s content dovetailed with Putin's broader promotion of a narrative in which Russia is a great power that recovered from the chaos and weakness of the Yeltsin era and overcame the hostility of deter- mined enemies, especially the United States. Accord- ing to the manual, Russia's dark chapters—its domi- nat

cally, fraught with failure. I remember similar logic in the summer of 1998, when the accepted mantra was that the US would bail out Russia and Boris Yeltsin, since President Clinton would not want to see a nuclear power like Russia slide back into Soviet rule, or anarchy (that view turned out to be wrong)