The New York Times
PALMYRA, Syria — For a Russian, there is never a bad time or place for a classical music concert.
And for the concert in the ancient ruins of this war-ravaged Syrian city, staged last week by Russia’s premier orchestra, the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra, the invitation came as improbably as the event itself.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry called my cellphone on a Saturday morning: Be ready to fly to Syria in a few days. We cannot tell you anything more. But there is a dress code. Bring a bulletproof vest.
So began the latest twist to Russia’s military intervention in the Syrian civil war, which has been characterized by subterfuge and misdirection since it started in September. That’s when the world was told that giant Ilyushin 76 transport airplanes flying from Russia to Syria were carrying humanitarian aid, when in fact they were bringing soldiers and military supplies.
Airstrikes commenced. The Russians said their warplanes were targeting terrorists; Western governments, however, said the real objective was to prop up Moscow’s ally, the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
In March, Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, proclaimed the operation completed, yet at least hundreds of soldiers and dozens of aircraft remained.
The curtain pulled back, if just a little, on Russia’s Syrian venture when the Russian press plane touched down around dawn one day last week at the Kremlin’s air base in the coastal city of Latakia.
Nearly a hundred Moscow-based foreign reporters emerged, blinking in the sun, and were greeted by Russia’s desert soldiers. Round, sunburned Slavic faces peered from under tan helmets.
The tour of Russia’s battle for hearts and minds — and ears — in Syria began in a tent mess, where a line of cheery middle-aged women ladled out kasha and tushonka, the Russian form of Spam.
One group of soldiers, dressed in blue shorts and T-shirts, played volleyball and jabbed away at punching bags for the television cameras.
An enlisted man was placed in a shipping container turned library, his nose trained on an open encyclopedia of Russian military medals, as if, improbably, he had suddenly decided to study up, as cameras rolled.
“Defense is a system of political, economic, social, legal and military means,” a placard on the wall read, seeming to illustrate the modern Russian way of war that we were witnessing.
Sometimes called a hybrid war after the intervention in Ukraine in 2014 that brought these tactics to light, it is a doctrine of tightly integrated diplomacy and messaging — including the art of military misdirection called maskirovka — along with conventional force, at play now in Syria.
This strategy prizes so-called soft power. In Syria, however, old-fashioned hard power also abounds.
The air base is a panoramic scene, cluttered with helicopters and planes. Russian armored vehicles and trucks sit on acres of parking lots. Despite the declared end of their presence here, there was no sign of packing up. During our visit, a Syrian road crew was laying fresh, smoking black asphalt to make room for more.
But Russia, as the United States tried in Iraq, has also been attempting to navigate the whirlpools of the war’s local politics.
Reporters were paraded through a “reconciliation center,” where a dozen or so Russian officers take calls from armed units seeking to join the cease-fire announced in February, and aid them in negotiating local truces with the Syrian Army. A flat-screen television hung on the wall beaming a static image of a dove, an olive sprig and the Syrian flag.
To illustrate its peacemaking efforts, the Russian military brought the press pool by bus to the dusty village of Kawkab, in Hama Province, about 70 miles from the embattled city of Aleppo and near a front line.
The site of ruined cinder-block homes, on a hill overlooking olive orchards, appeared deserted at first, but then a crowd of children, chanting and waving posters of Mr. Assad, emerged to greet the buses.
“It took many months for the warring sides to come to the negotiating table but it has finally come to fruition,” the Russian military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said of this place.
In a large green tent pitched in a ruined market, Syrian military officers signed a cease-fire agreement with village leaders. Then, through a slit in the back of the tent, young men with red-and-white head scarves covering their faces materialized, said to be newly reconciled Islamic militants from the village.
With the Russian military officers observing from their seats on white plastic lawn furniture, the young men clanked battered Kalashnikovs onto a table, surrendering their weapons, then pressed a thumbprint on a sheet of paper.
The Russian military says that it has overseen more than 90 such ceremonies in towns and villages since February, reconciling more than 7,000 former rebels, and that this work, not merely the airstrikes backing Mr. Assad’s forces, is central to its presence.
It was unclear, however, who had reconciled with whom in this ceremony.
Asked through a Russian military interpreter when he had come over to the government side, one of the village leaders who signed the agreement, Akhmed Mubarok, appeared confused. He said he had never been on any other side.
“I always supported the government,” he said. The interpreter shrugged.
Outside the tent, a Russian press official suggested I interview a local man, Mohamad Shoikh, who, surprisingly, spoke English.
“Russia has a very good army,” Mr. Shoikh said. “We need the Russian Army. We never want the Russian Army to leave. We want the whole Russian Army to come here. Putin is a good leader.”
All the while, there was not a word of confirmation about the concert in Palmyra, the city famous for its ruins from Roman and Near East civilizations that had been in the bloody grip of the Islamic State until earlier this year.
This was a military operation, cloaked in secrecy, to insert not only the journalists but three stand-up basses, cellos and other instruments and musicians from St. Petersburg into the Syrian front-line city.
After a dawn departure from the Mediterranean coast, Russian helicopter gunships buzzed overhead as separate convoys of buses, with the press and the string section, drove east into the Syrian desert.
Afterward, Britain’s foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, criticized the concert as “a tasteless attempt to distract attention” from suffering Syrians, and he noted that an airstrike on a refugee camp that day had killed 28 people. Russia denied its planes had bombed the camp.
But the concert was simply, starkly beautiful, and unfolded as the late afternoon sun faded over the ruins.
Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky director, said he chose the pieces for their optimistic emotions, to be played on the same stage where Islamic State militants last summer had filmed a video of a mass execution. “We protest against barbarism that destroyed tremendous monuments to world culture,” Mr. Gergiev said. “We protest against executions of people, here on this stage.”
Played in a second-century Roman amphitheater, it was a concert of a lifetime — and surely risked a few lives along the way. The Islamic State lines were said to be about nine miles away; outgoing artillery boomed as the buses arrived.
Then the gentler sounds of Pavel Milyukov playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chaconne for Solo Violin echoed through the eerie desert space.
Sergei P. Roldugin, a musician friend of Mr. Putin recently implicated in the Panama Papers financial scandal, acknowledged after the concert that he had missed notes in a cello solo of the Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin, though the piece was pleasant all the same. The orchestra played Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1.
After the solemn harmony, some comic dissonance was obtained on the return flight, over Iraqi and Iranian airspace.
Some Russian journalists, it turned out, had slipped out of the security bubble in Latakia to purchase several bottles of a local tipple, Arak, which the Russian press corps nicknamed “Igilovka” or “the Little ISIS.”
Bottles of the Little ISIS came out. A wicked miasma floated around the cabin. Americans and Russians agreed on one thing: “Igilovka” must be destroyed. And it was, before the final approach to the Chkalovsky military airfield outside Moscow.