August: The Cruellest Month for Russia

Every August, Russians wait for history, and they are rarely disappointed. On August 31, 1996, Russia wrapped up its disastrous first war against the breakaway Chechen Republic. The ceasefire wouldn't last long, because exactly three years later, on August 31, 1999, a bomb ripped through a Moscow shopping mall, killing one and injuring forty. It would be the first of five bombings—and hundreds of casualties—and it would trigger the second, still somewhat unfinished war in the region. On August 17, 1998, the Russian government devalued the ruble and defaulted on its debt, ushering in a long and painful economic crisis. On August 12, 2000, the Kursk nuclear submarine sank in the Barents Sea. While Moscow tried to cover up the disaster, everyone on board died. (“It sank,” Vladimir Putin said when Larry King asked him what happened.) On August 8, 2008, Russia went to war with Georgia, an unthinkable scenario given the twentieth-century love affair between the two Soviet republics. Last August, much of Russia's forests caught fire, and a thick blanket of pungent smoke covered Moscow for days, which, along with the anomalous heat, killed off many of the city's elderly. Something catastrophic happens almost every year. It's no wonder that Wikipedia has an entry for Russia's August Curse. October and February, the months of the Revolutions, were once the notorious months, but, in post-Soviet Russia, August has trumped them all.