The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

A month after Levada was forced out of the center he had built, the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested. He had failed to observe the new rules of the game. He was not staying out of politics—he was giving money to political parties and civil-society organizations—and at a meeting at the Kremlin, called to give the wealthy an opportunity to pledge allegiance to Putin, he had spoken about growing corruption. Soon after, the state takeover of his business ensued, playing out just like the earlier purges of the oligarchs Gusinsky and Berezovsky—or like the purge of Levada, except that there was a lot more money involved. Khodorkovsky got his warnings and failed to heed them. Now he was arrested and charged with tax evasion. In short order his company—the world’s largest oil producer—would be expropriated by the Putin clan. Gudkov observed with bitter satisfaction that although the Khodorkovsky arrest was different from the others only in the scale of his business, at least it had gotten some of his acquaintances finally to start expressing reservations about Putin.