MOSCOW —2 JULY 2008

After two bitter miscarriages, Marina delivered their first child.

It was a healthy baby boy, and Oleg was ecstatic, as were the rest of his and Marina’s extended families. Yet no one was more pleased than his father-in-law, who promptly insisted that the archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church himself —the one who had originally married the young couple —come to the hospital and pray for the baby and his parents.

Luganov further insisted the bishop also perform the dedication. In the tradition of the church, the ceremony would be performed on the eighth day. This was also the day the baby would be named. In the times of the czars, before the Communist Revolution of 1917, it was tradition that the local priest —not the parents —would name the baby. This is precisely what Luganov wanted. Privately, Oleg strenuously protested to Marina. His heart was set on naming his firstborn son after his own father, Stefan Mikhailovich Kraskin, but Marina pleaded with Oleg to let her father have his way.

“I love you more than life itself, Oleg Stefanovich —you know I do,” she said as the two headed to their bedroom and undressed for the night. “But my father is not merely the patriarch of my family; he is by all rights the patriarch of Mother Russia, and thus our shepherd, guiding us as a family and as a nation down the path he knows is best. Everyone is watching us because everyone is watching him. Please, my love —do not deny my father the honor of following tradition or the right to uphold the heritage of our people.”

“But they are not our traditions,” Oleg pushed back, rooting through every drawer for a cigarette but finding none. “We are not religious people. This is nonsense. We’d be doing it just for show.”

“That’s not true, darling,” Marina argued. “We may not believe in God, but certainly we believe in honoring our parents, do we not? Even more, we believe in upholding the glory of Mother Russia.”

“Of course, but —”

“Then I beg of you,” Marina interjected, “let us not concern ourselves with these myths and legends. They are not important to us. I don’t even think my mother cares. Your parents certainly aren’t pious. But my father is.”

“Pious?” Oleg asked, his voice tinged with cynicism.

“Well, religious,” Marina replied. “The point is: this matters to him. So why not give him this gift, this very simple but precious gift?”

“The name of our child? The very name he will bear for eternity?”

“Eternity? Why must you be so melodramatic, Oleg Stefanovich?” Marina said. “In the grand scheme of things, this is so trifling a gift for so great a leader, no?”

“No, that’s just it —it’s an enormous gift for a man who already has everything,” Oleg shot back, increasingly desperate for a smoke. “Marina, my darling, we finally have a son of our own, an heir, someone to carry on our name and our values. This baby is everything to us, especially after losing two others. Should we not be free to name him as we wish?”

Love is a stubborn thing. In the end, Oleg relented to his beloved wife, if not her father. Not only would he allow the bishop to name their son, but he also agreed to ask Marina’s parents, not his own, to be the child’s godparents.

Thus it was that on the eighth day after his birth, their baby was dedicated by the patriarch at the Church of the Twelve Apostles, on the grounds of the Kremlin. The bishop gave him the name Vasily. Neither Oleg nor Marina could remember a branch in either family tree bearing anyone with this name. But Oleg knew exactly where the name had come from. It was the Slavic version of the name Basil, which came from the Greek name Basileus, meaning “king.” There had been at least four or five Russian czars and princes named Vasily. The name hadn’t come from the archbishop at all. It had come from the president himself.

On the fortieth day after their baby’s birth, Oleg and Marina met again with their two families, not inside the Kremlin’s walls but in St. Basil’s Cathedral, the iconic onion-domed church planted in the heart of Red Square. The occasion was the baptism of little Vasily Olegovich Kraskin. Once again the president had chosen the venue. He had insisted that the archbishop and several priests be in attendance along with every member of his cabinet and dozens of other VIPs. As with his daughter’s marriage, Luganov wanted a national spectacle. The press was there, and the brief ceremony was the lead on the evening news.

This time Oleg did not resist, even in private. This was important to Marina because it was important to her father. He was willing to swallow his pride and go along. But he remained deeply uncomfortable with the religious commitments he was being asked to make in front of the entire country.

As the service began and incense wafted through the darkened sanctuary, Oleg stood beside the altar. He held a single lit candle in his hand. At his side, Marina —wearing a traditional headscarf —held their crying baby in her arms as the bishop, wizened and gray, led them through the liturgy.

“Oleg Stefanovich, do you renounce Satan and all his angels and all his works and all his services and all his pride?”

“I do,” Oleg said. “I renounce Satan and all his angels and all his works and all his services and all his pride.”

Marina was asked the same, and she responded in kind.

“Oleg Stefanovich, do you unite yourself to Christ?” the bishop asked.

Oleg took a deep breath. “I do,” he said through gritted teeth. “I unite myself to Christ.”

Marina answered in the same manner. Then came more prayers, more incense, readings from Scripture and from various Orthodox prayer books Oleg had never heard of. Eventually, after nearly an hour, though it seemed much longer, the bishop took their baby, held him over a large silver urn, and poured a silver pot of lukewarm water over his head. Vasily did not cry, but Oleg nearly did.

Oleg was surprised by how emotional he felt as a final prayer was said and Marina wrapped their son in a towel and held him to her breast. Marina was crying. So were Oleg’s parents, even as they beamed with pride.

Oddly, Yulia Luganova neither cried nor smiled. Indeed, she showed little emotion at all. The president, however, seemed genuinely and deeply touched, especially when Marina turned and put her son in her father’s arms. For only the second time Oleg could recall —the first being at their wedding —the hardness in his father-in-law’s fierce and forbidding features visibly softened. His eyes were red and moist. He struck Oleg as uncharacteristically vulnerable, even a bit self-conscious in that vulnerability. In that moment he was not the sovereign ruler of a great people. He was a simple grandfather who now held the grandson he had so long desired.

Oleg stood in the great and shadowy cathedral, the flickering light of candles and the intoxicating aroma of incense enveloping him, and pondered a thought that he had never dared consider before. Was there now, perhaps, a pathway to the kind of relationship with his father-in-law Oleg had always longed for? Were the cold steel barriers between him and this man he both feared and admired finally coming down?

Nine days later, Russian forces invaded the Republic of Georgia.

Oleg never saw it coming. He was not even in Moscow at the time. Rather, he had been sent to Beijing as part of the official Russian delegation to observe the opening ceremonies of the summer Olympic Games. He learned the news the same way every other world leader at the games did, first from the BBC and then via every other news service on the planet. Three hundred fifty Russian tanks, hundreds of armored personnel carriers, and more than nine thousand ground forces —including elite Spetsnaz units —were blasting their way into South Ossetia. Under cover from Russian fighter bombers and heavy artillery fire, they were taking the main roads in South Ossetia and pushing toward Georgia proper. Another thirty thousand Russian troops were massing in Abkhazia, the Russian territory directly adjoining the Georgian Republic, and a sizable Russian armada was steaming across the Black Sea, headed for Georgia’s western coast.

Oleg was not simply stunned. He felt betrayed. While he had participated in meetings where snap military exercises in Abkhazia had been discussed at length, he hadn’t been in a single meeting or on a single call or seen a single document or email or cable in which an invasion had even been hinted at or alluded to, much less stated outright. Aside from the feeling of utter embarrassment at being so far from home and having to represent and defend his nation and his president among dozens upon dozens of world leaders who were condemning the invasion in no uncertain terms, a flood of painful questions rushed through Oleg’s thoughts.

Why had the president invaded Georgia? Why would he invade any former Soviet republic? Was he really intent on capturing and occupying the entire nation, even Tbilisi, the capital? What in the world for? What was the upside? Wouldn’t this seriously damage Russia’s reputation, not to mention harm her economy in volatile and uncertain times?

And why hadn’t the president trusted Oleg enough to let him in on the secret?