The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

In March 1991, Gorbachev used tanks in the streets of Moscow to signal his resolve to put an end to pro-Yeltsin demonstrations—and hundreds of thousands of Muscovites ignored this signal. That month, as the country prepared for the referendum on the Union, Central Committee functionaries were frantically trying to keep the country in check. They banned a women’s forum planned in Dubna, a nuclear-science town a couple of hours outside Moscow, after a newspaper reported that among the young academics now hungrily cramming gender theory, older dissidents who had been publishing underground feminist journals, labor activists focusing on women’s rights, and a dozen foreign dignitaries, there would be two out lesbians from the United States. But one of the foreign guests—Colette Shulman, a New York journalist and academic who had long cultivated relationships among the Soviet elite—intervened, and the organizers’ arrangements were reinstated even though the newspaper, and the lesbians, rejected the request for a retraction.