The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

A group called the Union of Orthodox Citizens, which counted several well-known politicians among its leaders,26 issued a manifesto in defense of the sociology department: “There is no doubt that a concerted effort to foment an ‘orange revolution’ at Russia’s most important university is what stands behind the actions of radical youths and the students they have conscripted,” they wrote. Indeed, the sociology department was to provide a “training ground for a youth ‘maidan’”—Ukrainian for “square” but referring specifically to Kiev’s Independence Square, the geographic center of the Orange Revolution. This maidan would then spread to other institutions of higher learning. Along with Marches of the Dissenters, and, the manifesto added, “parades of sodomites,” the student rebellion “has every chance, come fall, to change the color of Red Square, turning it into an all-Russian rainbow ‘maidan.’”27 The statement was perfectly in keeping with the improbable assertion Lyosha had made in his thesis: a chasm was opening up in Russian society along the lines of sexual identity. The specter of gay liberation had emerged as a bogeyman much like the Freemasons, the Zionists, and the American financiers.