.

"I am proud of my children -- this is the future of Russia," the school's director, Vasily Dontsov, a retired Russian army colonel and paratrooper, told me. His small office features a portrait of Putin and various religious icons. Many of the graduates will pursue military careers, but doing so is not mandatory -- they can also become tax or customs inspectors, or pursue careers outside the state.

"I want to become a good protector of the motherland," said Sergei Kisselov, 15, who comes from a long line of Cossacks on his father's side. He has blond, Viking-like features, but not so the black-haired, dark-eyed Alexander Shevchenko, 14, who is also of Cossack descent and who asserted, "A Cossack means a free man and also a very well brought-up one." It might be that Shevchenko has Turkish blood -- Cossacks of olden days sometimes stole Turkish women as war prizes and sired children.

In the West, the Cossacks have a terrible reputation as shock troops for the czar, as the horseback-riding, leather-booted executors of rape-and-pillage pogroms against Jews living within the pale of the Russian Empire. History, as Cossacks write it, has been sanitized of such deeds. But the exploits that are celebrated these days are real enough: Before the Cossacks, many of whom were escaped serfs, swore their loyalty to the czar, they more or less had their own autonomous republic in the Don region. They share an authentic tradition of self-rule and democracy; in the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, there were White Cossacks and Red Cossacks and also Cossacks who frequently switched sides. Concerned about the Cossacks' capacity for self-organization, the Bolsheviks, once their grip on power was established, brutally repressed them.

The Cossacks' revival draws on nostalgia, of course, but it is also a testament to the current alignment of political power. Cossacks are well connected: Putin has an aide who handles Cossack affairs, and the supreme ataman for all Cossacks in Russia, Viktor Vodolatskiy, is also a deputy governor of Rostov. The Aksaisky Military School is one of six state-funded Cossack academies in Rostov, and the provincial administration has hired some 1,500 Cossacks to serve as assistants to police units, which tend to be undermanned. Bad guys "are more afraid of the Cossacks than of the police," Don Cossack Col. Vladimir Voronin told me. "Because the Cossacks have a brotherhood," Voronin explained, "a person knows that if one Cossack is harmed, then 1,000 Cossacks will come and explain to him, in words, how to behave properly."

That sounded threatening, but on a Sunday morning stroll through the rinok -- the outdoor market -- in Rostov-on-Don, which is tended largely by non-Russian vendors, including Muslims from former Soviet republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia, I found no complaints about Cossacks. "We know they exist, but they do not harass anyone," an Azeri potato-seller reported.

In the city's main cathedral, I met with a senior Orthodox Church official, Father Vadim, who is in charge of all church dealings with Cossacks in the Rostov region. A large man with a kindly face, he greeted me with a kiss on the cheek and got one from me in return. We chatted, standing just inside the main entrance to the cathedral. Midway through our talk, Russia's most famous ballerina, the golden-haired Anastasia Volochkova, her red face peeping out of a white shawl, stooped to kiss Father Vadim's hand. She was performing in Rostov-on-Don that evening. The cathedral was packed with afternoon worshippers, just as I had found it on a visit four years before.

"Our Cossack movement is flourishing because the local authorities support us," Father Vadim told me. "We must not only revive traditions but have someone to pass them on to." I tried to draw him out on the special role that the Orthodox Church plays in Cossack life. "We want decisions to be taken jointly by Cossack and church leaders," he began. He then offered a "poetic image" -- a river, a town on the river, and the threat of a flood. "The idea is to keep the river in its channel," Father Vadim said, and it's the job of the church to provide a "frame" to keep the river from overflowing its banks, to keep Cossack democracy, a good thing, from becoming anarchy. "If there is no frame, there is anarchy," Father Vadim pronounced.

The Re-Whitening Of Russia
In microcosm, the resurgence of the Don Cossacks speaks to an age-old problem in sprawling Russia -- the problem of order. Today's Russia -- threatened by Islamic militancy on its southern borders (the Chechen rebellion still simmers) and by drug traffickers, skinhead youth gangs, an AIDS epidemic, a declining population, and large remaining pockets of rural and urban poverty -- fears, as Russia always has feared, social fragmentation.

For Westerners hoping that post-Soviet Russia could take a more Western-type form, the country seems to be moving in the wrong direction. The twilight of Soviet society, in the late 1980s, saw the liberalizing movements of glasnost and perestroika; in 1991, with Boris Yeltsin, a Western-friendly president, installed in the Kremlin, the West sensed an unprecedented opportunity to help Russia at long last build the "normal" institutions of political, economic, and social life. Indeed, Russia was widely said to be "in transition," moving toward this destination.

In retrospect, it's clear that this opportunity was not as great as it seemed. In an interview in his Moscow office, Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin's acting prime minister in the early 1990s and still a stalwart liberal thinker, cheerfully told me that Russia's much-ballyhooed "liberal moment," following the Soviet collapse, "was a historical accident."

How so? "The liberals would never have been in power except for the collapse of the Soviet Union," Gaidar explained, and the Soviet Union wouldn't have collapsed but for gross mismanagement by its economic planners. Once the liberals were in power, they did what they could to create market economy conditions, particularly by freeing prices, and for this change, which initially caused great pain for ordinary Russians, the liberals became a hated sect.

Today's Russia, under Putin, is in a period of "post-revolution stabilization," Gaidar said, and this period could last "one generation." (By "revolution," Gaidar means the shift from Soviet central planning to a market economy.) "Stabilization" is a rather antiseptic term -- other disenchanted liberals speak darkly of the "re-Sovietization" of society. "It's not Soviet at all," Gaidar firmly countered. "It's Russian. Those who now say it is the Soviet Union probably do not remember the Soviet Union."

The Putin team is control-oriented -- but Russian regimes, not just Soviet ones, typically are. Putin's inner circle, in any case, is not a bunch of KGB clones. The Karl Rove-type figure, political adviser Vladislav Surkov, is a self-educated half-Chechen who despises Communists, previously worked in the business sector, and keeps in his office books by the seminal Russian historian Nikolay Karamzin, the court biographer of Czar Alexander I. Chief of Staff Sergei Sobyanin, a possible successor to Putin in 2008, is a former governor of an oil-rich Siberian province and has no KGB past at all, according to a knowledgeable Kremlin source.

Putin himself is perceived by his countrymen as a product of hardscrabble Russia, not merely the elite Soviet police organs. The son of a worker whose family survived the Nazi siege of Leningrad, he grew up in a rat-infested apartment building, mastered the martial arts, and was secretly raised in the Orthodox faith by his mother.

Nor does Putin's approach, except in his battles with business oligarchs, rely on Soviet-style coercion. A centerpiece, an initiative to increase the birthrate and thus halt Russia's steady decline in population, now 143 million, proposes to pay mothers large sums from state coffers to have a second child. But on this matter, for sure, Russian women will have the final word. A popular saying among those weary of the recent turbulent times is "Mui xhatim pazhit dlya sebya," which translates, "We want to live for ourselves."

Regime-imposed media controls exist -- but in their relative slackness they resemble the clampdowns of czarist-era Russia. A Kremlin with a Soviet-like "iron grip" on the public, "stifling civil liberties at every turn," as the critic Anna Politkovskaya rails in her new book, "Putin's Russia," surely would not allow her subversive tract to circulate. And yet there it was, on prominent display in Moskva bookstore, just up from Red Square on Tverskaya Street.

The current wave of interest in pre-Soviet Russian ideas and pursuits began gathering force early in the Yeltsin era. The trend can be seen in the renewed attention paid to the philosopher Ivan Ilyin, a late-19th-century espouser of monarchy and Orthodoxy who was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks for his anti-Communist activities, sentenced to death, and later expelled along with other prominent White intellectuals, never to return to Russia again.

Ilyin believed that Europe was rotting because of the anti-Christian, secular creeds of Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx -- and he saw Orthodox Russia as a gift to the world for overcoming this disease. Russian history, in his view, was the story of "morality triumphing over difficulties, temptation, danger, and enemies." He embraced the traditional idea of Russian separateness and tended to see the West as conspiratorially aligned against Russia. And he believed that the Russian character was in need of a strong, guiding, paternal hand: "Not having a mature, strong-willed nature himself," Ilyin wrote, "the Russian demands that his ruler have a will."

Putin, in his two most recent state-of-the-nation speeches, has cited Ilyin, this "great Russian philosopher," on matters including the imperative for the nation to rebuild its tattered army. But the president was climbing aboard an already-moving train. The Ilyin revival began in the early 1990s, with nationalist politicians like Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Alexander Rutskoi extolling his ideas. The Russian actor and filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov (of "Burnt by the Sun" fame in the West) propagated Ilyin's writings and successfully campaigned for the reburial of his remains at the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow in a ceremony attended by luminaries, including Patriarch Alexy II, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow.

One reason that post-Soviet Russia seems to surprise Westerners is that they have misunderstood the anti-Soviet dissident movement -- a movement that they thought of, wrongly, as a subsidiary of Western liberalism. Consider the case of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970 for such dissident writings as "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Solzhenitsyn did time in the Gulag and became a hero in Western liberal circles. But as has become clear, Solzhenitsyn is not and never was a Western-type liberal. In the mold of Ivan Ilyin, he is a conservative nationalist who hated the Soviet Union as a godless monstrosity but who also detests the secular West. In a recent interview with Moscow News, he praised Putin's foreign policy as "forward-thinking," accused NATO of "preparations for the complete encirclement of Russia," and said, "Present-day Western democracy is in a serious state of crisis" and should not be a model for Russia.

Solzhenitsyn is now an embarrassment in the fashionable Western literary parlors where he was once hailed. But Russian state television this year broadcast a 10-part adaptation of his once-banned novel "The First Circle," first published in the West in 1968. Taking its title from Dante's Inferno, the book is an indictment of Stalin's secret-police system. The restoration of Solzhenitsyn in Russia coincides with renewed popular interest in 19th-century novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who also wrote from a Slavic Christian perspective. Book sales of "The Idiot" spiked after a TV adaptation of the novel aired in 2003.

Russians are not yearning for Ivan the Terrible, the 16th-century czar known for his arbitrary murders of nobles and peasants alike. But there is a yen for the time of Catherine the Great, the mid-18th-century German princess-turned-czarina who sought, with mixed success, to introduce to Russia the Enlightenment ideas of her admirer Voltaire. The southern city of Krasnodar, which began as a Cossack fortress and was renamed Ekaterinodar ("Catherine's gift" in Russian), is erecting a statue in her honor.

And in a monument both to cultural nostalgia and oil-boom money, an opulent new Moscow restaurant, Turandot, is a re-creation of a typical aristocrat's palace in the Imperial St. Petersburg of Catherine's time. As visitors enter, they leave behind the noise and grime of Moscow's traffic-choked streets for a tranquil courtyard of pink-marble columns and mandarin trees, presided over by a large statue of Poseidon. With enough fine wine, say a bottle of 1975 Petrus listing for $5,900, it might feel like the days when the Empire was swallowing up Poland and the Crimea and beating back the Turks to become the dominant power in the Middle East.

Russia And The World Outside
In his most recent state-of-the-nation address, in May, Putin invoked a Russian parable about a wolf, apropos of America's unbounded role in the world. The tale translates poorly from the Russian, but the spirit of it is, "You can try to tame the wolf by feeding him, but he will always be a wolf, a beast of the forest." The story was interesting on several counts. First, Putin was projecting onto America a trait, an innate wildness, often attributed to Russia. Second, the unflattering metaphor -- the wolf, unlike the bear, is not well-regarded among Russians -- was yet another example of Putin catching up with popular opinion.

"Everything Putin does the West doesn't like, the Russians do," one of Russia's most astute political analysts, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, told me. That includes the Putin-sanctioned takedown and jailing of oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had close ties to Western business leaders and politicians but was viewed by Russians as a traitorous scoundrel. As far as most people are concerned, Khodorkovsky "probably should be shot," Kryshtanovskaya said. The business of being a czar, or any king, is often one of tossing bones -- or heads -- from the tower.

Anti-Americanism, or what is better described as America-phobia, bubbles up from a variety of fertile sources. The main one is a fear that America is bent on world domination, including mastery of Russia. This is not merely the stuff of ragtag pamphleteering. A typical bookstore offering, "America Against Russia: Why America Is Attacking," is the work of a well-respected Moscow-based writer, Andrei Parshev. Few Russians accept at face value the idea that the U.S. is genuinely interested in spreading democracy around the world -- they tend to believe, as Parshev argues, that America's thrusts into the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, so close to Mother Russia's soft southern underbelly, are an effort to lock up scarce energy resources.

In part, America-phobia is a result of Russia's post-Soviet-collapse sense of weakness, a feeling exacerbated, even U.S.-friendly Russians say, by American foreign policies over the past decade. In an interview in Moscow, the liberal leader Grigory Yavlinsky lectured me about Washington's shortsighted policies, including its successful push for NATO expansion into former Soviet (and Russian Empire) territories. A reckless America -- the America that invaded Iraq -- is a gift to nationalist-agenda rabble-rousers, in Russia and elsewhere, who can now plausibly clamor for the need to protect against the American beast, Yavlinsky warned.

This view probably overstates America's role as a stimulator of Russian chauvinism. After all, Russia doesn't need much of a jolt: The country has seldom known any imperative other than a push for expansion -- and a push back against enemies bent on conquest. But Yavlinsky is on the mark in seeing anti-Western, and particularly anti-American, sentiments as part of a larger ideology -- a populist Russian nationalism -- embraced by leading political figures.

In Moscow I had breakfast with Dmitri Rogozin, a prominent nationalist politician. Born in Moscow into a Soviet military family, Rogozin, a youthful-looking 42, was until recently the leader of the Rodina ("Motherland") Party. He was a popular figure, even a talked-about successor to Putin, but he left his position, he told me, because the Kremlin, determined to control the political flow in Russia, threatened to dismantle Rodina if he stayed. Dressed in a sport shirt and jeans, he slid into a seat at his favorite corner table at Cafe Pushkin and ordered an omelet.

For Rogozin, the story of the post-Soviet years is a tale of betrayal, twice over, first by the Gaidar-ilk liberals of the early 1990s and now by the Putin team. The liberals, with their privatization schemes that made billionaires of a few Russians, are "thieves," he said, and those in the Putin crowd are basically phony patriots, not the real article. The regime, he explained, is propping up a corrupt political and business elite who keep their money in foreign banks and educate their sons and daughters abroad. The Kremlin spends its political resources on manipulative games to keep a genuine nationalist movement from assuming power.

Rogozin's own agenda features "reunion." There should be "no strength methods," he said matter-of-factly, if not all that convincingly, but "Russians have the same right to reunite as did East and West Germans." He won't push the point of the Baltics -- there is a large Russian minority living in Latvia, a NATO member. But his plan for a "unified" Greater Russian state would fold in today's Russia (still the world's biggest country, by territory) along with Belarus and Ukraine on its East European borders and oil-rich Kazakhstan, which has a substantial Russian population, on its Central Asia border. This entity would be like the European Union but stronger, with one currency and the same foreign and defense policies, he said.

I asked Rogozin whether Americans and Europeans should fear Russian "reunion." "With America, there is only one possible clash -- if America tries to hinder Russia's natural revival," he answered. But in the main, America and Europe "should be afraid of chaos in a country like Russia," he said. "What I am talking about will promote consolidation. What now threatens Russia is mass poverty, social imbalances, and Islamic fundamentalism -- and the consolidation of Slavic nations will help Europe confront such threats."

Whether Rogozin's own political career is over or not, another horse could become the carrier of such ideas. Putin or Putin's (probably hand-picked) successor could gravitate toward this populist direction. But the upshot probably won't be a new Cold War, as some in the Russian and in the U.S. press suggest -- it's not as if Russia is seeking proxy confrontations with America all over the world. The dynamic is more like that of the 18th and 19th centuries, when czarist Russia played "great games" with the British Empire (now replaced by the U.S. one) to try to expand its buffer zones of regional influence. Moscow's main priority, as ever, is its ability to steer its own course in the world, subject to no outside dictates.

In Search Of Wholeness
The Russian preoccupation with the risk of chaos may strike Americans as excessive. But Americans have no sustained exposure to this peril -- only once, in the Civil War, did our country threaten to divide. By contrast, fragmentation is a recurring theme in the drama of Russian history: The very first "Rus," in Kiev, in the 10th century, disintegrated under assault from Mongols and from internal feuding.

Many Russians believe that when the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia was lucky to be spared the fate of Yugoslavia: a bloody breakup. Nor have they forgotten that Yeltsin, in 1993, used tanks to shell Communist and conservative nationalist opponents holed up in a government building a few miles from the Kremlin.

It is thus not surprising that Russians often wax lyrically about a hoped-for "consolidation" of their society. This desire is much more than a political idea -- it extends to the cultural and social realms, to the idea of the people, narod, feeling together, as one, in harmony with themselves and their surroundings. A communion with nature is part of this quest.

Perhaps a reason the Cossacks enjoy recurring seasons of celebration among Russians is that with a careful scrubbing away of certain stains, they can be presented as an idealized type -- brave, loyal to the state but not in a supine way, and able to live off the land with their hunts for wild boar and their wine-making. In Leo Tolstoy's laudatory novella, "The Cossacks," a young Russian army officer, weary of Moscow life, is stationed in a Cossack village. He says admiringly, "The people live as nature lives: They die, are born, unite, and more are born -- they fight, eat and drink, rejoice and die, without any restrictions but those that nature imposes on sun and grass, on animal and tree.... These people [are] beautiful, strong, and free."

Just over a year ago, Putin made a pilgrimage to a hallowed Don Cossacks spot: Veshenskay, a small town on the Don River where the writer Mikhail Sholokhov lived. His 1929 epic "Tikhiy Don" (known in English as "And Quiet Flows the Don") is revered among Cossacks, despite its tracts of Soviet propaganda, for its vivid and heroic depictions of the life of the Don Cossacks.

Putin was attending the town's annual Sholokhov festival. Just as they did for the czars, the Cossacks bestowed on their esteemed visitor a uniform and made him an honorary colonel. Putin, in turn, paid homage to the Cossacks. In a private meeting with Cossack leaders, according to one who was there, Putin said he had been researching the history of the Cossacks and at first was puzzled by the accounts of Cossacks who in the civil war fought at times for the Reds and at other times for the Whites. But "then I understood," Putin told the group -- the Cossacks do not stand for a particular ideology, they stand for keeping Russia together. "They have always been striving and fighting for the wholeness of Russia," Putin said. The word in Russian that Putin used for "wholeness" -- the word that thrilled his listeners -- was tselostnost.

On my own visit to Russia in May, I drove out to Veshenskay from Rostov-on-Don for the start of this year's Sholokhov festival, spending the night at the cottage of a Cossack widow, Lena, who plied me with okroshka, a chilled soup combining kvass (a sour malt beverage) with sour cream, potatoes, cucumber, dill, and boiled egg.

The town is situated on the high south bank of the Don. The river, as it does every spring, had flooded the brush and groves of willows and poplars. A cuckoo sounded in the distance, and doves flitted about. In the late-afternoon sunlight one could glimpse flashes of fish breaching the water's surface. Fishermen boast of their hauls of carp, perch, catfish, and pike; and even though hunting is now banned, this is still elk, boar, and wolf country. From the shore, the town's main square is framed by the golden spire of an Orthodox church and a statue of the heroes of Tikhiy Don, the young Cossack Grigory and his lover, Aksinia.

Putin is embracing this Russia, Old Russia. And Old Russia, for the most part, is returning the embrace. But in this mutual admiration is a recipe not so much for change as for a return to tradition. Putin is finding, and the West could profit from remembering, that this is a nation that tends to bend even its rulers to its own insistent flow.

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