The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

This was yet another reason for family fights: Masha’s grandmother held forth on ethnogenesis, Masha’s mother screamed at her about the math that proved that everything was something else, and Masha’s grandfather shouted the loudest that all of it was a Jewish conspiracy. Sometimes he also mentioned the queers, but then Masha’s mother invariably pointed out that Tchaikovsky had been a homosexual and yet a great Russian composer. To Masha, she added that Freddie Mercury had been gay too.

These Russians: They are just like us.

Nemtsov had misjudged the situation badly: he thought that he could use against the ascendant oligarchs the tools he had honed at home, dealing with old Soviet-style bosses whose power had waned. He had also banked on his authority as a government official, not realizing that in Moscow power was never fixed but always contingent on one’s proximity to Yeltsin, and on his favor. The president continued to support Nemtsov’s plan in theory, but he grew irritated with the public battles and Nemtsov’s lack of skill in handling them.6 Nemtsov had insulted the oligarchs by calling into question their legitimacy and their talents, and now he wanted to take away their political influence and their prospective wealth. They owned the media. They often used it to fight one another, but now they united against him. Moscow journalists ridiculed him for the same reasons the rich girls at her school bullied Zhanna: his cluelessness about clothes and cars. He had worn white trousers to the airport on a hot summer day to greet the president of Azerbaijan, who had arrived for a state visit. This disgraceful breach of protocol was shown on television over and over.

There is a lot here to unpack; a lot of important lessons.

Nemtsov’s nationwide popularity rating, which had been around 50 percent when he arrived in Moscow, dropped to an undetectable level.10 He was no longer the president’s heir apparent.

Then, one day in August 1998, Tatiana’s bank card stopped working. All the money they had in the world was in that account. The word was “default.” Russia had stopped paying its bills, and this meant that the ruble tumbled, prices skyrocketed, panic set in, people ran to the banks to get their money, and the banks cut off clients’ access to their own accounts. In several cases, this still could not keep the banks from collapsing. Masha’s tutoring had to be suspended, as did the sending out of the wash. But what really frightened Masha was the prospect of having to go without sanitary pads. She had recently started menstruating, and Tatiana had told her that back in the USSR, they had had to use cotton during their periods (she omitted the fact that even cotton was not reliably available). What if Masha’s next period came before Tatiana could get cash, and Masha had to resort to cotton? What if “default” meant that sanitary pads would disappear from the stores altogether? The thoughts were too much to bear. Someone they knew, who worked for Procter & Gamble, had just been paid in products—toothpaste and pads—and Masha convinced her mother to barter something, anything, for an industrial-size box of maxipads.

This is important.

The government’s misleading laissez-faire attitude, which masqueraded as freedom, was, Nemtsov believed, simply failure to accept responsibility for an economy headed for implosion. Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, looking at the issue through the prism of his own experience as a member of the Soviet leadership, saw the triumph of the group he had found most intractable during the perestroika era. These were the heads of Soviet industry, who, in the central-planning system, held the posts of government ministers, but whom Alexander Nikolaevich called simply the Mafia.

Because there is so much overlap, in the state of things now in Russia, between the State and organized crime, this passage is an important signifier of the way things are headed.

All the trappings of the new economy—the supposed market-based prices, the competitive salaries, and the taxes—were, according to Gaddy, nothing but illusions. He called it the “virtual economy,” coining the term long before the word “virtual” took on a different and more appealing meaning. He meant that the country pretended to have entered a new economic age but in reality traded through barter and never fully met any of its monetary obligations. He, too, placed the blame on the unreformed, and politically powerful, core of the command economy: the enormous inefficient companies run by the very Mafia that worried Alexander Nikolaevich. The “robber barons” who concerned Nemtsov were kings of the “virtual economy.”

Uggh. Pay close attention to this right here. #Warren2020

The Americans were bombing Masha’s Serbian brethren in the land of the great director Emir Kusturica. In a survey conducted by Gudkov’s colleagues, a majority of the respondents—52 percent—said they felt “outrage” at the bombing, and 92 percent said they believed the bombing campaign was illegal. Twenty-six percent said they felt “anxiety,” and 13 percent confessed to feeling “fear.”14 Gudkov sensed that all three emotions—outrage, anxiety, and fear—were stand-ins for “humiliation,” the sense that Russia’s loss of status in the world had just been shoved in the country’s face. Primakov’s dramatic sulk over the Atlantic had reinforced this sentiment.

On June 12—which happened to be Russian Independence Day—British peacekeepers were slated to secure the airport in Pristina, the capital city. But the night before, two hundred Russian peacekeepers stationed in Bosnia suddenly marched across the border to Pristina and seized the airport. The operation seemed to have no strategic objective, or even a plan—the Russian troops had not made arrangements for supplies, and were ultimately fed by NATO troops who took pity on them. Back in Russia, the demonstration of pointless and unopposed military power played well. Masha and her friends cheered the siege of the airport in much the same way as they cheered a Russian soccer victory over Holland. After a week, Russia agreed to send about 3,600 troops to Kosovo to work alongside Western peacekeepers, effectively renewing its relationship with NATO—which had been severed when the bombing began—without accepting NATO command.

In less than three months, Yeltsin once again changed his mind regarding his successor, fired Stepashin, and appointed another gray, unremarkable man. This time, however, the heir apparent was a virtual unknown, the colonel Yeltsin had recently chosen to run the secret police, Vladimir Putin.

“So he’ll be our prime minister now?” asked Tatiana. “Weird.” She had negotiated insurance contracts with this man, and she was unimpressed.

There was the miniseries TASS Is Authorized to Declare, in which a flawless and brilliant KGB officer exposes an American spy in Moscow. The spy’s handler, an American called John Glabb, is pure evil: not only does he organize pro-American military coups in small African countries, but he also traffics in heroin, which he packs into the bodies of infants purchased from impoverished families and killed for this purpose. He is also married to the scion of a Nazi fortune.

Ahhh. Hahahaaa. That is amazing.

Masha had also read a lot of books of the sort on which these films were based. Her grandmother had an endless supply of them. The glossy jackets had all been lost, so the books were plain brown or gray. The aesthetic uniformity of the outside matched the contents, which reliably delivered a light thrill followed by a sense that all was right with the world. Around eighth grade Masha graduated from the gray and brown books to black hardcovers with red letters, the complete translations of Arthur Conan Doyle in eight volumes. Here the thrill was greater but the moral-satisfaction quotient lower. Masha missed that feeling. “I hope he is our next president,” she said of Putin.

Unlike most people he knew, though, Gudkov was painfully aware of the expectations most Russians were placing on the country’s next president: they wanted a savior, a leader who would be not merely decisive but dominating.

What happened over the next few months looked unbelievable. From August to November 1999 the number of those who answered “Yes” to the question “Do you think that Vladimir Putin is, on the whole, doing a good job?” shot up from 31 to 80 percent, and the number of those who answered “No” dropped from 33 to 12. On a graph, it looked like two vertical lines, a blue one going up and a red one shooting down.19 It looked like nothing Gudkov had ever seen.

Mhhhhhhhh. 😕

Russia had been in a state that Gudkov could only describe as depression—more a psychological than an economic one. The financial crisis of 1998, coming as it did just when life was starting to seem normal again and when hope had seemed warranted, had plunged people into the darkest darkness—precisely because it crushed the very fragile fresh sprouts of hope. Economically, people regained their footing relatively fast, but emotions did not follow—until Putin came along and eight out of ten Russians miraculously regained hope just by looking at him.

Fuck. Here we go.

In August and September the country was shocked by a series of apartment-building explosions that killed 293 people and injured more than a thousand. The government used the bombings as a pretext to launch a new offensive in Chechnya, reigniting the war that had once nearly cost Yeltsin the presidency. This time, though, Gudkov observed that while Russians’ hearts ached for the young men being sent to fight the war, virtually no one seemed to feel sympathy for the civilians in Chechnya, their ostensible countrymen who were once again being bombed. Another thing made this war different from the first Chechen one: this time the Russian offensive was seen as spearheaded by a leader. If Yeltsin came across as desperate and flailing when he began his war in 1994, then his own prime minister, restarting the war five years later, came across as brave, and as a defender of ordinary Russians. This impression was based primarily on a single utterance Putin made in response to the apartment-building bombings: “We will pursue terrorists wherever they are. At the airport, if they are at the airport. And that means, I apologize, that if we catch them going to the bathroom, then we will rub them out in the outhouse, if it comes to that. That’s it, the issue is closed.”

There has been evidence that this bombing was conducted by the State.

The more distant past became ever more appealing: now 26 percent believed that Stalin’s rule had been good for the country, up from 18 percent in 1994. Those who held a negative view of the Soviet dictator were now in the minority. Russians continued to think of themselves mostly as “open” and “patient”—the percentage of people who cited these qualities had grown. At the same time, respondents seemed to become more open-minded with regard to “deviants”: only 15 percent now wanted to “liquidate” homosexuals, down from 22 percent in 1994. But the number of those who would “leave them to their own devices” dropped too, from 29 to 18 percent. Russians now overwhelmingly wanted to “help” their homosexuals—an option that implied a sort of medieval model of helping the afflicted. Viewed in the context of epidemic nostalgia for the Soviet past, these results made sense: they represented yet another way of returning to the paternalistic state.

Gah. 😷

The other troublesome feature in this election was a change in public etiquette. Local and federal government officials made an effort to appear on television more often than during the off-season—this was normal. But this time they did not appear solicitous of their voters: they consistently expressed certainty in their victory, making the election sound like a ritual rather than a contest. Their tone reminded Gudkov of the bureaucratic entitlement of the Soviet period. Looking at the data, Gudkov and his coauthor, Boris Dubin, concluded that these two traits of the parliamentary election were symptoms of a single problem: the election had all the trappings of a political contest but lacked the substance of one. Democratic procedure, which had seemed a revolution in itself, was now the political equivalent of the “virtual economy” described by Gaddy—a mask pulled over a structure that refused to change.

A more precise term could be borrowed from Max Weber, whom Levada had had Gudkov study all those years ago. The term was “acclamation,” a process by which the governed affirm a choice already made for them.21 But Russians were acclaiming not only the candidates chosen for them by the bureaucracy—Putin chief among them—but also themselves, reaching for a sense of belonging, a sense of being with the majority that had been lost with the Soviet Union. What was felt as a void in the early 1990s had gradually been transformed into nostalgia, and now it could be focused on one person. It was precisely Putin’s lack of distinction, which had made Gudkov think that he was a temporary figure, that in fact made him the perfect embodiment of the Soviet leadership style. In his person, charisma met bureaucracy.

The bland 'red blooded, everyman-ness' of DJT is part of this. Homer Simpson raised in wealth. He comes from a space that tends to raise the inadequate and incompetent over Others. Image who would have occupied that role if America was more in love with a superideological, nostalgic image of itself. Like, Jeff Sessions and Mitch McConnell is our full "Gone with the Wind" part of us. DJT is our Archie Bunker, Homer Simpson, Larry the Cable Guy self. There is a bloodless and efficient part of this spectrum (analogue to where Putin is at in his space) that I don't think we have quite reached -- and maybe haven't yet seen; oh wait: Steven Miller and Steve Bannon; banal, milk toast, graft-taking bureaucrats of a certain blandness whom a public is willing to project a image of national values onto. We have no Supreme Gentleman as A-list representatives. There seems to be plenty enough scurrying around points of power to be concerned though.

He was cautious—he said that he feared seeing Putin fall into a trap set by the resurgent bureaucracy, what he called “the nomenklatura monster,” and when he heard Putin speak of the need to strengthen the state, his concern grew. Still, he thought the new president deserved a chance.3 And Putin, to him, certainly seemed saner than the outgoing Russian president. The way everyone seemed to be acting like this was normal, to take this gray little man, announce that he would be president, and watch him ascend to the throne three months later—the way everyone was unfazed by this, made Seryozha feel crazy. He had been feeling that way more and more often. At Moscow State University, where Seryozha was now studying computer programming, everyone seemed to have been waiting for Putin to come along. Seryozha did not even notice when his portraits began appearing, along with patriotic paraphernalia he had not noticed before: flags, flyers for Putin’s Unity Party, posters calling on everyone to vote in the hastily scheduled presidential election. This pretend election of a barely perceptible candidate who was the preordained winner made Seryozha feel like he barely existed himself. It was probably a good thing that his field required virtually no social contact with his fellow students: he could not have grasped their reality if he had wanted to.

This is a remarkable passage.

“Did you know you had a prostitute in your grade?” She explained that thirteen boys had locked the girl in question in a cellar and had taken turns having intercourse with her. “She couldn’t get out,” said this accuser, “and she liked it.” Over the course of the next few days, the story was recounted many times, as the male participants boasted of their roles in it. Their victim stayed out of school for a few weeks, and when she returned, she and Lyosha became friends. They were now a group of three: the Faggot, the Prostitute, and the Snob.

This is an amazing story. We'll see how these kids work out of this predicament.

In May 2001, toward the end of tenth grade, Lyosha and his two friends were hanging out at the playground behind his building. They were too old for playgrounds, of course, but in the absence of other public spaces all young people in Solikamsk hung out in playgrounds, especially when the weather was good. A girl strolled by—she was one of the kids who used to sleep in Lyosha’s stairway, except she was not a kid anymore. She called out to someone else who happened to be walking by, a man of about thirty. He sauntered over. She pointed at Lyosha. “Faggot,” she said. The man took a short running start and kicked Lyosha in the lower back. Then again. His eyes were crazy, empty and furious at the same time, and Lyosha knew that he was about to be beaten to death.

Situations like this are a larger part of navigating this country as has been for the past decade. Crimes like these are on the rise. It is the twin forces of steep positive movements overall (particularly the Supreme Court's decision on marriage equality in 2013) along with the backlash movement being ascendant in the last few years. The terror is committed at a more severe degrees, and amplified along its intended channels much further. Deep down I think the hate groups know that most of the ground has already been lost. This is a way a pity party works amongst the hateful, violent, and cruel. The most dangerous time for someone leaving a violent relationship is in the immediate interval afterwards. Sometimes extra procedural steps need to be taken in order to best protect against ad hoc, retributive violence. We haven't gotten that. I'm sorry this young man went trough this. It is not ok.

“I am gay,” he said to himself. He had learned the word from films on the cable channel. The beating convinced him that the word applied to him. There was a new counselor at school, a recent college graduate who had made it clear that she wanted to be Lyosha’s friend. He dialed her number now, from his sickbed, while his mother and stepfather slept in the next room. Lyosha’s courage ran out once she picked up the phone, though. They stayed on the line for five hours, alternating between filler chatter and awful silences. “Is this about something illegal?” she asked. “Drugs?” she asked. “Are you trying to tell me that you are gay?” she asked. “I am gay.” She was fine with it—more than fine. Lyosha was suddenly spilling his thoughts and feelings, and she sighed and laughed in all the right places. He was even able to talk to her about sex, or what he imagined sex to be. After that, he told his cousin, who was now a military-school cadet. The cousin said that he could not accept the homosexual lifestyle but he still loved Lyosha.

As it was reported earlier in the book, he had already started to come out to himself. This incident basically sealed it; and because of the vulnerability of it he put himself in the hands of some trusted friends. Thank God this went the way it did. It isn't always like that. And it has dire repercussions for kids, young adults, and older folks who don't get the support they need when stuff like this happens.

By May 2002, it was clear that Lyosha would be graduating with a silver medal, a scholastic distinction that would entitle him to skip general-knowledge university entrance exams: he had to sit only for the exam in whatever subject he chose to study. On the eve of graduation, Lyosha bleached one half of his bangs. At the breakfast table, his stepfather, wearing his perennial wife-beater undershirt, took a break from making his disgusting eating noises to ask: “Are you a faggot or something?” “None of your business,” said Lyosha.

Damn. This is a sliver medal kid right here.

In five days’ time he would go to the mayor’s office to pick up his silver medal. He would be out of there. Then it dawned on him that there was no turning back. Soon enough, the news of his coming out would spread through town. His life now depended on getting into university.

The stakes are real. His struggle is real, as we have seen. These kids don't let their families or their communities down. Why is it that it is often not the case the other way around? Seems pretty fucked up.

Tatiana could afford to pay for Masha to attend, but she refused, citing a central rule of her own life: “Never put yourself in a situation where you will be the smartest person in the room.”

This is a very good rule to have. In endorse it entirely.

At the apartment, women kept ringing the doorbell, saying they were faith healers sent by Masha’s aunt. Masha’s grandmother pushed an inexhaustible supply of books with titles like Cancer Can Be Cured. Everyone was insisting that Tatiana be baptized. It was a hot summer in Moscow. It got dark late, and cooled down even later. Only at night did Masha get to be alone with her mother, in a sort of peace. On June 30, Tatiana asked Masha to pick up a morphine prescription at the neighborhood polyclinic, which still, eleven years after the end of the USSR, had a monopoly on prescribing controlled substances, which could be dispensed only to citizens officially residing in the clinic’s catchment area. “It’s not time yet,” said the doctor. “Well, when it is time, why don’t you just let me know,” said Masha. “Since when are you allowed to speak to me like that?” asked the doctor. “Since my mother is dying,” said Masha. The doctor called the chief of the polyclinic, who had Masha removed from the premises.

😞😔 🙅🙆

They said that Masha had to wake up the neighbors because someone had to witness the removal of the body. It was three in the morning, and Masha felt bad about waking people up, but she was worried that soon it would get hot again and things would start happening to the body. While she was trying to decide what to do, the morgue’s driver left. The policeman remained and was now demanding money, a bribe, though Masha could not quite understand what for. She called her aunt again. She came, and so did Masha’s grandparents. The body was now cold and the skin had started changing color. It will be hot soon, Masha said. Her grandfather shouted at her, something about how the smell was the only thing she was worried about, and why was she not crying? Why was she not crying? Because she needed to be alone to cry, and she also needed a cigarette, she wanted to smoke more than anything in the world right now, but she had only recently turned eighteen and she still did not feel that she could smoke in front of her grandparents.

The company’s logistics director was dispatched to deal with the arrangements. Together with Masha’s grandparents and aunt, he organized a memorial service at a church. Masha tried to tell them that this was a bad idea, but she did not know how to explain it. They asked her if she believed in God, and she said that she did but she also loved and respected her mother, who had been an atheist, and they should respect her too. They said Tatiana was with God now.

Back in the dorm, talking to young women who were his new friends, Lyosha said, “Putin reminds me of some sort of miniature military dictator.” The women agreed. When he said “miniature,” Lyosha did not really mean Putin’s size—more the general sense that whatever frightening words his new books offered, the phenomena they were describing did not feel quite real. Lyosha, for one, did not have the sense of living in a military dictatorship, or a military anything, or any kind of dictatorship. He was a student at a very politically liberal department, where instructors ridiculed Putin mercilessly, as though engaged in some sort of competition for the wittiest put-down. The facts were there—in just two years, Putin had greatly weakened the power of elected officials by creating federal oversight over governors and giving the federal center the right to fire elected governors; reversed judicial reform; and monopolized national broadcast television in the hands of the Kremlin. So while his regime could not yet be called authoritarian, that seemed to be the direction in which it was headed. This transitional state, Lyosha learned, was called an “authoritarian situation”—meaning, authoritarianism could happen here.

Lyosha was on his way to Solikamsk for the weekend when the storm began, and when he got to his mother’s apartment all that the television would show him was footage of the theater hall, empty but for the bodies of the terrorists slumped over some of the seats. The chairs were a plush red, the terrorists were all dressed in black, and the scene reminded Lyosha somehow of a game of checkers. He learned from the radio that 129 hostages had died in the storming of the theater, which sounded like it had been botched—the sleeping gas that had been pumped into the space to disable the terrorists had ended up killing many of the hostages, although there were no pictures of those other bodies. So this is what an authoritarian situation looks like, thought Lyosha. A checkerboard.

Fucking up. And hiding bodies, showering the whole escapade in praise. Very much noted.

There was a rumor that Putin had seen Levada make an inappropriate face at some official function and had taken offense. The new president was getting a reputation for being thin-skinned and vengeful, and the old sociologist, for all his Soviet experience, had never had much of a poker face. The rumor may or may not have been true, and it was ultimately unnecessary for explaining what was happening to the center.

But it was the sociologists’ job to observe shifts in the logic and culture of institutions, and they saw it clearly soon after Putin took office. He moved to reassert executive-branch control not only over the media but also over the judiciary and, broadly, the economy. He instituted tax reform that was widely praised by liberal economists for the introduction of a flat income tax but whose other provisions served to push smaller businesses into the shadow; at the same time, Putin started placing his own people at the helm of large corporations that were owned by the state—and some that were not. His relationship with the oligarchs seemed to follow the logic of Nemtsov’s idea of “nationalizing the Kremlin”: he directed the very rich to forfeit their political power—and sometimes the assets that ensured this power. Two of the oligarchs who owned national television companies, Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, were forced into exile, but not before giving up control of their media outlets. And it was clear that in Putin’s Russia ownership would mean active control: the tenor and content of the television broadcasts were changing rapidly. The first thing to go was any programming that poked fun at the Kremlin.

The Putin regime taking control of massive amounts of private wealth is an important part of this story. He wasn't a billionaire when he entered office, but he is firmly one of Russias richest men now. He seems to inspire something in delusional hacks who chase wealth for its own sake, but I can't put my finger on what it is...Oh yeah: He's winning the race by the only metrics they are bound to respect - power and personal enrichment. Staring at the people with the far away look of someone who just farted in an elevator.

When Levada wrote his traditional year-end summary for 2000, he noted that it had felt to Russians like the easiest year in a long time. They had hope. They had little or no concern for the issues that disproportionately worried the liberal intellectuals, like the state takeover of broadcast media or the fact that Russia had now restored the old Soviet national anthem as its own, with the lyrics changed slightly, to omit references to Lenin and the glorious communist future.

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.

In the harsh electrical light at night the apartment looked worse than ever: peeling wallpaper, cracked plaster, every color a faded copy of itself. It occurred to Masha that Tatiana’s perennial idea that life was elsewhere really meant that she had expected life to happen later. Now she was dead at forty-three.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russians did not stop looking into the American mirror. What they saw now was humiliating: the United States was giving Russians handouts, sending them “Legs of Bush” and other food that Americans themselves did not want to eat. America was not just wealthier than Russia—so were many other countries, and some of them, like Switzerland or Saudi Arabia, were wealthier than the United States itself. But unlike an old European country, America did not apportion its wealth according to an entrenched class structure: it was a country of achievement and possibility for all—or so it claimed, and Russians believed this part. Nor was it a tiny oil dictatorship like the Saudis. America was the very definition of modernity; it was the country that Russia had failed to become. Here was a sterling example of Soviet-style doublethink: America was attractive and threatening at the same time, worth emulating and eminently hateable. Hatred for the United States had become a Soviet political and social tradition. And now Russia’s search for its own traditions infused this hatred with new potency. “I hate, therefore I am,” Gudkov wrote, trying to describe the driving force behind this new anti-Americanism. September 11 fueled the hatred because it engendered anxiety. Surveys were showing that Russians feared that a third world war would result from the attacks, though there was no consensus as to who the parties in this war might be. It was nonetheless—or all ...

In this picture, the United States defined itself by its relationship to Russia, just as Russia defined itself in opposition to and in comparison with America. In this picture, it made sense for America to give up on democracy now that the Soviet Union was no more. Most important, this picture affirmed the idea that building a market economy and an authoritarian—“almost totalitarian”—regime at the same time was not just possible but also right.

They got this twisted.

Twelve years after the end of the USSR, Russia still perceived its former subjects as parts of itself. Unlike clearly distinct foreign countries, former Soviet republics were referred to as the “near abroad” (Helsinki and Vienna are closer to Moscow than Kiev and Tbilisi, but the designation referred to psychic and political rather than physical distance). Relations with the “near abroad” were not even part of the foreign ministry’s purview: they were handled by the presidential administration itself. This was perhaps the most striking example of a Soviet institution that had been claimed by Russia in 1991 and preserved against the logic of time and space. “In essence, this maintained the Soviet system in which the Union republics reported to the Central Committee of the Communist Party,” Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar has written. “And since the presidential administration occupied the very same building in Staraya Square as the Central Committee of the Communist Party had, it so happened that the tradition had been maintained for decades, even though the Soviet Union no longer existed.”

The Kremlin had not expected this backlash. The protests were the stuff of nightmares. The protesters were the elderly and the feeble, and the state could not use force against them even when they were blocking roadways, as they did in cities across the country, or when they set up tents in the streets, as happened in St. Petersburg. Nor were the retirees the only people protesting. A slew of youth organizations seemed to appear out of nowhere. Some were radical, like the National Bolshevik Party, which had been rejuvenated by an influx of young people all over the country; they were demonstrating alongside or on behalf of the pensioners. Others were youth spin-offs or splinter groups of conventional political parties; these tended to model themselves, aesthetically, on Otpor (“Resistance”), the Yugoslav youth movement that had been instrumental in toppling Milošević. They staged small guerrilla-theater actions. Finally, chess champion Garry Kasparov, one of the best-known people in the entire country, announced that he was quitting the sport to devote himself to political struggle. He formed an organization called the United Civic Front, an umbrella coalition that could unite the pensioners, the Otpor imitators, and the National Bolsheviks and their ilk, simply because they all opposed Putin and the authoritarian regime he was building. Together, they staged marches, which they called the Marches of the Dissenters.

This is all nothing but strange games, an imitation of democracy. The candidates are copying each other’s platforms. You can tell ahead of time what they are going to say. What they are really doing is creating a one-party system, which is the road to authoritarianism. We’ll probably see parties that will pretend they are the opposition, or the quasi-opposition, and they will by turn kowtow to the government and criticize it. But their true function will be to prop up the one-party system. If the Bolsheviks had been smarter, they would have done this themselves—created a dozen such little bedbugs that will run up and down the body of society. ALEXANDER NIKOLAEVICH YAKOVLEV had never before let himself sound so testy in public. But in April 2005 he had just finished a lecture tour that had taken him across Russia, sapping his will and his wish to sound civil. “We are laying down a nationalist future for ourselves,” he told a journalist. The word “nationalist” remained one of the most damning in his vocabulary. “I am seeing Stalin’s mug displayed everywhere, every day, and people are eating it up. It is the face of a nationalist, a chauvinist, a murderer. But we are being told that if we look into it, he wasn’t so bad.”

Why do so many people idealize the past? It’s the “leader principle.”* It’s a disease. It’s a Russian tradition. We had our czars, our princes, our secretaries-general, our collective-farm chairmen, and so on. We live in fear of the boss. Think about it: we are not afraid of earthquakes, floods, fires, wars, or terrorist attacks. We are afraid of freedom. We don’t know what to do with it. . . . That’s where the fascist groups come from, too—the shock troops of tomorrow.

This was Alexander Nikolaevich’s last major interview. He died in October 2005, a few weeks short of his eighty-second birthday.

The “virtual economy” problem described by Clifford Gaddy was not solved: about half of Russian industry continued to lose value. But these companies were not represented on Russia’s tiny stock market, which was dominated by oil and gas companies—so the stock market grew and grew. By 2005, the oil and gas rents far exceeded the needs of the federal budget, which allowed money to be deposited in a reserve fund, which, in turn, could be used in an emergency—like when the fires of the pensioners’ protest had to be put out.

After a few days, Masha figured out that she was part of the hospital’s corrupt survival strategy. Russia had instituted a system of mandatory health insurance, a state-run policy that reimbursed hospitals. But this was a facility that no one would voluntarily choose, so at night, ambulances would deliver policyholders to this hospital in exchange for kickbacks. This was what had happened to Masha. Once she was hospitalized, the doctors placed her under an infectious-diseases quarantine, making it impossible to transfer to another facility. Back at home, something strange happened to Sergei. Instead of doing what any normal husband would do in this situation—asking his mother or Masha’s grandmother to come and take care of the baby—he bonded with his son. When Masha came home, she got the sense that Sergei was now more of a parent than she was. He let her join in, and they stayed home for the next year, mothering their baby and running their website.

Hm. This is a rollercoaster of a couple of paragraphs.

Putin had responded to the pensioners’ protests by announcing mammoth government investment in social services. The investment was divided into four different “priority national projects.” The first year, Russia invested about $2 billion in the four projects, and the following year the amount went up. The largest share of the money went to National Project Health. It was designed to radically modernize Russian medicine.19 Health care and research institutions began importing vast amounts of medical equipment and the chemicals and parts required for it to function. Because the funds were federal, all purchases had to go through the health ministry, where kickbacks accounted for 80 to 90 percent of the expenditures. But foreign suppliers, bound by their national laws, could not accommodate the kickback schemes or pay the bribes at customs. This was where the “distribution company” stepped in. It was Masha’s job to ensure that the corruption premiums were paid but the paperwork looked clean. She got an excellent salary.

“He’ll do what he wants when he decides it’s time.” She also made it clear to him that she did not want to know any of the details: she asked no questions, welcomed no confidences, but also never said anything pejorative. Still, things felt a bit better after Lyosha broke up with Alexei. Galina seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. What had happened was that Alexei had brought someone home when Lyosha was there. Lyosha had reluctantly agreed to an open relationship, but this was unbearable. Lyosha ended the relationship, but he also made a promise to himself to rid himself of jealousy. It was an unproductive emotion. If he ever had a boyfriend again, he would be mindful of the need for a variety of experiences and would be tolerant of indiscretions as long as the boyfriend did not fall in love with another person. The relationship with Alexei had made Lyosha wiser. Back in the dormitory now, he became a bit of a love guru: female students came to him for advice, and so did the mother of one of his female classmates.

Finally, Lyosha found himself at a birthday party where Sasha was also a guest, and someone introduced them to each other. Sasha asked Lyosha specific questions about his studies and a recent trip Lyosha had taken to a conference in Moscow: Sasha had clearly done as much research on Lyosha as Lyosha had done on him. Lyosha, for his part, already knew that Sasha came from a struggling family, that his parents drank and he had a half-dozen siblings, and that he had tried and failed two or three times to get into Perm Polytechnic. They were, by now, a couple of years into their strange courtship.

This is an amazing meet-cute.

They left the party together, with a young woman. They walked her home, and then Sasha walked Lyosha home, explaining that the streets were rough and he himself had such a long way to go to his apartment on the outskirts that the detour made no difference. There was no physical contact: Lyosha was cool, open but not rash. He regretted it the next morning.

Haha. Look at these crazy kids.

Lyosha decided that what they needed was to speak in person, not in the mall or in the street, but in private. Sasha just needed to feel safe. Lyosha found a classified-ad newspaper in which people offered apartments for rent by the day. He called, he paid, he picked up the key and called Sasha with the address. He cooked supper and waited. Sasha came. He said, “I can’t.” He said, “I’m sorry. I should not have let this go on. I can’t. I hope you can forgive me.” Lyosha said, “Don’t ask me to forgive you. I just hope you can forgive yourself.” Lyosha thought it was all too much like a movie, and a very long one: somehow, it took them four hours to say those things to each other. Then Sasha left, and Lyosha left too, because the last thing he wanted now was to spend the night in this apartment.

Aw. 😔