In Europe

people's confidence. His supporters were sure he would find a political and diplomatic way out. ‘What the average German did not see was that not a single great battle was fought after that. The Russians simply drew back, saving their strength. In 1941 the papers were full of reports about millions of prisoners of war, in 1942 there were no more such reports.’
    Only one year later, after Stalingrad, did the Germans truly begin to understand how badly, how very badly, the war was going.

    The sound of Moscow's resurrection is that of the grinder and the excavator. An underground shopping mall is being built outside the gates of the Kremlin. The builders worked on day and night, using everything theRussian Army and commerce has to offer in terms of manpower, cranes and excavators, and now the complex is finished, gleaming and glowing, the showroom for the new Russia.
    Moscow is like a household after a divorce: after a period of neglect and confusion, the city is once again bursting with activity. My regular taxi driver, Viktor, calls his mafia boss: will he go along with a special rate for a regular customer? ‘You pay me twelve dollars now,’ he says to me, ‘but don't forget: seventy per cent of that goes to him.’ At the city's most chic parking spots the gates open for him free of charge: that, too, is the mafia. He shows me the wooden cudgel beside his seat: his personal protection. One of his childhood friends now owns a gym and acts as bodyguard to a big industrialist, another old friend became a sharpshooter; he was Gorbachev's bodyguard ten years ago, and now he works for the country's biggest oil magnate.
    ‘This is no life, this is a fire in a packed theatre!’ Chekhov's poor country doctor, Sobol, shouted a hundred years ago. ‘Anyone who stumbles or screams in fear and loses his head is the established order's number-one enemy. You have to remain upright, keep your eyes open and not make a sound!’
    The more respectable part of Moscow's population still tries to follow those directives from 1892. Almost all the people I meet have two or three jobs and race around the city from this job to that deal. There is hammering and painting, one café after another is opened, a new merchant class is starting to take root. Everyone who visits the city is amazed by the speed with which it is changing, and meanwhile the pioneers of local trade and industry move on, further into the provinces.
    In the café beside the disco on Pushkin Square, the city's
jeunesse dorée
are sipping at coffee with cognac. These are the children of the new
nomenklatura
: bankers, businessmen and odd-jobbers. The price of admission at the disco is thirty dollars, half the monthly salary of a journalist, and I am told the place is always full. ‘This is the great going-out-of-business sale for savers, honest incomes and respectability,’ wrote Erich Maria Remarque of the inflationary fever in the Weimar Republic in 1922, and in the Moscow of 1999 things are not very different: the vultures come flocking in from all sides, and only those with power, bad friends and a big mouth are well off.
    The party now being held here signifies the end of social change from the top down. It is the great dismantling of the idea that ruled Soviet life from the 1920s to the 1980s. For let there be no mistake about this: even Stalin, with all his cruelty, was well loved in the Soviet Union during his lifetime. And his views were adhered to by a broad cross section of the population.
    Stalin and Hitler were both ultra-radical, they both went to extremes in pursuit of their utopias. But Stalin was a revolutionary; in the end, Hitler, who always protected the established order, was not. And, after a certain fashion, Stalin's vision was more rational and even more optimistic. The ideal human and the ideal society were determined, in his eyes, not by birth and racial selection; no, the ideal could be
achieved
. The criminal could be rehabilitated and become a good citizen, the backward Russian masses could be remoulded into the building blocks of a new society. That was the core of Stalin's Soviet project.
    For him, therefore, mass murder was not an end in itself, but a revolutionary means to build his ideal Soviet state. A ‘state’ indeed, for Stalin held no truck with the old revolutionary idea that the state is a ‘lie’. In his view, the nation state was to assume a fully central role once more, and that was one of the most crucial points of