The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

In 2006, Bikbov organized a conference on the sociology of prisons. Two prominent French academics presented, as did Bikbov’s seminar participants and several young people who volunteered at Memorial, the organization founded in the 1980s to tell the story of the Gulag. The combination of the subject matter and academics and students and activists in one room proved combustible. The students resolved to demand change at Moscow State’s sociology department.23 For a semester in 2007, students staged a series of protests. “Education at the department is a lie!” proclaimed their first flyer. The flyer claimed that staff faculty were forbidden to do original research: instead, they had to use multivolume textbooks written by the dean, Vladimir Dobrenkov, as the basis for all instruction.