The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

way, than the one the Russians had built. If Hitler hadn’t had a brain-fuck, excuse me, on the idea of winning world domination for his beloved German people—and that’s a totally demented idea; no
people
can dominate the world, only corporations can, and that’s how it has always been and always will be—if he hadn’t had, to put it simply, a bunch of idiotic fantasies in his head, history would’ve have taken a different course. And the US today would mean no more than Honduras. Or, say, New Zealand.”
    “So what then, Adolf fucked up?”
    Vadym does not share my irony.
    “Exactly. Fucked up. There was a reason Stalin couldn’t, until the very last moment, believe that Hitler would attack him. He couldn’t fathom that a politician of that stature could turn out to be such an ideological dickhead, like a green student radical or something. They could have—couldn’t they?—just divided the world into spheres of influence as they’d agreed in ’39, and everything would’ve been fine. A lot less blood would’ve been spilled, too. Back in my university days, I wrote my thesis on the Battle of Kursk—I tell you, that was a horrific business: if you didn’t know better, you’d think the only thing either side cared about was how to kill more of its own soldiers. There you have your ideas.”
    “Is there any chance it might matter
what
those ideas are?”
    “Whatever you want them to be, Daryna! In politics, all they do is stand in the way—they’re noise. Trust me; I’ve been handling this shit for years. And without gloves,” he clarifies as if this were some especially sophisticated exclusive he were giving me. “We’re onthe verge of a new world order—the status quo that emerged after World War II has long been pushed to its limits, the Yalta epoch has exhausted itself. Think about it, you’re a smart woman. Do you honestly believe that toppling the Twin Towers was the homespun work of a handful of demented Arabs from nowhere? And that Bush, who, by the way, has old family business ties to the Saudi oil sheiks, went into Iraq to save the world? And the apartment buildings blown up in Ryazan when Putin needed to send the Taman Guards to Chechnya, a division recruited from that same Ryazan—is that not the same scenario? Only they did a sloppier job in Russia, and everyone knows that those explosions were FSB’s handiwork. But it’s too late now; the deed’s done. The way to the Caspian oil pipeline’s been cleared—Georgia’s still fussing underfoot, but it’ll be its turn soon. Now one of your journalist people over in the States is making a movie about September 11—trying to prove the whole thing was a political provocation, and that Bush knew about it ahead of time...”
    “You mean Michael Moore?” I remember I saw the headline on a news crawl somewhere—about the film’s presentation at the Cannes Film Festival, where I am no longer going. “I wouldn’t think you followed that kind of news. So, is there a hypothesis about
who
engineered that provocation?”
    Again, a quick triumphant flame flares up in Vadym’s eyes—as if he himself were one of the provocation’s authors. “Who it was, Daryna, no one will find out for the next ten to twenty years. Until the new redistribution of the energy-source markets is over. And that Moore guy won’t prove anything to anyone, mark my word.”
    “Why do you think that?”
    “Because—again—it’s too late! The button has been pushed, the masses mobilized: they were shown very real horror on television, and they got scared. Bunched together into a herd. And no journalistic investigation can now convince them that that was precisely the goal—to have them bunch together into a herd and put their fate in the shepherd’s hands. On the contrary. Now, the more American blood is spilled in Iraq, the more trust there will be for the administration because it is the hardest thing forpeople to admit that their loved ones died for nothing. Nothing glues a nation together like spilled blood: the USSR was sealed in the same way—by the Great War. And Bush, you can be sure, will get reelected for a second term this fall. That’s the reality, Daryna. And all the talk about liberal democracy, or the Party’s dictatorship, or whatever—it’s all crap, forget it. The politics of today is an amalgamation of the experience of twentieth-century superpowers and the experience of the marketplace, of advertising. An immensely