Rockin’ the Kremlin

Last Thursday, the Scorpions played a concert at the Kremlin that celebrated the founding of the FSB, the successor security service to the KGB, NKVD, and the Cheka, which Dzerzhinsky, “Iron Feliks,” founded ninety years before on December 20, 1917. Lead singer Klaus Meine later said that he had no clue about the occasion of the show, which, it turned out, was packed by FSB agents and guests (who politely applauded the band’s perestroika-inspired “Wind of Change.”) Among the former KGB men present was the previous FSB director, and now Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.