As the world watched chaos unfold, Russia tried to project calm at home

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Walking near the Kremlin in downtown Moscow on Saturday morning, Nina Khrushcheva encountered a wedding party gathered outside the historic National Hotel.

When she asked about continuing with the celebration amid a national crisis, one guest responded, “We are not going to cancel it for no reason,” said Khrushcheva, an expert on international relations and a descendant of former Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev.

A man takes down the poster with writing reading “Join us at Wagner”.Credit: AP

Life in Moscow continued with an air of studied calm even as Yevgeny Prigozhin, the pugnacious head of the Wagner mercenary group, seized control of a key military headquarters in the southwestern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and began dispatching convoys of troops and armoured vehicles towards the capital before standing down. President Vladimir Putin continued to work in the Kremlin, his spokesperson, Dmitri Peskov, told reporters.

Even before the uprising, officials had made every effort to project an air of normalcy in Moscow while Russia waged a brutal war across the border in Ukraine. Much of that effort continued on Saturday. Movie theatres and museums were open in the capital, and there was no sign of lines at the supermarkets to stock up on goods.

Still, there were some indications of the crisis. Red Square, just outside the formidable medieval walls of the Kremlin, was closed to the public. A large graduation ceremony scheduled for the theatre inside the Kremlin was cancelled, as were all large public gatherings in Moscow and other major cities.

In Moscow, and in two other regions between the capital and Rostov-on-Don, authorities announced a “counterterrorist operation regime”, expanding the powers of local law enforcement.

An empty Red Square in Moscow on Saturday.Credit: AP

Along that corridor, highways were blocked and public transportation also faced disruptions in some places. The price of airline tickets from Moscow to nearby capitals that Russians can enter without a visa skyrocketed.

In Rostov, where there was some anticipation that Russian government forces might besiege the city to bottle up Prigozhin’s forces, some residents lined up to purchase petrol and food, according to 161.ru, a local online news outlet. Some supermarkets took measures such as limiting the amount of essential goods – including salt, sugar and flour – that a customer could purchase.

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.

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.

An armoured personnel carrier and police officers stand on the highway on the outskirts of Moscow on Saturday.Credit: AP

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.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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