The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

for seryozha, who had spent a summer in the castle-like dacha where Gorbachev was held hostage, the failed coup offered an unremarkable spectacle. He knew the girl whom the entire country watched coming out of the airplane draped in a blanket. He was used to seeing his intimates on television. What struck him more was the short conversation his father had with him. Anatoly said that he had spent the three days in front of the White House. He said it with disgust: he had hated feeling helpless, unarmed in the face of tanks.

Seryozha's grandfather Alexander Nikolaevich had been at the Moscow City Council building, where the local government was organizing its own resistance effort. He had addressed the crowd. "The most frightening thing that could happen, has happened," he said. "Never before has our land seen days so tragic."⁴² But while Gorbachev thanked Yeltsin and his allies for their help in resisting the coup, he had no words of gratitude for Alexander Nikolaevich. He did not see his old ally when he returned to Moscow, and when questioned during his press conference, he reproached Alexander Nikolaevich for having caved in to the hard-liners and resigned from the Party. It seemed there might not be a place for Alexander Nikolaevich in the leadership of this new country to which Gorbachev claimed to have returned.

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. Yeltsin began appointing presidential "representatives" to these regions, signing off on dozens of names a day—mostly people he did not know, who had been hurriedly recruited by his staff. Nemtsov was an exception. Yeltsin knew him and liked him, and after spending three days in the besieged White House together, they started playing tennis with each other whenever they could. Nemtsov was thirty-one, and he would now be running Russia's third-largest city and the surrounding area. This was one of Yeltsin's more considered appointments.⁴⁴

The union treaty, meanwhile, was crumbling. Gorbachev continued negotiating, but so did Yeltsin. The Russian president pressured the Soviet one finally to recognize the independence of the Baltic states. Even the republics that had seemed to favor the Union before the coup now declared independence. Gorbachev, however, kept trying to convene meetings on the treaty. But Ukraine, the second-largest republic, now boycotted them. Finally, on December 7, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus convened a meeting at which they devised the formal dissolution of the USSR and invented a consolation prize, a vague entity called the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev was not invited, and was not even the first to know: he was informed by the Belorussian leader only after Yeltsin had called the American president, George H. W. Bush, to notify him. Gorbachev raged to reporters a few days later: "I don't think our people understand yet that they are losing the country. The country will not exist!"⁴⁵

Less than two weeks later, on December 25, Gorbachev addressed his countrymen as president for the last time: "In light of what's happened, with the foundation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I am resigning my post as president of the USSR."⁴⁶ The Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Masha and her mother were on the train to Poland, valid passports of a nonexistent country in Tatiana's bag.

six

THE EXECUTION OF THE WHITE HOUSE

seryozha remembered this. He was on a Metro train, on his way home from school, and when the train emerged from the tunnel onto the bridge over the Moscow River, Seryozha saw tanks. He got off at the next stop to board the train going in the opposite direction so that he could ride over the bridge again and look at the tanks. Then he did it again, and again, and again, until it was dark.

When he was an adult, he wondered whether this was a memory from 1991 or 1993. He checked Wikipedia, but then he forgot. He checked again, and searched for a mnemonic device, but then forgot again. Eventually he resigned himself to looking it up every six months or so.

seryozha could be forgiven for being perpetually unable to pin down what had happened to the country in which he was born: much older people, learned observers and passionate participants in the events alike, had similar difficulties. Several narratives finally emerged. Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy has argued that the USSR collapsed because it was an empire in the century that ended empires: the process may have taken longer and looked different from the deaths of other empires because of the peculiarities of Soviet state-building and ideology, but that did not change the forces that pulled the Soviet Union apart.¹ Zbigniew Brzezinski, who predicted the Soviet collapse —and the 1991 coup—wrote that a basic paradox would bring the country down: its economy had dead-ended, and to survive economically it would have to reform politically, which would

inevitably destroy the state's entire system. But if, he posited, the country wanted to preserve its political system, it would fail

economically.²

More than a decade later, Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin wrote the story of the Soviet collapse as precipitated by Gorbachev himself, by oscillating between pursuing reform and not, constantly trying to fight a process he had set in motion.³ In other disciplines, University of California at Berkeley anthropologist Alexei Yurchak has also written that the Soviet Union was brought down by its own paradoxes, falling into the gap between the governing ideology and lived reality—a gap that exists and can produce a crisis in any society.⁴ And, of course, Yuri Levada and his team of sociologists predicted that the Soviet Union would die off because Homo Sovieticus, who held up all of its institutions, would go extinct.

With the exception of Brzezinski, who was a student and theorist of totalitarianism, and Levada, who proposed the Homo Sovieticus model, all these explanations try to make sense of the demise of the USSR in terms imported from very different societies. The loss of the social sciences in the Soviet Union made this inevitable: Soviet society had been forbidden to know itself, and had no native language to describe and define what had happened. The occasional fortochkas that opened up the possibility of self-examination were usually too small to allow scholars to adjust and adapt imported models, or to invent their own. Yurchak, who grew up in the Soviet Union but received his graduate education in the United States in the 1990s, provides probably the most obvious example of the ill fit of foreign models. He lacks the tools to explore the ways in which the gaps between ideology and reality in the Soviet Union differed from the gaps in Western countries, for which his model was devised. In functioning democracies the contradictions between avowed ideals and reality can be and often are called out, causing social and political change. That does not eliminate the built-in gap, but it has a way of making societies a little more democratic and a little less unequal, in spurts. Totalitarian ideology allows no such correction. Hannah Arendt maintained that any ideology can become totalitarian, but for that to happen it needs to be reduced to a single simple idea, which is then turned into a single simple idea from which the ostensible "laws of history" are derived—and enforced through terror.⁵ What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it. There is no gap between totalitarian ideology and reality because totalitarian ideology contains all of reality within itself.

That quality of Soviet ideology is also the problem with Plokhy's argument that the USSR fell apart because it was an empire. Not only did the Soviet state not consider itself an empire, it claimed to be the opposite of one. That self-concept did not change during the Soviet dismantling or later, when Russia became its own federation of different territories, cultures, and ethnic groups. Of course, one can argue that an empire does not stop being an empire just because it says it is not one—a dog does not stop being a dog just because it identifies with its friend the cat—but an empire is unarguably a sociopolitical construction, and what it thinks of itself matters. To pass, like other empires in the twentieth century, into a post-imperial future, Russia would have had to reform its identity accordingly. But not even Yeltsin, who played perhaps the most important role in taking the Soviet Union apart, thought of it, or of Russia, as an empire.

Kotkin's explanation for the disintegration of the Soviet state is, essentially, mismanagement: Gorbachev flailed until nothing worked. Kotkin's is a view from the top of the process of institutional collapse that Levada had predicted from the bottom. But neither man focused on the connections between persons and institutions, the glue that holds societies together.

When the word "totalitarianism" is used in casual Western speech, it conjures the image of a monstrous society in which force is applied to every person at all times. Of course, that would be impossibly inefficient, even for an extremely inefficient state such as the Soviet Union. The economy of force in totalitarian societies is achieved through terror. Totalitarianism establishes its own social contract, in which most people will be safe from violence most of the time, provided they stay within certain boundaries and shoulder some of the responsibility for keeping other citizens within the same boundaries. The boundaries are ever-shifting—Arendt described totalitarian societies as producing a state of constant flux and inconsistency⁶—and this requires the population to be ever-vigilant in order to stay abreast of the shifts. A hypersensitivity to signals is essential for survival.

one area in which Soviet citizens learned to be hypersensitive to signals was the regulation of private life. The party line on the family kept changing over the course of Soviet history. Right after the 1917 Revolution, marriage was abandoned and the family was willed to wither away. Less than twenty years later, the family was officially redeemed and even consecrated as the "nucleus of Soviet society."⁷ In the years immediately following the Revolution, homosexuality was tolerated (but, contrary to myth, not celebrated or even really accepted), but in 1934 it was recriminalized.⁸ As the pendulum swung back, divorce was made prohibitively difficult, and abortion, legal and common in the 1920s, was outlawed.⁹ Faced with a crisis of depopulation after the Second World War, the Soviet Union first made divorce even more difficult and then reversed direction, taking measures, instead, to encourage single motherhood by legitimizing, in effect, multiple relationships.¹⁰ In the mid-1950s, however, abortion was again legalized.¹¹

The legal shifts demanded that Soviet citizens change not only their behavior but also their very outlook on life—and the social contract dictated that the state send out reasonably clear signals and the population react accordingly. Signals were sent through propaganda in newspapers, movies, and books; through legal changes; and through enforcement, with demonstrative punishment of the few keeping the many in line (the proportion of those being punished to those observing shifted after the death of Stalin, and this solidified the principle of teaching by frightening example). It was this system of signaling and response that broke down by 1991.

The milestones of the breakdown were large and small. In 1988, Gorbachev released all political prisoners. The same year, Novodvorskaya and her allies held that outrageous congress founding the country's first alternative political party, the Democratic Union, and ignoring the threats and summonses from the KGB (which their party proposed to abolish). The way Gorbachev was zigzagging, the release of all political prisoners did not mean that dissidents would never again be jailed—it was the Democratic Union's rejection of the KGB's signals that made the secret police powerless against them. In March 1991, Gorbachev used tanks in the streets of Moscow to signal his resolve to put an end to pro-Yeltsin demonstrations—and hundreds of thousands of Muscovites ignored this signal. That month, as the country prepared for the referendum on the Union, Central Committee functionaries were frantically trying to keep the country in check. They banned a women's forum planned in Dubna, a nuclear-science town a couple of hours outside Moscow, after a newspaper reported that among the young academics now hungrily cramming gender theory, older dissidents who had been publishing underground feminist journals, labor activists focusing on women's rights, and a dozen foreign dignitaries, there would be two out lesbians from the United States. But one of the foreign guests— Colette Shulman, a New York journalist and academic who had long cultivated relationships among the Soviet elite—intervened, and the organizers' arrangements were reinstated even though the newspaper, and the lesbians, rejected the request for a retraction.¹²

The Russian politician Yegor Gaidar described similar incidents in his memoir. In the late 1980s he served as economics editor at Kommunist, a journal of the Central Committee.

Kommunist pages now contained words that had been unthinkable as applied to a socialist economy: inflation, unemployment, poverty, social inequality, budget deficit. We published the first realistic estimates of military spending. . . . Periodically a call would come in from the Central Committee's headquarters.

"What are you doing? Since when is this issue subject to public discussion?"

Such calls were generally easy to handle. I would ask in response, "Don't you know?" The caller, a bureaucrat who could not be sure of what the latest party line was, would shrink back and leave me

alone.¹³

The Party's signaling system had ceased functioning, and this in turn rendered the ideology no longer hermetic—in effect, no longer totalitarian.

Four months after the women's forum, the two American lesbian activists and their Soviet partners held a gay and lesbian film festival and a series of workshops, first in Leningrad and then in Moscow. Mindful of the feminists' experience, they made backup arrangements in case they lost their venues. But the festival proceeded without incident, in a centrally located "house of culture" in Leningrad and a similarly central movie theater in Moscow. Both venues belonged to the state, but by now they could be rented for a few hundred dollars. The organizers were able to bring into the country reels with gay-themed films, though neither censorship nor criminal penalties for homosexual conduct had been abolished. At the end of the festival, they even rented a restaurant in central Moscow and held the country's first nonclandestine gay party. By this time, Moscow had a few "cooperative" restaurants—a perestroika-era euphemism for newly legalized private businesses—but this was not one of them: the gay party was held at the Central House of the Workers of the Arts, which for six decades had served the elite who serviced the ideology.

In the four months between the feminist forum and the gay festival the government had not shifted its stance on homosexuality or on private life more generally, but between rapid political change and new economic exigencies—every venue needed hard currency— the system of signaling and response, the very social contract of Soviet society, lay in ruins. At one point during the Moscow leg of the festival, the police meekly tried to seal off the movie theater from the street by stringing construction-site flags around it. The gays cut these down with scissors, and the shows went on. In another three weeks, many of the people who had attended the gay festival were in front of the Moscow White House, preparing to push back the tanks. The American activists had given the Moscow gay group a photocopier, and it was now put to work printing Yeltsin's address to the people.

The tanks were there but never moved in on the protesters. Gaidar later described what happened as follows:

As of August 19, 1991, there was nothing in Russian or Soviet history to give one hope that the resistance would not be brutally suppressed. The coup leaders were clearly prepared to do just that. All that was needed was someone willing to accept immediate responsibility for large-scale bloodshed and mass repressions, someone who would organize and demand action from the troops, someone who would identify the most reliable, trustworthy, and decisive of generals and place him on the leading tank, assigning to him personally the task of crushing the resistance. In other words, there had to be a person who would overcome the military's natural inertia and reluctance to accept blame. As it turned out, there was no such person among the coup plotters. Hence the back-and-forth, the inconsistency of action, the will to shift responsibility onto

others, and the military's wheel-spinning.¹⁴

The coup organizers, in other words, tried to will the signaling system back into existence simply by issuing several decrees—and by placing the country's president under house arrest, which has to rank near the top in the hierarchy of signals—but the social contract could not be resuscitated. The army did not respond to the hard-liners' signals, but it did not pick up on signals from Yeltsin's White House either, and did not side with the resistance: it simply did not act.

for the post-soviet intelligentsia and Western journalists and politicians, the most important moment in August 1991 came after the coup failed, when a giant statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, was removed from its pedestal in the middle of Lubyanka Square, a short walk from the Kremlin, a block from the Central Committee, and right in front of KGB headquarters and the

Children's World department store, which stood kitty-corner to each other. The toppling, mandated by the Moscow City Council, which wanted to beat the jubilant crowds to it for safety reasons, symbolized the simultaneous dismantling of the two pillars of totalitarianism: ideology and terror. As it was lifted by a crane, the giant monument was revealed to be hollow.

Neither Masha nor Lyosha nor Zhanna nor Seryozha remembered the toppling of Dzerzhinsky—which was televised—as the defining moment of the coup. They remembered the tanks in the streets, the ballet on television, Yeltsin on the tank, and Gorbachev on the plane. Lyosha also thought he remembered footage of Gorbachev under house arrest, but that was probably an acquired memory rather than a true one. In general, they remembered the coup not as the end—or the beginning—of an era, with a strong symbolic finale, but as one in a chain of confusing and exciting and sometimes frightening events that engaged the adults in their lives. Another such event for Lyosha was the murder, later in 1991, of Igor Talkov, a young bearded singer who performed heartrending pop songs of a new patriotism—Russian rather than Soviet. Lyosha's mother had a boyfriend now—she would marry him before the year was out—and he followed newly emerging popular culture. Like everyone else in Russia, Sergei loved Talkov. He was watching the Song of the Year contest on television when the announcer said, "Talkov has been shot." Sergei and Lyosha, sitting next to each other on the couch, saw the singer's body being carried on a stretcher; he was wearing only his underwear. Sergei cried, and so did Lyosha. It was the most frightening thing he had ever seen.

The August coup looked like only one in a chain of important events from at least one other vantage point: that of Yeltsin. He spent all that year waging his war for Russia. He was fighting on at least two fronts simultaneously, against the Party conservatives, who opposed all reform, and against Gorbachev, who wished to rein in Russia's and Yeltsin's own political ambitions. Yeltsin won several battles that year: in March he defeated Gorbachev in the battle for the streets of Moscow; in June, when Russia declared sovereignty, he won a battle against both of his opponents—a battle for the hearts of Russians. When Yeltsin triumphed over the coup in August, he

eliminated one of the fronts in his war. With hard-liners no longer a force, it was just him against Gorbachev. On this front, victory was virtually assured.

In the intelligentsia's mythology, 1991 was the year of Russia's bloodless revolution. But it was not bloodless: its victims included the three men who died in Moscow in August and the nineteen people killed in Vilnius and Riga in January, and the hundreds who had died in Azerbaijan since 1988 and during the brutal breakup of a demonstration in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1989.¹⁵ Nor was it a revolution. For the remainder of 1991 Yeltsin focused not on destroying the institutions of the Soviet state but on taking them over. He claimed, for his newly independent Russia, the army, the central bank, and the Soviet seat in the United Nations. Wisdom in the West was that this was a good thing: most of the Soviet nuclear arsenal would be in one place, and Russia would not renege on its predecessor's foreign debt, as the Bolsheviks had done in 1917.

To a very hopeful, very anti-Soviet eye, Yeltsin might have appeared to be tackling the pillars of the totalitarian system, its machines of ideology and terror. He banned the activities of the Communist Party and he tasked his (nominally, Gorbachev's) new head of the KGB with dismantling the organization. But on closer inspection, the Party ban concerned economic activity—Yeltsin feared, with good reason, that the Party apparatus would siphon off what remained of its wealth. The dismantling of the KGB was actually its partitioning into fifteen constituent parts among the republics of the USSR, which ensured that Russia inherited a functioning Soviet- style secret police.¹⁶

By the end of 1991, Yeltsin had a country to run. But even with the former institutions of the Soviet state under his control, he faced a dire deficit of instruments of governance, and of people to use them. He appointed leaders of the constituent members of the Russian Federation—in some cases, leaders who had already emerged locally, whether they called themselves "governor," "mayor," or "president." Only a few of them were, like Boris Nemtsov, loyal to Yeltsin personally and committed to his political agenda, with its focus on the immediate introduction of the market. Nemtsov set about privatizing stores and other property in Nizhny Novgorod. An endless stream of foreigners—potential investors, Western advisers, journalists, and dignitaries—flowed into the city to talk to him. Yeltsin did not have other regional leaders to show them.

In several regions, especially Chechnya and Tatarstan, the local leader had been brought to power by a movement for national independence. Elsewhere, like in Yakutia in the far north, home to Russia's diamond mines, the push to secede was framed in terms of economic self-interest. Even a group in St. Petersburg proclaimed independence as the region's goal, only half in jest. The constitution of the Russian Republic, unlike the constitution of the USSR, did not guarantee the right to secession, but that seemed irrelevant now.

The forces pulling at Russia now were eerily similar to those that had torn apart the Soviet Union. There were also new, confounding problems. Russia was a country nearing economic ruin, surrounded by other countries nearing economic ruin. It shared a currency with them and its borders with them were porous, yet Russia held next to no political sway over them. One of these countries—Georgia—was sinking into civil war, and the neighboring regions of Russia—North Ossetia and Chechnya—were already involved in the conflict. The South Ossetians, on Georgian territory, were fighting to secede and join Russia. Over to the west, a small part of Moldova called Transdniester was fighting to join Russia, from which it was now separated by a narrow strip of independent Ukraine. Russian troops were mired in the conflict there. Russia now also acquired an exclave: Kaliningrad, the former Prussian city of Konigsberg, which had been annexed and Russified by the USSR after the Second World War and now had independent Lithuania between it and the Russian mainland.

The legal and political foundations of the new state were not entirely clear. It had a parliament of sorts, the Congress of People's Deputies, which had been elected in 1990, before Russia declared sovereignty. At its first session, in May 1990, 920 of its 1,068 members belonged to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A year later, only 767 Congress members remained in the Party. But even after Yeltsin banned the Communist Party's activities, a majority —675 people—maintained their Party affiliation. The Congress could pass legislation, including amendments to the constitution. The president had the right to veto legislation, but his veto could be overcome with a simple majority of the Congress.¹⁷

There were laws. Like every other former Soviet republic, Russia inherited criminal and civil procedure codes that banned private enterprise in nearly any guise, operations with hard currency, and being unemployed, among other things. Russia also inherited a constitution that contained virtually no information about the country's structure, principles, and identity. This was an issue common to all former Eastern Bloc countries, with the exception of East Germany: all they knew about themselves at first was that they were not what they had been. The peaceful-revolution narrative (which was more accurate in most of the other countries) compelled them to start their new state on the old legal foundation. Their success depended largely on implied political understandings. Countries amended their old Communist constitutions to make them workable, and lived with the resulting patchwork for years. But here, as in other areas, Russia's problems ran deeper because its inherited constitution did not aim to create even an illusion of statehood.

In the late fall of 1991, Yeltsin scrambled to create a functioning cabinet. He most urgently needed someone to take charge of the economy, which after the coup went from bad to dead. Both trust in and fear of command-economy authorities had evaporated, and collective farms halted grain deliveries to the centralized distribution centers: rather than fulfill their socialist obligations in exchange for worthless rubles, they would barter their goods locally. Russia's biggest cities, where the military-industrial complex dominated the economy, were hit the hardest, for they had little that could be bartered. "The country was in a state of high anxiety," Gaidar the economist wrote in his memoir. "Autumn 1991 was filled with anticipation of catastrophe, hunger, and the paralysis of transportation and heating systems. Portable coal stoves were in high demand. The dominant topic of conversation was survival."¹⁸ Ration

cards had long been introduced throughout the country, but local authorities could no longer guarantee a supply of even minimal rations.

Yeltsin asked Gaidar to figure out how the country was going to survive. Gaidar was the thirty-five-year-old scion of a privileged Soviet family, grandson of two of the country's most venerated writers and husband of the daughter of a third.* Save for a short stint as an editor, he had worked only at research institutions. He assembled a team of like-minded economists, starting with half a dozen and later adding a few more. All of them were roughly the same age and came from academia. They had no experience in government or administration of any sort, and with the exception of a few recent short trips to the West, they had never seen a market economy outside of a textbook. Their predicament was not unlike that of Levada's sociologists trying to devise their first actual survey, except this group of theoreticians was asked to prevent famine and a total collapse of the infrastructure while also reinventing the country's economy.

The group spent the fall of 1991 holed up at a government dacha outside Moscow. In the first few weeks they learned that the situation was even more dire than they had imagined. The country had no currency or gold reserves—most had been spent and the rest appeared to have been plundered. Because consumer goods had been in short supply for years, and also because prices for all goods were set by the government without regard for cost or demand, people had accumulated a lot of unspent rubles—there was no telling exactly how many. Between that and the inability of the Russian government to control the supply of rubles in the economy—because the neighbors could print them too—there was little to no hope of being able to stem inflation if consumer goods became available and price controls were lifted. But the only way to make consumer goods available seemed to be to lift price controls. "It became clear that the situation was mercilessly dictating only one option: the most conflict-ridden and riskiest scenario of starting reform," wrote Gaidar.¹⁹

In November 1991, Yeltsin appointed Gaidar his minister of the economy and finance with the rank of vice-premier. Yeltsin decided to run the cabinet himself, without appointing a prime minister—in no small part because no one wanted to accept a suicide mission—and this meant that Gaidar would in effect run the government. To ensure that reform could go forward, Yeltsin secured the right to issue decrees that contradicted existing law, provided the Congress signed off on them.

on January 2, 1992, the government lifted price controls on consumer goods, with the exception of bread, milk, and alcohol. In a couple of weeks, goods began showing up on store shelves. Within a month, prices had gone up 352 percent and the money that Russians had thought of as savings and Gaidar had thought of as a dangerous cash surplus had been spent.²⁰ In an effort to avoid continued hyperinflation, the government pursued a stringent monetary policy. For most Russian citizens, this meant that on the one hand they were paid in large wads or small bags of cash, and on the other hand they could not afford most of the goods that were now accosting them everywhere. In January 1992, Yeltsin signed a decree legalizing private commerce, and private citizens began trading. They stood on the sidewalks holding their wares—sometimes a single raw steak or a fried chicken, exposed, because wrapping supplies were a deficit and a luxury. Many of them had clipped Yeltsin's decree out of the newspaper and pinned it to their jackets to protect them from the police. The orderly gray streets of Soviet cities came alive, vibrating with the sight of varied goods, the voices of people hawking them, and the overwhelming sense of uncertainty. Gaidar's reforms may have averted famine and total infrastructural collapse, but the anxiety they produced far exceeded anything that had come before. By the end of the winter, Yeltsin's honeymoon with the Congress was over.

A majority of the people's deputies adopted a stance familiar from the perestroika era, when the parliament's main task was to challenge central authority. The Congress wanted reforms stopped or even reversed, and it wanted Gaidar out. Yeltsin would not budge, and his

cabinet continued along its path. Where local authorities cooperated, stores and services were privatized. By the summer, the government discontinued all subsidies of consumer goods, including bread, milk, and alcohol. Inflation stabilized at levels well below hyperinflation. From the point of view of Gaidar and his team, this was success. From the point of view of many Russians, this was unemployment, no longer hidden, as it had been under the old regime, with its pretend work for pretend pay. Not only had it been exposed, it was growing, thanks to falling production, and wages that had become laughable. The Congress began blocking presidential decrees—for example, one that would have introduced bankruptcy as an option and a procedure. Wrote Gaidar:

As we moved forward, more and more obstacles presented themselves. Our progress felt strange. It did not resemble climbing a mountain: however steep and dangerous it may be, the end result depends only on you, your strength, and your perseverance. It was more like trying to make one's way through a tar pit: the path is unstable beneath your feet, sedge is cutting your skin, mosquitoes are getting in your eyes, and a single misstep can plunge you into

the liquid blackness.²¹

In other areas, Yeltsin was walking a similarly uncertain path. In March, almost exactly a year after Gorbachev's referendum on the Soviet Union, Yeltsin organized the signing of the Federation Treaty, the founding document of the new Russian union. This was not a promising beginning for the country: the document was hazy, and the signing was rocky. The federation included three different categories of members, with different degrees of independence from the center. Two republics—Tatarstan and Chechnya—refused to sign; both considered themselves independent states. The otherwise unremarkable Kaluga region, just a couple of hours from Moscow, signed but added a caveat. St. Petersburg added three—among other things, it refused to recognize Moscow's right to declare a state of emergency in the region.²² The imposition of a state of emergency

followed—not in St. Petersburg, but in North Ossetia and Ingushetia, where armed conflict over territory erupted in 1992.²³

By the fall of 1992, even Nemtsov, the poster boy for economic reform, was begging the cabinet to slow down.²⁴ But the cabinet pressed on with ever greater urgency. By the end of the year, it approved a privatization plan for Russia, according to which every one of the country's 148 million citizens would receive a voucher that could be turned into shares of any newly non-state-owned enterprise. The Congress generally hated the idea, but agreed to let it proceed. Soon after, the people's deputies demanded that Yeltsin get rid of Gaidar: until he did, they would block every one of the president's initiatives.

The new Russian prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, looked much more the part of a Russian, or, rather, Soviet official. He was fifty-four, came from a working-class family in a small town in the steppes, and had risen through the ranks of the Communist Party, from which he never resigned. He had been a member of the Central Committee, and his last job before joining the cabinet had been as head of the state's natural-gas monopoly.²⁵ He promised the Congress to stem the fall of production and to keep the population from growing poorer. "A market system need not be a bazaar," he said.²⁶

Chernomyrdin failed. He tried to reverse some of Gaidar's policies, but he lacked the cooperation of most of the cabinet. Russian politics had returned to its pre-coup state: the president and his cabinet, hardly a united front, were in an all-out war with the Congress. The hastily patched and repatched old Soviet-Russian constitution made matters worse because it did not delineate the responsibilities and powers of the branches of government. As large industrial plants began privatizing, corruption became a major force once again, with officials scrambling to apportion property, whether or not they had the right to do so.²⁷ With the president and Congress at war, there was no chance of adopting a new constitution. Instead, the Congress began to discuss, ad nauseam, impeaching Yeltsin. In a televised address on March 20, 1993, Yeltsin declared that the country's political crisis stemmed from "a deep contradiction between the people and the old Bolshevik anti-people system that still has not fallen and that now aims to restore the power it has lost."²⁸ Yeltsin said he was revoking the Congress's power to block his decrees and was scheduling a referendum for April 25. Russian citizens would be asked to affirm their confidence in the president and to vote on the draft of a new constitution.

It did not work. Yeltsin's move itself was unconstitutional, and the Constitutional Court invalidated it. Yeltsin got his referendum, but only on the following four questions:

Do you have confidence in the president of the Russian Federation, B. N. Yeltsin?

Do you approve of the social and political policies pursued by the president and cabinet of the Russian Federation since 1992?

Do you consider it necessary to hold early elections to the office of the president of the Russian Federation?

Do you consider it necessary to hold early elections of people's

deputies of the Russian Federation?²⁹

Leading up to the vote, Yeltsin's supporters flooded the airwaves with a chant: Da-Da-Nyet-Da, "Yes-Yes-No-Yes." Flyers with the same rhythmic sequence were handed out on every corner. This was, in essence, the first election campaign in post-Soviet Russia. Yeltsin got nearly the vote he wanted: Russians answered "Yes" to all four questions, but the margin on question 3 was very small. The Constitutional Court had ruled that early elections would require a majority of all eligible voters, not merely those who had gone to the polls, and question 4 did not get that despite the fact that the number of those who said "Yes" was more than twice that of voters who said "No." Yeltsin declared victory, but he did not have legal grounds to schedule a new parliamentary election.

In the days immediately following the referendum, Yeltsin fired his vice-president, General Alexander Rutskoi, who had taken to siding with the Congress, and began to push measures that the cabinet considered important. One was a set of changes to Russian criminal and procedure codes that brought them into line with minimal European standards. These included penalties for the use and mishandling of biological weapons, the criminalization of kidnapping, and the decriminalization of consensual homosexual intercourse.³⁰ All of these changes were required for membership in the Council of Europe. This legislation went largely unnoticed, including by the prison authority, which neglected to instruct wardens to release men convicted of sodomy. There had been bigger news that day: Yeltsin unveiled the draft of a new constitution and invited the federation's constituent republics to start submitting amendments.³¹

Within a week, Russia's political setup reverted to its pre- referendum state of ongoing, slow-burning crisis. The people's deputies produced their own draft constitutions, at least two of them. None of these documents had a chance of garnering enough support from all branches of government to begin the process of shaping the law of the land.

on September 21, 1993, Yeltsin issued a decree dissolving the Congress and scheduling a new election for December 12. The Congress refused to recognize the decree and instead anointed General Rutskoi the country's new president. Just two years after the coup that finished the Soviet Union, history was repeating itself in a B-movie version. Now it was the opposition to Yeltsin that barricaded itself in the White House—several hundred men and a few women—their supporters gathering outside. The country once again had two men who called themselves president. This time, again, the people who thought of themselves as proponents of democracy were supporting Yeltsin, who they thought had waited too long to take action against his political enemies. If they feared anything, it was that he would not carry through. Veronika Kutsyllo, a young journalist for the leading newspaper Kommersant, which positioned itself as the voice of the new entrepreneurial class, was inside the White House along with a group of other reporters:

Before the clock struck midnight, we got a chance to grab some coffee in the cafeteria and discuss the situation. We concluded that the thing everyone had been wishing for, long and passionately, had happened. The president had finally violated the Constitution ("He has stomped on it," I added as a point of clarification), and this meant that in accordance with Amendment 6 to Article 121, the president is automatically removed from power. That makes Rutskoi president and the parliament happy. Yet it's clear that Yeltsin is not about to retreat. That creates a stalemate. He needs to take the next step, it needs to be decisive, but what will it be? Our peace-loving leader surely won't want to use force to get the

deputies out of the White House.³²

The 1991 coup had exposed the collapse of the Soviet social contract. That void had not been filled. Russian citizens still carried Soviet passports with a hammer and sickle on the cover, paid for food with Soviet rubles decorated with profiles of Lenin and the Soviet state seal, and could not even be sure of the name of their country. Was it Russia? The Russian Federation? The constitution still called it the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, but the constitution was a thing to be stomped on, and Yeltsin's most important supporters—the new journalists—thought he was not doing it with enough force.

Even though Yeltsin had spent months considering his move to dissolve the Congress, he was no better prepared than the coup plotters two years earlier. He had no plan of action in case the people's deputies, in full accordance with the constitution, refused to disband. Worse, his opposition had stronger evident ties to the military, the police, and the KGB than he did. And unlike Yeltsin in 1991, the men—and a few women—who had now barricaded themselves in the White House had access to weapons. They began handing them out to their supporters in the street. At the same time, the Congress voted to institute the death penalty for Yeltsin's key supporters. In response, the cabinet had the phones in the White House turned off.³³

The standoff, punctuated by ever more virulent public statements on both sides, lasted nearly two weeks. The heads of the

Constitutional Court and the Russian Orthodox Church brokered negotiations, and these failed. On October 3, armed supporters of the Congress stormed the Moscow mayoralty and the federal television center. For a time, TV screens went blank—or, rather, gray—with an announcement in white type: "Broadcasting on Channels 1 and 4 has been disrupted by an armed mob that has forced its way into the building." Nearly a hundred people died during the attack on the television center. The armed mob, directed by General Rutskoi, went on to storm the Ministry of Communications, the customs office, and other federal buildings. Gaidar, who was now back in the cabinet, serving as minister of the economy, issued a radio address in which he once again called on civilians to come out and protect Yeltsin, as they had done two years earlier. In the evening of October 3, Muscovites began coming out into the streets. The cabinet was mobilizing civilians because it could not be sure that the armed services would side with it: there was no law and no force that could compel them to do so.

This time, though, the military chose sides, and it picked Yeltsin. By the morning of October 4, tanks had pulled up to the White House. At seven, they began firing, aiming at the upper floors, apparently to provide the people's deputies and their supporters the option of evacuating the building. Still, when soldiers finally forced their way in, they found about forty bodies. Twenty military men died during the storm. The White House burned into the night, visible for miles around: it was by far the tallest building in the neighborhood. In the morning, it looked like a giant decayed tooth. The casualty total was 146 dead, over a thousand injured, and at least two thousand arrested.³⁴

Yeltsin scheduled a parliamentary election for December. A referendum on his draft of the new Russian constitution would be held the same day. There would be no parliamentary discussion of the document, because until then, there would be no parliament. For the first time in a year and a half—virtually for the first time since the end of the Soviet Union—Yeltsin had a firm hold on power. The hold was based not on law but on force. But the fact that Yeltsin had been able to resort to force stemmed from a new understanding in Russian society, though the nature of that understanding could not be clear to anyone in the immediate aftermath of what became known as "the Execution of the White House."

arutyunyan noticed that very soon after the Execution of the White House people began conflating the events of 1991 and 1993. The two sets of barricades, two sets of politicians holed up in the White House, two television gray-outs, and two sets of deaths and arrests melded into one. All of it settled in memory as "politics," and the charred remains of the White House stuck out in the Moscow landscape as a daily reminder that in politics, anything is possible. Looking at it, one wanted to stay as far away from politics as possible.

Masha's grandfather, who had been such an ardent Yeltsin supporter, had had a political change of heart. He now spent his days reading the emergent ultranationalist press, newly known as the red- brown part of the political spectrum for its combination of Communist and brownshirt fervor. Boris Mikhailovich took to reading antisemitic passages out loud. Tatiana diagnosed this as senility and told her daughter that such was the tragedy of old age: Boris Mikhailovich, who had been an articulate, if generally quiet, opponent of the Communists his entire life, was now aligning himself with people who were not only brown but also red. More to the point, after his brief love affair with politics, Boris Mikhailovich was angry and disillusioned, and the "red-brown" press was the vehicle most immediately available for the expression of his disgust with politics.

Evgenia was no longer involved with any political party. Gay activism had also suddenly lost its way after Yeltsin repealed the sodomy law for no reason that had anything to do with actual gays and lesbians in Russia. She decided to boycott the December 1993 election: the idea was, clearly, to create a pliant parliament and to ram through a constitution drafted behind closed doors, and she wanted nothing to do with either. But if she was going to vote for anyone, she would pick Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his Liberal Democratic Party.³⁵ Its platform, and Zhirinovsky's public

statements, were anything but liberal or democratic. The Western media called him an ultranationalist. Russians were more likely to see him as either a clown or a truthsayer.

Unless we get back the historical borders of Russia, at least those that existed before the 1917 Revolution, or those that corresponded to the 1977 [Soviet] Constitution, we are slowly going to degrade and die out. . . . That is what the West wants. The West is afraid of us, and this circumstance must be made use of in the resurrection of Russia. When I speak of this, I am accused of being a "fascist," a "Hitler scaring other people." We have been feared for a

millennium. That is our capital.³⁶

That passage from a 1993 speech, and many others like it— Zhirinovsky was a prolific speaker—certainly sounded like ultranationalism. But his speeches were both more and less than that. They promised a return to simplicity after years of the soul-searching that perestroika had demanded, and the mind-numbing economic and legalistic debates of the Yeltsin years. They were triumphantly anti- political.

If Evgenia and Boris Mikhailovich were merely listening to people who were flirting with ultranationalist and fascist rhetoric, then Dugin was going to the source. He had grown fascinated with Hitler's philosophy and system of governance. He produced and narrated a documentary movie series called The Mysteries of the Century: The Mysticism of the Third Reich, a close study that mixed archival research and rumor. The first episode asked whether it might be true that Hitler had access to "ancient knowledge" that led to the invention of the atomic bomb. Dugin also wondered aloud whether it was possible that evidence of the Nazis' satanic practices had been elided from the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials. The film hinted at a Western conspiracy to conceal the true nature of Hitler's power, and also promised perhaps to show how a disillusioned society could be brought to cohesion. "The streets are filled with the Brownian motion of disappointed Germans," explained the voice-over to footage of early 1930s Berlin. "But a drop of some magical catalyst has already

fallen into this mass and chaos will soon turn to order. Every loser in this desolate world of profit-driven decisions and outdated religious dogma will be transformed. He will follow a Holy Grail that will grant him power over all the world." Cut to footage of Germans marching in formation and throwing their hands up in the Hitler salute.³⁷ The three-part miniseries was broadcast on Russia's two leading federal channels in the fall of 1993, and Dugin, who was on-screen for minutes at a time, leafing through what looked like archival documents and telling a story of mysticism and world domination, became famous.

On election night, the country's leading television channel was broadcasting the returns live. Sixty percent of voters approved of the new constitution—enough to make it the country's foundational document in accordance with the very low bar set by Yeltsin's September decree. Of the thirteen parties that had succeeded in getting on the ballot during the very short campaign, eight got enough votes to sit in parliament. Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democrats were firmly in the lead with 23 percent. Russia's Choice, the government's party, led by Gaidar, got 15.5 percent. The Communist Party came in third with 12.4 percent. "Russia, you have lost your mind!" shouted a well-known writer, Yuri Karyakin, who had been invited as a guest commentator. Then he stormed out of the studio.³⁸

seven

EVERYONE WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE

for zhanna, politics ended in 1991. Until that fall, everything that happened on television had also happened in the Nemtsov family kitchen—first in the strange wooden house in central Gorky, and then in the two-rooms-plus-a-kitchen they had been granted a few bus stops from the center of town. When conversation did not concern elections and reforms, it centered on food and shortages, which led right back to reform, and elections.

But when Boris was appointed governor in 1991, they moved to a dacha in a village created for the Party elite just outside the city— which, much to Zhanna's relief, was no longer called Gorky, or "bitter," but had recovered its pre-Soviet name, Nizhny Novgorod. The village was designed to feel like a piece of heaven that could exist anywhere, so it seemed as if the Nemtsovs had left familiar space and time altogether. Zhanna spent most of her time biking around the village, collecting berries in the lush surrounding woods, and playing with the cat, Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov. Food was no longer an issue of importance, because there was plenty of it. Politics, which had been the subject of animated conversation at the kitchen table, turned into a set of incomprehensible words, which Boris recited like a mantra: "privatization," "investment," "infrastructure." These magic words seemed to transform Zhanna's father into a celebrity. The foreign advisers who flocked to town took up residence in the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, a medieval fortress where Boris now had his office; World Bank economists and Peace Corps advisers were quartered there side by side.¹ Journalists and foreign officials came to see what Moscow was advertising as the Nizhny Novgorod miracle.

"So what, then, is the situation in this ancient city of merchants, a place that has declared itself unabashedly open for business, a genuine enterprise zone where local officials are pushing ahead with real economic reforms faster than anywhere else in the country?" asked a Chicago Tribune correspondent in September 1992. His report was mixed. Nizhny had held the first public auction of grocery stores just five months earlier and had also since privatized 22 percent of the three thousand small businesses in the city. Nemtsov had devised an ingenious plan for solving the most vexing problems of privatizing enterprise: the shops and restaurants were sold free of debt and also free of the obligation to retain old employees—but some of the proceeds from each auction were deposited in a fund for those who lost their jobs as a result. At the same time, the privatization was temporary: in most cases, the new storekeepers could secure only five-year leases, because their businesses were located in large apartment buildings that would not be privatized until the following year. Worse, the storekeepers' ability to do business was impeded by infrastructural obstacles old and new: a Soviet-era trucking monopoly that controlled deliveries, and tax rates that changed from month to month, at one point rising to some 85 percent of profits.

And then there was the American who opened a restaurant only to be denied access to the city's water system, and the hotel whose manager "delights in gouging his foreign guests, barring them from the restaurant and, often, simply refusing to rent them rooms." This happened to be the city's only hotel in a state of reasonable repair, so most of the foreign visitors tried to stay there, opening themselves up to humiliation.² Still, the reporter found one example of spectacular positive change: what had been Municipal Cheese Shop Number 11 was bought by employees at the city's very first auction, cleaned up, restocked, and rechristened Dmitrievsky. It even stopped shuttering for lunch in the middle of the day.

Margaret Thatcher, the retired British prime minister, came to visit in 1993. As she later wrote in her memoirs, rumors of Nemtsov's

commitment to a "radical programme that some called Thatcherism" had reached her back in London:

Nizhny Novgorod's saviour was, I found, frighteningly young (in his mid-thirties), extraordinarily good-looking and gifted with both intelligence and shrewdness (which do not always go together). . . .

The Governor and I took a walk down Bolshaya Pokrovskaya Street. All the stores were privately owned. Every few yards we stopped to talk to the shopkeepers and see what they had to sell. No greater contrast with the drab uniformity of Moscow could be imagined. One shop remains vivid in my memory. It sold dairy produce, and it had a greater selection of different cheeses than I have ever seen in one place. I ate samples of several and they were very good. I also discovered that they were all Russian, and considerably cheaper than their equivalents in Britain. I enthusiastically expressed my appreciation. Perhaps because as a grocer's daughter I carry a conviction on such matters, a great cheer went up when my words were translated, and someone cried,

"Thatcher for President!"³

From that point on, Dmitrievsky's director kept three pictures on her desk: Jesus, Mary, and Margaret Thatcher.⁴

The visiting foreigners included a young American who seemed to follow Nemtsov everywhere and whom Zhanna liked because he was always cracking jokes. On the whole, though, she resented her father's new job, because he was coming home late and no longer had time to help her with her homework. He asked a physicist friend who often stayed at the dacha to help her instead, but Zhanna found his explanations confusing and unsatisfying. She took to begging Boris to take her to work with him, but soon realized that she hated it: her father's workday seemed to consist of driving from one town or collective farm to the next, stopping every time the car crossed an invisible border between districts and having a full banquet served on a tablecloth spread on the hood of the car. With vodka the most important element of each of these feasts, Zhanna's father's conversation grew duller with each passing hour and dried up completely by mid-afternoon.

In a memoir Nemtsov wrote much later, he explained the origins of his strange banquet habit. When he was first appointed, his deputy, an older and more experienced politician, told Nemtsov that if he wanted to be taken seriously, he would need to drink with every local boss in his region, including the directors of some five hundred factories and the heads of about 750 collective farms. Nemtsov whittled the list down to four hundred and set about the project of sharing a bottle of vodka with each of them. In about a year he realized that his health had deteriorated, his body had become permanently swollen, and he was generally exhibiting the symptoms of alcoholism familiar to most Russians. He also noticed that he had assimilated attitudes typical of the Soviet political establishment, which was suspicious of any man who did not drink.⁵

In some ways, Nemtsov proved more adaptable than his young daughter. She got used to the dacha easily, but she could not make peace with the black Volga, the perennial nomenklatura car, that now took her to school in the mornings. She asked to be dropped off about five hundred yards from the entrance, even though everyone knew she was the governor's daughter and expected her to be chauffeured. And though she liked that her mother no longer had to spend her days struggling to procure food, the way foodstuffs now showed up at their dacha made Zhanna uneasy. At holiday time—New Year's, Victory Day, and the anniversary of the Great October Revolution every November—something frighteningly extravagant, like an entire roasted baby pig, would show up on the doorstep, as though placed there by the invisible and indestructible hand of the Soviet privilege machine.

while zhanna was struggling to accept the cars and roast piglets, Seryozha had woken up one day to their absence. His grandfather still led a political party, still served on commissions—but in 1991, along with the entire Gorbachev establishment, he was rendered irrelevant to the machinery that ran the country. Seryozha's parents divorced that year. His father moved out. Everything was different now.

Seryozha changed schools. His old school was in the neighborhood, and his classmates there were other children from the Czars' Village, plump and blond. Multiple black Volgas pulled up to the building in the morning to deposit them in an environment that, from the start, reminded Seryozha of the way he had seen prison shown in films. During breaks between classes, the children walked around the school vestibule in a circle, in different-sex pairs, holding hands. If a child asked to be allowed to go to the bathroom during class, he was likewise paired with a student of the opposite sex, who had to stand guard outside the lavatory. This system of opposite-sex pairing was one of peer control: that the children could not actually enter the bathroom together ensured there would be no collusion and truancy; making children walk in circles with someone of the opposite sex—someone who, at that age, could not possibly be a friend—bored them into passivity.

Seryozha's new school was in a dilapidated building in the messy center of Moscow. Children did not wear uniforms, march in formation, or in any other way resemble Seryozha's old classmates. School Number 57 had long been an oasis of freethinking in Moscow: it was a math-and-science high school under the old regime, a place where ideological controls were slightly relaxed to facilitate the production of minds useful to the Soviet military-industrial complex. During perestroika, the school was allowed to start offering primary- level education. Seryozha now joined the children who had been the first entering first-graders. Their parents—linguists, writers, and one psychoanalyst—tensed up at the appearance of a child of the nomenklatura who would now be studying alongside their offspring, but grew to accept him, because the times were meant to be changing.

To Seryozha, entry to School Number 57 felt a bit like the Russian bathhouse where his grandfather so liked to go: a jarring sequence of warm comfort, extreme overstimulating heat, and dips in an ice-cold pool. He liked the lessons—most of them centered on an experimental classification of all worldly phenomena as either "bags" or "chains," meaning sets and sequences, and this made good sense. The school's social world, however, was harsh and convoluted. The class was divided into castes, with four extremely bright and charismatic boys at the top. They made up games that were worlds unto themselves, governed by rules and plots accessible only to their authors and their handpicked playmates. Seryozha was rarely invited. When he was allowed a peek into their world, he saw ghosts, spirits, and cosmic vampires. The second social tier consisted of boys and girls whose parents belonged to the same circles as the parents of the boys at the top—the Moscow intelligentsia that was now feeling confident and free. Seryozha was generally accepted by this second caste, but he felt a bit different from them, perhaps because his language and habits came from another world, or because their parents viewed him with suspicion. In his mind, Seryozha belonged to a third caste, in which he was perhaps alone. Still, he was not one of the kids at the bottom—the misfits, whom the rest of the class called "the untouchables" when they were not calling them something far more insulting, like bomzh, a new acronym for a new phenomenon: someone who was homeless.*

So rigid and cruel were the divisions these ten-year-olds created that one day their teacher canceled a regular biology class in order to teach them the plot of Lord of the Flies. Everyone was deeply impressed, and nothing changed in the way the class dynamics operated. Seryozha had a sense that what happened in class mirrored the new ways of life for the adults. He had been born into a small world where everyone stood on equal footing and was affirmed and appreciated simply for being, not for doing anything in particular. Adults were talking about this a lot now, and their words—"snobbery" and "inequality"—described his experience too.

Perhaps it was because the other children had not spent their childhoods behind tall fences that Seryozha also felt like a bigger child—or, to be more precise, like a smaller child—than everyone else. Soon after he finally became close friends with two boys in his class, both of his friends developed crushes on the same girl and fought about it, and Seryozha went home and cried himself to sleep over the fact that his friends felt pain and caused each other pain and he could do nothing to alleviate this pain or even to understand it.

Seryozha's mother, who taught at Moscow State University, could not have made ends meet on her salary (which, in the past, had been largely irrelevant because the nomenklatura distribution system had provided a safety net). Unlike other professors, though, she had their large Czars' Village apartment, and she took a boarder, a Belgian man. He had a car, and he paid Seryozha a dollar to wash it. That bought a couple of cans of Coca-Cola at a new kiosk right in Red Square, a ten- minute walk from School Number 57. What had been sacred ground was now home to commerce. The honor guard still goose-stepped to their post at the entrance to the Lenin Mausoleum and stood there perfectly motionless, but there was no longer a giant line of people waiting to see the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution in his glass coffin. After the Execution of the White House, Yeltsin ordered the honor guard removed, and on October 6, 1993, the last two soldiers to have had that duty departed with a casual wave.⁶ In 1990 Seryozha and his classmates from his old school were inducted into the Little Octobrists at the History Museum at the entrance to Red Square. Now he treated his new classmates to Coca-Cola here. It felt like freedom.

It seemed that Seryozha's grandfather was experiencing something similar. Alexander Nikolaevich no longer had his Central Committee dacha behind the tall solid fence but he had been granted a dacha in an Academy of Sciences village, just one rung lower on the ladder of privilege. The house was opulent by Soviet standards and most of the world's standards, but Seryozha had never seen a smaller house. Still, it sat on a plot filled with century-old pines, and the trees, combined with the size of the yard, made it feel like the only house for miles. Alexander Nikolaevich had always wanted a yard with a pond with fish in it, and now his son and his grandson were endlessly pushing wheelbarrows of soil off his property as what would one day be the pond grew deeper. In the old days, there would have been conscripts around to do the digging and push the wheelbarrows, but now, Seryozha understood, the Yakovlevs lived like regular people, the way his grandfather had always preferred.

When Seryozha was in eighth grade, his father and a couple of friends decided to organize a home school for their children. Seryozha lost touch with children from School Number 57. He spent the next four years speaking only to members of his family and the other two teenagers at the home school. They did not become friends. He had no friends, or people, other than his grandfather, who understood him in this world.

for lyosha, economic reform began with soap. Lyosha's mother amassed scores of what was called "household soap"—hard, sharp- edged bars that looked like greenish-brown bricks. When none of the imported better-smelling and nicer-looking alternatives were available, the highly alkaline soap could be used to wash clothes, dishes, skin, and hair, and even to make a nasal rinse that was said to cure a cold. Teenagers said it killed acne. Some claimed it could burn off a wart. It probably killed everything in its path—to keep hair from falling lifelessly after washing with "household soap," one had to rinse it with vinegar. "Household soap" was the only thing Galina could get for her ration cards in 1991, so she stocked up. The bars formed a fifth wall in their bathroom.

The same year, Lyosha saw something he had never seen before: a chicken that consisted only of legs and thighs. Until then, "buying a chicken" meant bringing home a bluish rubbery-looking thing that Galina held over the flame of the gas stove to singe the copious remnants of feathers before cooking. Now she brought home leg quarters, each of them nearly as large as a whole chicken. She said that these were "Legs of Bush" and then explained that Bush was the name of the American president and he and Gorbachev had struck an agreement to send to Russia the dark-meat parts of chickens, which Americans happened to dislike. This was the story generally told about "Legs of Bush," and it was only slightly inaccurate. In 1990, Bush and Gorbachev finally signed a trade agreement that had languished for years. This allowed United States producers to sell to the Soviet Union grain and the dark-meat parts of chicken that Russians, indeed, prefer and American consumers disproportionately shunned. But the Soviet Union had no money to pay for the grain and the chicken quarters, so in December 1990 President Bush arranged for loans to the Soviet Union, and this ensured that the dark meat of

chickens, in Russia, bore his name for years after his presidency ended.⁷

"Legs of Bush" signaled the beginning of a better time. Before they appeared, there had come a point when preserved cabbage was the sole grocery item available in Solikamsk, and the lines to buy it stretched for blocks. After "Legs of Bush," other food items began to materialize, and Lyosha's mother could afford some of them. When Galina's school stopped paying its employees, she found a job at a different school. By this time, she had married Sergei, her boyfriend, and his salary tided them over. Sergei worked as a miner. Many miners did not get paid because, like teachers, they were employed by the state, and the state, in accordance with Gaidar's policies of monetary austerity, had no cash. Sergei's mine was privatized early, and this meant that he had a salary—as long as he could stay sober long enough to go to work.

It was the drinking families in Lyosha's building that seemed to hit the point of utter despair. Some were hunting stray dogs to eat them. The kids who used to sleep on Lyosha's landing were trying to make their own money. The two brothers, aged about five and six, were serving local teenage boys, who paid them a ruble, then ten rubles at a time, for performing oral sex on them. There was little you could buy with that.

The secret of plenty lay in private enterprise, this much was clear. When Galina's school ran out of cash, it simply stopped paying, but when his stepfather's mine ran low, it found ways to pay employees in kind. Sergei brought home odd-tasting Swedish candy—it must have been licorice—and metal cans containing tiny little sausages in brine. A friend of Galina's, a fellow history teacher, quit the school to go to work as manager at the Solikamsk Pulp and Paper Mill, which

was among the first Russian companies to be privatized.⁸ The company was one of the country's largest producers of newsprint during a newspaper renaissance. Its building was soon lavishly renovated for all to see. Galina's former colleague became a rich man. Every time Lyosha's family went to his house for dinner, they saw

food and things—pens, notebooks, dishes, and other objects Lyosha generally thought of as souvenirs—unlike any they saw elsewhere.

Like all Russians, in 1992 Lyosha's family got privatization vouchers, watermarked certificates roughly five by three inches in size, with a picture of the Moscow White House in an elliptical frame in the middle. They had a little over a year to decide what to do with the vouchers: sell, invest, or ignore. They exchanged their three vouchers for shares of Doka Pizza, a new restaurant that advertised on billboards all over town. They never saw any dividends. Some of Galina's friends told her she should have done what they did: bought shares in one of the newly privatized oil companies. These would indeed be worth money in a few years.

In the new world of vouchers, private companies, and investments, one story caught Lyosha's attention. A company called MMM saturated the airwaves with thirty-second TV spots devoted to the financial life of a dowdy middle-aged man named Lyonya Golubkov. At first Lyonya did not know what to do with his rubles, which were losing purchasing power so rapidly. Then he figured out that he could convert his worthless cash into MMM shares and live off dividends. This allowed him to buy a new pair of black leather cowboy boots for his wife, then a full-length fur coat for her, then a car and a house. The wife, who in the early ads seemed too young and tall for Lyonya, was now sitting in a chair in her pink housecoat, eating bonbons, looking less glamorous and perfectly domesticated, while Lyonya swelled with newfound financial confidence. Lyonya's brother, a miner, criticized Lyonya for doing nothing, but Lyonya found the words to argue that, far from being a sloth, he was a shrewd investor who made money with hard-earned money. When Lyonya bought tickets to the United States to see a soccer match between the Russian and Brazilian national teams, his brother, seated next to him in the stands, had to concede his point, tearfully.⁹

Like any pyramid scheme, MMM collapsed. It happened in the summer of 1994. People who had handed over their savings to the company numbered in the millions. When the founder of MMM was arrested for tax evasion, hundreds of these investors camped out in front of the company's headquarters in Moscow demanding his release and the return of a company in which they continued to have faith. In Solikamsk, nine-year-old Lyosha was devastated: he realized he was in love with Lyonya Golubkov, who was now gone from TV.

pyramid schemes abounded. A company called Hoper-Invest ran a fifteen-second spot that showed a cheerful military officer walking into a modern-looking office where two nearly identical women in feminine business attire poured him a cup of tea while they handed him his shares.¹⁰ Millions of people bought Hoper shares at two dozen branches across the country.¹¹ A Ponzi scheme that called itself Chara Bank eschewed television advertising in favor of word of mouth, and members of the urban educated classes entrusted it with their savings—in exchange for handsome monthly dividends— because they felt they were in the know. The companies issued watermarked certificates that looked no less or more official than the state's privatization vouchers and supported them with assurances that sounded no less or more credible than the government's. MMM promised boots, a car, and a trip to America; Hoper dangled the prospect of looking and acting like imaginary Western office workers; Chara guaranteed a worry-free future in an uncertain world; and the government said that everyone would be rich. In August 1992, introducing the voucher program, privatization chief Anatoly Chubais claimed that with time each certificate would be worth as much as two Volgas.¹² All these promises sounded equally new and bizarre.

In the early 1990s, Lev Gudkov was trying to make sense of Russians' emerging relationship to wealth. Adjusting expectations was a traumatic process, he found, one that opened up chasms between generations. In the postwar Soviet Union, each successive generation had lived moderately better than the last. Aspirations were passed on from parents to children with only minor adjustments. Most Soviet citizens had hoped that they, or their grown children, would be able to graduate from a room in a communal apartment to a one-room-plus-a-kitchen apartment of their own, and then to two rooms and a kitchen. With luck, they would eventually add a dacha and a Soviet-made Fiat. No one except the elites dreamed of palaces or Volgas—and the elites were safely hidden from view by their seven fences and seven locks. Now most of what Russians saw on television —commercials, government announcements, and even the sets of the Latin American soap operas everyone seemed to be watching—told them to aspire to more. Only the Soviet movies, which the television also still showed, allowed the weary eye and mind to rest on the reassuringly modest decorations of the bygone era.

Gudkov and his team began asking survey respondents not only how much they made but also how much they needed to survive and how much they needed to live well. An extremely large study—nearly seventy-five thousand respondents in all—showed that real income grew consistently, but so did everyone's idea of what it would take to live well. Later, two American economists who mined Russian statistical data came to the same conclusion: in the course of the 1990s, average living space increased (from sixteen to nineteen square meters per person), the number of people traveling abroad as tourists more than tripled, the percentage of households that owned televisions, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and washing machines increased, and the number of privately owned cars doubled.¹³ Compared with life in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Russians were better off—but they felt poor.

Conventional wisdom was that some people were getting very rich while others sank into poverty, but Gudkov's data did not bear this out: it looked like the wealth gap was remaining steady or even shrinking slightly. True, some of the screens shielding the structural inequalities of Soviet society had been lifted, allowing people to observe others being rich—if only because, with most of the old secret distribution centers closed, the rich were now much more likely to do their shopping in plain view. But this exposure could hardly explain what Gudkov was seeing. He focused on the millions of people who had now traveled abroad: by 1995 nearly 17 percent of adults had been outside Russia. The experience had not made them feel like life had gotten better. They had seen something more devastating than the fact that some of their compatriots were better off: they saw that, beyond the country's western borders, virtually everyone was better off than virtually everyone in Russia. They had felt themselves to be not just poor individuals but people from a poor country. As this self- perception solidified, so did some of the results of Gudkov's surveys: the gap between answers to the questions "How much do you earn?" and "How much do you need to earn to survive?" closed. This did not mean that people felt like they had enough; they felt like things could hardly get worse. Their idea of how much they needed to live well continued to be out of reach.

Even as the country seemed to be in the throes of romance with private enterprise, one of Gudkov's stock questions—"Who is living well and happily in Russia?"—continued to elicit a stock, Soviet-era answer: crooks, con men, bureaucrats, criminals, and entrepreneurs. Happiness and wealth belonged to the Other. Asked if they thought they earned more or less than other people of comparable skill and experience, two-thirds of respondents answered "less"—a statistical impossibility that doomed Russians to jealousy.¹⁴

In late 1994, when MMM collapsed, Hoper-Invest also stopped paying out, and the ruble lost nearly a quarter of its value overnight. All three events were to some extent related to something that had happened earlier in the year: the government relaxed its monetary policy and began printing rubles—this was a boon to the pyramid schemes, and it also doomed the ruble to fall.¹⁵ Many Russians' core beliefs were thus confirmed: the government was no more trustworthy than the self-anointed investment kings, and economic hardship and injustice were life's only certainties.

arutyunyan was now attending training seminars abroad: Western psychoanalysts continued to give generously of their time and expertise to help their less experienced colleagues. At one of these seminars, conducted in English, she noticed that she could now tell the difference between the meanings of two words: "envy" and "jealousy." The former was a way of desiring something that someone else had and you lacked; the latter was resenting someone's taking possession of something that was yours. Envy was what you felt when someone had more money than you did. Jealousy was what you felt when you thought that the money was or should be yours. Either emotion could be awful to experience, but envy could also be constructive—it could spur you to action—and even benevolent, like when you envied someone his ability to be generous or productive. It stood to reason that the distinction was lacking in contemporary Russian: for three generations everything had been said to belong to everyone, and having more was said to be shameful. Jealousy was the only relevant emotion.

Human beings are perhaps born jealous—the emotion stems from a basic survival instinct. Now it was like Arutyunyan's clients had been stripped to their bare selves and could feel only that most basic, most painful, most burning of emotions. Everyone felt like he had been robbed. The visual symbols of wealth were raspberry-colored sport coats that someone must have glimpsed at a private school abroad—and they, complete with a gold-embroidered emblem on the breast pocket, became the uniform of the emerging flaunting class. The other symbol was the Mercedes. Both signs of extreme wealth, like extreme wealth itself, were so rare as to be almost phantoms, but the mere shadow of a sighting gave rise to furious jealousy. It had never before been acceptable to show wealth. Arutyunyan's mother remembered having studied, at Moscow State University, alongside Stalin's daughter. The first daughter, she said, was the worst-dressed girl in their year, and the chauffeur had always dropped her off two blocks away from the school. Such was the Soviet ethos of demonstrative asceticism, which Zhanna must have absorbed as a toddler, before privilege happened to her. Newly visible wealth was doubly insulting because it violated aesthetic conventions and because the newly wealthy, unlike the old nomenklatura, had no claim to entitlement: Who were they to be rich?

The fact that the very rich were vanishingly few exacerbated things. The only thing worse than feeling like a loser was feeling like a member of an entire society of losers. The jealousy rarely manifested as jealousy: before it reached the surface it was usually transformed into a different sentiment—feeling used, feeling angry, feeling fear.

Some people had good reason to feel fear. The new entrepreneurs, it was said, were murdering one another left and right. For most people, the violence was as much an abstraction as was big money, but the fear of being caught in the cross fire was not entirely unfounded. A friend of Arutyunyan's once stumbled onto a shootout in the street in Moscow in broad daylight. Arutyunyan's office mate, a cognitive behavioral therapist—they rented a small apartment together and took turns seeing clients there—took months to work up the nerve to ask a client, an entrepreneur, to stow his gun in the coat closet when he arrived for his session.

Arutyunyan's first client from the new world of entrepreneurship did not carry a gun. He was, contrary to stereotype, a cultivated young man from a professor's family not unlike Arutyunyan's own. He would not say what exactly he did, but Arutyunyan surmised that it had to do with oil. He sought help because he had started flying into rages. It took only a few sessions—too few, Arutyunyan later realized —to conclude that the rages stemmed from repressed anxiety. Shortly after, the man decided to stop therapy. Getting in touch with his feelings was too risky a proposition. "I am a tightrope walker," he explained. "Imagine what can happen to me if I pause to think." He might look weak. He might even cry. Flying into a rage and, say, beating someone to a pulp was an altogether safer option. Neither Arutyunyan nor the client broached the idea that he could change his line of work to something less evidently dangerous: in the new reality, everyone was assumed to want to be an entrepreneur.

masha's mother had long since stopped importing intimate essentials from Poland. She now made frequent trips to China to buy patent- leather handbags. They looked distinctive and, Masha thought, hideous, but some quirk of fashion fortune made them the "it" bag for Russian women in 1993-1994. Tatiana now had her own kiosk on Kalininsky Prospect, a wide central avenue lined with high-rises that had looked chic in the 1960s. She sold the bags at the kiosk, and also supplied them to other vendors.

There was a day when Masha entered a Metro car and noticed that every woman in it had one of those bags that her mother—and no one else—imported. Every single woman in the subway car. "We must be rich," thought Masha. But the image of what it was to be rich in no way jived with how she and Tatiana lived. They still had their two- rooms-plus-a-kitchen rather than a palace. They washed their clothes by hand in the bathtub. Masha still got bullied at school: for being younger than all her classmates, for the clothes she wore, but most of all, for being somehow different. That would not happen if they really were rich, would it?

PART THREE

UNRAVELING

eight

GRIEF, ARRESTED

in the MID-1990S the Western psychoanalysts who had sporadically been traveling to post-Soviet countries launched a formal training program for their colleagues from countries where the psychoanalytic tradition had been interrupted. Arutyunyan attended a series of training sessions held in Poland. She had been working as an analyst for about a decade, give or take a flailing year or two. For years now she had enjoyed free access to psychoanalytic literature. She had also been studying psychodrama at a school started in Russia by Swedish therapists. She was a well-educated, well-rounded psychoanalyst, no longer a beginner, so she had a phrase to call what she experienced when she started at the new program: it was a narcissistic blow. She observed masters at work, and she realized that she could not work half that well—not because the instructors were innately so much more talented or intelligent but because they stood on the shoulders of their predecessors, who stood on the shoulders of their predecessors, who stood on the shoulders of giants. Arutyunyan, on the other hand, stood on emptiness, and she herself felt empty. Her ideas were archaic at best, naive at worst. What she felt was that burning, destructive jealousy: this mastery, this fluidity, this depth should have been hers.

The post-Soviet psychoanalysts lacked the central qualification of their profession: they had not themselves gone through analysis. A number of psychoanalysts in Germany, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands began taking on the role of analyst and supervisor for the Russians, who would travel to their supervisors' cities for a few

weeks at a time to undergo analysis, while their own patients were on hold, to return and pick up their work and receive supervision over e­mail. Some of their colleagues pointed out that this was not how it was done, but the participants recalled that the early Freudians had shuttled much the same way. Arutyunyan began traveling to Germany for three-week stints of daily analysis. The language of her sessions was English, the mother tongue for neither analyst nor patient. Sometimes the work of expressing feelings in a language to which these feelings were foreign seemed impossible. Other times, Arutyunyan was grateful for the task of simplification and explication English forced upon her: it made obfuscation more difficult. As she went deeper into analysis, she observed the unconscious playing tricks with language—like when her dreams contained German phrases that she thought she could not understand—but she could remember them and, translated, they unmistakably revealed their meaning.

Shuttle analysis worked on a rigid schedule with long gaps, hardly suited to work so delicate and unpredictable. Arutyunyan often left her clients in Moscow at the least opportune moment in their own analytic processes and then compounded the problem by returning in a changed and vulnerable state. Weekly e-mail sessions with a supervisor called her to order. "Where did that come from?" he would write, challenging her interpretation of a particularly difficult moment. "Could it be that you are frustrated at being torn away from your own analysis and you are taking revenge on the person who caused the separation?" That would be her patient, who was utterly defenseless in this situation. Arutyunyan felt defenseless. All of Russia felt defenseless, it seemed. Pressing on with her own analysis, and her patients', was a way to hang on, by the skin of her teeth, to who she was.

lyosha's mother encouraged him to enter a citywide history essay contest. It was the sort of thing she did—she was, after all, a history teacher, and she expected her only son to do much better than she had, just as she had done so much better than her own illiterate- peasant mother. The essay topic was "My Family Story in the History of the Twentieth Century." Lyosha had a sense that this was a trendy topic—the heady days of media revelations about Stalin and the Gulag were over, long since overshadowed by economic reform and political conflict, but recently people all around Lyosha and Galina seemed to be talking about their family histories. The teachers at school had also suggested that researching one's roots was a good pathway to winning student competitions. Except Lyosha had hardly any family and certainly no history. He did not even carry the family name anymore: when his mother married Sergei, in December 1991, she had changed Lyosha's last name from Misharin to Gorshkov, and his patronymic from Yurievich to Sergeevich, as though Lyosha had always been his new stepfather's son. It had been a horrible wedding, during which Lyosha was told not to get in the way of the adults while they celebrated, and he had decided then and there that he hated marriage and would never marry as long as he lived. His stepfather, who had seemed so fun before the wedding, when he would spend hours watching pop music performances on television with Lyosha, now appeared to be a quiet, lazy alcoholic who simply vegetated in front of the television. Lyosha decided that he hated everything about him, especially the way he ate—as though he would never eat again. Lyosha hated his new patronymic and surname too.

Galina said that she could tell him a bit about family history. Lyosha's great-grandparents, she said, were part of a large German- speaking community that had settled along the Volga River in the late eighteenth century.¹ By the standards of the Revolution, the family were kulaks—peasants who owned land and livestock, which made them class enemies. Lyosha's great-grandfather was stripped of his belongings and disappeared. His great-grandmother and her children lived in abject poverty as members of a newly formed collective farm. Two years after the disappearance of the husband and father, Lyosha's great-grandmother and her children were loaded into a cattle car, along with other ethnic Germans, and shipped off to the Urals, to a remote rural area outside Solikamsk. Here, reunited with Lyosha's great-grandfather, they had to start from scratch at a new

collective farm, on previously uncultivated land. Lyosha's grandmother was ten years old. When the family was being herded onto the train, a soldier had taken away her only toy, a wooden doll. In the Urals, authorities changed her name from Emma to Serafima. She received no schooling after the deportation, which was why she was functionally illiterate: before the disaster, the family had spoken German exclusively, and the girl had learned to read using the German Bible.

Everyone in the new village was German. This sounded familiar to Lyosha—there was a part of Solikamsk that was called the German Settlement, though the ethnic Germans who lived there had all emigrated during perestroika. They left behind neat little village-style houses they had built themselves, and a ghost of clean and ordered living that Lyosha found seductive. When Serafima was eighteen, a young man from a neighboring village decided to make her his. In Galina's telling, his resolve was unilateral and final. He was Russian. He moved Serafima to his village, where she was hated for being a German and a Catholic. Her new husband was an atheist and a Communist, but his own mother was Russian Orthodox, and she refused to accept Serafima as her daughter-in-law in the absence of a church wedding. There was no wedding at all, in fact—this was the early 1930s, and marriage was still a bourgeois anachronism.

Serafima's new husband drank, had numerous affairs and relationships—at least one other woman considered herself his wife— and built a career in the Party and on the collective farm. He would eventually become chairman of the collective farm and a member of the Supreme Soviet. In 1935, a voronok—a black prisoner-transport car—pulled up to the house: someone had denounced Serafima's husband for stealing the bricks he had used to build his house. Fortunately, it was Serafima's habit to maintain order in all things, including receipts for the purchase of bricks, and her husband escaped being jailed.

In 1941, Serafima's husband went off to war to fight the Germans, and Serafima herself, left alone with a small baby—her first son— went from being an outcast to being the enemy. Her own brother-in- law came around, drunk, in the middle of the night, to smash all her windows, screaming, "German!"

In the late 1940s, years after the Soviets had resanctified marriage, as Lyosha's grandfather made his way up the Party ladder, he finally registered his marriage to Lyosha's grandmother. Serafima took her husband's Russian surname, Misharina. The last people to carry the German family name, Klauser—Lyosha's great-grandparents—died long before he was born. Lyosha had seen photographs of their funerals and he had asked about their coffins, adorned with what looked to him like a very strange Christian cross, but no one had answered his questions. Now his mother explained that her grandparents had been Catholic, and her sister recalled that as children, Serafima's two daughters and three sons would spend summers in the German-speaking village and their grandfather would ply them with candy to persuade them to agree to speak a little German or to read from his German Bible. When Serafima's parents died, the German stopped—none of her children remembered it now —and so did the connection with family on the Klauser side, who had once written Lyosha's great-grandfather letters, some from Kazakhstan, where they had also been exiled, and others from Germany and New York, where they had escaped during the war.

Serafima confirmed the story for Lyosha and added personal details about her five children. Two of her daughters—Lyosha's aunts —had been left alone with their children because, like Serafima, they had married alcoholics. One of the husbands drowned while drunk, the other died of alcohol poisoning. As for Galina, said Lyosha's grandmother, she had been lying to him when she told him that his father lived in Perm. Lyosha's father was right there in Solikamsk—he was "Uncle Yura," who had stopped visiting when Lyosha's stepfather came on the scene. Unlike the stepfather, Yuri was an educated man who did well for himself in the new economy, rising to the position of director at a manufacturing company. He came from a family of Polish Jews who had also been exiled to these parts. He was married and had a daughter, about ten years Lyosha's senior, who worked at the local children's library. Lyosha started going to the library even more frequently. He fantasized about inserting a note to his half sister into one of the books he was returning. "You don't know me, but we have something important in common." Or, "I see you several times a week, and I wonder if you ever notice our likeness." The logistics of the plan were unclear—what if someone else found the note?—and the consequences were unpredictable, so Lyosha never followed through.

When he was not thinking about being his father's son, he thought about being German. It all made sense now: his punctuality, his obsessive neatness, his love of all things that made sense, and his inability to tolerate the sounds Sergei made when eating. Lyosha was no Alexei Sergeevich Gorshkov or even Alexei Yurievich Misharin: he was Alexei Klauser. He won the history essay contest.

Meanwhile, Galina sent a query to the state archives in Saratov, the major city in the Volga region from which she understood her family to have been exiled. You could do this now—ask for information on family who had been declared traitors, criminals, or enemies by the Stalin state. The archives confirmed that Lyosha's great-grandfather had, in the language of the authorities, "been repressed." As for Lyosha's great-grandmother, her file had been misplaced and no information was available.

"to learn about oneself is the toughest among the challenges of learning," wrote Alexander Etkind, one of the most perceptive scholars of the post-Soviet cultural experience. He was writing about the particular horror of the Soviet legacy:

Victims and perpetrators were mixed together in the same families,

ethnic groups, and lines of descent If the Nazi Holocaust

exterminated the Other, the Soviet terror was suicidal. The self- inflicted nature of Soviet terror has complicated the circulation of three energies that structure the postcatastrophic world: a cognitive striving to learn about the catastrophe; an emotional desire to mourn for its victims; and an active desire to find justice and take

revenge on the perpetrators The suicidal nature of the Soviet

atrocities made revenge all but impossible, and even learning very

difficult.²

Before perestroika, dissident historians had been trying to do the work of learning in the near-complete absence of information. Even after mass terror ended with the death of Stalin, even after Nikita Khrushchev chose to speak out about the terror, he first doctored the information and then made the redacted story secret. When Mikhail Gorbachev, as Party leader, looked at some of the secret archives for the first time in the 1980s, he felt shock, disgust, and disbelief—not only because of what had been done but because it had been done by his own Party and in its name.³

In 1989, Gorbachev made Alexander Nikolaevich chair of a newly created Rehabilitation Commission, in charge of reviewing archival documents and clearing the names of those who had been unjustly punished in the Stalin era. Alexander Nikolaevich was better prepared than Gorbachev to start learning about the terror, both because he was old enough to have heard Khrushchev deliver his secret speech to the Party Congress and because he had seen the cattle cars carrying Soviet prisoners of war to the Gulag after the Great Patriotic War. But what he saw when he studied the archives during perestroika made his stomach turn. He saw that Stalin personally had signed execution orders for forty-four thousand people, people he did not know and whose cases he had not read, if the cases even existed—he had simply signed off on long lists of names, apparently because he enjoyed the process.⁴ He saw evidence of secret-police competitions, formal ones —like when different departments within the NKVD (the precursor agency to the KGB) raced one another to highest number of political probes launched—and informal ones, like when three of the NKVD brass took three thousand cases with them on a train journey, got drunk, and engaged in a speed challenge: Who could go through a stack of cases fastest, marking each with the letter P. They were not reading the cases. The letter P—pronounced r in Russian—stood for rasstrel, "execution." He saw evidence of specific days on which the fate of thousands was decided. On November 22, 1937, Stalin and two of his closest advisers, Vyacheslav Molotov and Andrei Zhdanov, approved twelve lists submitted by the NKVD, containing 1,352 people who would be executed. On December 7, they signed off on

thirteen lists for a total of 2,397 people, 2,124 of whom were to be executed. On January 3, 1938, they were joined by two other top Bolsheviks, Kliment Voroshilov and Lazar Kaganovich, and together they signed off on twenty-two lists with 2,547 names, 2,270 to be executed.

June 10, 1938: twenty-nine lists, 2,750 people, 2,371 to be executed.

September 12, 1938: thirty-eight lists, 6,013 people, 4,825 to be executed.

There were too many such dates and figures to make them commemorative or otherwise meaningful. Some lists had a specific makeup. On August 20, 1938, Stalin and Molotov together signed off on a list of fifteen women who were classified as "wives of enemies of the people." Ten of them were housewives and two were students. All were executed. Their husbands, who had been arrested earlier, were executed later.⁵ Other lists looked altogether random, though the mind scrambled each time to make sense of them.

Lidiya Chukovskaya, a writer whose husband, a physicist, was executed in 1938 at the age of thirty-one, raged against this habit of attempting to make sense of the absurd:

The truth was too primitive and too bloody. The regime had attacked its citizens for no imaginable reason and was beating them, torturing them, and executing them. How were we to understand the reason for such whimsy? If you let it sink in that there is no reason, that they were doing it "just because," that killers killed just because it is their job to kill, then your heart, though no bullet has pierced it, will be torn apart, and your mind, in its intact shell of a head, will grow shaky. Looking at the truth would have been akin to

staring down the barrel of a gun, so one tried to steal oneself away.⁶

Alexander Nikolaevich had not read these lines: Chukovskaya drafted and redrafted this book for decades, perhaps still hoping to land on a narrative. It was published by Chukovskaya's daughter only in 2001, five years after its author's death. The book was called The Elision.

Alexander Nikolaevich ultimately concluded that the terror could not be understood. The explanations offered by his colleagues and any number of historians—that Stalin was mentally ill, that he suffered from paranoid delusions—explained nothing. The tyrant had had any number of his relatives, and the relatives of his wives, executed. One time, Alexander Nikolaevich discovered, Stalin invited an old friend back in Georgia to Moscow for a reunion. They dined and drank—Stalin took pride in his hospitality and his menus, which

he personally curated.⁷ Later the same night, the friend was arrested in his hotel room. He was executed before dawn. This could not be explained with any words or ideas available to man.⁸

Alexander Nikolaevich could not understand it, but he could try to describe it. The Soviet state was based on punishment. As Young Pioneers, children were taught to criticize one another and themselves in a group setting, reveling in the details of their shortcomings, the intricacies of blame, the ecstasy of repentance, and the imagined precision of the penalties. The Komsomol and the Party itself were also enforcement organizations, as was the "labor collective"—Sovietspeak for "workplace"—where meetings were regularly convened to "expose" fault and to "take measures."⁹

In 1989, its first year in existence, the Rehabilitation Commission reviewed about 280,000 court cases and cleared 367,690 names.¹⁰ This was, by Alexander Nikolaevich's estimate, about 2 percent of the job. From what he could tell now that he had full access to existing documents, casualties of mass terror numbered about twenty million. That was just Stalin's part of it: more people had died in the collectivization campaign that preceded his rise to power, and the punishment machine had continued to work, albeit at a greatly reduced pace, after Stalin's death.¹¹ Even if the group continued to review cases at the same rate as in its first year, it would not complete the job in Alexander Nikolaevich's lifetime.

The Rehabilitation Commission had been formed under the auspices of the Central Committee. This meant that Yeltsin's 1991 decree halting all economic activity of the Communist Party turned the commission into a nongovernmental organization with no funding, and Alexander Nikolaevich into its unpaid coordinator. He decided to ensure that the documents to which he had access were at least published. He planned to put together volumes on the secret police and on Stalin's chief henchmen, and a series on the Party's foreign activities, including a book on the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. If everyone had access to the facts on paper, it would be harder to lie about history, he reasoned. The documents might also make it possible to tell the truth—if anyone ever did find a way to begin making sense of the past. He assembled a team of ten people, if you counted the administrative assistant, the accountant, and the typist, and began the work of sorting, verifying, and cross- referencing.¹² The first volume, on a failed 1921 military rebellion against Bolshevik rule, was published in 1997. Seryozha began helping too, first with the typing, then with some of the more complicated tasks. His grandfather was in a hurry—he said that he had to publish as much as possible before he, and the country, lost access to the documents.

By law, information about mass terror had to be publicly available: Yeltsin had issued a decree to that effect in June 1992.¹³ Early on, even some of the dissident historians had favored a cautious approach. Some of what they had glimpsed in the archives, they argued, could not be released to the public without further analysis. Take, for example, a report submitted by a little-known writer on her much more famous friend. The report's author wrote that the other woman had praised Stalin in superlative terms. It appeared likely that the lesser-known writer had made the claim—and, indeed, had agreed to be an informant—solely to protect her friend from suspicion and persecution. But if the document were released uncritically, it might sully a great writer's name. Or take another case: a low-level KGB operative reports that he has met with a dissident who has been consigned to internal exile and the man has agreed to cease all anti- Soviet activity. It is known, however, that after his term in exile the man continued to be active in the dissident movement. How is the report to be interpreted? Was the KGB officer lying, was the dissident telling him what he wanted to hear just to end the conversation, or is there reason to believe that after his exile the dissident had become a mole? Something similar had happened in Poland, where the secret- police archives turned up a dossier on Lech Walesa, founder of the Solidarity movement, Nobel laureate, and the country's first post- Communist president. If the dossier was to be believed, Walesa had been a paid secret-police informant. Walesa's stature and popularity outweighed the damage the dossier could have done, but the paper trail continued to haunt him for years.¹⁴

There was a deeper reason Russia did not throw open the door to its secret-police archives. The Eastern Bloc countries that took this step—Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic among them— treated the documents as having been left behind by an occupying power. But Soviet institutions had become Russian institutions after 1991, and soon the Russian bureaucracy began to guard many Soviet secrets like its own. Following the logic of institutions rather than the law, a government commission was formed to review archival documents one by one and decide whether they could be declassified. As time went on, fewer and fewer documents made it into the open. A variety of institutions, ranging from the KGB to the foreign ministry to the Cartographic Service, all of which used to be "all-Soviet" and became "all-Russian," stopped releasing any part of their archives to authorities that could theoretically declassify them. Soviet secrets ossified.¹⁵

Alexander Nikolaevich concentrated on publishing the documents to which he had already secured access—those would be enough for a lifetime and more. The inability to make sense of tragedy continued to plague him: not only was there no identifiable reason for what had happened, there was no clear border between the victims and the executioners. He had decided early on that he would focus on victims on a case-by-case basis, regardless of who the victims had been before. But what if a person was victimized by becoming the executioner? Take Stalin's last wave of terror, euphemistically called "the anti-cosmopolitan campaign." Blatantly anti-semitic in nature, it had hinged on a conspiracy ostensibly discovered among the country's most prominent doctors—most of them Jewish—who were accused of poisoning their patients among the Party elite. When the smear campaign against the doctors kicked into gear in January 1953, the nation learned of a Russian doctor who had apparently exposed the Jewish bastards. Her name was Lidia Timashuk, and she was promptly, amid much fanfare, awarded the Order of Lenin for her vigilance. The campaign claimed thousands of victims in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc before it was halted abruptly following Stalin's death in March 1953. The doctors were presently exonerated, and the Order of Lenin was quietly rescinded—so quietly, though, that Timashuk remained forever associated with the plot to frame the Jews.¹⁶

As late as 1966—thirteen years after Stalin's death—Timashuk wrote to the Party leadership asking for her good name back. She had never claimed the doctors were enemies of the state, much less killers, she wrote. All she had done was, years earlier, disagree with an older colleague on the course of treatment chosen for a top member of the Politburo. It had emerged that she had been right to disagree—the older doctor had misdiagnosed a heart attack as a chronic condition—but she was remembered as the woman who had launched the hideous campaign against Soviet Jews, not as the doctor who had the right diagnosis.¹⁷ Timashuk may or may not have been telling the truth when she wrote that she never, not even when questioned by the secret police, cast aspersions on the Jewish doctors. She had certainly suffered less than the other doctors, who had been jailed and tortured and one of whom had died in pretrial detention: Timashuk complained that she had been forced to retire a decade after the Doctors' Plot because those who had been targeted by the campaign refused to work side by side with her. Surely, as executioners went, she was not in the major leagues. Neither was she unequivocally a victim. When she wrote her letter in 1966, the post- Stalin Thaw was over and her appeal was ignored. By the time Alexander Nikolaevich read the letter, Timashuk was dead. He decided to publish the letter.

The cases of other, more obvious executioners presented legal conundrums but not moral ones. Stalin's terror machine executed its executioners at regular intervals. In 1938 alone, forty-two thousand investigators who had taken part in the great industrial-scale purges were executed, as was the chief of the secret police, Nikolai Yezhov. The last of the top-level killers, Lavrentiy Beria, was executed after Stalin's death—but he was convicted not of murder, torture, and abuse of power but of having spied for fourteen different foreign countries. Other executioners had also been punished for imaginary crimes. Legally, this was grounds for rehabilitation. Morally, Alexander Nikolaevich decided that as long as he headed the Rehabilitation Commission, honor would not be restored to a single executioner. He also decided that he would run the commission as long as he lived and was able. Under Yeltsin, the commission was taken back into the fold of the state, with the heads of all federal law- enforcement agencies joining as members, though Alexander Nikolaevich continued to serve in an unpaid capacity. Clearing the names of tens of millions of Soviet citizens was his volunteer job.¹⁸

a woman came to see Arutyunyan about her eleven-year-old daughter, an otherwise lovely girl who kept having strange accidents that her mother suspected were not entirely accidental. Once, for example, she accidentally set the curtains on fire. Another time she accidentally locked the door to the balcony when her own grandmother—the woman's mother—was outside, stranding the older woman in the brutal cold without a coat. The family dynamics were clear enough: three generations of women were living together as an insular family unit—a fairly typical setup. The grandmother ruled the family like a tyrant. The mother carried out all the grandmother's orders, no matter how unreasonable, and tolerated all interventions, no matter how cruel. One time, for example, the mother had the apartment renovated—an expensive and arduous task. When the job was completed, the grandmother demanded a change of wallpaper, and the mother complied. Another time the older woman showed up at her granddaughter's school to denounce the girl for being insufficiently conscientious about homework.

Clearly, the girl's "accidents" were outward expressions of aggression that her mother was stifling. Arutyunyan and her patient began working through it. The woman's pain was immense: she was facing the apparent facts that she, a loving daughter, secretly wished her mother dead, and, even worse, that she, a loving mother, had saddled her own daughter with unmanageable feelings. Then the mother made a discovery: the grandmother had once worked as a guard in the Gulag.

The family was now recast as a camp, complete with dead-end make-work, the primacy of discipline, and the total abolition of personal boundaries. The balcony incident looked particularly eerie in this light: it reproduced a common torture technique, when inmates were forced to stand in the freezing cold just outside their barracks. Arutyunyan remembered reading—back when she had access to only some of Freud's writing—that humans play out that which they cannot remember.

A man came seeking help for problems that clearly resided in his relationship with his father. The man's life looked like an unfunny caricature of Soviet culture. He had grown up in a bedroom where the walls were entirely covered with slogans. He went to bed and woke up to "Man! The word has a proud sound!" (a quote from the writer Maxim Gorky), "Courage lies not in a lack of fear but in one's ability to suppress one's fear" (a quote from educator Alexei Makarenko), and the like. Not an inch of space was left vacant, and the message of all these pronouncements together was that not a fraction of the little boy's soul or body should remain unoccupied. When he broke both of his arms, he dared not tell his father, because he was afraid to admit that he had engaged in disorderly play. Nor could he admit to feeling pain—the slogans had taught him that would be weakness—so he never cried. The boy's father had no room for thoughts and perceptions in his mind either, so he made no notice of his son's injuries. The man who came to Arutyunyan now had limited mobility in both of his arms because they had healed without the aid of casts.

Arutyunyan worked with the man to reconstruct a family story: whatever had hurt him so profoundly had clearly traumatized his father first. The father, as the man described him, was a man who had

no inner world whatsoever. His single greatest fear seemed to be that of having a thought of his own. It eventually emerged that an earlier generation had greatly feared arrest and had devised a strategy of extreme mimicry: they would be more Soviet than the Soviets who might arrest them for not being Soviet enough. The strategy may have worked—or the man's relatives may simply have been among the tens of millions who happened not to be arrested—but by the time Arutyunyan's patient was born, the Soviet masks had been pulled on so tight for so long that the people behind the masks were frozen in immobility.

As extreme as the case was, the way forward was fairly clear. When the patient's main fear is that of simply engaging in reflection, the presence of an uncritical other can help him realize that he will not destroy the world with his thoughts. The journey is extremely painful, but at the end of it lies freedom.

throughout the 1990S, Robert Jay Lifton, an American psychiatrist known for his work on trauma and on the traumatic effects of totalitarian ideologies, convened a group of Eastern European psychotherapists to try to understand the particular problems they and their patients faced. The essential story revolved around people discovering their histories in family secrets. "Often, parents hide facts because they don't want to endanger their children," wrote Fyodor Konkov, the Russian contributor to the resulting collection.

They reason that ignorance of a parent who has been purged or marginalized will protect their children from having problems with the regime. But what I understand happens in such situations from the child's point of view is that an empty space, a void develops in

their identity.¹⁹

The strategy had two protective goals, practical and psychological:

The parent thinks, if I deny that something bad has happened to us and I deny and prevent myself from showing the feelings I have

about the trauma, I will save my child the pain of these feelings. But the surviving parent also prevents himself from the potential closeness with the child which comes from sharing the pain. By behaving in this manner, the parent trains the son to deny the clues he has already perceived. . . . It is not hard to understand that children raised in this way experience gaps in their emotional life which affect their ability to make and keep intimate relationships.

Many layers of understanding are missing.²⁰

"Dr. Konkov describes a specific affective state, one of inner emptiness, which children experience during arrested grief, when they feel they have been lied to about the life and death of their parents or grandparents," Lifton and his coeditor, psychoanalyst Jacob D. Lindy, added in their comments.²¹ Perhaps this was the nature of the emptiness that had so struck Carl Rogers when he visited the Soviet Union—when he also observed that none of his interlocutors seemed to have been able to keep an intimate relationship going.

Lifton and Lindy also noted a particular problem these therapists faced, one that they had seen in other psychologists working with traumatized populations: a certain kind of countertransference. "In each case, this intense reaction was a clue to ways in which the patient's wound—a legacy of the Communist era—connected with the therapist's wound of the same traumatic history."²²

arutyunyan was certain that wounds formed when something was missing, willfully unremembered. Her own family had made the unusual choice to maintain its story, and this gave her an advantage. She had learned the story in stages. It must have been in fourth or fifth grade when she asked her mother why the family album contained no photographs of Arutyunyan's grandfather. The absence was conspicuous: the life of the family was otherwise solidly visually documented, or so it seemed to Arutyunyan. There was a photograph of her mother, Maya, as a baby, in 1925. There were numerous photographs of Maya's mother, Anna Mikhailovna, as she made her

way up to the very top of the Soviet ladder, becoming a member of the Academy of Sciences and the Central Committee, collecting honors and awards along the way, looking stern yet inspired every time. And not a single photograph of Anna Mikhailovna's husband, Maya's father, Grigory Yakovlevich Yakovin. Arutyunyan knew that he had died long ago, before the war, and even that he had been executed. But surely there had to be pictures?

"They feared for me," said Maya. "So they destroyed the photographs."

"They" were Maya's mother and grandmother, but what did this mean?

"You see, there was a time when innocent people could be condemned. And if their families did not reject them, then children could be in danger." Maya got out a volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, a tome in blue-black cloth. This was volume five, which began and ended with perfectly incomprehensible words: "Berezna" and "Botokudy." Maya opened the book to a full-page portrait of a middle-aged, mostly bald man with a round face, perfectly thin lips, and a pince-nez with round rimless lenses. This was Lavrentiy Beria, whom the accompanying four-page article described as "one of the most outstanding leaders of the All-Soviet Communist Party of Bolsheviks and of the Soviet state, a loyal student and comrade of J. V. Stalin," and so forth. This was not Arutyunyan's grandfather—this was Stalin's chief executioner. After he himself was executed, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia received a letter that Maya was now showing her:

The state scholarly publishing house of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia recommends that pages 21, 22, 23, and 24, as well as the portrait bound in between pages 22 and 23, be removed and replaced with new pages, enclosed with this letter.

Use scissors or a razor blade to remove the above- mentioned pages, taking care to retain inner margins to which new pages are to be glued.

The replacement pages contained an article on the Bering Strait.²³

"You see, this is the sort of thing that would happen," explained Maya. "And if it was a close relative, you had to be really careful."

This was a fascinating answer. It had a tinge of adventure to it. The physical and figurative disappearance of Grigory Yakovlevich Yakovin registered as mystery rather than tragedy.

Then, in high school, Arutyunyan read A Steep Road,* a memoir by a woman, a historian and a loyal Party member, who was falsely accused of being a Trotskyist and spent a decade in the Gulag, followed by another in internal exile. The book was a clear-eyed catalog of human suffering:

When I was young, I liked to repeat the phrase, "I think, therefore I am." Now I could say, "I hurt, therefore I am." . . .

Back in 1937, when I first admitted my share of responsibility for all that had happened, I dreamed of redemption through pain. By 1949, I knew that pain works only for a time. When it stretches for decades and becomes a part of the everyday, it is no longer redemptive. It is simply something that turns you into a block of wood.

Physical suffering drowns out the pain of inner torment.

This is a horror theater in which some of the actors have been assigned to play victims and others, the executioners. The latter

have it worse.²⁴

The book was published in the West and smuggled into the Soviet Union, and Arutyunyan had simply found it sitting on the desk of one of her parents. Now she could not put it down. She could not sleep. She could not stop crying. She summoned her closest friends from school. They spent the night—the book could not be taken out of the apartment—reading and crying.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Arutyunyan demanded of her parents.

"But we did," they said.

"Not like this!"

She came back to them after this conversation, asking for details about her grandfather. After a few queries, Maya handed her a copy of

a poem typed, in the samizdat fashion, on what was called "cigarette paper"—it was thin as rolling papers, and this allowed as many as four copies to be produced through the use of carbon paper and a manual typewriter.

"Here, read this," Maya said. "The facts don't match, but this is your grandmother's story."

It was a long piece by the emigre poet Naum Korzhavin. It was written in the second person, addressed to a woman who, if the poem was to be believed, was wholeheartedly, slavishly devoted to the Party.

You lied in the name of ideals, but the tradition of lying

Was continued by those

better suited for purposeful lies.

We are all mortal beings.

Our passions express who we are....

You rejected your love

in the name of a higher desire.

But was there love,

was there love even once in your life?

No, said the poem, the woman had never loved. Yes, it contradicted itself, once she did fall in love, with a fellow Party intellectual, a skinny bespectacled Jew. His views were to the right of the protagonist's—which meant that they were to the right of the Party line—and they argued the issues, until he got arrested. She was asked to testify, and she did not hesitate.

The work of the Party is sacred, no room for emotions.

Stick to the substance. Discard everything else.

She "told them everything." It was the right thing to do, but when she found out that he had died, she spent all night crying. By this time, according to the poem, she was in the Gulag herself. By the end

of the poem it becomes clear that the heroine survived—and, in spite of all that happened to her, remained a true believer. The author despairs of reasoning with her.

You gave it all to the fight,

including that which cannot be given.

All of it:

the ability to love, to think, and to feel.

All of you, nothing spared— But how

do you live without your self?²⁵

If this was the story of her grandmother—a claim Arutyunyan instinctively doubted—then her grandfather had once again been elided. The poem described the betrayal, but not the man who was betrayed. Maya finally told her daughter what she knew. Both of her parents had been revolutionaries, underground organizers in czarist Russia, fighters during the Civil War, and scholars after. They had met as students at the Institute for Red Professors, which had been formed to create a cadre of university instructors to replace those who were being exiled or arrested. This was around the time of Lenin's death and Stalin's rise to power. When Maya was a newborn, her parents were dispatched to Germany for a year to further their studies. When they returned, the Party assigned them to teach history in Leningrad. Soon after, Maya's mother, Anna Mikhailovna, denounced her husband publicly for his Trotskyist views— Arutyunyan had no idea what that meant, and Maya explained that he was opposed to Stalin, who he feared would establish the rule of terror. Then Anna Mikhailovna left for Moscow, taking little Maya with her. Maya never saw her father again, though he lived for another dozen years. He was arrested, exiled, arrested again, and finally executed, and in all that time he never named a name, never signed a false confession, and never wavered in his beliefs.

All of this sounded, suspiciously, like the sort of story Arutyunyan would have learned in school when they studied the lives of the

Bolshevik quasi-saints: all heroism and no human. Maya spoke about her mother in similarly epic terms. She was pure. She loved the Party and she loved her husband, and later, when she was a powerful woman, she always stood up for people who fell out of favor, always defended their Leninist credentials. Back in the 1920s, Maya said, her mother had been granted a visit with her jailed husband. Maya was unclear about whether the initiative had been her mother's or the Party's, but she knew that the goal of the visit was to tear Grigory Yakovlevich from his mistaken beliefs and return him to the fold of the Party of Stalin. He had been elated to see his wife, but the moment he realized what her true objective was, he asked her to leave.

Thus had Anna Mikhailovna lost her one true love among men. From that point on, she belonged to the Party only, body and soul. But in the mid-1930s, when Maya was about ten, Anna Mikhailovna was herself expelled from the Party, for mentoring a student whose dissertation was perceived to contain nationalist notes inconsistent with the then current post-anti-imperial line. She made a suicide pact with her best friend, who had also fallen into disfavor. She left a note: "The Party can live without me, but I cannot live without the Party." The maid walked in on her, spoiling the suicide attempt; the best friend was already dead. After that, a senior scholar stepped in, arranging for Anna Mikhailovna to teach history at a provincial secondary school. For years after that, it was Maya's grandmother who took care of her. After the war, however, Stalin decided that he needed a woman in the Central Committee, and Anna Mikhailovna was not only reinstated in the Party but flown right up the career ladder to the top.

Arutyunyan found this narrative unsatisfying. It sounded to her like not one but two bad plays: one about star-crossed lovers, the other about a man so heroic he could not be imagined. She had read enough by now to know that the system of torture, humiliation, and threats broke the best of the best and that the current generation was in no position to judge them.

This was the early 1970s, years before Arutyunyan became a professional psychologist, but she needed no special training to see through the family myth. It was all compensation. Maya loved her mother, and she needed a story grand enough to make up for her betrayals. Anna Mikhailovna had taken Maya's father away—twice: first by denouncing him and again by destroying all traces of him. She had also abandoned Maya repeatedly, first as a baby: that beautiful picture from 1925 had been taken in a Berlin children's home, where the little girl was kept while her parents were off uniting the world's proletariat in revolt. The calligraphically perfect caption on the back of the photograph said, "Liebe Mutter, liebe Tochter," and this broke Arutyunyan's heart. When Anna Mikhailovna went off to teach school in a remote city, she did not even say goodbye—she simply disappeared. There were no letters, only an anonymous message that Maya's mother was "well and living in a different city." Wounds that large required equally large myths, which was why Maya had had to conjure a father so heroic and a mother so long-suffering that they could exist only in her imagination. This explained why Maya chose to believe, too, that Korzhavin's tragic, romantic poem had something to do with her mother even though the plot details did not match: if the poet had such compassion for his protagonist, then she must have deserved it. Arutyunyan was a loving daughter too, so she kept her doubts to herself.

twenty years after that conversation, in a friend's kitchen in Munich, of all places, Arutyunyan met a historian of the samizdat, the keeper of the largest known collection of self-published Russian writing. She did not even know why she felt compelled to mention the family legend according to which Korzhavin's poem "Tan'ka" had been written for and about her grandmother. The archivist became curious. A day later he returned to that kitchen to tell Arutyunyan that he had located an early manuscript of the poem and it contained a dedication to A. M. Pankratova, her grandmother. He suggested that the dedication had been omitted from later iterations to avoid endangering Anna Mikhailovna's family—Arutyunyan and her parents.

Maya was not a sentimental person, but when Arutyunyan told her that she had confirmed the legend of the poem, she teared up— perhaps because her daughter had remembered what she had told her so many years earlier, or perhaps because she had finally believed her.

Maya died in 1999. In her papers, Arutyunyan found Anna Mikhailovna's journals. Maya had quoted lines from them to her daughter but had never let her see them: she said that they were too intimate. They were.

1 November 1923 (night)

We have just parted, and I have flown back to my room like a bird, so incredibly, insanely, unconscionably happy.

"Why do I love you so?" he asked. "Why does it make me so happy to see you?"

"Is that true?" I asked. I could not yet believe it, but I could feel the fire engulfing me.

We were standing on the stairs and discussing Party business.

Anna Mikhailovna carried this love through the rest of her life, just as Maya had said. Her later notes contained a chronology of nonstarter romances. "Gr. would never do a thing like that," she would write, damning a potential suitor with this comparison to her late husband. "No, he is no Gr.," she would write, dismissing another.

Arutyunyan asked a close friend, a historian well-versed in Stalin- era archives, to look up her grandfather's case files. She gave him power of attorney for the purpose—by this time, access to archives was restricted to family members.

It all checked out. Grigory Yakovlevich was every bit the hero from Maya's stories. He never named a name, never lost his dignity, never gave an inch to his tormentors. Transcripts of his interrogations were repetitive:

"I consider it inappropriate to name people."

"I deny that."

"Prosecutors and investigators may be concerned with actions, not opinions and intentions. . . . I do not see a need to testify with regards

to opinions."

"I don't recall."

"I will not name anyone."

"That's a falsehood. I am aware of no such group."

The unbelievable story of Anna Mikhailovna's failed redemptive visit also proved true. She had been dispatched by the Party to try to lure her estranged, ideologically wayward husband back into the fold. He was released into her custody. They spent three or four nights together at a hotel before irreconcilable ideological differences separated them forever. Arutyunyan's friend was even able to make copies of photographs—two sets of mug shots, taken at two arrests. Grigory Yakovlevich was handsome, with strong features and a full head of dark wavy hair. He looked tall, if one can look tall in a mug shot. His likeness had nothing in common with the "skinny, bespectacled Jew" from the Korzhavin poem. There had been other scant but more accurate descriptions of him, including this from the memoir of revolutionary expat Victor Serge:

Grigory Yakovlevich Yakovin, aged thirty, had returned from Germany, on which country he had just written an excellent book. A sporting enthusiast with a constantly alert intelligence, good looks,

and a spontaneous charm . . .—

The Chilean writer Roberto Bolano gave Grigory Yakovlevich a three-line cameo in his epic novel 2666: "Grigory Yakovin, a great expert in contemporary Germany history."²⁷ Several years after Maya, the last person to have seen Grigory Yakovlevich alive, had died, Arutyunyan was finally able to see a clear picture of her grandfather— in an academic paper her historian friend wrote after researching the case.²⁸

arutyunyan found herself regretting that her mother did not live to read her own father's court documents—and then she wondered why Maya had not used the brief window of openness in the early 1990s to look for the case herself (a history professor, she would have been

confident undertaking that kind of research). Had Maya harbored her own doubts? Her information had, after all, come solely from her mother, who had idolized her late husband and whose authority Maya would have feared undermining even decades after her death.

There was something extravagantly old-fashioned about the way Anna Mikhailovna and Grigory Yakovlevich's generation had carried its beliefs. "In the disillusioned world of post-Stalinism, maintaining the values of the revolutionary years was perceived as personal vanity," wrote Etkind, the cultural historian.²⁹ In the post-Stalin era, scaling desires and ambitions from universal down to petit-bourgeois was seen as a virtue, a sign of humanity that was being gradually restored. That made it complicated to admire Grigory Yakovlevich and empathize with Anna Mikhailovna, and it made it difficult to mourn them. The tools of mourning are epic and profound, but after Stalin, people trusted only small emotions and soft categories. "Now, Shakespeare seemed too earnest, austere, stiff; his gravity seemed laughable," Etkind wrote.³⁰

The people who most clearly opposed the Soviet regime were, at least in Arutyunyan's generation, the ones who were most suspicious of grand gestures and big pronouncements. Perhaps this was one of the reasons people stopped removing Soviet monuments within a couple of days of the August 1991 coup. The toppled Dzerzhinsky, along with a Stalin, a head of Khrushchev, and a couple of very large Old Bolsheviks, were delivered to a vast vacant lot in the back of a recently constructed House of the Artists in central Moscow. But hundreds, if not thousands, of Lenins, Bolsheviks, obscure heroic Young Pioneers, and disembodied hammer-and-sickles and five- pointed stars continued to dot Moscow parks, public squares, and building facades. Alexander Nikolaevich suggested removing the largest Lenin monument in the city, in Oktyabrskaya Square, and replacing it with a monument to all victims of Soviet terror—but retaining the name of the square "as a lesson to our descendants."³¹ Instead, Lenin kept standing, roughly as tall as a three-story building, but the square was renamed.

In November 1996, on the seventy-ninth anniversary of the Great October Revolution, Yeltsin renamed the holiday that was always celebrated on November 7. From now on, it would be called the Day of Agreement and Reconciliation. The following year, the eightieth since the Revolution and the sixtieth since the year of the Great Terror—the most brutal year of Stalinism—would become an entire Year of Agreement and Reconciliation.³² The same year, post- apartheid South Africa established its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which harked back to a number of "truth commissions" that had functioned in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Nepal, and others. But Yeltsin was omitting the fact-finding component of the process, focusing solely on reconciliation, or at least agreement. Indeed, Yeltsin was proposing to dispense with all three of the "energies" that Etkind has described as components of postcatastrophic recovery—knowledge, grief, and justice—and proceed directly to some imaginary future in which reckoning had been left behind.

Yeltsin no longer had the strength, or the popular support, to continue fighting against the Communist Party. If he went ahead with a planned trial of the Party, he risked losing—if not in Constitutional Court then in the court of public opinion. With resentment the dominant emotion in the land, Yeltsin could afford no public confrontation with the past. The eighty-volume case against the Communist Party, and the argument for a permanent ban on its existence, were now shelved. The organizers of the 1991 coup and the leaders of the armed uprising of 1993—three dozen people in all— were pardoned by the Russian parliament in its very first amnesty, in February 1994—not because the two conflicts had melded into one in the minds of Russian parliament members but because both conflicts had to be retired and forgotten.³³ Even Alexander Nikolaevich's quiet and plodding work on the Rehabilitation Commission came to seem too confrontational. In 1997, Alexander Nikolaevich submitted two rehabilitation decrees—one concerning children who had been incarcerated in the Gulag and the other concerning members of non-

Bolshevik socialist parties who had been executed in the terror—and Yeltsin ignored them.³⁴

Yeltsin, who had always had an infallible sense of the public mood, was increasingly distancing himself from the young radical reformers in favor of many of the old guard. He seemed willing to forget and forgive everything, including personal insults and state treason. "He is making himself a laughing stock with the Communists!" said Alexander Nikolaevich. In April 1997, in the spirit of reconciliation, Yeltsin sent greetings to the annual congress of the Russian Communist Party. The hall whistled and booed when the address was read from the stage. Then they laughed.³⁵

nine

OLD SONGS

new year's eve 1994 was depressing. Like most of his acquaintances, Lev Gudkov was feeling shell-shocked—or simply shocked. Russia had gone to war against a part of itself. After months of rumors, threats, and several botched covert operations, Yeltsin had decided to put an end to a forceful separatist movement in Chechnya, a small republic in the North Caucasus, on the border with Turkey and Georgia. He would use the army to dislodge the local government. But the Chechen resistance was well armed and possessed of ten times the resolve of the Russian troops, along with familiarity with the terrain and the support of the local population. What had been planned as a fast attack, essentially a police operation, turned into an all-out military offensive. On December 31—twenty days after the operation began—Moscow staged a series of bombing raids that reduced Grozny, one of the country's own cities, to a smoking ruin. Several of the old dissidents—men who were well past middle age, and who had seen prison but never armed battle—were now down in Chechnya, documenting the atrocities and trying to use their own bodies to draw the world's attention to the war. The entire Moscow press corps, it seemed, was also there. Information was flowing from Chechnya like blood from a broken artery. The effect of the glut of macabre detail was as terrifying and depressing as anything Gudkov had ever experienced.

This effect was exacerbated by the results of a survey the public opinion center had just completed. Five years after the original Homo Sovieticus study, Levada's team decided to check in. It was another difficult survey to design: the country's borders, its name, and its system of government had changed since the first study. Some questions had to be discarded, and some of the others were reworked. A few new ones had to be devised.

There was good news in the survey: when people were asked Gudkov's "dynamite" question—what ought to be done with various deviant groups—their responses generally expressed more tolerance than they had five years earlier. The overall share of those who favored "liquidating" deviants went down from 31 to 23 percent, and those who supported the idea of "leaving them to their own devices" went up from 12 to 29 percent. Those who would "liquidate" the disabled decreased from 25 to 18 percent while those who would "help" the disabled grew from 50 to 56 percent. By Western standards, these were frightening figures, but those were not the standards to be applied here: the sociologists wanted to know only how much attitudes were changing, and in which direction. But even such scant optimism as was engendered by this approach was dampened by responses to other questions. The share of those who would "leave alone" members of religious cults dropped from 57 to 51 percent while the proportion of those who would "liquidate" or "isolate" them grew noticeably. The same thing happened with "rockers": 26 percent wanted to "liquidate" them, up from 20. This issue was a bit of a Rorschach test: no one could be quite sure what "rockers" meant. It had once referred to those who played or listened to forbidden Western music, but the days when the state banned rock music were long over. If there was no marginalized or indeed identifiable group that was called "rockers," whom were the respondents wanting to "liquidate," and why? The sociologists concluded that the word had become a stand-in for "other," or "strange," and elicited an aggressive reaction precisely because— unlike homosexuals or the disabled—"rockers," whoever they were, were not the subject of any public discussion.

The rest of the survey left little room for hope. The percentage of people who said they were unhappy had more than doubled in five years—from 14 to 34 (though the share of those who said they were happy stayed steady at 46). A clue to what had made so many people so unhappy showed up in answers to another question, in which respondents were asked to rank the importance of changes that had occurred in the country. Barely half named things that could be considered accomplishments, such as political freedoms, the ability to travel, work, and study abroad, the right to open one's own business, and the "option of living without regard for the authorities," as the sociologists phrased it. An overwhelming majority saw the state's failures as the most significant changes: the rise of unemployment, the "impoverishment of the people," and a "weakening of Russian unity." Asked to name the most important events in the entire history of the country, people resorted to Soviet historiography, pointing to the Great October Revolution and the Great Patriotic War, which seemed to have lost none of its symbolic sheen despite a wealth of newly available information, starting with the Stalin-Hitler military alliance. In general, people seemed to have lost interest in learning more about Stalin, his rule, and his terror. Twenty-five percent of respondents now saw his role in history as positive (there was no benchmark to compare this response with, because five years earlier, at the height of the public conversation about Stalinist terror, the question itself would have been inconceivable). He ranked not far below Gorbachev and Yeltsin, whose "positive" ratings were 33 and 30 percent, respectively. These reflected a newly dim view of perestroika, which, people overwhelmingly said, had led to the regrettable breakup of the Soviet Union. The democratic revolution of 1991—the defeat of totalitarianism—was an event that existed in the sociologists' minds but not in the minds of their respondents.

Gudkov recalled going to a celebratory rally immediately after the failure of the August 1991 coup. A German friend had come along. "Long live great Russia!" chanted the crowd, and Gudkov sensed his friend tensing up. He noted that Germans are hypersensitive to expressions of nationalism, but Gudkov himself was unconcerned about the crowd's sentiment. Now he wondered if he should have paid more attention to the tone, and to the linguistic sleight of hand of the slogan. It had started as "Long live democratic Russia," but in the course of a few hours the word "democratic" had been dropped in

favor of "great." Had the ideas of freedom and democracy really been forgotten no sooner than they had apparently won?

Asked, in 1994, which of the major changes of the last five years had brought the country more harm or more good, Russians were lukewarm on freedoms: only 53 percent thought that freedom of speech had been a positive change, and other new freedoms ranked lower. Only 8 percent thought that the breakup of the Soviet Union had been a positive development. Seventy-five percent thought it had caused more harm, and this was the single highest figure in the entire survey, the thing Russians agreed on over any other.

Respondents did not exactly want to return to the Soviet Union, from what Gudkov could tell: the memory of food shortages, poverty, and airlessness was still raw. What Russians wanted was certainty, a clear sense of who they were and what their country was.

The sociologists tried to tease out what ideas of national identity there were. All individuals and societies define themselves, to some extent, in opposition to others, and for the Russians in 1994 this jumping-off image was a generalized stereotype of the European. This imaginary person was rational, cultivated, active—and Other. Russia was coming off a period of concerted self-denigration, when society was processing the shock of seeing firsthand what it had been told was the "rotten West." It had turned out to be shiny, happy, and also ordinary and law-based. For years, newspapers had used the phrase "the civilized world" to refer to that which Russia was not. Now Russians were distinctly tired of thinking of themselves, and their country, as inferior. So what did they see as the innate positive qualities of Russians? This open question elicited, on the basis of 2,957 surveys, three leading qualities: "open," "simple," and "patient." The ideal Russian, it seemed, was a person without qualities. It was clear to Gudkov that this was the blank mirror of the hostile and violent regimes under which Russians had long lived.

Hannah Arendt had written about the way totalitarianism robs people of the ability to form opinions, to define themselves as distinct from other members of society or from the regime itself.¹ Now this hollowed-out person was holding up the emptiness as his greatest virtue. If "open" and "simple" described the undifferentiated nature of a Russian, then "patient," as Gudkov read the responses, referred to Russians' tolerance for violence. In contrast to the imaginary European, all of whose qualities described agency, the respondents saw themselves as subjects of a regime that ruled by force. This made it seem that the war in Chechnya, which most of Gudkov's circle saw as a tragic anomaly, was actually a logical expression of the people's expectations.

The worst news in the survey, though, was that it contradicted Levada's original concept of Homo Sovieticus: back in 1989, he had predicted that as the subjects of totalitarianism died off, Soviet institutions would crumble. But this survey suggested that Homo Sovieticus was not going anywhere: there was no clear evidence that this sociological type was less prevalent among young people than in their parents' generation. Homo Sovieticus's central trait— doublethink—was in full display across age groups. Respondents continued to think in antinomies. A central one was this. A majority of respondents agreed with the following statement: "Over the seventy-five years of the Soviet regime our people have become different from people of the West, and it is too late to change that." A slightly larger majority agreed with the statement "Sooner or later Russia will follow the path that is common for all civilized countries." Most people agreed with both statements at the same time, and the fact that they did seemed to affirm the former and make the latter seem vanishingly unlikely.²

If Levada's original hypothesis was wrong, then the sociologists' interpretation of the collapse of the Soviet Union needed to be revised. Levada had long ago suggested that Soviet society moved, pendulum-like, between periods of extreme oppression and relative liberalization, as under Khrushchev and early on under Gorbachev, and that these cycles followed a pragmatic logic. The periods of liberalization allowed pent-up frustrations—and, more important, the people who would articulate them—to bubble to the surface. With the potential troublemakers visible and active, the crackdown that inevitably followed eliminated them. In the long run, the cycles

ensured the stability of the regime. The sociologists called the crackdowns "periodic castration."

Perestroika had seemed to begin as yet another period of a temporary loosening of the reins, but then the pendulum appeared to swing too far, bringing the entire edifice down. But what if that was not what happened? What if, in fact, it had swung just as far as it needed to go to maintain the cycles? What if the changes in borders, state structure, and laws did not actually reflect or cause profound changes in the structure of society?

on December 31, 1995, Channel 1, the main television broadcaster, aired a wholly new type of show. The New Year's Eve tradition had been in flux since perestroika. In 1986, Gorbachev, speaking at the twenty- seventh Party Congress, condemned Soviet television for being dull. In response, broadcast executives rushed to reformat their programming, scrapping, among others, The Blue Flame, the New Year's Eve variety show that had been in existence for a generation. Now Channel 1, which reached about 93 percent of Russian households, showed a film that sounded remarkably like the old show.³ Called Old Songs About the Most Important Things, it was billed as a musical. The cast of characters harked back to the propaganda musicals of the 1930s and 1950s. These generally featured collective-farm workers, friendly competitions, and innocuous love interests that spurred self-improvement in the less perfect of the pair. Often, there was class conflict that presented the opportunity for mild ideological critique, which invariably ended with the victory of communism over evil.

Old Songs featured collective-farm workers, a truck driver, a recently decommissioned soldier, a teacher, a bourgeois, a recently released convict, a "rocker" (one could tell because he had long hair and wore fancy city clothes), and a "virgin ready for marriage" (this was the role as listed in the credits), among others. The plot, such as it was, provided opportunities for this ensemble to sing twenty-one Soviet songs, most of them lyrical but many with references to the Great Patriotic War. This was no remake of a Soviet movie, though. In

this film, the classes lived in peace. Indeed, there was no conflict of any kind. There was a lot of pursuing of love interests, interspersed with the women's insistence that there be no premarital sex, but there was no culmination: no one got married, no one had sex, and nothing triumphed over anything else. The only person clearly marked as Other in the film—the "rocker"—sang a song in Ukrainian, a language not yet perceived as foreign but rather as a difficult-to- decipher dialect of Russian. In fact, nothing happened in the film, and this seemed to be the heart of its nostalgic message: against the backdrop of post-Soviet Russia, where the war in Chechnya was entering its second year, where newspapers reported endlessly on crime, conflict, and constant economic concerns, it imagined a past straight out of Soviet newspapers, where nothing ever happened unless it was in the West. In Old Songs, people happily consumed Soviet-made products such as hollow-filter Belomorkanal cigarettes (so named for the Gulag's largest project) and a rubbery processed cheese called Druzhba ("Friendship"), but they bought them willingly, and without having to stand in line, from a well-stocked shop where male customers were cheerfully served by busty saleswomen decked out in evening gowns. The Soviet era was recast as romantically placid and the Soviet regime as benevolent. In the film's most bizarre moment, a man and a woman huddle in a tiny rowboat.

"Do you know why your feet are so adorable?" he asks her.

"I do," she responds. "It is because our Soviet regime is so wonderful."

"That's correct," he says, and rises from kissing her feet to kissing her face—or so we assume, for the camera shyly pans away. The scene referenced Soviet-era spoofs of Soviet propaganda, which ascribed to the regime both unlimited powers and boundless magnanimity. But if the Soviet-era spoofs, which circulated in samizdat or simply as jokes, were edgy, this spoof of a spoof was soft and rounded. At the end of the film the entire cast, including the "rocker," the bourgeois, and the convict, gather around a giant table at the center of which sits one of the unique edible symbols of Soviet privilege, a roast suckling pig just like the ones Zhanna's father started receiving on New Year's Eve

once he became governor. In the reimagined Soviet past, everyone got a piece of the pig.⁴

Created by two men who were about to become the most influential people in Russian television,* Old Songs was a huge hit. The new renditions of the old songs could, for the next year and beyond, be heard on street corners all over the country, where kiosks were briskly selling two-cassette audio sets. There would be sequels: Old Songs About the Most Important Things 2, 3, and 4. The following year, the other major federal broadcast channel resurrected The Blue Flame, the Soviet New Year's Eve show, to compete for what was turning out to be a giant nostalgia audience. Once cable and satellite television took hold a few years later, an entire channel was launched to show Soviet television twenty-four hours a day. It was called Nostalgia, and its logo, shown in a corner of the screen, contained a red hammer and sickle.

Television producers were tapping into the moods Gudkov and his colleagues had documented in their survey. In the years between the 1989 and 1994 studies, Russians had grown tired of thinking about the future. They were drawing their sense of identity from the past, and they were imbuing this past with an additional air of wholesome conservatism.

the "open," "simple" quality-less Russian outsourced his agency to something or someone more powerful. An element of the nostalgia that was becoming evident by the end of 1995 was the longing for a strong leader, capable of exerting the force for which Homo Sovieticus was ever prepared. Yeltsin no longer seemed suited for the role: he was passive, often absent, always embroiled in yet another tussle with the parliament, though these had long since stopped seeming fateful. His army was fighting a hopeless, protracted war against Russian citizens in Chechnya, and Yeltsin himself, who had once seemed larger than life, was fumbling even this opportunity to demonstrate his resolve. On two occasions Chechen insurgents took large groups of hostages on territories adjacent to Chechnya, in an effort to force Russia to negotiate. The first time, Yeltsin went

missing and his prime minister had to handle the negotiations; the second time, Yeltsin made incoherent televised comments.⁵ The war had lost him the support of the old dissidents and many of the new liberal economists who had worked in his government, but this served only to reinforce a tendency that had been evident for a couple of years: Yeltsin was increasingly surrounding himself with old Soviet hands. In the population at large, the war was unpopular but not so unpopular that it could arouse protests of any scale—after a few attempts, efforts to organize demonstrations devolved into a weekly miniature rally, more of an information session held by a few activists staffing a table in central Moscow. The war did not arouse passions, but in 1995 Yeltsin's popularity plummeted into the single digits.⁶ In 1996, as he approached the end of his first term, his political life seemed to be over.

Yeltsin, democrat though he was, had a distinctly monarchical obsession with choosing a successor. In August 1994 he cruised into Nizhny Novgorod on a river liner sailing down the Volga and, stepping ashore to speak to the crowds, announced that he had settled on a successor: Boris Nemtsov. "I just want to say that he has grown so much that we can now set our sights on his being president," said Yeltsin. The awkward phrasing showed that the decision was Yeltsin's, not the younger man's.⁷ Nemtsov remained the heir apparent until he began voicing his opposition to the war in Chechnya. In 1996 the people of Nizhny Novgorod collected a million signatures against the war—with a population of 3.7 million, this meant that nearly all adults in the region signed. Nemtsov rode in a Nizhny Novgorod-made van to deliver the signatures to the Kremlin. He had the driver stop just outside the fortress and marched straight into Yeltsin's office, one of the fat cardboard binders with petitions in his hands.

"What do you think," asked Yeltsin, addressing him in the familiar, as one might address a child. "Are these signatures for me or against me?"

"If you stop the war, they will be for you, and if you don't, they will be against you."

When Nemtsov left, he assumed he was no longer Yeltsin's chosen successor. He did not hear from the president for months.⁸

In March 1996, Yegor Gaidar, the former prime minister, came to Nizhny Novgorod to ask Nemtsov to run for president. He joined Nemtsov on a visit to one of the collective farms, and what he saw only affirmed his resolve. Nemtsov, who had been governor during four and a half years of struggle and extremely complicated reforms, was genuinely beloved in his region. Unlike Gaidar, whose name was associated with every unpopular move made by the Russian government and whose manner and looks made him seem aloof and condescending, Nemtsov was a natural politician, charismatic and attractive in an approachable way. Gaidar argued that Nemtsov could become the true democratic candidate and beat both Yeltsin and the resurgent Communists in the election. Nemtsov said that he could not betray Yeltsin. Gaidar argued in favor of principle over personal loyalty, and failed.⁹

In the end, it looked like it would be Yeltsin against the Communists and he would lose. But the country's newly rich rallied behind the president, as did the politicians he had patronized— including, in the end, the majority of the antiwar bureaucrats—and as did the newly free press. But most of all, it was Yeltsin himself who rallied. After a couple of years when he seemed to oscillate between depression and binge-drinking, the president mobilized to campaign. "The people suddenly saw an entirely different president, one they had forgotten: it was Yeltsin as he had been in 1991, with his unique ability to talk to people, to attract support through his energy and drive," Gaidar wrote later.¹⁰

Surveys conducted by Levada's center showed that Russians wanted three things in this election cycle: an end to economic instability; an end to the war in Chechnya; and the restoration of their country to greatness. Among themselves, the sociologists began talking about the trauma caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union. For the Kremlin, they wrote memo after memo. Gudkov wrote one in which he claimed to prove that if Yeltsin did not find a way to end the war in Chechnya, he would lose the election. Yeltsin called Nemtsov

to summon him to a government airport in Moscow: they were going to Chechnya, together, to signal the beginning of the end of the war.¹¹ Yeltsin dispatched a negotiation team to Chechnya with the mandate to broker peace at any cost. Watching television reports on negotiations that quickly proceeded from ceasefire to treaty, Gudkov marveled at the real-life consequences of sociology.

If peace in Chechnya was a difficult goal, the other two—ending economic hardship and restoring Russian grandeur—were impossible. Yeltsin opted to fight directly against the rising wave of nostalgia. His campaign endeavored to drown out Old Songs About the Most Important Things with a barrage of messages, most of them frightening. Cartoons imagined a future under the Communists, with nothing in the refrigerator and only one program on television. A rock star implored his fans to vote for Yeltsin because "I don't want my country to turn into a communist concentration camp again." A clip composed of black-and-white footage from the 1918-1922 civil war said, "It's not too late to prevent civil war or famine."¹² In July 1996, Yeltsin won the election.

yeltsin was apparently aware that he had won by promoting an emotion rather than a program. Ten days after the election, he created a commission to look for a new Russian national idea. He appointed a close aide, Georgy Satarov, to run the commission, and gave it a year to produce a result. The government newspaper Rossiyskaya gazeta announced an essay contest with a handsome top prize—10 million rubles, or about $2,000, for the best national idea in seven pages or less. Satarov, an intellectual and a liberal, rushed to reassure the public that the commission would not be crafting an ideology and forcing it on the population, Soviet style. Rather, it would aim to help articulate an idea on which the nation could agree, and perhaps already agreed on. Satarov himself proposed to the commission that it could borrow a page from West Germany's post- Nazism playbook, combining a program of economic healing with what he called "national penitence." The proposal flopped. The essay contest fizzled, and the grand prize was never awarded.¹³

"Rumor has it, government dachas outside Moscow are filled with dozens of Russia's 'best minds,'" wrote the leading nationalist magazine, Nash sovremennik ("Our Contemporary"), in May 1997. "They've wasted tons of paper trying to formulate the idea. But it seems something is not working."¹⁴

Rumor in the Kremlin press pool in the fall of 1997 was that Yeltsin would unveil the Russian national idea during a visit to Nizhny Novgorod, which remained a post-Communist transition success story. Word was, Yeltsin would say that Russia was now a capitalist country working toward the glorious future of a "people's capitalism." The construction paralleled the old Soviet propaganda paradigm, when the country was said to be "socialist," working toward a glorious communist future. A catchphrase had apparently been coined to express the essence of the new national idea: "equal- opportunity capitalism," as opposed to what much of the population perceived to be Russia's current state of enrichment for the well- connected.

The rumor may have been false, in whole or in part, or Yeltsin may have thought better of the plan. On the visit to Nizhny Novgorod he did make liberal use of the phrase "equal-opportunity capitalism," but he did not present it as the new Russian idea. The press pool concluded that conservatives in the Kremlin had scuttled the proposal, once again winning at palace intrigue.¹⁵

gudkov's and his colleagues' research suggested that no message about the present and the future could capture the hearts and minds of Russians, who now had their eyes set firmly on the past. A year after failing to produce an idea for the future, Yeltsin addressed the past, finally introducing the concept of national penitence. On July 17, 1998, he took an apparently impulsive, unplanned trip to St. Petersburg to speak at the reburial of the remains of Russia's last czar and his family. It was the eightieth anniversary of the day when Czar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, their five children, and four other people had been executed in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg, where they had been held for several months.

After the execution, the house had served as a museum of the Revolution, and later as a minor administrative building. Details of what had happened to Nicholas and his family were never made public. No one knew where they were buried. Soviet schoolchildren learned only that the last Russian czar had abdicated and the October Revolution had triumphed. To ensure that all memory of the execution was erased, in the 1970s the Party ordered the house razed, and Yeltsin, then the local Party boss, made sure the order was carried out. Local lore maintained an uncertain memory of the execution, however, and in 1991 remains that were thought to belong to the czar and his family were exhumed. Genetic analysis took seven years—the science of testing remains was just then coming into being —but in the end the remains were positively identified as belonging to the czar, his wife, and three of the five children. Now they would receive a proper Russian Orthodox burial.

Yeltsin entered a St. Petersburg cathedral, flanked by the local governor and Nemtsov, who had last chaired the government commission on identifying the remains. "Esteemed countrymen," said Yeltsin,

today is a historic day for Russia. It has been eighty years since the day the last Russian emperor and his family were killed. For many years we concealed this horrific crime, but the time has come to tell the truth. The Yekaterinburg massacre is one of the most shameful pages of our history. As we bury the remains of these innocent victims, we seek redemption for the sins of our fathers. The blame belongs with those who committed this act of violence and with those who, for decades, justified their actions. The blame belongs with all of us. We have no right to lie to ourselves, using political adjectives to justify senseless cruelty. The execution of the Romanov family resulted from an irreparable split in Russian society, into "us" and "them." We are still suffering from the consequences of that split. By burying the remains of the victims of the Yekaterinburg tragedy we commit, first and foremost, an act of human justice. It symbolizes the unification of our people and the redemption of our shared guilt. We are all responsible for preserving the historical memory of our people. That is why I had to

be here today. It is my duty as a man and as the president to be here. I bow my head before the victims of merciless killing.

Yeltsin lowered his head, and after a moment of silence the church choir stepped in. Rather, this was what happened on national television.¹⁶ In reality, Yeltsin continued for another two minutes:

As we build a new Russia, we must find our footing in its history. The Romanov* name is written on some of the glorious pages of our fatherland's history, but this name is also connected to one of history's most bitter lessons: any attempt to change our life through violence is doomed. It is our duty to bring closure to this century, which for Russia became a century of blood and lawlessness, through repentance and reconciliation, regardless of our political views, religious belief, and membership in an ethnic group. History is giving us a chance. As we enter the third millennium, we must do this, for the sake of those alive today and for the sake of the generations to come. Let us remember the innocent victims of

hatred and violence. May they rest in peace.¹⁷

Whether in its truncated or full version, it was a magnificent speech, all the more striking because Yeltsin, for all his charisma, had never been a particularly inspiring speaker.

Lyosha was thirteen when the czar and his family were reinterred. Four years earlier, he had read a book about the family and the execution and had decided that he hated the Bolsheviks for killing children. His mother had hidden away her desktop bust of Lenin a couple of years earlier, and had started bringing home books like this one. When school started again in September 1998, Lyosha's entire class discussed Yeltsin's speech. They concluded that now, after the ceremony, the Soviet era was finally over.

But what did that mean? Solikamsk began rebuilding a cathedral destroyed by the Bolsheviks. A men's monastery, which had been repurposed as a Soviet jail, reopened as a monastery. Somehow, these events seemed to Lyosha to connect directly to Yeltsin's speech in the glorious St. Petersburg cathedral, under an elaborate dome and

majestic chandeliers to which the camera had panned after the president bowed his head.

Yeltsin's brief speech contained two key messages: the need for national unity and the need for national penitence. Only the unity part had traction, though, perhaps because it had been heard before, paired with "agreement and reconciliation." The ideas of redemption and of accepting the blame for Soviet-era crimes sounded from the national pulpit only once, on that day in St. Petersburg, and they remained suspended somewhere under the beautiful painted dome. Nemtsov, who wrote a detailed memoir of his political career in the 1990s, made no mention of his role as chairman of the commission that identified the remains. Yeltsin, for his part, left the entire subject of the "national idea" out of his memoirs. In a book published in 2000—barely two years after the ceremony—Yeltsin quoted his own speech at the reburial as follows:

For many years we concealed this horrific crime, but the time has come to tell the truth. The Yekaterinburg massacre is one of the most shameful pages of our history. As we bury the remains of these innocent victims, we seek redemption for the sins of our fathers. The blame belongs with those who committed this act of

violence and with those who, for decades, justified their actions

I bow my head before the victims of merciless killing. . . . Any

attempt to change our life through violence is doomed.¹⁸

In this version of the speech, blame was entirely externalized. The theme of shared responsibility, as well as the idea of the historic significance of the moment, was omitted. Both sets of omissions— Nemtsov's and Yeltsin's—showed the extent to which, for both politicians, the symbolic sphere took a backseat to the material. Yeltsin's elisions also suggested that he had thought better of his one attempt to accept, on behalf of his nation, the weight of responsibility for its "century of blood and lawlessness." by the time Lyosha was a teenager, he was familiar with the Soviet film canon—the small number of movies that had been produced in the Soviet Union, and the fact that they kept being shown on television made this possible. He liked the propaganda musicals of the 1930s and 1950s, which he watched with his mother, and the slightly bitter comedies from the 1970s—mild, wink-and-a-smile satires of the Brezhnev era—but his favorites were the films about the Great Patriotic War. He liked all of them: the melodramas from the 1950s, the treacly portrayals of heroism from the 1970s, and the singular 1970s film that carried a heavy undertone of complexity (it was called Twenty Days Without War). Basically, he loved the Great Patriotic War.

So did most Russians. The 1994 survey showed that, after all the upheavals of the 1980s and 1990s, they clung stronger than ever to the one event that seemed to occupy an unambiguous place in the nation's memory. Reading survey responses, Gudkov imagined this war as an ideal vehicle. The vehicle had headlights, which illuminated the Soviet Union's future as a superpower. The vehicle also had rear lights, which cast a beatifying glow on the crimes of the regime that preceded the war. The vehicle's heft conveniently obscured the outsize losses of the Soviet military and the disregard for human life that had made them, and the Soviet victory, possible. What Gudkov could not yet quite imagine were people like Lyosha, born in the year perestroika began but identified entirely with a war that had ended forty years to the day before he was born.

Masha loved the war too. As she entered her preteen years, she and her mother began an asymmetrical argument. Tatiana became more explicit about why they continued to live amid peeling plaster: life in Russia was no kind of life, she said, and it would never be any kind of life. She did not mean that they did not live well, exactly—by this time it was clear that they were some kind of well-off—but she meant that life that required paying a bribe to do anything was a life of daily humiliation, and in protest she continued willfully failing to repaint, re-wallpaper, or buy a washing machine; instead, they gave their washing to a new wash-and-fold place called Diana, which had pickup and drop-off spots all over town. The implication was that

someday they would go somewhere else to live a life worth living, and this life was a life beyond Russia.

In protest against her mother's protest, Masha joined the Young Seamen Club, which somehow deigned to accept a girl. The club offered target practice, endless talk of Russian military greatness, and computer-programming lessons, which were the reason Tatiana allowed Masha to join up. As soon as the ice broke at the Khimki Reservoir, a short tram ride from Tatiana and Masha's dilapidated apartment, the Young Seamen would start practice—paddling around the reservoir in small rowboats. They sailed to St. Petersburg to tour a real navy yard, but Masha was excluded because the ship could not accommodate a female.

As the only female Young Seaman, though, Masha was given a ticket to attend the festivities on May 9, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the great victory. World leaders were coming, though this had not been easy to arrange. Yeltsin was facing international criticism for the war in Chechnya, and American president Bill Clinton was wavering as late as March. As a concession, or a lure, Yeltsin promised to forgo a military parade with tanks and rockets in Red Square. Such parades had been conducted before the Second World War to frighten potential opponents and after the Second World War to celebrate victory, but none had been held since 1990. A chapel had even been constructed at the entrance to Red Square in the exact spot where a chapel had stood until 1931, when it was razed to make way for military equipment on parade days. For the half-century jubilee, a parade was planned again, but Yeltsin volunteered to hold it elsewhere, allowing foreign leaders to attend a veterans' procession in Red Square but avoid the military.

Clinton came, as did the United Kingdom's John Major, France's Francois Mitterrand, Germany's Helmut Kohl, and many others—the first meeting of the Allies on Russian soil since 1945, and one of the largest gatherings of dignitaries in Moscow, ever.¹⁹ Military bands from all over the world paraded just next to Red Square, in front of the History Museum, and this was the part of the festivities that Masha got to attend. She thought it was awesome. Even Tatiana

admitted reluctantly that she could see its appeal. Masha, triumphant, clutched an iron-on patch given to her by one of the members of the American brass band.

the history museum, which still told a story that spanned from the Stone Age to the USSR and had left more than a few Little Octobrists with the impression that prehistoric man had developed directly into Lenin, had, on days when there was no Victory Day parade, become a magnet for Russian nationalists of all kinds. Men and occasionally women milled around on its porch, giving speeches aimed at the thousands who filed by daily, convening improvised discussion groups, handing out flyers, and, most important, selling books and periodicals. One came here to buy the journal Nash sovremennik and other publications that advertised themselves as "patriotic." Folding tables buckled under the weight of books on Russia and the Russians, which ranged from works by men who had left on the Philosophers' Ship to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

By far the most prominent and most numerous were books by Lev Gumilev, a prolific ethnographer whose work had been inaccessible to the general public during the Soviet era. Gumilev was the son of Anna Akhmatova, one of the greatest Russian poets of all time, and Nikolai Gumilev, a poet and an officer in the czar's army who was executed by the Bolsheviks. Lev Gumilev was arrested for the first time, briefly, in 1933, when he was barely twenty-one, then again two years later. That time he was held for a couple of months and, upon his release, expelled from the university. In 1938 he was arrested again. He spent the following five years in the Gulag. Almost as soon as he was released, he was conscripted. After the end of the Second World War he was finally allowed to return to his studies, and, at the age of thirty-six, to defend his doctoral dissertation. Then he was arrested again, and sentenced to ten years. He served seven—his release came after Khrushchev condemned Stalin's political prosecutions—and finally obtained his first research position at the age of forty-four. He claimed, however, to have conceived his most important ideas while he was in the camps.²⁰

Gumilev's central idea was the concept of ethnogenesis, a process by which, according to his theory, different ethnic groups came into being and acquired distinct characteristics that were passed on from generation to generation. An ethnic group, or an ethnos, as Gumilev called it, was shaped by two major forces: the geographic conditions in which they lived, and radiation from outer space. In his works on ethnogenesis, Gumilev detailed his ideas on radiation and the resulting genetic mutations, while in his works on history he pursued the geographic-determinist line and drew on the ideas of Eurasianists, a school of thought—born around the time of, and apparently in reaction to, the Bolshevik Revolution—that held that Russia's unique course was set by its predicament of straddling the two continents.²¹

Gumilev was barely tolerated by the Soviet academic establishment after he was released and his name was cleared, and his ideas were largely shunned. But he enjoyed a year or two of popularity and even celebrity before his death in 1992: he recorded a series of lectures that millions saw on television, and later the press runs of his books, originally written for an academic audience, beat all conceivable records. He was the perfect post-Soviet intellectual hero, a victim of the regime whose mind seemed to have triumphed over unconscionable adversity. His famous mother's best-known work, a heartbreaking cycle of poems called Requiem, which circulated underground in the Soviet Union, told the story of his imprisonment.

They took you away at dawn, As though at a wake, I followed, In the dark room weeping children, Among icons, the candle guttered. On your lips, the chill of a cross, On your brow a deathly pall. I'll be, like a woman to be shot,

Dragged to the Kremlin wall.²²

Gumilev's intellectual quest could be seen as the essence—or as a caricature—of the fate of the social sciences in the Soviet Union: decades spent working in a hostile environment, isolated from the ideas of others, struggling to invent the wheel in the dark. Working on his own, Gumilev had had to create his own theory of the universe, complete with radiation from outer space. The totality of his theory and its scientific sheen had to appeal to post-Soviet minds, which had just lost another totalizing explanation of the world. Ethnos entered everyday Russian speech, as did other concepts of Gumilev's coinage, such as passionarnost', a measure of the degree to which an ethnos was initially receptive to radiation and eventually possessed of ethnos-specific powers.

Other schools of thought that offered totality and scientific language were also gaining a foothold in Russia. Scientology, for example, was particularly popular among small-business men and bureaucrats in smaller cities. But two attributes made Gumilev's ideas perfect for the historical moment. His insistence on the essential nature of ethnic groups helped explain the agony of the empire. His geographic determinism fit well with the idea of Russia's unique destiny, which the Levada survey had shown to be so important for Russians.

Masha's grandmother was taken with Gumilev's theories. Masha's mother objected. She chose a different all-encompassing revisionist theory, one invented by Anatoli Fomenko, a mathematician who claimed that his calculations recast all of world history. In his story, history was shorter and more accessible: in the Middle Ages, the world was a giant empire with Russia at its center; before that, there was hardly anything. Conventional history was fiction, concocted by the Russians-who-ruled-the-world for their own entertainment. Fomenko was a classic conspiracy theorist: he proved his assertions by way of relentlessly logical constructions based on random mathematical assumptions, and he dismissed all contrary evidence as falsification by his enemies. Fomenko was particularly popular with the exact-sciences crowd, including the chess champion Garry Kasparov, who for a time became a vocal adherent.²³ The head of

Moscow State University, also a mathematician, idolized Fomenko and by the mid-1990s had promoted him to the top of the university's mathematics hierarchy, lending his theories ever more credibility.²⁴ 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.

dugin absorbed all of Gumilev as his foundational science. Gumilev's language became his language, and he used Gumilev's premises to launch his own new ideas. He was writing nearly as fast as he was reading, firing off articles for the patriotic press and then compiling them into books at the rate of one or two every year. Now that he had access to a nearly unlimited number of publications, he was finding ideas he could use everywhere. The German theorist Carl Schmitt, Hitler's favorite legal scholar, became a source of inspiration, but so did Karl Popper, the Austrian-British philosopher who created the concept of an "open society." George Soros, the Hungarian-born American billionaire who was opening foundations and learning institutions throughout the disintegrating Eastern Bloc, had been taken with Popper for decades and included the words "open society" in the names of most of his organizations. Popper's ideas represented everything that Russia was now declaring it wanted to be, and the philosopher himself had once suggested a dichotomy: the open society on one hand, and its enemies on the other. Dugin wanted to be the enemy of the open society.

In 1994, Dugin published The Conservative Revolution. In this book, he envisioned a movement that would resist what he called "extremist humanism"—the idea that all humans everywhere have rights—and the concept of a law-based society. He explained that these ideas, imported from the West, were wrong precisely because

they were fundamentally foreign to Russians, whose ethnos developed in accordance with its own destiny and whose geography made it the natural enemy of the United States and Britain.²⁵

Dugin teamed up with two men who were older and much better- known than he: a rock star named Yegor Letov and a writer named Eduard Limonov. Both were leather-jacket-wearing bohemians who had spent their lives in opposition to any establishment they encountered. Limonov had been an underground poet in the Soviet Union, a gay-identified hobo in 1970s New York, an avant-garde writer in 1980s Paris, and he had returned to Russia by way of Yugoslavia, where he had spent time traveling with the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and firing at Bosnian Muslims for fun. Now Limonov was looking for a way to be heard in the cacophony of post- Soviet Russia. Together, the three men took the idea proposed to Dugin by Robert Steuckers, the Belgian, three years earlier, and launched the National Bolshevik Party. For Limonov, Letov, and another avant-garde musician who immediately joined the group with the shocking name, the National Bolshevik Party was primarily an artistic exercise. Dugin took it more seriously as a long-term project, both a political and a philosophical one. After nearly four years of shuttling back and forth to Europe to take part in New Right gatherings, Dugin stopped traveling to concentrate on working in Russia. He penned the party's manifesto, which read in part:

The best and most complete definition of national-bolshevism would be the following: "National-bolshevism is a superideology common to all enemies of open society." It is not merely one of the ideologies hostile to an open society but specifically its complete conscious total and substantive opposite. National-bolshevism is a worldview that is built on the total and radical negation of the

individual and his centrality.—

Neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis had stated it quite so explicitly.

ten

IT'S ALL OVER ALL OVER AGAIN

after winning the election, Yeltsin again began casting about for a successor. The task was now less symbolic and more urgent. The 1993 constitution dictated that his second term would be his last. Though he could easily have made the legal argument that he had first run for office in a different country, this would have gone against his own principles. And in the autumn of 1996 Yeltsin had multiple-bypass heart surgery, which, combined with the enormous battle he had had to wage to remain in office, must have made him aware of his own vulnerability. At the same time, the 1996 presidential election—the first to have been conducted in post-Soviet Russia—did not convey the sense that the country would now be governed by men chosen on their merits by the public. It had the opposite effect, that of showing that the battle for power in Russia was waged between clans, a war in which victory depended on the effectiveness of mobilization on either side.

Gudkov spent much of his time trying to make sense of this effect, and also of the fact that this description could certainly be applied to the functioning of some Western democracies, most notably the United States. The difference lay in the historical contexts. The Russian clans were direct descendants of the Soviet nomenklatura system. In the five years that had passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, no new institutions for producing leaders, public politicians, or even government bureaucrats had emerged. If anything, the opposite had happened: younger people, like Gaidar and the members of his cabinet, who had come to government from

structures adjacent or tangential to the Party, had been pushed out of government and had mostly gone into private business.¹ Old government, Party, and KGB hands had filled the many voids at all levels of the bureaucracy and had resumed their ascent up the power ladder, as though the end of the Soviet Union had caused just a temporary layoff. Among these old faces, there were just a handful of exceptions—a few elected governors and a couple of prominent generals who had gone into politics—and it so happened that Yeltsin disliked most of them.

That left Boris Nemtsov. His designated-successor status had been suspended after his protest against the war in Chechnya, but now that the war had ended, Nemtsov could be restored to favor. Yeltsin's attitude toward the younger Boris had always been paternal—caring and condescending at the same time—and this made it easier to return Nemtsov to favor. The thirty-seven-year-old Nemtsov was appointed one of two first vice-premiers—the number-three position in the cabinet—and brought to Moscow, with all the media reporting that the appointment was an anointment.

To Zhanna, the move was yet another step in her father's love affair with himself in politics. After he became governor, he had developed a taste for watching himself on television. When he was on the news—as he often was, being an active and supremely popular governor—the whole family had to watch. He teased Zhanna for loving a soap opera called Santa Barbara: he joked that he could be dying and if Santa Barbara was on she would not notice. This made him sound jealous of a television show, but Zhanna was, even more absurdly, jealous of her father's infatuation with his own televised likeness. At the end of the year, the local station usually prepared a two-hour year-in-review special that effectively starred Boris Nemtsov, and he would be glued to the set for the entire two hours. To Zhanna, this was what politics now meant: her father's insatiable taste for himself on the screen. Now this drive was taking the family from the dacha Zhanna loved, from the forest and her bike, to Moscow.

Boris promised that in Moscow they would also live at a dacha in the woods. This was not a lie, but it also was not true. There was a dacha, in an old nomenklatura village, outfitted with dusty, impersonal furniture. Zhanna's school was in the very center of Moscow, and the drive there, even with a cabinet member's traffic privileges, felt interminable. The school, which had once been reserved for the Soviet elite, was now inhabited by the children of the new rich, drawn by the school's reputation for good English-language instruction. The students were the daughters of an aluminum king, a game-show host, a media magnate. Zhanna was thirteen, awkward, and provincial. Her clothes were ordinary, and she knew nothing about luxury brands. She also did not know anything about expensive cars. She did not vacation abroad and had given no thought to a future at some fancy Western school. She did not belong.

After one quarter at the school, Zhanna declared that she was returning to Nizhny Novgorod. Her parents knew better than to argue. Her teacher said, "You are making the biggest mistake of your life." Whatever glorious future she might be forfeiting, as her teacher implied, Zhanna wanted no part of it. She returned to Nizhny Novgorod, took up residence with her grandmother, and resumed studies at her old school.

Back in Moscow, her father was experiencing frustrations and humiliations similar to her own. Around the time of his arrival in Moscow, Nemtsov published a book he had written over the preceding year. The slim volume was called The Provincial, but if the title promised some ironic distance, the book delivered none. It exposed an overconfident young man who was dazzled by his own standing in the world. The book's meaty middle was a series of capsule descriptions of all the famous men—and one woman, Margaret Thatcher—whom Nemtsov had been lucky enough to meet, from Boris Yeltsin to Richard Gere. These included miniature profiles of some of the men with whom Nemtsov would now be working in Moscow, and an unflattering description of their progress so far:

We are living in shapeless times. What reforms are there to talk

about? There have been no real reforms! So consumer prices have

been deregulated. Freedom for all has been declared. What kind of reforms are those? Reforms involve a leash that is being let out gradually, with constant control exercised over the level of tension. You have to be able to tell the difference between freedom and total

lack of oversight!²

Not only was the government neglecting its oversight function, wrote Nemtsov, but it was letting itself be manipulated by the newly moneyed class. He compared their influence to that exerted by the mystic Grigory Rasputin over Russia's last czar in the 1910s.

Russia has always had its official authorities, who had the job titles and the status, and its unofficial ones. There was, for example, Grishka Rasputin. Now we have a sort of group Rasputin. There are many of them, but they are nobodies. Grishka was an extraordinary man who had his talents. You can't really say that about the people

who surround the czar we have today.³

Nemtsov coined two terms: "oligarchs" and "robber-baron capitalism"; the usages stuck.⁴ He conjured a plan for getting the rich in line once he arrived in Moscow. After five years of wielding power effectively in Nizhny Novgorod, he was sure that in his new post getting the federal government's house in order would be a simple matter of will.⁵ He wrote a memo to Yeltsin outlining his program for what he called "nationalizing the Kremlin." The memo explained that the Kremlin—by which Nemtsov and the rest of Russia meant "political authority in the country"—had been privatized in much the same way as shops and oil companies had been, and now had to be reclaimed by its rightful, elected occupants. Nemtsov's "nationalization" involved measures big and small. The oligarchs' Kremlin-issued identification cards, which allowed unrestricted entrance to the fortress, must be taken away, along with their Kremlin-issued license plates and flashing blue lights, which made them exempt from traffic rules. Privatization, going forward, should be transparent, creating a level playing field for all potential investors. The practice of loans-for-shares auctions must be discontinued.