The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

The difference between this reward system and the old Soviet one of assigning privilege was that the new approach was more personalized and less systematized—each apartment was gifted on its own terms, at the discretion of the boss. Also, unlike the Soviet apartments, which nominally belonged to the state, these new ones became the property of the recipient, whether he stayed in his post for many years or for a few months.

It was also a very convenient and very uncomfortable place to live: you could get anywhere in the city fast from there, but the Garden Ring itself was so heavy with traffic at all times that one could not even open the front-facing windows, so much noise and filth would burst in.

Nemtsov had been sounding the alarm about the Russian state’s mounting debt. The government’s misleading laissez-faire attitude, which masqueraded as freedom, was, Nemtsov believed, simply failure to accept responsibility for an economy headed for implosion. Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, looking at the issue through the prism of his own experience as a member of the Soviet leadership, saw the triumph of the group he had found most intractable during the perestroika era.

Clifford Gaddy, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., made the radical claim that all of Russia’s reforms of the early 1990s had failed to budge the behemoths of the command economy, which continued, in all their illogical and profoundly unprofitable ways, to dominate the Russian economy. All the trappings of the new economy—the supposed market-based prices, the competitive salaries, and the taxes—were, according to Gaddy, nothing but illusions. He called it the “virtual economy,” coining the term long before the word “virtual” took on a different and more appealing meaning.

He, too, placed the blame on the unreformed, and politically powerful, core of the command economy: the enormous inefficient companies run by the very Mafia that worried Alexander Nikolaevich. The “robber barons” who concerned Nemtsov were kings of the “virtual economy.”

Nemtsov had been proposing monetary reform, which would have included dropping the value of the ruble—thereby perhaps making the entire monetary system a little less “virtual”—but these proposals were rejected. Instead, Russia borrowed more and more heavily, to prop up the currency. The debt became a pyramid, which collapsed in August 1998.

A seventy-year-old veteran of the foreign intelligence service who embodied the crumpled-gray-suit ethos of the Soviet bureaucrat, Yevgeniy Primakov, was finally confirmed to run the government. Nemtsov resigned: there was nothing he was going to be able to do in a Primakov cabinet.

In a survey conducted by Gudkov’s colleagues, a majority of the respondents—52 percent—said they felt “outrage” at the bombing, and 92 percent said they believed the bombing campaign was illegal. Twenty-six percent said they felt “anxiety,” and 13 percent confessed to feeling “fear.”14 Gudkov sensed that all three emotions—outrage, anxiety, and fear—were stand-ins for “humiliation,” the sense that Russia’s loss of status in the world had just been shoved in the country’s face.

There was no need to spell out that it was NATO, with its bombing campaign, that was attempting retroactively to “diminish the significance of our victory.” Yeltsin, thought Gudkov, was finally playing the card he had resisted using for so long: staking his own legitimacy on the mythology of the Great Patriotic War.

The NATO bombing of Serbia ended in May, with a negotiated agreement that turned Kosovo into a de facto protectorate of the Western powers. Peacekeeping troops began moving into position in the area, for what would clearly be a long stay. On June 12—which happened to be Russian Independence Day—British peacekeepers were slated to secure the airport in Pristina, the capital city. But the night before, two hundred Russian peacekeepers stationed in Bosnia suddenly marched across the border to Pristina and seized the airport. The operation seemed to have no strategic objective, or even a plan—the Russian troops had not made arrangements for supplies, and were ultimately fed by NATO troops who took pity on them.

After a week, Russia agreed to send about 3,600 troops to Kosovo to work alongside Western peacekeepers, effectively renewing its relationship with NATO—which had been severed when the bombing began—without accepting NATO command.

In less than three months, Yeltsin once again changed his mind regarding his successor, fired Stepashin, and appointed another gray, unremarkable man. This time, however, the heir apparent was a virtual unknown, the colonel Yeltsin had recently chosen to run the secret police, Vladimir Putin.

There was the miniseries TASS Is Authorized to Declare, in which a flawless and brilliant KGB officer exposes an American spy in Moscow. The spy’s handler, an American called John Glabb, is pure evil: not only does he organize pro-American military coups in small African countries, but he also traffics in heroin, which he packs into the bodies of infants purchased from impoverished families and killed for this purpose. He is also married to the scion of a Nazi fortune.

I mean it's no weirder or melodramatic than mat American movies .