The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

He was alone only in his epiphany: unlike him, the other participants—Brits, Americans, and Ukrainians—lived and worked with others who were like them. Ukraine, he learned, had thirty-seven registered LGBT groups. The number boggled his mind. He had always thought of Ukraine as Russia’s simple provincial cousin, but this country had gender studies and queer studies theorists at several of its universities. And they were not revolutionary explorers like Lyosha: they had teachers. Lyosha had Darya, who was just a couple of years older—a peer, and a friend supportive enough that he sometimes forgot that she was the daughter of a dean, and straight. But then he remembered. The people here had mentors who had studied in the West in the 1990s. Lyosha felt not unlike Arutyunyan had felt nearly twenty years earlier, when she attended the training seminar abroad that delivered her “narcissistic blow.” Like her, he saw people standing on the shoulders of their predecessors who stood on the shoulders of their predecessors who stood on the shoulders of giants—while Lyosha stood all alone.