The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

The Orange Revolution had not brought the change that the revolutionaries had demanded—indeed, Viktor Yanukovych, the once failed pro-Moscow candidate, had finally been elected president in 2010—but nevertheless, Ukraine had left the Soviet Union. Farther west, all three Baltic states had joined both NATO and the European Union in 2004. Several other post-Soviet states, including Ukraine and Georgia, were negotiating with these international organizations with an eye to possible ascension. Russia was moving in the opposite direction. In his state-of-the-federation address in April 2005, Putin stressed that Russia had to “first of all acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. . . . Tens of millions of our countrymen ended up outside our country’s borders.” The rest of that speech was a mishmash of familiar rhetoric—including the assertion that Russia was a European country that valued human rights and civil society—but the statement of grand regret framed the speech, and Putin’s politics.