A flag-waving veteran of the Red Army confronting an anti-communist protester in Moscow, circa 1990
I remember the veterans. They came with their medals, their heavy coats, their stories that no one wanted to hear anymore. The world was moving too fast, too violently. One moment, Lenin’s statues stood tall, the next, they were being pulled down by cranes, their heads rolling like something out of a fever dream.
He is one of them—this man in the uniform, his chest heavy with ribbons. His body, too, is heavy with time, with the weight of a country that is disappearing beneath his feet. In his hands, the flag—the old flag, red as the blood of those who never came back from Kursk, from Stalingrad, from Afghanistan. He holds onto it like an old man holds onto a photograph of his youth, convinced that if he grips it tightly enough, it will not slip away.
The man he is speaking to—no, confronting—is different. He is leather-jacketed, sharp, modern. He belongs to the new world, the one that speaks in English loans, in American advertisements, in promises of things no one really understands yet. He does not believe in the veteran’s war. He does not believe in the Soviet dream. He believes in something else—democracy, capitalism, freedom, words that fill the air but have no clear shape yet.
They stare at each other, and between them is everything that has been lost. The Red Army veteran speaks with the passion of someone who does not know how to live in this new reality. “You do not understand,” he says. “You have no idea what we suffered for, what we built with our hands, with our bones!” He gestures wildly, as if hoping to pull the past back into the present, as if hoping to remind everyone that once, Moscow was the heart of the world, not just another city where people now wait in long lines for American jeans and McDonald’s hamburgers.
The younger man listens, but he does not agree. His silence is hard, unyielding. He sees no victory in what the veteran remembers. To him, the Soviet Union was hunger, was repression, was a lie that stretched for decades. He does not see the factories built, the libraries filled with books, the people who felt proud once, even if it was a pride they were forced to carry.
Around them, the crowd moves—some watching, some avoiding the scene altogether. A woman stands behind them, her face grim. Maybe she lost her son in Afghanistan. Maybe she spent her youth standing in bread lines. Maybe she is just tired.
What is there to say? One world is dying, another is being born, but it is not a clean birth. There is blood, there is screaming. The veteran shakes his head, grips his flag tighter. The young man crosses his arms. And somewhere, in the distance, another statue falls.
Maria Callas and Marylin Monroe at the 1962 celebration of JFK’s birthday in NYC
There is something hypnotic about this image, something that lingers beyond its immediate glamour. Two women, both mythologized in their own right, suspended in a moment that feels less like history and more like foreshadowing. Maria Callas, poised, composed, her expression caught somewhere between admiration and assessment. Marilyn Monroe, luminous and already half-ghost, draped in the kind of dress that turns the body itself into spectacle.
They are both smiling. That much is certain. But the smile of a woman in a photograph—especially a woman who has learned to be looked at—is rarely simple. Callas, the diva assoluta, accustomed to worship and warfare in equal measure, stands in a gown that speaks of discipline and restraint. Monroe, ethereal and knowing, wears hers like a second skin, an apparition of fragility and provocation. They are standing side by side, but they are not in the same place.
The occasion, of course, is Kennedy’s birthday. The room is crowded with power and pretense, with the theater of masculinity playing out on the grandest stage possible. Monroe had arrived late, making an entrance in a way only she could, and when she took the stage to sing Happy Birthday, it was less a song than an invocation—breathless, intimate, vaguely tragic. It was a performance meant to be remembered, though perhaps not in the way she intended.
Callas had no such moment that evening. She was there not as a performer but as a witness, a guest in a night curated for the President’s amusement. And yet, she and Monroe occupy the same frame, as if the camera itself understood something they did not. They were women who had been placed in the orbit of powerful men. Women who had been adored and scrutinized in equal measure. Women who had spent years perfecting their art, only to find that the world was more interested in what could be extracted from them.
Three months later, Monroe would be gone. A year after that, Kennedy. Callas would outlive them both but would carry her own kind of death, the slow unraveling of a voice, a love affair, an identity. Looking at this image now, one cannot help but see the ghost of what was coming, the inevitability of it all. The mythology of beauty, of desire, of power, of loss.
They are both smiling. That much is certain. But the tragedy, as always, is in the spaces between.
Neville Chamberlain proclaims “peace in our time” after allowing Nazi Germany to annex Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, September 30, 1938
On September 30, 1938, Neville Chamberlain stepped onto the tarmac at Heston Aerodrome, waving a slip of paper that, in his mind, symbolized the triumph of reason over the growing storm in Europe. His return from Munich marked what he believed to be a great diplomatic success: Hitler had been appeased, war had been averted, and Britain’s future, for now, remained at peace.
Hours later, standing before the press at 10 Downing Street, he delivered the words that would define him:
“My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.”
The crowd outside cheered. The memory of the Great War still haunted Britain, and for many, the idea of another conflict was unthinkable. Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement—so carefully crafted over months of negotiations—seemed vindicated. He had yielded to Hitler’s demand for the Sudetenland, allowing the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, but in doing so, he believed he had secured Hitler’s final territorial claim in Europe.
Yet, in Berlin, there was no such celebration—only quiet satisfaction. Hitler had not been forced into compromise; he had dictated terms. The Munich Agreement was, in effect, a capitulation by Britain and France, who had demonstrated that they would not fight to preserve the existing order in Central Europe. Far from signaling the end of German expansionism, the agreement emboldened Hitler. The Führer, who despised Chamberlain’s weakness, had privately dismissed the British Prime Minister as a man who would concede anything to avoid war. The remaining Czech lands, he told his inner circle, would soon fall under German control.
For the Czechs, Munich was an unmitigated disaster. They had not been invited to the negotiations that determined their country’s fate. Their defensive fortifications, once their greatest protection, now lay in German hands. Their faith in Britain and France had been betrayed. The Munich Agreement ensured that Czechoslovakia would survive only a few more months before Hitler’s forces occupied Prague in March 1939.
The Munich settlement, so celebrated in London, was already unraveling. While Chamberlain had been convinced that Hitler was a man with whom Britain could do business, the dictator had interpreted Munich as proof that Britain and France lacked the will to resist. Appeasement, so carefully pursued, had not prevented war—it had hastened it.
Within a year, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland. The illusion of peace for our time was shattered. Chamberlain’s name would forever be linked to Munich, not as a statesman who preserved peace, but as the man who had gambled on Hitler’s word—and lost.
A group of Russian oligarchs, including members of the Semibankirshchina, at a party. Circa 1996.
Moscow, 1996. The city was still shedding the ghosts of its Soviet past, but inside the opulent halls of the Kremlin’s inner circle, a new Russia was already being written. A group of men, dressed in tailored suits, stood in a loose semicircle, champagne glasses raised in quiet triumph. The occasion was not just a gathering—it was a coronation of sorts. These were the men who had saved Boris Yeltsin, the men who had ensured that Russia’s first democratic experiment would continue, at least for now.
The faces in the photograph tell a story. At the center, Anatoly Chubais, the architect of Russia’s chaotic privatization, the man who had parceled out state industries for a fraction of their worth in the name of reform. To his right, Boris Berezovsky, a former mathematician turned kingmaker, whose ability to maneuver within the corridors of power had made him one of the most feared and influential figures in post-Soviet Russia. To his left, Vladimir Potanin, the quiet, calculating banker who had brokered the infamous loans-for-shares deals, ensuring that the state’s most valuable assets would end up in the hands of a select few.
These were the powerbrokers of the Semibankirshchina—the “Seven Bankers.” They had, in a matter of years, rewritten the rules of Russian capitalism, transforming themselves from mid-level businessmen into the de facto rulers of the economy. Their wealth had been acquired not through competition, but through connections. They understood that in the chaos of the 1990s, influence was the only currency that mattered.
This gathering was not just about celebration; it was about consolidation. Months earlier, Yeltsin had been languishing in the polls, his presidency teetering on the edge of collapse. Communist challenger Gennady Zyuganov threatened to undo the reforms of the previous five years, and the oligarchs understood that their fortunes—both political and literal—depended on keeping the old system at bay. So they mobilized. They funded Yeltsin’s reelection campaign, flooded the airwaves with propaganda, and in return, secured their grip on the country’s most valuable assets.
As they toasted that evening, they were not merely celebrating Yeltsin’s victory. They were celebrating their own ascendance. They had gambled on power, and they had won. For now.
But beneath the veneer of confidence, there was an unspoken truth: Russia’s new capitalism was built on fragile foundations. The corruption, the cronyism, the backroom deals—these were not symptoms of the system; they were the system. And as history would soon prove, in Russia, power was never permanent.
A few years later, some of the men in this photo would be in exile. Others would be dead. And a new man—one who had watched their rise and understood their weaknesses—would take their place.
The new man was Vladimir Putin.
By the late 1990s, the oligarchs who had engineered Boris Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996 believed they would continue to dictate the political and economic landscape of Russia. They had handpicked Yeltsin’s successor, expecting him to be a pliable figure who would safeguard their influence. Instead, they had elevated a former KGB officer with an acute understanding of power and a long memory.
Putin became Prime Minister in 1999 and then President on December 31, 1999, when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Almost immediately, he set about dismantling the old order. The oligarchs who had controlled Russia’s economy in the 1990s—particularly those who had meddled in politics—were given a choice: submit to the new Kremlin authority or be destroyed.
Boris Berezovsky, once one of the most powerful figures in Russia, refused to bow to Putin. By 2000, he was in exile in London. Vladimir Gusinsky, another influential media tycoon, met a similar fate. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia at the time, thought he could challenge Putin’s authority; he was arrested in 2003, his oil empire dismantled, and spent a decade in prison.
Putin had learned from the oligarchs of the 1990s. He saw how they had manipulated the weak Yeltsin government and ensured that no such system would exist under his rule. Over the next two decades, a new class of billionaires emerged, but they owed their wealth not to freewheeling capitalism, but to their loyalty to the Kremlin. The wild, anarchic capitalism of the 1990s was dead. In its place was a system where money and power flowed through one man.
The oligarchs had made Putin president. They never expected him to make himself Tsar.
A woman’s head is shaved as punishment for collaboration horizontale. Montélimar area, August 1944.
Montélimar, August 1944. Liberation had come to France, and with it, the settling of accounts. The Germans were gone, driven out by Allied troops and the resistance, but the wounds of occupation remained. And where justice could not be imposed on the true architects of collaboration—on the Vichy ministers, the industrialists who profited, the bureaucrats who signed their names to deportation lists—there were others, easier targets, on whom the anger of a humiliated nation could be exercised.
The woman on the bench was one such target.
Her crime was collaboration horizontale—that peculiarly gendered offense, condemned less for its betrayal of the nation than for its perceived violation of the body as a vessel of patriotic duty. She had slept with the enemy. Whether by choice, by circumstance, or by coercion was irrelevant. She had been seen on the arm of a German soldier, perhaps even smiling, perhaps even in love. That was enough.
And so, she was made to pay.
Her punishment was swift, symbolic, and merciless. The men who had done nothing while the Germans were in power now held her down. The barber’s clippers buzzed through her hair, stripping away her femininity, her dignity, leaving her scalp uneven and raw. The cigarette-smoking man grinned slightly as he worked. The men in shirtsleeves held her still, the ones who had spent the war waiting, hedging their bets, doing what was necessary to survive—much as she had.
The crowd was eager, righteous, desperate for an outlet. Some, no doubt, had suffered too much to care for nuance. They had lost brothers, husbands, children. They had endured the shame of occupation, of enforced submission. And now, finally, they could punish someone.
Collaboration came in many forms, but not all of it could be seen in the streets. The politicians and businessmen who had dined with German officers, who had provided them with resources and intelligence, who had enriched themselves while others starved—many of them would escape justice, quietly reinventing themselves as patriots after the war. But a woman’s body had no such refuge. The men who had worked with the Germans could make speeches, could deny, could claim they had only done what was necessary. A woman who had shared a German’s bed had no such defense.
She would be shaved, paraded through the streets, perhaps beaten. She would wear the mark of her disgrace long after the men who had profited from occupation slipped back into polite society.
And yet, it was not really about her. The public spectacle was not justice; it was catharsis. It was the assertion that France had not been complicit, that the occupation had been endured, not accommodated, that the true betrayers were only a handful of women and weak men, easily denounced, easily shamed.
But history would remember. France had collaborated. Not just her. Not just the women who had taken German lovers. The whole of France had lived with the occupation, had adapted to it, had worked within its system.
This was not a trial. It was a purge of the collective conscience. And she was simply the scapegoat.
