The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Next day was Victory Day. The podium from which Putin spoke in Red Square was erected closer to the multicolored St. Basil's Cathedral—Putin did not stand on the Lenin Mausoleum like the Politburo used to, but otherwise the look and feel of the Soviet-era military parade had been restored. So had the scale and the symbolism: the parade once again served to demonstrate Russia's might and affirm its right:

We have the great moral right to be principled and insistent in defending our positions, because it was our country that bore the

brunt of the fight against Nazism The young people of today are

the heirs of the true freedom fighters We will always be faithful

to their valor, and that means that we have a future.* . . . Glory to Russia!

Fourteen thousand men shouted "Hooray!" three times in perfect unison, and the Russian national anthem—the restored Soviet anthem—began playing.⁸

The Victory Day Parade had evolved since Yeltsin renewed the practice in 1999 and Putin took the reins in 2000. In his first parade speech, Putin had focused on the importance of the holiday to all Russians. At his second parade, in 2001, he ended the speech with "Glory to Russia!"—a slogan that until then had been the mark of fringe ultranationalist organizations. As the years wore on, the focus of the speech shifted to the present day, to the need to be vigilant.

The number of troops grew, from about five thousand in 2003 to eight thousand in 2008 and fourteen thousand in 2012. In 2007, the year of the Munich speech in which Putin accused NATO of betrayal and aggression, he used his parade speech for the first time to make a transparent reference to the United States. He did not name the country, but said that, just as in the times of the Third Reich, there was a country that has "pretensions to global exceptionalism and command." In 2008, the year of the war in Georgia, a parade of military equipment—a long procession of tanks and rockets—was added to the Red Square pageant for the first time since the Soviet era. This was also the year Medvedev formally became president, so he and Putin now stood together at the podium, microphones distributed to both of them as though both were speaking at the same time. It was Medvedev who gave the speech for the next four years, though. He did not end it with "Glory to Russia," opting for "Happy Day of the Great Victory" instead. In 2010, the sixty-fifth anniversary of victory, foreign heads of state joined in the celebration in Red Square. That day, an air show was added to the parade, the evening fireworks were extended from ten to fifteen minutes, and for the first time an "all-Russian Victory Day Parade" was declared—full military parades were held in nineteen cities and smaller military marches in fifty-two. The air show was repeated every year after that, and so was the all-Russian parade, in an ever-growing number of cities.⁹

The day after Victory Day, Putin flew to the Urals to visit UralVagonZavod, a factory that had just received a large new military contract. The factory made armored personnel carriers, tanks, and modified tanks called Terminator, with two guns instead of the usual one plus two grenade launchers, and Terminator-2, with two guns and four rockets on two launchers. Back in December, Putin's marathon televised hotline—the one that began with his confession that he had mistaken white ribbons for condoms—ended with a video call-in question from the factory floor of UralVagonZavod. In a colorized re-creation of the Soviet industrial aesthetic, about sixty men had stood together, wearing identical black-and-orange

uniforms, freshly ironed, and one man standing in the middle spoke for them. He wore a tie under his uniform jacket.

I am Igor Kholmanskikh. I am head of the assembly shop. . . . I have a question that's causing me heartache. Back when we were having a hard time, Vladimir Vladimirovich, you came to our plant and helped us. Today . . . we treasure our stability and we don't want to go back in time. I want to say something about those protests. If the police don't know how to do their jobs, if they can't do anything about the protests, then my men and I are prepared to come out in defense of our stability.