The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

But what country was this? “Does the Soviet Union still exist?” became the conversation opener of the day, the week, and the autumn. The Soviet Union seemed to exist, but its form was elusive. Yeltsin’s Russian Republic summarily subsumed some of the Union’s governing mechanisms. Yeltsin also plainly strong-armed Gorbachev into canceling some of his first post-coup appointments. Most important, he made Gorbachev appoint an outsider of Yeltsin’s choosing to run the Soviet KGB and then added the dismantling of the agency to the man’s job description.43 On August 23 and August 25, Yeltsin signed decrees that suspended the activities of both the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Russian Republic’s own Communist Party. On August 27—five days after the coup—Yeltsin appointed Boris Nemtsov, Zhanna’s father, to run the Nizhny Novgorod region. Only three of Russia’s eighty-nine regions had leaders who had been elected, their posts newly created during perestroika: the mayors of Moscow and Leningrad and the president of Tatarstan. The rest of the regions were still run by Party structures, which were now literally, physically being abandoned.