76

Monday, March 29, 2021, 5PM Moscow Standard Time

The President of Russia stood staring out at the skyline of his city. Spring was finally making itself evident in Moscow. Protest season. Some opposition leaders and journalists will not make it to see the fall, he thought. Much as some others had not made it to see spring.

***

“Gospodin Prezident,” Sergei had said, sticking his head into the office after knocking on his door twice, about two hours previously.

“Da, Sergei Borisevich?”

“I have just received a report that a certain mid-level employee of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg seems unfortunately to have died after a bout of drinking at a local nightclub.”

“It was not Mr. Gorsky, one assumes?”

“Nyet, Gospodin Prezident.”

“Well, that is a shame. Who, then?”

“It was Mr. Antonov. I don’t know if you remember him. He worked on some systems issues for us.”

The President cocked his head to the side as if trying to recall something of minor importance from a long-ago period.

“Antonov,” he said. “Ah yes. The young man who once sent me a computer?”

“Indeed, sir.”

“I suppose a card or flowers would be excessive,” the president said.

“I sense that it would be,” Sergei said.

“I will abide by your judgment, then, Sergei Borisevich,” the president had said, waving his hand to shoo him away. The door had closed again, and it had not opened since.

***

Two hours later, the sun was still high in the sky here, with dusk not coming until seven. A few years back, it would not have set till 8PM, but the President had made the decision that Russia would no longer participate in the European-American madness of Daylight Savings Time. He had grown up without it, and he associated its institution in the early 1980s with the decline of the Soviet Union, so when he achieved power, he decided to do away with it completely.

He could tell the sun when to rise and set here. But now, as he looked out at the city and nation he reputedly ruled with an iron hand, he was experiencing an unaccustomed feeling: surprise.

Years of manipulating the perceptions of American voters and the public – to some degree, anyway; he was open to the possibility it might be either more or less than advertised – had accustomed him to thinking he could more or less manage events and anticipate the reactions of American leadership. Okomo was a terrible poker player; so, he, the Russian president, could move forthrightly into Syria, secure that Okomo would never enforce any “red lines” he had ostensibly drawn. Before Okomo, he had faced his Republican predecessor, who “looked into his soul” and assigned him a diminutive nickname, while underestimating him very badly.

So, when he had dumped a gigantic tranche of incriminating information about both the American President and most of his party’s leadership onto the Internet two days previously, after brazenly invading and occupying three American allies, after manipulating the Americans into pulling their NATO troops out of the Baltics, he had hoped for more of a sense of outrage on the part of that American President.

Instead, the President had defended him! He had even lied and told the press that he had spoken to him, the Russian president, and had been assured by him that Russia had not invaded the Baltics!

When did we speak? he thought to himself. Has that virus completely destroyed his brain?

Now that he had gotten used to the idea, the Russian president was no longer as shocked by this statement; the American President had, in the past, when pressed on alleged (in truth, quite actual) depredations on the part of himself against America, the American President had said that he, the Russian president, had assured him, the American President, that Russia was not behind these actions,“and I have no reason not to believe him.”

And when it came out that Russia had been paying Taliban to murder American soldiers last year, the American President had done nothing at all – had even announced a couple of months later that he thought Russia should be made a member of the G-8 again!

He himself had, of course, smirkingly denied being behind the 2016 attempts at election interference he had personally ordered and supervised (if at a distance), but the American President’s statement about not having any reason to disbelieve the Russian president was one that, perhaps ironically, caused that Russian president to shake his head in disbelief. Everyone in the world seemed to know it was a lie, except the one man the American people had chosen to defend their interests. And, of course, his most ardent voters. Not even Republican officeholders believed it, above a certain naïve, worshipful, local, lower echelon.

And why would they? They had been, at least somewhat knowingly, taking Russian money for a decade.

Of course, the American president had every reason not to want to believe that the Russian government had had anything to do with installing him as “Leader of the Free World.” This went back to what the Russian president saw as the American President’s Prime Directive: the care and maintenance of his own image above all things. He wanted it not to be true; so, in his mind, it was not true, regardless of the findings of every element of his own intelligence services, as well as all the intelligence services of his allies, and, perhaps most tellingly, the almost open admissions of Russian officials to the world press.

And the massive dump of email traffic and financial records documenting huge illicit contributions by Russian state organs, Russian oligarchs, Russian mobsters, pro-Russian Ukrainian interests, and other literally un-American interests to Republican campaigns and SuperPACs, “think tanks,” media entities, and other Republican-aligned organizations, as well as “anti-vaxxer” and climate change denialist groups, had also not had the effect he had anticipated or desired. Nor had the evidence of the massive Russian fiddling with voter rolls in swing states, in favor of Republicans. Instead of destroying the Republican Party, it had merely hardened existing divisions even more.

Which was something, he supposed; his ultimate goal was to disempower and humiliate the United States, and democratic republicanism, and rule of law in general, globally; so this helped.

But he had hoped that these revelations would leave the Republican Party a shameful smoking hole in the ground, never to be revived, a spent force, a ruined scaffold now creakily undergirding a damaged President who was himself, along with his family, publicly linked to many of the crooked transactions at issue. But the revelations manifestly had done no such thing. It was as if the entire roof of Notre Dame Cathedral had fallen in in that fire, but the spire resting upon it was still floating above the cavity, unsupported by anything real at all.

We are the victims of our own success, thought the Russian president. We have done such a good job destroying Americans’ ability to distinguish truth from falsehood that even a straightforward Russian invasion of three American allies, open Russian interference in American elections, and a virus that had manifestly killed more Americans than citizens of any other nation, simply cannot be real to Republicans.

Republicans now had their own truth; Democrats, though still more closely committed to reality, were also finally on their way to mirroring the Manichean approach to reality that their enemies across the aisle had embraced decades before.

So maybe it should not have shocked him that Republicans responded not with horror or shame, but instead immediately denounced these very real, documented, true allegations against them as “Democrat fabrications,” and “Fake News,” and leapt further forward to accuse completely unsuspecting Democrats of being Russian stooges themselves, guilty of every crime of which Republicans themselves were suddenly provably, objectively, manifestly guilty. And perhaps after the past four (or thirty-four?) years, it probably should not have surprised him that their preposterous and laughable counterattack on this mountain of evidence of their guilt would be completely and enthusiastically swallowed whole by their voters.

Democrats screamed bloody murder, of course; but they were so perpetually outraged by Republicans, and especially this President, that their bleating was discounted in advance even by the “liberal-biased media.”

This “mainstream media” had become used to hurdling the immediate facts of any scandal, and making the story all about the inability of Democrats to profit politically from even the most brazen offenses of Republicans. Actual analysis of the substance of the allegations did exist, but only as a minor pretext to get to the only story they ever seemed to report: the eternal, exasperating political impotence of Democrats; indeed, of anyone committed to the rule of law; and the inevitability that once again, Republicans would succeed in shoving the boundaries of the acceptable several miles farther down the road, over the mangled bodies of their clueless, hapless foes.

It was a very strange thing, this “free press,” the Russian president thought to himself. In theory it was supposed to be the great bulwark against the rise of exactly the sort of leader that ruled in Washington now, or even himself, come to think of it. Instead, in the United States at least, it spent almost no time at all examining the substance of even the most plausible and provable and serious of allegations; it leaped forward to polls, horserace, counting votes, and pre-declaring any resistance to be futile.

If the “free press” could be depended upon to be so amoral and mercenary in Russia, he thought, far fewer of them would end up dead or in prison. His handpicked house media organs scarcely did a more effective job of promoting his own interests than the “liberal” press in America did for his counterpart in Washington.

So, the veritable Himalaya mountain range of evidence the Russians had leaked had not changed any minds. There simply were no open American minds left to change, only closed minds to harden.

That was the achievement of the Russian president; but, also, the ironic constraint upon his ability to effect the further damage he had hoped to inflict. A shame.

Shame. That was what the Russian president had unconsciously been counting on. That Republicans might, as their Richard Nixon had in the 1970s, be shamed by the public revelation of their leaders’ crimes. He had recalled that era’s American President, weeping and drinking heavily, if reports were to be believed, walking the halls talking to the paintings of his predecessors, and finally visited by his party leaders and told that he must go. Shame had accomplished that; shame had restored rule of law. His shame, and his party’s.

Shame? Shame was dead. Shame was for the losers. For the hapless defenders of rule of law, in America, in Russia, in Hungary, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Belarus, and all over the world.

Thus the American President was essentially unharmed by the Russian president’s very obvious attempt to cripple him. This American President had never known shame himself; that was how he had taken over his party. He had been willing to go places his fellow Republicans never had dared, to shout what they had only whispered, to grin proudly when shown to be an adulterer, a criminal, unfit for the office. And the worse the things were of which he was accused, the more his people loved him, because of the inevitable and natural reaction of revulsion by Democrats.

That was the true guiding principle of Republicans now: not just devotion to the President, but maybe even more powerfully, an urge to punish and humiliate Democrats. The worse he was, the more ridiculous his crimes, the more they defended him.

At least this was the most pro-Russian American President imaginable. They had even dropped all charges against any Russians for the 2016 election hacking! He shook his head again.

America has gone crazy, he thought. If my country – and I myself – had been attacked so openly and humiliated so completely, I would have been plotting a truly deadly revenge, or I would be killed by my own people.

He shook his head in disbelief at his counterpart’s lack of response. Was there a single world leader in all of history who could be so completely oblivious to such an obvious insult? Was there even a human being alive, aside from this man, who would miss the clear and malevolent intent?

He picked up the phone.

“Sergei,” he said.

“Yes, Gospodin Prezident?”

“I would like you to release the last bundle of information.”

“The American President’s tax and financial records?”

“Da. I think it is time the American people find out that the ‘billionaire’ they elected twice is only a mere millionaire, and he is only that thanks to Russian money.”

“Da, Gospodin Prezident.”

The president hung up the phone.

Well, on the bright side, he thought, it is clear that partisan division has perhaps permanently destroyed any prospect of majority support in the United States for democracy, rule of law, or any united effort in any direction.

“America is finished as a force in the world,” he said aloud, to no one, a smile on his lips.

He raised an imaginary glass toward the west.

If I still drank vodka, this would be more than worth a toast.

© 2020 Nolan O’Brian