13 August, 19:37
On 12 August, celestial mechanics, without giving the matter a moment's thought, delivered the Kremlin a thoroughly derisive slap in the face. Having failed to clear its schedule with the political programme of United Russia, the Moon's shadow insolently fell across the Earth.
Astronomers keep their own genealogy of catastrophes, and this eclipse belongs to the cycle known as Saros 126. The last time that cycle called on Russia was 1 August 2008: the shadow covered Novosibirsk, and exactly one week later Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, opening a war of naked aggression. This time Saros 126 passed over the Russian expanse, looked at what had become of the place, winced in distaste and moved on. Its next appointment is in 2044, in Canada.
But something else is of interest here. At the very hour the sun was going out over Taimyr, the foremost geostrategist of our age - whether hiding from the star itself or trying to outwit the prophecy attached to the cycle - physically pressed himself into the furthest edge of his boundless prison camp. Eight time zones. Seven thousand kilometres of panicked flight from an astronomical event, all to end up on Sakhalin, ostensibly to inspect the rusting tub that Russian propaganda calls the cruiser Varyag and holds up as some sort of specimen of the Pacific Fleet's former grandeur. There was, quite literally, nowhere further from the dying sun that Putin could have gone that day without leaving Russia altogether.
Whether it is worth recalling, in this connection, the story of the original Varyag - which after an hour's fighting off Chemulpo failed to break out, returned to the roadstead and was scuttled by its own crew, and was then served up for a full century as the gold standard of naval valour - I leave to the reader.
But back to the great mind, and to the chief undertaker of democracy in Russia. Could the visit to the country's most distant point on the day of a solar eclipse have been coincidence? For a normal politician, unquestionably. A normal politician has no idea where the path of totality runs; he has a diary, a budget and elections. But we are not dealing with a normal politician. We are dealing with a specific psychological type, and history has documented that type in detail: the dictator. Putin is precisely that type - the crystallised, textbook dictator in the terminal stage of paranoia.
Dictators are pathologically incapable of trusting people, because they see in others the same liars they know themselves to be, which leaves them one last redoubt: witches, shamans, fortune-tellers and astrologers. The Third Reich lived in schizophrenic doublethink. Goebbels harnessed the quatrains of Nostradamus to the propaganda effort and scattered them over France; yet when Rudolf Hess flew to the British on the strength of his astrological charts, the Gestapo scythed down stargazers across Germany. Stalin disliked being taken for a mystic, but drove his own suspicion to the point of clinical superstition: poison in every tablet, a traitor in every comrade, a conspiracy in every rustle.
The current master of the Kremlin crowns this cabinet of curiosities rather naturally. A man who, according to journalists' reporting, soaks in baths of boiled Altai deer antler. A ruler whom the loyal Shoigu drove around Tuvan sanctuaries so he could rub himself against the "places of power". A pensioner with a strict schedule of Epiphany plunges and personal holy elders is, by definition, incapable of ignoring a lunar shadow.
When the Yakut shaman Alexander Gabyshev set off on foot for Moscow with a handcart to "drive out the demon", the nuclear power did not tap its finger against its temple. It sent special forces to intercept him and buried the shaman in punitive psychiatry. The rule holds without exception: a regime that does not fear the drum does not send riot police after it. A regime that does not believe in astrology does not hide from eclipses.
The ancient Assyrians, as it happens, had a worked-out protocol for the likes of Saros 126. A total eclipse meant the certain death of the ruler. To swindle the heavenly bureaucracy, a "substitute king" was solemnly enthroned - a stand-in hung about with sceptres and the trappings of power - while the real sovereign was dressed as a commoner and stowed out of sight. The eclipse passed, the stand-in's head came off, the gods received their ration of blood, and the king crawled out of hiding to dust off his robes.
In our own century, on Sakhalin, they decided to dispense with the Assyrian paperwork. Why seat a double on the throne, when he might decline to hand it back, if one can simply haul one's precious person off to where the evil omen supposedly cannot reach?
But does that alter the substance of the prophecy? It does not. A fatal, purely psychological error crept into the logistics of Putin's flight from the sun. The Assyrian king saved himself by ceasing to be king. He took off the crown. The Sakhalin fugitive trembled with mystical dread on the deck of a cruiser, surrounded by admirals, in maximally regal configuration, having brought along the little case with the nuclear button and the special case for collecting the imperial excrement.
He has fused with his throne so completely that the crown now comes off only with the scalp. And so he does not flee fate travelling light, as the ancient instructions require. He tries to outsmart it while dragging the entire royal inventory to the edge of the map.
The record of attempts to cheat the Sun is not encouraging. Erra-imitti, king of Isin, did everything by the book: installed a gardener on the throne, went into hiding, and waited. He then died in that hiding place, scalded by hot gruel, while the gardener happily reigned for another quarter of a century. Croesus of Lydia asked the Delphic oracle whether to go to war, was told he would destroy a great empire, and duly wiped his own off the face of the earth. Oleg the Seer, warned that he would die because of his horse, exiled the animal to the maximum available distance. The snake waited patiently in its skull.
Seven thousand kilometres to Taimyr is, for Ukrainian missiles, a distance still out of reach. For fate it is no distance at all. Fate knows how to wait, even when you have wedged yourself eight time zones away from it.