By Jelani Cobb

The Park Kultury train station smells like smoke and roses. It is the first warm day after a winter that was brutal even by Moscow standards but people seemed to scarcely notice. There are thousands of flowers on the station’s lower platform, arrayed in an impromptu shrine to the memory of twelve Moscow commuters who were killed here yesterday.

The rush hour uncommonly silent, a quiet that seems to drown out even the clamor of trains entering the station. And candles. Dozens of memorial flames flickering in the defiled atrium of the building.

The world knows by now that two suicide bombers detonated explosives in two train stations during the Monday morning, rush hour, killing thirty-eight people, wounding more than a hundred and sending riots of black smoke furling to the surface. There is still an acrid quality to air this evening, a hint of charred metal that catches you at random moments.

Moscow’s subways are a thing to behold. Designed to be functional museums, the stations have marble floors, massive stained glass panoramas and epic scale sculpture of revolutionary war heroes. But for several hours yesterday those floors were given over to a less noble task as the dead were pulled from the carnage of the south bound red line train and laid out to be counted and removed.

The government declared this a day of mourning. The president and prime minister have convened emergency meetings, offered condolences to families and vowed to bring justice to the as yet unknown perpetrators. Cell phone companies refunded the cost of text messages sent between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. yesterday, reasoning that no one should have to pay to check on a loved one. And today a new Russian flag hung outside the station as a sign of national unity in the face of tragedy. Still the people outside the station wore a kind of stunned resignation on their faces.

This is a city given over to floral expressions. In some places it’s difficult to travel more than a few hundred feet without passing a sveti shop, its stands crowded with roses, carnations and tulips. A line of people stretched outside the shop beside Park Kultury. Near the front a young woman pushed past me carrying two white roses and a face full of anguish.

Inside, the police, always a heavy presence in the Moscow subways, were virtually an army of occupation today, eyeing passengers, inspecting random bags but mostly trying to create the image of order where bedlam reigned 24 hours earlier. It was a losing battle.

I saw women weeping as they rode the escalator up to their transfer points, I saw a man take a knee, overcome with grief near the entrance. Random travelers, young and old, genuflected as they made their way off the subway cars. The trains here arrive every two minutes, which meant today that the platform took on the quality of a wake for a head of state. Thousands arrived here at those two minute intervals, most stopped for a reflective moment at the memorial, a few adding to the harvest of roses and then weaved their way through the crowd heading home.

I am a visitor here teaching American history at Moscow State University, I knew none of the victims, but there were all kinds of personal resonances. I’m a native New Yorker, who grew up with the World Trade Center as personal point of reference. Last week I taught about violence in the Jim Crow South and told my students that lynching was a form of American terrorism. I praised the strength of people whose will could not be bent by bombs or lynch ropes. I also pass through the Park Kultury station a half dozen times per week. I will be there again on tomorrow, coming off the brown line from Octoberskaya, transferring to the south bound red line. The same one that exploded as it entered the station yesterday.

The early news reports were hesitant to ascribe the explosions to terrorism but coordinated blasts roughly thirty minutes apart left little room for any other conclusion. About an hour in they began saying it was the work of two suicide bombers and I immediately recalled reading about the grim algebra of bomb investigation. (Gather all the body parts and the head that is missing a torso is your prime suspect.) Later they made cryptic reference to evidence that suggested they were from the Northern Caucuses. Not that the public had drawn any other conclusions.

Vladmir Putin vowed to “destroy” the people responsible for these actions. It seemed a very Putin-esque thing to say but I doubted “destroy” was the verb Russia needed. At least not at that hour. This was not an act of random mania; the Lubyanka and Park Kultury bombings were the latest installments in a conflict the runs deep into Russian history.

Days before the attacks I started reading Robert Service’s History of Modern Russia. As Service points out, the Russian empire staggered into the 20th century as a collection of peoples sharing little sense of common national identity.

The tsars were plagued by the nationalist ambitions of various parts of the empire. When socialist radicals toppled Nicolas II in 1917, their provisional government immediately split into factions over the question of how much autonomy each of the small states would be granted. That question reemerged eighty years later in the wake of Communism’s fall and been the bitter source of conflict ever since. Chechen demands for independence run counter to Russia’s economic needs – Chechnya has the nation’s only warm water port – but, more importantly, it assaults the nation’s identity. A nation that once helped define the history of the 20th century saw itself collapse and dissolve in the 1990s. Chechnya has become a sort of line in the sand for Russian politics: the nation will grow no smaller.

In my time here I’ve heard offhand comments, a kind of ambient racism directed at Chechens and other people from the Caucuses. The term “Caucasian” means something completely different here than it does in the United States. The olive-skinned, dark-haired people from the region are derogatorily referred to as “blacks” and accused of stealing jobs from Slavic Russians. They work in the lowest tiers of the economy, many of them, ironically, operating flower stands on Moscow’s streets. Yelena Khanga, a black Russian journalist in Moscow told me that these tensions are exacerbated by the bad economy and the belief among some business owners that the predominantly Muslim people of the Caucuses make better employees. Islam forbids alcohol and this is a country where alcoholism is a big enough problem that it is driving down life expectancy for Russian men.

But politics and history mean nothing to the families of 38 people who rode the red line yesterday. The scenes of people streaming up from the smoke-belching tunnels took me back to September 11th. I was teaching an American history class when the first tower collapsed. I told my students that the sum total of evil in history stems from the ability to view human lives as abstractions. None of those people on the train mattered to the two women who strapped on explosive belts yesterday morning. They were animate symbols, gears in the machinery of Russia. And thus another digit added to the tally of human failure, misery and, yes, evil.

A journalist told me that the red line was targeted because of the number of Russian civil servants who ride it. The first bomb was detonated in the Lubyanka Station, which runs beneath the headquarters of the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency. But the line also goes to Moscow University and the second blast struck just four stops away from the campus. I have been preoccupied with the thought that students may have been on the train ever since.

People have asked if I plan to cut my trip short. Interestingly, the thought had not occurred to me. I made a commitment to my students; I intend to keep it. And I would be trading this experience for the false security of home. In the cruel lottery of terrorism, none of us is ever really safe. I appreciated that question. After answering it I felt calm, rational, resolved. Like the Russians who I saw lined up at Shabolavka this afternoon to buy passes for the orange line, fully aware of what had happened and equally intent upon continuing with their lives. That’s what I felt this afternoon. What I feel on Wednesday as the southbound red line leaves Kropotkinskaya and slips into the station at Park Kultury is another matter entirely.

William Jelani Cobb is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Spelman College. His book, The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, will be published by Walker & Co in May 2010.