Vlad Putin, Line One

It's Yuri's birthday today. He's bouncing around somewhere in his late 20s. He's an actor. Not a great actor, but a working actor. He had his birthday party at a place called Dacha. You couldn't possibly find it if you didn't know what you were looking for. It's in a former apartment building. Inside, the restaurant is themed like one of the classic communal apartments of the Soviet era.


Several candlelit salons break away from a winding corridor. Yuri's party was in one such salon. It's worth noting that back in the bad old days when the KGB was at its most ornery, the communal residents of the communal apartment would retreat into their respective rooms when the KGB would enter a house to come take someone away. Doors would slam and no one would dare look out. You sat in your salon hoping the pounding boots would pass you by. You would hear a door kicked open. There would be shouting. And after the KGB had gone, everyone would emerge slowly to see who simply wasn't there anymore. Most of the time, they never came back.

Now, this restaurant is a strange kind of Disneyland designed to evoke that era. Portraits of Lenin hang on the walls. The wall paper, the tapestries depicting Russian myths, it's all here. It's cozy. It's warm. It's lovely.




It's not that any of this is lost on the younger generation. It's just that it doesn't have a visceral hold on them. And why should it? I think it's both a good thing and a bad thing. It's good that this generation isn't emotionally enslaved by the country's past. For too long, Russians' relationship to their history has been like an abusive relationship. But now, there is a generation of young Russians who can shed the yoke of their past and, with luck, build a more open future. I don't see how they can't.


For example, Pasha showed up wearing his Third Reich officer's uniform from HITLER KAPUT! Everyone thought it was hilarious. People passed around the hat, the jacket, the holster. This sort of thing would have been incomprehensible just 20 years ago. Again, it's not that they don't understand the horror of what happened; there's hardly a single person here who didn't lose relatives among the 20 million Russians who died in World War II. It's just that the idea of tyranny has been defanged somewhat. And laughing at a tyrant is the best way to render him a fool.


Speaking of which, Yuri's phone rang and it's Vladimir Putin on the line wishing him a happy birthday. Putin knows Yuri's sister. That's all I'll say about that. But an immediate hush fell over the room while Yuri stood in the middle talking to Putin. As the call started to wind down, a TV director named Yaroslav began to chant, "Pu-TIN! Pu-TIN! Pu-TIN...!" Soon the entire room was chanting and Yuri held the phone high over his head. There was a great cheer. Yuri sad goodbye. And that was that.