The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Yeltsin had decided to put an end to a forceful separatist movement in Chechnya, a small republic in the North Caucasus, on the border with Turkey and Georgia. He would use the army to dislodge the local government. But the Chechen resistance was well armed and possessed of ten times the resolve of the Russian troops, along with familiarity with the terrain and the support of the local population. What had been planned as a fast attack, essentially a police operation, turned into an all-out military offensive.

As new laws piled up, political discussion, such as it was, centered on the need to protect children: from drugs, from abortions, and, perhaps most important, from pedophiles.

a consensus emerged in parliament: they had in their ranks a “pedophile lobby” that was sabotaging the protection of children.

There were several points when Ukrainians who remained loyal to Kiev were referred to as “nationalists” and even as Nazis—and Putin pointed out that “such was the historical past of these territories, these lands, and these people.”