The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

People found ways to circumvent the sanctions, of course. They labeled food products as being something other than what they were or originating somewhere other than where they originated. One could now buy seafood from landlocked Belarus. In the summer of 2015—a year after countersanctions were first introduced—Putin signed a decree ordering the destruction of all foodstuffs deemed to be contraband. The cabinet then published rules dictating that banned foods should be destroyed “by any available means” in the presence of two impartial witnesses and the process must be captured by photo or video. There was talk of crematoria and of mobile incinerators. Some people were taken aback. A government plan to destroy vast quantities of food—edible food, food that was undeniably in demand—would probably be bizarre in any country, but in Russia it might have seemed particularly shocking. This was the country of the man-made famines that had killed millions, the country of the Siege of Leningrad, of the postwar hunger, of the catastrophic shortages of the 1980s, and of the salary arrears and subsistence off tiny plots of land of the 1990s. The president’s own mother had nearly died of starvation during the Siege of Leningrad—this had been the obvious subtext of the outrage over TV Rain’s tweet—and now the president was ordering the destruction of food. Over a hundred fifty thousand people signed a petition asking the government to give banned products to the poor instead, and a few...