MOSCOW - This spring, Russian tanks and missiles rolled across the cobblestones of Red Square as soldiers in olive green uniforms goose-stepped and a military band played the revived Soviet anthem. It was the first full-scale military display at the annual Victory Day parade in almost two decades.
On Aug. 8, the tanks rolled again, but this time it wasn't just a parade. As hundreds of Russian armored vehicles rumbled toward the cavernous Roki tunnel into Georgia, the show ended and the shooting started.
The move stunned many in the U.S. and Europe. But it was the result, at least in part, of factors the West has never really understood: Russia's wounded pride over its loss of the Soviet empire, its fear of NATO expansion along its borders and its anger over being treated as a backwater in Europe rather than a global power.
Russia says it was forced to respond to Georgia's ferocious assault on the capital of separatist South Ossetia, which likely killed scores of civilians and a number of Russian peacekeepers. But Russia's role in the Caucasus is much more than that of a neutral peacekeeping force, and its intervention goes much deeper than the latest clashes.
Georgia, meanwhile, blames Russia for provoking the crisis by supporting separatist territories on its soil. The sight of Russian tanks rolling down its highways was also a searing reminder that Moscow dominated Georgia for almost two centuries, and that Soviet tanks entered the capital of Tbilisi in 1989 and soldiers beat 20 protesters to death with shovels.
For much of the world, the motives behind the conflict seem murky; after all, the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union is dead. Russia, it seemed, was becoming a modern nation, part of the international community.
What is hard for the world to see, though, is that there are two Russias. The first is a rapidly developing modern country, a major energy exporter with expanding ties to the global economy, a nation with a sense of pride and purpose after years of struggle.
Symbols of this new Russia are everywhere, from the gleaming skyscrapers springing up along the Moscow River, to shopping centers being built in Siberia, to Russian tourists crowding beaches in Turkey and shops in Manhattan, to the reed-thin women in designer dresses who saunter down the capital's Tverskaya Street, a coiffed miniature dog tucked under one arm.
But behind this growing European facade is an older and less familiar Russia, one that is much harder for foreigners to grasp. This Russia is a 1,000-year-old civilization that is distrustful of political change, wary of the West and jealous of its historic role as master of its corner of the world.
This is a country that throughout its history has felt threatened by independent nations on its borders, and now feels under siege.
The feeling of being surrounded is an uncomfortably familiar one for Russia, which has no natural borders and has been invaded by everyone from the Mongols to the Swedes and the French. To protect itself physically, Russia continually sought to extend its borders and prop up neutral buffer states at the periphery of its sphere of influence. To protect its unique culture, which is neither European nor Asian but both, it adopted a kind of psychological isolation from the rest of the world.
Russia's intervention in Georgia draws on a long history of empire that goes back not just to the Communist era, but much further, to its Czarist past. The symbols of this past survive in the names of many Russian provincial cities — Vladivostok, which means "Conqueror of the East," and Vladikavkaz, "Conqueror of the Caucasus" — in the canals and mansions of St. Petersburg, dredged from a swamp on orders of Peter the Great; and of course in the red-brick walls of the Kremlin itself.
Unlike many Western powers, Russia seems unable or unwilling to turn its back on its cruel but glorious legacy of empire. As Vladimir Sorokin, the Russian writer, told a German magazine last year: "We still live in the country that was built by Ivan the Terrible."
"Russia is a big and capable country, which will not let the West dictate the conditions," Igor Saryov, 33, of Moscow, said matter-of-factly as he waited on a sidewalk outside a Moscow metro station. "In any situation, Russia is going to act as it sees fit."
Standing next to him was Alexei, 33, with slicked-back black hair, drinking a beer at around 10:45 a.m. He refused to give his last name.
Far from committing aggression in Georgia, he said, Russia was resisting it. "Russia has never been conquered, not in 1,000 years, though many tried," he said. "It's because it's in our genes not to allow anyone to dictate the conditions, how to act, where to act."
The roots of Russia's latest intervention in Georgia can be traced at least back to 1991, when Tbilisi declared its independence and an impoverished, divided Soviet Union finally crumbled.
After centuries of being feared by its neighbors and presiding over a patchwork of European and Asian cultures, Russians were suddenly expected to build a modest nation state and live within its shrunken borders. While many of Moscow's satellite states in Europe rebounded quickly, Russia, the epicenter of the failed Soviet experiment, never recovered from the memory of humiliation, poverty and dependence of the immediate post-Soviet period.
Like the U.S., Russia is a patchwork of ethnic groups and cultures. America's diverse population has traditionally rallied behind ideals of individual freedom. Russians, meanwhile, have been united in their pride in Moscow's imperial scope and power.
When the empire crumbled, Russia suddenly found itself without a reason to exist.
A few days after his re-election in 1996, President Boris N. Yeltsin asked an advisory panel to come up with "a new national idea to unite all Russians." The panel gave up in frustration.
As Europe advanced, so did NATO, the Western military alliance originally formed to thwart Soviet expansion — stoking Russia's fears of being surrounded and eventually overwhelmed.
Analysts also say Europe has tended to treat Russia as a second-class European nation. "They've realized that if Russia merely plays the role the West has made for it, we would quickly become a country that protects the pipeline sending gas and oil from Western Siberia," said Sergey Mikheyev, an analyst at Center for Political Technologies.
After Russia defaulted on its debt in 1998, its economy started to grow, aided by cheap rubles and fueled by rising gas and oil prices.
Russia's gross domestic product rose 58 percent from 2000 to 2006, and perhaps a fifth of Russians belong to an emerging middle class that didn't exist in Russia before 1991. Russia now earns $1.2 billion a day from gas and oil exports, according to UralSib Capital, a Moscow financial corporation. Its gold and currency reserves are worth more than $581 billion, compared to just $10 billion a decade ago.
Suddenly, there was the sense that the West needed Russia more than Russia needed the West.
The driving force behind Russia's political transformation was Putin, who rose under late President Boris Yeltsin to become prime minister in 1999. In an essay released just days before Yeltsin's resignation, Putin wrote: "It is too early to bury Russia as a great power."
Whether by accident or design, the political system Putin built came to bear an uncanny resemblance to that of the old Czarist state. Today, as in the Czarist epoch, Russia's institutions — its courts, media and businesses — enjoy a measure of independence they could only dream of in Soviet times. But they still are ultimately answerable to the government, especially if they challenge the state.
So what happens now?
While politicians sometimes talk of a new Cold War, none seems on the horizon. The Kremlin seems to have abandoned efforts to impose a Utopian system on the world by force and keep its citizens captive behind an Iron Curtain.
But in striking at Georgia, Russia has asserted its right to intervene in the affairs of countries along its borders — especially the former Soviet republics, which Russians call their "near abroad." The invasion also expanded the role of Russia's military, which until now mainly kept the peace domestically, fighting Islamic or ethnic separatists in the restive North Caucasus.
