MOSCOW — The snow fell softly all day in Moscow. It fell on Boris Yeltsin as he left the Kremlin as an ordinary citizen. It fell on shoppers slipping through the slushy streets searching for last-minute holiday gifts.
And it fell on 10-year-old Katya Keymakh as she twirled boldly if unevenly on the ice at a central Moscow skating pond, watched proudly by her videotaping father, Vladimir.
"It was time for Yeltsin to go," the 36-year-old said, brushing the snow from his lens. "We've been prepared for this for a long time--that's why we react to it calmly. The fact that we are replacing the president with the prime minister is not going to change our lives at all."
During his eight years as president, Yeltsin repeatedly turned his country upside down and his countrymen's lives inside out. Which may be one reason why so many Russians responded to his abrupt New Year's Eve resignation with far more relief than surprise.
"By now, we're immune to these shocks," Keymakh said.
Outside the Kremlin in the afternoon, even as Russia's Security Council was handing over the nuclear codes to acting President Vladimir V. Putin, workers were nonchalantly constructing a sound stage for the night's New Year's revelry. A few teens were getting a head start on the festivities, setting off fireworks and rockets when police weren't looking.
In the GUM shopping arcade on Red Square, families strolled through the glass-ceilinged corridors, nibbling ice cream cones and soaking in the holiday atmosphere--and seemingly oblivious to the political drama underway a few hundred yards away in the Kremlin.
Goga Shkitin, 36, surrounded by shopping bags, snatched a few moments of rest by sitting on a wooden fire equipment box. He said he doesn't doubt that the 68-year-old Yeltsin resigned in order to ensure an easier victory for Putin in the presidential election in March. And he said he is certain that Yeltsin deliberately chose New Year's Eve to make as big an impact as possible on the rest of the world.
"But in Russia," Shkitin said, "our holiday will continue. We're used to all this. We don't frighten easily."
While the timing of Yeltsin's resignation ensured that he would capture the world's attention on the last day of 1999, in Russia it seemed to have the opposite effect. New Year's is the biggest holiday of the year, a private time of family gift-giving, and many people seemed too wrapped up in their own festivities to spare much reflection for the departing president and the end of his era.
