The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

It was as if the entire city was, without changing location, transported from its eerie everyday identity as a former military-industrial city closed to outsiders to some shiny Europe of the imagination. In exchange, Europe would someday put Perm on its map—as a capital, no less. This frantic ambition was contagious, especially because Chirkunov and his people made it clear that their vision reached beyond the arts: the governor promised to forge a new “economy of the intellect, where we will create not with our hands but with our heads.”10 The university, too, developed a vision of itself as a European institution. Lyosha knew that he fit in it well. His own vision was that he would soon be running Russia’s only LGBT Studies program. For now, he and Darya, the friend who had been teaching the one gender studies course, launched a gender studies center. It helped that Darya’s father was the dean of another department at the university. Darya and Lyosha got some funding for hosting conferences and publishing the proceedings. Their publications had no official status in the university, but this meant that they did not have to face an academic-review board. Lyosha was lucky. He had heard that a legal scholar in Novosibirsk had not been allowed to defend her dissertation on LGBT rights.11 In 2010, Lyosha presented at a conference at Moscow State University. His paper was titled “Gender Gaps in Political Science.” Only one person—a professor from St. Petersburg—had a question f...