The wave of intense hatred with which Russians had reacted to NATO’s Kosovo bombing campaign of 1999 had died down within a few months, returning the country to a sort of baseline level of anti-American sentiment, but now Gudkov was seeing it return, incongruously, in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Initially, the polls showed, Russians had reacted with sympathy and compassion, but very soon those feelings gave way to something else: the search for a way to blame the Americans themselves for the tragedy.
