Moscow: No Longer Silent

Putin, left, at the Federal Security Service, Moscow. March 26, 2015            AP

"We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow," a KGB officer is told as a Dresden crowd swirls around him weeks before the fall of the Berlin wall. "And Moscow is silent." Vladimir Putin's Moscow is making lots of political noise these days, and that, according to this article, can be traced back to the Russian leader's last days as a KGB agent in East Germany, the agent who got that response when he called headquarters for help. That was when he came to understand, first-hand, the power the people can have when they come together. "Now," says his German biographer, Boris Reitschuster, "when you have crowds in Kiev in 2004, in Moscow in 2011 or in Kiev in 2013 and 2014, I think he remembers this time in Dresden. And all these old fears come up inside him": http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32066222
   What's it like to live in Moscow now? American Jeffrey Tayler, an author and contributing editor at the Atlantic who has lived there for the last 22 years, explains it all. The city has changed dramatically in the 15 years of Putin's rule, he says, and not always for the worse. "More and more, in public places once dour Muscovites smile and treat one another with a politesse that was rare a decade ago. A new generation is growing up studying English and traveling abroad. The formerly ubiquitous rude Russian salesclerk is mostly gone, with affable warmth toward customers increasingly the rule": http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/150322-ngmytown-jeffrey-tayler-moscow-putin-red-square-kremlin-lenin-yeltsin/