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People snapped pictures of Wagner’s tanks, or argued with its fighters. “What is happening,” wondered Irina Alenina, a resident of Rostov-on-Don, in a local news group on Vkontakte, a social messaging app. “A civil war is starting, or something like that,” responded Alexander Salazov.
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State-run television and newspapers were reporting the events in real time, forgoing their previous tradition of putting the ballet Swan Lake on an endless loop until the crisis of the moment had passed.
Some Russians remembered similar crises, including the periodic eruptions that marked the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
“I remember I was 5 and was going to a kindergarten and tanks were shooting at the White House on TV,” wrote Dmitry Dakhin on Vkontakte, referring to the shelling of what was Russia’s parliament building in Moscow at the time. “Now I am 35 and again something bad happens.”
Some of the calm could be attributed to support for Putin. Olga Rudeva, 64, said trust in the Russian leader had made the situation now very different from the turmoil of the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.
Rudeva, a tour guide in Voronezh – one of the cities reached by the Wagner forces en route to Moscow on Saturday before Prigozhin said he had ordered them to turn around – said in a telephone interview that, back then, people were afraid of the unknown. In contrast, she said, she was about to go out for a walk and her grandchildren had gone to the park to swim. She acknowledged that there were lines outside petrol stations, but suggested that was not so much a reflection of concern as of people’s desire to simply do something in reaction to the news.
In Moscow, at the Manege exhibition hall right near the Kremlin walls, it was the last day for an exhibition of works by a nationalistic, patriotic painter named Vasily Nesterenko, built around the theme that God had long protected Russia.
There was a long line to get in, said Khrushcheva, who listened to the chatter among waiting patrons. “They were discussing how we are great and patriotic and God is with us,” she said, “and that the Kremlin is not going to let us suffer and nothing bad will happen.”
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