The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

These auctions allowed investors to take possession of large companies by granting them credit guaranteed by a majority of the shares, knowing that the companies would be unable to repay; the auctions themselves were generally organized by the prospective lender.

Yeltsin liked the plan—Nemtsov later wrote that the part about the oligarchs' access privileges must have been particularly appealing to the president because it reminded him of the old Party system of apportioning and regulating perks, a system Yeltsin had once railed against. But as soon as the government tried to implement plans for leveling the privatization playing field, the oligarchs went to war. Nemtsov had misjudged the situation badly: he thought that he could use against the ascendant oligarchs the tools he had honed at home, dealing with old Soviet-style bosses whose power had waned. He had also banked on his authority as a government official, not realizing that in Moscow power was never fixed but always contingent on one's proximity to Yeltsin, and on his favor. The president continued to support Nemtsov's plan in theory, but he grew irritated with the public battles and Nemtsov's lack of skill in handling them.⁶

Nemtsov had insulted the oligarchs by calling into question their legitimacy and their talents, and now he wanted to take away their political influence and their prospective wealth. They owned the media. They often used it to fight one another, but now they united against him. Moscow journalists ridiculed him for the same reasons the rich girls at her school bullied Zhanna: his cluelessness about clothes and cars. He had worn white trousers to the airport on a hot summer day to greet the president of Azerbaijan, who had arrived for a state visit. This disgraceful breach of protocol was shown on television over and over.⁷ As for cars, Nemtsov was lobbying to require that the government use only Russian-made cars to chauffeur its bureaucrats around. By this time, the officials in Moscow were used to Mercedes-Benz S-Class cars, and Nemtsov was portrayed as not only ignorant about cars but also possibly corrupt, because the Volga, for which he was lobbying, was made in Nizhny Novgorod. One of the country's most popular television anchors, Sergei Dorenko,

reported that Nemtsov had taken part in a sex party with strippers hired for the occasion—and failed to pay them.⁸ Nemtsov later wrote that after a few years Dorenko told him that he himself had hired the sex workers to defame Nemtsov on camera.⁹

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

in 1995, Masha's mother quit the retail business. She stopped shuttling back and forth and importing the hideous Korean handbags. With the money she had made, she bought a dacha on the Istra River, northwest of Moscow, and went back to college. She wanted to use her mind again, but physics was clearly never going to bring her any money. Someone had told Tatiana about a new field called "actuarial science"—it was new for Russia, that is: the market was ushering it into existence, but very few people were qualified to work in this area. Tatiana figured that with her background in statistical physics, she could succeed, fast. Then, through her studies, she met a man from the Military Insurance Company, and he gave her a job.

Like so many new businesses, the Military Insurance Company was born out of a combination of a new need and old resources and access. Tatiana's new bosses were retired military brass, and they created a company from expertise and connections: much of their business early on exploited legal loopholes to allow clients to use what appeared to be payments on insurance policies to avoid paying taxes. Some of their business was actual insurance, though, and Tatiana's newly acquired actuarial skills proved invaluable. The retired colonels liked her. It was as alien an environment as any she had ever encountered, but they were kind to her and to Masha, who spent some time around the office that Tatiana never seemed to leave.

Tatiana had not exactly changed her view on the subject of a future in Russia—she had simply adjusted her expectations by one generation. She herself would never make a life elsewhere, but her daughter would. To that end, she not only secured a decent and stable

income but spent most of her money on tutors for Masha, whose job it now was to gain admission to Moscow State University and later parlay that degree into a ticket to graduate school abroad.

Then, one day in August 1998, Tatiana's bank card stopped working. All the money they had in the world was in that account. The word was "default." Russia had stopped paying its bills, and this meant that the ruble tumbled, prices skyrocketed, panic set in, people ran to the banks to get their money, and the banks cut off clients' access to their own accounts. In several cases, this still could not keep the banks from collapsing.

Masha's tutoring had to be suspended, as did the sending out of the wash. But what really frightened Masha was the prospect of having to go without sanitary pads. She had recently started menstruating, and Tatiana had told her that back in the USSR, they had had to use cotton during their periods (she omitted the fact that even cotton was not reliably available). What if Masha's next period came before Tatiana could get cash, and Masha had to resort to cotton? What if "default" meant that sanitary pads would disappear from the stores altogether? The thoughts were too much to bear. Someone they knew, who worked for Procter & Gamble, had just been paid in products—toothpaste and pads—and Masha convinced her mother to barter something, anything, for an industrial-size box of maxipads.

This panic did not last. Within a couple of months, Tatiana was getting paid regularly and they were sending out the wash again. They owed their family's speedy recovery to the improved fortunes of the Military Insurance Company, which had just secured a lavish new contract with the Federal Security Service, the FSB, where Yeltsin had just appointed a new boss. He was a colonel from St. Petersburg, by the name of Vladimir Putin.

for a teacher living in Solikamsk, recovery took much longer. Lyosha's mother, like other teachers she knew, worked for no pay for the entire 1998-1999 school year. Her husband was still drawing a salary at the mine, but it was Lyosha's mother's potato garden that

kept them going. When they were not eating potatoes, it was pasta with sugar—a stomach-fooling dish from Galina's childhood. They forgot about meat for months.

in the summer of 1998, Zhanna agreed to return to Moscow, on one condition: she would go to a regular-people school. Secondary School Number 312 was so regular that students who did not drink and smoke stood out, uncomfortably. But even before school began in September, there came a day Zhanna would always remember.

They were living on the Garden Ring, the wide circular avenue that circumscribed central Moscow. Yeltsin had granted Nemtsov his own apartment there—it was very much the done thing at all levels of government now: a judge would get an apartment from the mayor, a regional legislator from the governor, and a member of the cabinet, like Nemtsov, from the president himself. The difference between this reward system and the old Soviet one of assigning privilege was that the new approach was more personalized and less systematized— each apartment was gifted on its own terms, at the discretion of the boss. Also, unlike the Soviet apartments, which nominally belonged to the state, these new ones became the property of the recipient, whether he stayed in his post for many years or for a few months.

An apartment on the Garden Ring was a mark of privilege and prestige. It was also a very convenient and very uncomfortable place to live: you could get anywhere in the city fast from there, but the Garden Ring itself was so heavy with traffic at all times that one could not even open the front-facing windows, so much noise and filth would burst in. They kept the windows shut, and watched an ever thicker layer of black film coat them on the outside.

But that day in August, Zhanna went up to the window and saw nothing. Where a solid flow of cars should have been, only a few could be seen—they looked like stragglers from some great escape. Something terrible must have happened. Her father had for months been talking about a looming economic crisis. This must be what that looked like.

Nemtsov had been sounding the alarm about the Russian state's mounting debt. The government's misleading laissez-faire attitude, which masqueraded as freedom, was, Nemtsov believed, simply failure to accept responsibility for an economy headed for implosion. Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, looking at the issue through the prism of his own experience as a member of the Soviet leadership, saw the triumph of the group he had found most intractable during the perestroika era. These were the heads of Soviet industry, who, in the central-planning system, held the posts of government ministers, but whom Alexander Nikolaevich called simply the Mafia.¹¹ He believed that they had once again contrived to receive—and loot— giant sums of money. Clifford Gaddy, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., made the radical claim that all of Russia's reforms of the early 1990s had failed to budge the behemoths of the command economy, which continued, in all their illogical and profoundly unprofitable ways, to dominate the Russian economy. All the trappings of the new economy—the supposed market-based prices, the competitive salaries, and the taxes—were, according to Gaddy, nothing but illusions. He called it the "virtual economy," coining the term long before the word "virtual" took on a different and more appealing meaning. He meant that the country pretended to have entered a new economic age but in reality traded through barter and never fully met any of its monetary obligations. He, too, placed the blame on the unreformed, and politically powerful, core of the command economy: the enormous inefficient companies run by the very Mafia that worried Alexander Nikolaevich. The "robber barons" who concerned Nemtsov were kings of the "virtual economy."¹²

Whether one focused on debt, on the remaining influence of the Soviet economic lobby, or on the imaginary nature of the new Russian economy, these critics—who included a number-three member of the cabinet—agreed that the situation was untenable and the government was in denial. Nemtsov had been proposing monetary reform, which would have included dropping the value of the ruble—thereby perhaps making the entire monetary system a little less "virtual"—but these proposals were rejected. Instead, Russia borrowed more and more heavily, to prop up the currency. The debt became a pyramid, which collapsed in August 1998. This was "default"—a word Boris Nemtsov read on the newswires and Zhanna heard on the radio. Russia stopped servicing its debt, the people went into a panic, the banks stopped giving out cash, and cars stopped running up and down the Garden Ring.

Nemtsov wanted to resign from the cabinet but Raisa said, "You were not the one who defaulted, and you shouldn't be the one who resigns." Yeltsin said something essentially similar: he fired much of the rest of the cabinet, but kept Nemtsov. But, weakened politically by the crash, Yeltsin could not hope to push a premier of his own choosing through parliament. A seventy-year-old veteran of the foreign intelligence service who embodied the crumpled-gray-suit ethos of the Soviet bureaucrat, Yevgeniy Primakov, was finally confirmed to run the government. Nemtsov resigned: there was nothing he was going to be able to do in a Primakov cabinet.

Time slowed instantly. After New Year's, the family flew to America. They stayed at Harvard for a month. Nemtsov lectured on the Russian economy, arguing that it was in need of a profound restructuring and a deep cleansing.¹³ The family was given a room in a university residence hall. It had cracking plaster on the ceiling, creaky bunk beds, and, as it turned out, bedbugs. Boris complained, and a professor set them up in his own apartment, which he was not using. Zhanna was allowed to attend classes at a nearby private school in Cambridge. She was happy. Things were better than they had been in years. After Harvard they went to New York, where the slow, intimate life of temporary exiles continued.

back in russia, politics was speeding up. On March 24, 1999, NATO forces began bombing Serbia in response to the Yugoslav army's actions in Kosovo. Prime Minister Primakov happened to be on his way to the United States when the bombing began. The insult and the injury were on display. Russians had long considered the Orthodox Serbs to be their existential allies. Kosovo was, legally, a part of Serbia —a secessionist, Muslim part—and the parallels to Chechnya were obvious. Primakov was mere hours from arriving in the United States, where President Bill Clinton might at least have paid lip service to consulting him, and not doing so was an affront. Primakov turned his plane around and returned to Russia.

The following day, Masha's class had a field trip to the Lev Tolstoy Library on Lev Tolstoy Street. They had recently read Lev Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, at the end of which Anna's love, the endlessly desirable Vronsky, volunteers to fight on the side of the Serbs against the Ottoman Empire. As they walked down Lev Tolstoy Street, the tenth-graders discussed the NATO bombings of Serbia. It was an outrage, they agreed, a betrayal, and practically an American attack on Russia. For Masha, this was a moment when the two most authoritative and passionate voices in her head—the one of the militarized sailing club and the one of her cinephile mother—finally came together in a single fervor. The Americans were bombing Masha's Serbian brethren in the land of the great director Emir Kusturica.

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

On May 9—a month and a half after the start of the bombing campaign—Red Square saw its first Victory Day military parade in a decade. There was no heavy equipment—no tanks and rockets, like in days past, only a march of men in uniform—and they moved through the square in the opposite direction to that taken in Soviet times, before the chapel at the entrance to the square had been restored. But the four men goose-stepping in front of the procession—one leader and three young officers behind him—carried a red flag with a hammer and sickle, like the one that had been placed on the Reichstag in 1945. Yeltsin did not take the Soviet secretary-general's conventional place atop the Lenin Mausoleum, but he assumed the traditional role of overseeing the parade, from a podium set up just in front of the granite building, where the Bolshevik leader's body was still on display after seventy-five years. It was the fifty-fourth anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War, but the television voice-over pronounced that figure as though it had particular symbolism and went on to stress, "Whoever might be trying today to diminish the significance of our victory, for the people it will forever

remain great."¹⁵ There was no need to spell out that it was NATO, with its bombing campaign, that was attempting retroactively to "diminish the significance of our victory."

Yeltsin, thought Gudkov, was finally playing the card he had resisted using for so long: staking his own legitimacy on the mythology of the Great Patriotic War.

three days after the Victory Day parade, Yeltsin set in motion a parade of successors. Primakov, whom he distrusted and plainly disliked, was out. He appointed a new prime minister, forty-seven- year-old Sergei Stepashin, who had been serving as minister of the interior. A career law-enforcement officer, Stepashin had been in and out of the government for a decade, so his was a familiar face—even if he lacked the force of personality to elicit any particular emotional response. Now, by dint of being appointed prime minister, he was Yeltsin's new heir apparent.

The NATO bombing of Serbia ended in May, with a negotiated agreement that turned Kosovo into a de facto protectorate of the Western powers. Peacekeeping troops began moving into position in the area, for what would clearly be a long stay. On June 12—which happened to be Russian Independence Day—British peacekeepers were slated to secure the airport in Pristina, the capital city. But the night before, two hundred Russian peacekeepers stationed in Bosnia suddenly marched across the border to Pristina and seized the airport. The operation seemed to have no strategic objective, or even a plan—

the Russian troops had not made arrangements for supplies, and were ultimately fed by NATO troops who took pity on them. Back in Russia, the demonstration of pointless and unopposed military power played well. Masha and her friends cheered the siege of the airport in much the same way as they cheered a Russian soccer victory over Holland. After a week, Russia agreed to send about 3,600 troops to Kosovo to work alongside Western peacekeepers, effectively renewing its relationship with NATO—which had been severed when the bombing began—without accepting NATO command.—

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

That summer, before Masha's last year of high school, she went to Crimea with a friend and the friend's mother. They rented a single room in Alushta. They went to the beach and watched television. Masha read romantic poetry by Anna Akhmatova and Maximilian Voloshin. They met teenagers from Ukrainian cities—Dnepropetrovsk and Kiev—who told them that they spoke with a Moscow accent. Masha objected that she did not have an accent: they did. They laughed. They drank together, a lot. After the friend's mother left, trading places with Tatiana, they had even more freedom. They had no curfew. They drank on the piers at night. One night, a freak wave covered all of them and pulled them off the pier, but they got out and laughed.

"I'm sick of Crimea," Masha said at one point. "I want to go back to Russia. You know, birch trees, mosquitoes, the nostalgia."

Tatiana thought this was funny—who gets sick of the sea? Masha thought it was funny too. But they went to the dacha for the rest of the summer. It was early August.

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

Masha was impressed, though. He was an intelligence officer. Soviet intelligence officers were a special breed. Masha had binge- watched films about them when she was sick one time, at her grandmother's apartment. There was the miniseries TASS Is Authorized to Declare, in which a flawless and brilliant KGB officer exposes an American spy in Moscow. The spy's handler, an American called John Glabb, is pure evil: not only does he organize pro- American military coups in small African countries, but he also traffics in heroin, which he packs into the bodies of infants purchased from impoverished families and killed for this purpose. He is also married to the scion of a Nazi fortune.¹⁷ Another film was Dead Season, in which a Soviet intelligence officer working deep undercover captures a former Nazi doctor now working for one of the Western powers. The doctor has developed a potion that turns off individual will.¹⁸

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

"I hope he is our next president," she said of Putin.

like most people he knew, Gudkov assumed that Putin would be a temporary figure, a placeholder picked by a leader who was feeling disoriented. Unlike most people he knew, though, Gudkov was painfully aware of the expectations most Russians were placing on the country's next president: they wanted a savior, a leader who would be not merely decisive but dominating. Putin hardly seemed suited for that role: he had no history and no presence.

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

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

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

A majority saw courage and determination in Putin's phrasing, and this distinguished him from Yeltsin. Some were charmed by his hint at modesty and reason—"I apologize" and "if it comes to that" played to this audience. On the whole, he came off as being one of the people, and yet ready to lead the people.

Who were "the people"? Levada's team had conducted its third Homo Sovieticus survey, and the results were devastating. Ten years after the original study, the hypothesis had been fully invalidated. Homo Sovieticus was not, as Levada had suggested, dying off. He was not only surviving but reproducing—and this meant that he was reclaiming his dominant position in the population.

According to the results of the 1999 survey, Russians were ever more nostalgic. "Would you prefer that things return to the way they were before 1985?"—before perestroika—drew a clear majority of respondents who agreed: 58 percent, up from 44 in 1994. The proportion of people who viewed the changes of the early 1990s as positive continued to shrink, while the percentage of those who said they could not cope with the changes grew noticeably. The more distant past became ever more appealing: now 26 percent believed that Stalin's rule had been good for the country, up from 18 percent in 1994. Those who held a negative view of the Soviet dictator were now in the minority. Russians continued to think of themselves mostly as "open" and "patient"—the percentage of people who cited these qualities had grown. At the same time, respondents seemed to become more open-minded with regard to "deviants": only 15 percent now wanted to "liquidate" homosexuals, down from 22 percent in 1994. But the number of those who would "leave them to their own devices" dropped too, from 29 to 18 percent. Russians now overwhelmingly wanted to "help" their homosexuals—an option that implied a sort of medieval model of helping the afflicted. Viewed in the context of epidemic nostalgia for the Soviet past, these results

made sense: they represented yet another way of returning to the paternalistic state.²⁰

In December 1999, Russia held its third post-Soviet parliamentary election. This seemed like one of the new era's few indisputable accomplishments: a number of different parties competed in what could reasonably be called a fair and open process. They split the popular vote in ways that pointed to the existence of large distinct groups that favored particular parties. There were features, however, that made this election very different from one you might observe in a functioning democracy. The leading parties had been formed just weeks or months before the election. This had been the case in the first two post-Soviet elections as well, but that had seemed understandable in the early stages of Russia's self-reinvention. Now, though, Gudkov found himself trying to understand what caused political parties to be discarded between elections.

The other troublesome feature in this election was a change in public etiquette. Local and federal government officials made an effort to appear on television more often than during the off-season— this was normal. But this time they did not appear solicitous of their voters: they consistently expressed certainty in their victory, making the election sound like a ritual rather than a contest. Their tone reminded Gudkov of the bureaucratic entitlement of the Soviet period.

Looking at the data, Gudkov and his coauthor, Boris Dubin, concluded that these two traits of the parliamentary election were symptoms of a single problem: the election had all the trappings of a political contest but lacked the substance of one. Democratic procedure, which had seemed a revolution in itself, was now the political equivalent of the "virtual economy" described by Gaddy—a mask pulled over a structure that refused to change.

Russia's current nominal multiparty system had grown out of the collapse of the Party state. The process was not unlike what Alexander Nikolaevich had proposed more than a decade earlier when he suggested to Gorbachev that the Communist Party should be split into two, in order to launch political competition. The suggestion might have looked naive but well-intentioned back then: Alexander Nikolaevich was trying to bridge the gap between a totalitarian system and a democratic one. Now it appeared that the gap had been unbridgeable: the old system's institutions had reconstituted themselves in a new guise. Gudkov and Dubin found that Russians— both the candidates and the voters—believed that political power rightly belonged to bureaucrats, whose chief qualification was experience in the bureaucracy. If a party advanced an agenda that diverged widely from existing policy, this party was viewed a priori as marginal. Elections became a popularity contest in a very small political field, where the leading candidates, by definition, agreed with one another. Of course, to some extent this could be said of many, possibly any, Western democracy. But Western democracies did not inherit their narrow political field from a seventy-year period of totalitarianism, and their future did not depend on their ability to advance fundamental social change.

It was now clear that even back in 1996, when the contest between Yeltsin and his Communist challenger, Gennady Zyuganov, was filled with desperate rancor, the two candidates' political platforms were interchangeable: both contained vague promises of building a market economy with a human face. Now, in a country united by two waves of strong emotions in one year—first in response to the NATO bombing of Serbia and then, more profoundly, in reaction to the apartment-building explosions and the war in Chechnya—there was no room at all for difference. Two new political parties appeared just before the election. One, Yedinstvo ("Unity"), was formed by the Kremlin for the express purpose of supporting Putin's ascendancy to the throne. The other, the Union of Right Forces, was its nominal liberal opponent, but it too supported Putin and the war in Chechnya. They differed mostly in style, with the Union of Right Forces—which included Nemtsov among its five leaders—appealing to a younger, more educated audience, the same people who had most vocally opposed the first war in Chechnya. In Solikamsk, fourteen-year-old Lyosha was observing this neat nondivision division clearly: his aunts, who had supported the Communists as long as he could remember, were now in favor of Unity, while his mother's more

sophisticated friends donned T-shirts brought to town by the Union of Right Forces; they were emblazoned with the phrase "You Are Right." There was no disagreement among his mother's friends and her family, though, because all of them were positively in thrall to Putin.

Gudkov started thinking that "political party" and "election" were just two more Western terms that could not be used in Russian— except to mislead. A more precise term could be borrowed from Max Weber, whom Levada had had Gudkov study all those years ago. The term was "acclamation," a process by which the governed affirm a choice already made for them.²¹

But Russians were acclaiming not only the candidates chosen for them by the bureaucracy—Putin chief among them—but also themselves, reaching for a sense of belonging, a sense of being with the majority that had been lost with the Soviet Union. What was felt as a void in the early 1990s had gradually been transformed into nostalgia, and now it could be focused on one person. It was precisely Putin's lack of distinction, which had made Gudkov think that he was a temporary figure, that in fact made him the perfect embodiment of the Soviet leadership style. In his person, charisma met bureaucracy.

Gudkov and Dubin included these observations in their article about the December 1999 parliamentary election, which they titled "The Time of the 'Gray People.'" They meant that the distinction between supposedly competing parties was as minor as the difference between gray and black—specifically that the so-called reformers had diluted their agenda to such an extent that they could stand out only against the pitch-black background of total Soviet nostalgia. The headline also contained a literary reference, to a novel called Hard to Be a God, a piece of science fiction by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which the Soviet intelligentsia of the 1980s read and quoted like the Bible. The novel described a future academic-history experiment involving an artificially assembled civilization from the human Middle Ages. "The Gray Ones" in the novel are the shock troops of a man who appears to be an interim ruler, someone dispatched by stronger—and darker—forces to clear the land. The

Gray Ones wage war on what they see as dangerous liberal ideas and on enlightenment as such. The Gray Ones, and their gray cardinal of a leader, appear inept, and come off as saboteurs rather than statesmen, yet they turn out to have infinite staying power.²² Gudkov and Dubin were thinking of no such scenario, though: when they chose the title for their article, they had in mind only the image of gray against black.²³

PART FOUR

RESURRECTION

eleven

LIFE AFTER DEATH

on December 31, 1999, Lyosha, his mother, his stepfather, his aunt, and her son all drove out to the countryside to celebrate New Year's with Lyosha's grandmother. Serafima Adamovna greeted them on the porch. She looked devastated.

"Yeltsin is leaving," she said.

All of them stood there, stricken by this news. They had been abandoned. How was this even possible?

In the house, the television was on. Yeltsin had already announced his resignation, and now the news anchors were talking about it, showing clips of Yeltsin's speech—he looked like he was crying—and other footage that showed that while Lyosha and his family were driving, the country had moved on.

"I have fulfilled my life's mission," Yeltsin had said in his address. "Russia will never go back to the past. From now on, Russia will be moving forward. I should not stand in the way. I should not spend another six months holding on to power when the country has a strong man who deserves to be president—and on whom virtually every Russian today is pinning his hopes for the future."¹

Then there were two men in a Kremlin office, one wearing a Navy uniform and the other in a gray civilian suit. Yeltsin shook both their right hands. In their left hands, each held a hard-sided briefcase and something that looked like a camera case. There was no voice-over— only the sound of the Russian national anthem playing—but it was obvious that the four objects together constituted what was known in the vernacular as the "nuclear suitcase." The men shook Putin's hand

next. Then he stepped closer to Yeltsin. Putin was holding a red file folder under his arm. Yeltsin wiped a tear from his left eye. He looked like he had limited mobility now—he seemed bloated—and he had only three fingers on his left hand because of a childhood accident, and all that together made him look awkward and vulnerable, like a giant toddler. Putin, Lyosha thought, looked disoriented and unsure of himself. Lyosha's grandmother was disoriented too, and scared, though in the months leading up to this day she had been quoting Putin copiously and gleefully, mostly his line about the terrorists in the outhouse. On the television, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, in his tall white hat topped with a golden cross, was watching over the transfer of power.

Then there was Yeltsin wearing an overcoat, opening a door for Putin, who was dressed only in a suit. "Here is your office," said Yeltsin, gesturing with his three-fingered hand. The camera panned to the presidential desk, with a small decorated New Year's tree next to it.*

And then there was Yeltsin out on the porch, in his overcoat and fur hat, with Putin next to him, still wearing only a suit, like a host who has stepped outside for a moment to say goodbye to a departing guest. Yeltsin got into a Mercedes stretch limo and drove off the premises as Putin, flanked by several other men, waved to him from the porch.²

sometimes seryozha thought that he was crazy—or everyone else was. This whole setup with the transfer of power struck him as bizarre, possibly even unreal. On New Year's night, he asked, "Is he putting us on?" But even his grandfather, who was usually Seryozha's political ally and guiding light in the family, said that Putin was saying some reasonable things, making points that Alexander Nikolaevich himself had long been making. He heard Putin speaking about the social responsibility of government—health care, education, culture, words that Yeltsin had never seemed to utter—and this gave him some hope. He was cautious—he said that he feared seeing Putin fall into a trap set by the resurgent bureaucracy, what he called "the nomenklatura monster," and when he heard Putin speak of the need to strengthen the state, his concern grew. Still, he thought the new president deserved a chance.³ And Putin, to him, certainly seemed saner than the outgoing Russian president.

The way everyone seemed to be acting like this was normal, to take this gray little man, announce that he would be president, and watch him ascend to the throne three months later—the way everyone was unfazed by this, made Seryozha feel crazy. He had been feeling that way more and more often.

At Moscow State University, where Seryozha was now studying computer programming, everyone seemed to have been waiting for Putin to come along. Seryozha did not even notice when his portraits began appearing, along with patriotic paraphernalia he had not noticed before: flags, flyers for Putin's Unity Party, posters calling on everyone to vote in the hastily scheduled presidential election. This pretend election of a barely perceptible candidate who was the preordained winner made Seryozha feel like he barely existed himself. It was probably a good thing that his field required virtually no social contact with his fellow students: he could not have grasped their reality if he had wanted to.

in august 2000, Lyosha went to the Black Sea coast with his mother. They spent their days at the beach, which was so crowded that they had to get there early to find a place to throw down a towel on the sand, and their evenings in the kitchen of a rented apartment, eating sickly sweet local grapes and listening to the radio. The news was as slow as the southern air, until something inconceivable happened. According to the radio, a Russian nuclear submarine, the Kursk, had sunk off the coast of Murmansk. Some of the crew were still alive, but trapped at the bottom of the Barents Sea. The radio was saying that Russian rescue crews could not get to the submarine. The radio was also saying that Norway had offered to help but Russia had declined. The radio was saying that President Putin had decided not to interrupt his vacation in Sochi.

The days slowed even more. In the fog of his sleepless nights and his circular daydreams, Lyosha kept imagining the sailors, boys a few years older than he was, at the bottom of the cold sea, waiting for help that could not get to them, and the president—the little man to whom Yeltsin had handed his office—somewhere quite near here, lying on a stretch of the Black Sea beach that was pristine and uncrowded, reserved for Putin's uninterruptible vacation.

Thinking about all this was a relief, because Lyosha's thoughts before the submarine disaster had been even worse. Something had happened to Lyosha his first day at the beach. When he saw other boys, teenagers like himself or young men, dressed, like he was, in only a pair of small black bathing trunks, he felt heat shoot excruciatingly through his body and a thrilling invisible shiver set in. It happened every day after that first time. The thoughts it brought were unthinkable. I am a pervert, he thought. I am sick. I am the only person in the world who feels this way. Now these awful phrases floating in his mind mixed with images of the sailors dying at the bottom of the sea.

Rationally, Lyosha knew that there were homosexuals in the world. In seventh grade his class had made a weekly visit to a family- planning center where a psychologist talked to them about things their parents did not. The program was funded by American billionaire George Soros, the school had a contract with the center, and parents of the seventh-graders had to sign consent forms to allow their children to attend. The psychologist happened to be the mother of Lyosha's friend, a girl with whom he shared a desk in every one of his classes. She was as unpopular as he was, not just with other children but also with teachers, who seemed to suspect her of being smarter than they were. Lyosha, for his part, had somehow earned the nickname "faggot" among fellow students. One day at the center, the psychologist said that in addition to "heterosexual" families there were also "homosexual" ones. The idea was sudden, exciting, and as foreign as Soros, the American billionaire.

The following year—eighth grade—an older girl stormed into their class one day and asked loudly, "Did you know you had a prostitute in your grade?" She explained that thirteen boys had locked the girl in

question in a cellar and had taken turns having intercourse with her. "She couldn't get out," said this accuser, "and she liked it." Over the course of the next few days, the story was recounted many times, as the male participants boasted of their roles in it. Their victim stayed out of school for a few weeks, and when she returned, she and Lyosha became friends. They were now a group of three: the Faggot, the Prostitute, and the Snob.

As they got older, some of their classmates seemed to develop respect for their intelligence and their ability to learn, explain, and argue about things. In tenth grade—the penultimate year of high school—Lyosha studied harder than ever before, because this seemed the only way to chase away the thoughts that had begun tormenting him in August on the Black Sea. Toward the end of the school year, he was elected class president: whatever some of his classmates thought of him, whatever led them to call Lyosha "faggot," they agreed that he was the best person to represent their interests before the school administration.

In May 2001, toward the end of tenth grade, Lyosha and his two friends were hanging out at the playground behind his building. They were too old for playgrounds, of course, but in the absence of other public spaces all young people in Solikamsk hung out in playgrounds, especially when the weather was good. A girl strolled by—she was one of the kids who used to sleep in Lyosha's stairway, except she was not a kid anymore. She called out to someone else who happened to be walking by, a man of about thirty. He sauntered over. She pointed at Lyosha.

"Faggot," she said.

The man took a short running start and kicked Lyosha in the lower back. Then again. His eyes were crazy, empty and furious at the same time, and Lyosha knew that he was about to be beaten to death.

Lyosha's stepfather happened to come out on the balcony just then. This gave him a clear view of the playground.

"Get out of here," barked the girl.

Lyosha ran.

At the emergency room he was told that there was bleeding and that he now had a condition called a "floating kidney"—literally, one

of his kidneys was no longer securely attached by surrounding tissue. The pain was excruciating, and to relieve it—and to avoid surgery—he would have to stay in bed for two weeks. Lyosha's mother wanted to go to the police, but Lyosha was terrified that the reason for the beating would then be revealed. Because if he had to explain what had happened to him, he would have to say, "I am gay."

"I am gay," he said to himself. He had learned the word from films on the cable channel. The beating convinced him that the word applied to him.

There was a new counselor at school, a recent college graduate who had made it clear that she wanted to be Lyosha's friend. He dialed her number now, from his sickbed, while his mother and stepfather slept in the next room. Lyosha's courage ran out once she picked up the phone, though. They stayed on the line for five hours, alternating between filler chatter and awful silences.

"Is this about something illegal?" she asked.

"Drugs?" she asked.

"Are you trying to tell me that you are gay?" she asked.

"I am gay."

She was fine with it—more than fine. Lyosha was suddenly spilling his thoughts and feelings, and she sighed and laughed in all the right places. He was even able to talk to her about sex, or what he imagined sex to be. After that, he told his cousin, who was now a military- school cadet. The cousin said that he could not accept the homosexual lifestyle but he still loved Lyosha.

Lyosha decided not to tell his two school friends, but even so, things did not look nearly so desperate as they had a year ago, on the Black Sea. He had stopped being afraid of his stepfather since the time Sergei got drunk and nasty and Lyosha hit him over the head with a kitchen stool. He had only one year of high school left. After that, he would leave Solikamsk for good and go to university. He studied harder than he ever had before, entering every conceivable student competition to maximize his chances of university admission.

By May 2002, it was clear that Lyosha would be graduating with a silver medal, a scholastic distinction that would entitle him to skip general-knowledge university entrance exams: he had to sit only for

the exam in whatever subject he chose to study. On the eve of graduation, Lyosha bleached one half of his bangs. At the breakfast table, his stepfather, wearing his perennial wife-beater undershirt, took a break from making his disgusting eating noises to ask:

"Are you a faggot or something?"

"None of your business," said Lyosha.

after graduation, one of the boys in the class threw a party at his parents' dacha, and about fifteen people went. They danced and drank. By five in the morning, a couple of the guests had passed out in an alcoholic stupor. The rest gathered in the kitchen to eat ice cream. Lyosha stood up and said, "I am gay."

"Why?" asked one of the girls. She seemed upset.

"I knew it," said someone else.

Then the conversation moved on. Lyosha had his high school diploma. In five days' time he would go to the mayor's office to pick up his silver medal. He would be out of there.

Then it dawned on him that there was no turning back. Soon enough, the news of his coming out would spread through town. His life now depended on getting into university.

masha wanted a career in the military. There were a few problems with this, of which Tatiana's shock and horror at the idea was perhaps the least. Masha wanted to be an officer in an army that was not the Russian army but a glorious army of some strong and proud country. She sometimes thought of herself as a sort of extraterritorial patriot: given a country, she would be proud, and given a uniform, she would serve. Instead, she was given Russia, which filled her heart with despair and her mind with the idea that life was not worth living.

With an empty mind like that, Masha would never get into university, said Tatiana. By "university" she meant Moscow State, where everyone in the family had gone. Everything else was not really higher education. And everything that was not the sciences was not really knowledge. Meanwhile, Masha was barely passing chemistry. She started cramming, and discovered that she actually liked chemistry. She declared her intention to apply to the chemistry department of Moscow State. This would be a lot better than a military academy, said Tatiana, if only Masha had a prayer of getting in.

Masha graduated from high school in May 2000, a month after her sixteenth birthday. She took the Moscow State entrance exams and fell just one point short of full admission to chemistry. In the post-Soviet setup, state universities now had two tracks: tuition-free admission for the top students and paid for those who scored slightly lower. Tatiana could afford to pay for Masha to attend, but she refused, citing a central rule of her own life: "Never put yourself in a situation where you will be the smartest person in the room." Masha would have to push papers at the Military Insurance Company for a year and then try for admission to the tuition-free track again.

In June 2001, she was accepted. This was the beginning of real life, and Masha was starting out with success. Tatiana was now talking about buying an apartment where they would live for the next five or six years, before Masha went off to graduate school abroad. They went to look at some of the more promising apartment towers going up in the neighborhood. Masha said she wanted a bedroom with a view of the Moscow River. They would start apartment- shopping in earnest in the fall, after Masha got some well-deserved rest on the Black Sea. She was going with her aunt; Tatiana was staying in Moscow, at work, where she was now a senior executive in charge of rates.

Masha and her aunt returned on August 25, a week before classes would start. Masha was seventeen, tall and tan, and her hair was the whitest shade of blond it had ever been. That evening Tatiana told her that she had breast cancer, stage IV.

In the months that followed, Masha went to class and Tatiana went to work and to get chemo. Sometimes she went into the hospital. At the end of May 2002, the hospital told her to go home: there would be no more chemo. She lost weight. Then she gained weight, because her liver grew and grew. In mid-June she stopped going to work.

At the apartment, women kept ringing the doorbell, saying they

were faith healers sent by Masha's aunt. Masha's grandmother pushed an inexhaustible supply of books with titles like Cancer Can Be Cured. Everyone was insisting that Tatiana be baptized. It was a hot summer in Moscow. It got dark late, and cooled down even later. Only at night did Masha get to be alone with her mother, in a sort of peace.

On June 30, Tatiana asked Masha to pick up a morphine prescription at the neighborhood polyclinic, which still, eleven years after the end of the USSR, had a monopoly on prescribing controlled substances, which could be dispensed only to citizens officially residing in the clinic's catchment area.

"It's not time yet," said the doctor.

"Well, when it is time, why don't you just let me know," said Masha.

"Since when are you allowed to speak to me like that?" asked the doctor.

"Since my mother is dying," said Masha.

The doctor called the chief of the polyclinic, who had Masha removed from the premises.

that night, Tatiana fell asleep in the armchair. When it finally got dark, Masha lifted her mother out of the chair and laid her on the couch. She was about to get some sleep herself, on a cot set up in the same room, when a flock of pigeons landed on the windowsill outside. Tatiana said something. Masha got up and turned on the light. Tatiana was staring out the window. Masha picked up and held her mother's body in her arms.

She called her aunt, told her, and put down the phone. She wanted to sit there for a bit and maybe learn to understand what had happened. But her aunt must have gotten on the phone, because an ambulance came, a policeman, then someone from the morgue. They said that Masha had to wake up the neighbors because someone had to witness the removal of the body. It was three in the morning, and Masha felt bad about waking people up, but she was worried that soon it would get hot again and things would start happening to the body. While she was trying to decide what to do, the morgue's driver left. The policeman remained and was now demanding money, a bribe, though Masha could not quite understand what for. She called her aunt again. She came, and so did Masha's grandparents. The body was now cold and the skin had started changing color. It will be hot soon, Masha said.

Her grandfather shouted at her, something about how the smell was the only thing she was worried about, and why was she not crying?

Why was she not crying? Because she needed to be alone to cry, and she also needed a cigarette, she wanted to smoke more than anything in the world right now, but she had only recently turned eighteen and she still did not feel that she could smoke in front of her grandparents.

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

Somewhere along the way Masha learned that some hours after Tatiana died, a Russian passenger plane had collided with a cargo plane over southern Germany, killing seventy-one people, including more than fifty children.⁴ From that point on, she would tell people that her mother died on the day of the Uberlingen catastrophe. That way the day meant something to other people too.

lyosha applied to the history department at Perm State University. With his silver medal, all he had to do was get a top score on an oral history exam. He pulled what they call a "ticket"—a card with a topic printed on it:

The Battle on Ice and Soviet Culture of the 1920s and 1930s

Lyosha talked. He knew his subject, but he sensed that he did not do as well as he should have. His score was five/four when what he needed was five/five.

So much for the history department. The political science department was examining applicants the next day. He called his mother, and she said that he would find political science boring. But he could not go back to Solikamsk. He carried his application over to political science and went to the library to study for another oral exam.

He went about studying in the most stubborn and counterproductive way possible, and he knew it. He wanted to figure out what he had been missing during the exam he had just taken. He pulled out Mikhail Pokrovsky's Russian History Beginning in Ancient Times, a classic tome, and started reading. He knew this was the book he should have referenced, just as he knew it was too late to fix the omission.

The examiners were the same two professors as the day before. Lyosha pulled his ticket, turned it over, and read:

The Battle on Ice and Soviet Culture of the 1920s and 1930s

"Do you have anything to add?" asked one of the examiners.

Lyosha did. He got a five/five. He would be studying political science.

Political science turned out to have its own language, which made Lyosha understand things differently—both the events he was now witnessing and ones he had largely ignored when his body and mind were overwhelmed with other concerns two years earlier, on the Black Sea. In that time, as he now read in an article by Moscow political scientist Olga Kryshtanovskaya, Putin had reshaped the government and now a quarter of all top posts were held by military officers. Kryshtanovskaya wrote that this was called a militocracy.⁵ Back in the dorm, talking to young women who were his new friends,

Lyosha said, "Putin reminds me of some sort of miniature military dictator." The women agreed.

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

In October of Lyosha's first year at university, a group of armed men and women who said they were Chechen seized a theater in Moscow during the performance of a musical, taking more than nine hundred hostages. The standoff lasted three days, and then federal troops stormed the theater, killing the terrorists and freeing the hostages. Lyosha was on his way to Solikamsk for the weekend when the storm began, and when he got to his mother's apartment all that the television would show him was footage of the theater hall, empty but for the bodies of the terrorists slumped over some of the seats. The chairs were a plush red, the terrorists were all dressed in black, and the scene reminded Lyosha somehow of a game of checkers. He learned from the radio that 129 hostages had died in the storming of the theater, which sounded like it had been botched—the sleeping gas that had been pumped into the space to disable the terrorists had ended up killing many of the hostages, although there were no pictures of those other bodies. So this is what an authoritarian situation looks like, thought Lyosha. A checkerboard.

some disasters come suddenly and proceed in tedious slow motion. Gudkov was not a member of the executive board of his center, so he was not privy to some of the early discussions, but once he knew, it seemed obvious: they were in big, inexorable trouble. There was a rumor that Putin had seen Levada make an inappropriate face at some official function and had taken offense. The new president was getting a reputation for being thin-skinned and vengeful, and the old sociologist, for all his Soviet experience, had never had much of a poker face. The rumor may or may not have been true, and it was ultimately unnecessary for explaining what was happening to the center.

They had begun as the All-Soviet Center for Public Opinion Research, under the auspices of the trade union authority and the Soviet labor ministry. It was the Soviet Union, and every institution was an institution of the state, and this seemed no more absurd in the case of the public opinion research center than it did in the case of the trade unions. Then the Soviet Union collapsed and the center became the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, under the auspices of the Russian Labor Ministry and the state property authority. This conformed entirely to the logic by which institutions passed from the old empire to the new Russian state. Like many other state institutions, the center received no direct government funding but was able to rent office space from the government at a fixed rate that seemed laughably low as Moscow real estate prices grew. The nominal founders of the center—the ministry and the property authority—had the power to appoint the director, but had no other way to exert control over the center's work or staffing; they lacked even the power to fire the director before his five-year term was up. If anyone who worked at the center were to claim that this seemed like sufficient protection from government interference, that would be a lie: in fact, no one at the center was at all concerned with protecting it from government interference.

But it was the sociologists' job to observe shifts in the logic and culture of institutions, and they saw it clearly soon after Putin took

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

The All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research did not ridicule the Kremlin or its new inhabitant. For the most part, the news it produced was flattering to Putin: people liked their new president and their life with him. When Levada wrote his traditional year-end summary for 2000, he noted that it had felt to Russians like the easiest year in a long time. They had hope. They had little or no concern for the issues that disproportionately worried the liberal intellectuals, like the state takeover of broadcast media or the fact that Russia had now restored the old Soviet national anthem as its own, with the lyrics changed slightly, to omit references to Lenin and the glorious communist future. Still, the Kursk nuclear submarine disaster ranked as the most important event of the year by far, and support for the second war in Chechnya, now a year and a half old, was clearly waning.⁶

Two years later, after the theater siege in Moscow, the center reported that 81 percent of Russians believed they were not being told the whole truth of what had happened, and 75 percent thought the

leadership of Russian security ministries had to be held responsible for letting the hostage-taking occur in the first place.⁷

Then an election year began. It would not be the entire parliament —Putin had reinterpreted a vaguely worded provision in the 1993 Constitution to turn the upper house into an appointed body—but the 450 seats in the lower house would come up for a vote in December 2003 (and Putin himself would face reelection in March 2004). The ruling party was now called United Russia, and at the start of the election year the center's polls showed its ratings dropping precipitously.⁸

Levada was summoned to the ministry. His contract would not be up for another two years, but he now faced a small group of bureaucrats, one of whom said to him, "You are not a young man." They said that he needed a successor and they had someone for him. In fact, this proposed successor was there, in the next room, waiting to be introduced to Levada. He entered presently. He was all of twenty-nine, and his experience was limited largely to working for one of the groups that had created Putin's political persona for the presidential election. Levada was instructed to appoint this youth as his deputy for about six months and then retire. Without waiting for a response, Levada's interlocutors told him what would happen if he failed to comply: he would face criminal charges. Surely a tax or other financial irregularity could be found, given a careful-enough examination of the center's records.

Levada refused, and the center's death watch commenced. Gudkov dreaded seeing Levada charged with a crime or dragged into the media. Levada, meanwhile, tried to petition the state to allow the staff to buy out the center and transform it into a joint-stock company. The petition was rejected. Everyone on staff who had ever been friendly with or done a survey for a highly placed official in the government now appealed for help. These people promised to try but then invariably confessed that they had failed.

In the end, Levada was fired. It was against the law, but this no longer mattered. If he sued, he would lose. Every single person on the center's staff—more than a hundred people—tendered a resignation.

One of them, an older woman from accounting, decided to retire. The rest set about creating a new company. It was no longer the All- Russian Center for Public Opinion Research—that name now belonged to other people. This one would be called simply the Levada Center. Compared with the times Levada had been forced out of jobs back in the Soviet Union, this experience was an improvement: the team could stay together now. All they had to do was start from scratch.

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

In December 2003, United Russia won the election with 37 percent of the vote,⁹ which would give it an absolute majority in parliament. For the first time since the end of the Soviet Union there would be no party in parliament that positioned itself as liberal, pro- reform, and generally post-Soviet: the other three parties that won enough votes to be seated were the Communists, the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, which had been running on radical nationalist rhetoric for more than a decade, and a new Kremlin- backed party, Rodina ("Motherland"). Nemtsov spent election night getting drunk with his friends and allies and trying to enumerate the

reasons for the disastrous showing of the Union of Right Forces. He thought they had run bad campaign ads, advanced the wrong candidates, and failed to form a coalition with another right-liberal party.¹⁰ But if he had read Gudkov's analysis three years earlier, he might have noticed that the reason for the party's failure was different, and simpler: this time it was not the one positioned by the Kremlin as the "other" party of power. He also might have noticed that something basic had changed in the way the two-party game was played. In 1996 and 2000, the foil to the ruling party was more liberal and advocated for greater economic and social reform. Motherland, the party that played the role of foil this year, staked out a more nationalist, more socially conservative position than the official political mainstream. The differences continued to be ever more subtle—gray against black—but the country had reversed political direction.

for the first six months after Tatiana's death, Masha slept with the lights on. Everything that had ever happened in the apartment now came back to her as a frightening memory, even if she had been too young or had felt too safe to be scared when it first happened. The time the local authorities sent them new flatmates, an ethnic Russian couple who had fled Chechnya. The time after the couple moved out and Tatiana was waging her battle to keep the apartment for herself and Masha, when the residential authorities broke down the door; Tatiana replaced it with an unbreakable steel one. The two times, in 1995 and 1997, when Masha's former classmate, now a heroin addict, climbed in through the window to steal something he could sell. In the harsh electrical light at night the apartment looked worse than ever: peeling wallpaper, cracked plaster, every color a faded copy of itself. It occurred to Masha that Tatiana's perennial idea that life was elsewhere really meant that she had expected life to happen later. Now she was dead at forty-three.

Tatiana had saved some money for that apartment she was going to buy—it was in her debit-card account, but when she was dying, she could not remember her PIN. She left no will. Convoluted Russian law granted priority inheritance rights to veterans of the Great Patriotic War—and anyway, it was not like eighteen-year-old Masha was going to fight her relatives. The money was gone. Masha's aunt claimed the dacha. Masha got the apartment. There went Masha's relationship with her aunt, too. The Military Insurance Company never abandoned Masha—she got a small monthly payment from it— and that amount, combined with her university stipend, added up to about two hundred dollars a month. After she paid all the apartment bills, Masha had enough left to buy buckwheat and butter to last her a month. After the 1990s, she felt she had a clear idea of what poverty looked like, and now she was staring it in the face. She had a boyfriend who came from a well-to-do family, and his relatives made comments about Masha's cheap clothes.

In March 2003, after one semester of this existence, Masha took a leave of absence from the university. She got a job as a "consultant," which really meant salesperson, at a shop called Digital Foto. Now she spent her days with people her age who lived with their parents and for whom Moscow State University was as foreign a phenomenon as, say, England.

Masha realized that the only way she would ever rid herself of her fear of the dark was to just plunge in. One night she flipped the switch.

By summer, Masha had saved enough money to hire a crew to make her apartment "pretty." That was the word she used, and the workers understood what she wanted. Money was beginning to flow in Moscow and everyone was beautifying their apartments: putting in new double-pane windows in plastic housing, painting the kitchens yellow, and buying fuzzy rugs for the bathroom at the newly opened IKEA just outside the city (it ran a free shuttle from the Metro). Masha got a cat.

She needed to return to her world. She went back to university. She posted her resume on a new site called job.ru and got calls from two companies. She took a job with the one that imported chemicals for the cosmetics industry, which was taking off because everything was taking off. Thanks to the skyrocketing price of oil, Russia was having a consumer boom on a scale the reformers of the 1990s could not have imagined. Large shiny well-lit shopping malls were opening all over Moscow, stalling traffic, and all of them had one or two makeup department stores stocked with products both real and counterfeit, and vast quantities of chemicals were required to produce them. These chemicals had to be imported, and it was Masha's job to organize the process. She negotiated—she learned to use her English on the phone—and she arranged, and she cleared customs: she learned to give bribes. She also looked stunning at meetings with suppliers, and once she had a drink in her, she could tell jokes in English.

The chemistry department had an unofficial online home called chemport.ru. Among other things, it hosted anonymous reviews of department faculty. This meant a captive audience: undergraduates, graduate students, and professors. This, as far as Masha was concerned, meant that the site should be making money. Anyone who was not making money these days was an idiot. She found the guy who had started the site. His name was Sergei Baronov. He was a graduate student, recently divorced, and therefore living in the dorms. She told him about her scheme: they had to create a subscription service for sales managers for chemical companies. All they had to do was think of a service these people would get in exchange—they were just looking for a way to spend their companies' money. Sergei asked if she knew why countries had given up the gold standard in favor of gold-and-currency reserves. Why? Masha asked—she had a slightly hostile way of asking that she never could quite modulate—and he started explaining. He was not an idiot at all. She liked someone who could tell her something she did not know. As it turned out, he had started his dissertation at a university in Florida and was teaching radiochemistry. They became a couple, and chemport.ru started making money.

Sergei said they should have children. It sounded reasonable. Masha was not exactly in love with him, but they did have a business together. Money was raining down on them, and there was no reason to think it would stop. Other things, though, might be short-lived. By "things," Masha meant people. She was twenty, he was twenty-five, and they might as well have children now. He moved into her pretty apartment. They started trying to conceive, but it did not work. They tried assisted insemination, and that did not work. They gave up, got drunk, and it worked.

When Masha was eight weeks pregnant, the doctor said that the fetus had no heartbeat and handed her a referral for a D&C. She went home, cried her eyes out, and then googled "fetal heartbeat." She went back to the doctor and told her that the heartbeat can show up later than eight weeks.

"What are you, the smartest one here?" asked the doctor.

"Yeah," said Masha.

twelve

THE ORANGE MENACE

boris nemtsov worried that his daughter would not make it in the world. He was convinced that, stern and uncompromising as she was, she would never find a husband. That meant that she would have to be self-sufficient—but as far as he could tell, she lacked ambition. He was right about that: in her lack of ambition, Zhanna was like her mother, but Raisa, unlike Zhanna, was pliant and easy to live with. Boris said that was fine: he did not want his women too smart or too active—except his daughter, who was so headstrong that she needed a Plan B. When she tagged along with him one day to an interview at Echo Moskvy (Echo of Moscow), the big pro-democracy radio station, he had a sudden inspiration.

"Hey," he said to the editor in chief in the overly familiar tone he assumed when the situation called for underscoring his influence. "Why don't you take my girl on as an intern here?"

Why not, indeed. The fact that Zhanna was fifteen, too young legally to work full-time, was of little concern. She had a famous name and she knew people—or, more accurately, many people knew her as her father's daughter. Zhanna was hired. Her job was to call Yeltsin's press secretary and inquire after the president's health. Rather than brush her off rudely, as he would have another reporter, the press secretary dutifully allowed her to record a sentence or two to the effect that the president's health was just fine.

When Zhanna was not calling Yeltsin's press secretary, she was fetching, xeroxing, and performing other typical intern duties. The point was, she was developing a work ethic that would allow her to

survive in spite of her insufferably unaccommodating personality. She started school at nine in the morning, rushed directly from her last class to the radio station to be at work by four, and finished at midnight. It was hell, but she was able to buy herself a black-and-gray cropped cardigan sweater at Benetton. It cost a lot of money, and it was money she had earned.

Then Yeltsin quit—the phone call came on New Year's Eve, a couple of weeks after Boris had won his parliamentary election, when the family was on vacation at a ski resort in France. Soon after, the leadership of his new party, the Union of Right Forces, gathered to discuss their position on the presidential election. Would they field a candidate? Yeltsin's resignation had been timed to render such an attempt futile—he had effectively moved the vote up by four months, to March. The traditional New Year's and Christmas holidays, when no one was in Moscow (except, as it turned out, Yeltsin and Putin), had already bitten another two weeks off the lead time. Putin's popularity rating was sky-high. The rational thing to do under the circumstances, argued former prime minister Gaidar and two other members of the party's leadership, was to fall in line behind Putin. Boris argued that as long as the presumptive president had no political platform—which Putin did not—there was nothing to get behind. He was outvoted.

On March 26, 2000, Vladimir Putin was elected president of Russia, and Zhanna turned sixteen. She was nearly indifferent to both events. In the preceding months, she had quit her job at Echo Moskvy and found ambition. Her life's goal now was to gain admission to an American university. This was not at all what Boris had had in mind when he told her that she needed to be self-sufficient. It would not be a good look for a parliament member to have a daughter studying in America. But he said that he would not stand in her way.

He was not helping her either. Zhanna got all the textbooks and study aids and proceeded in a self-sufficient manner. She got the highest possible score on the Test of English as a Foreign Language and very high SAT scores as well. She was accepted to Fordham University in New York City. She was aiming higher, of course, but now she had a plan: a year or two at Fordham, then she would

transfer to Columbia and finish up there. In August 2001 she said goodbye to the apartment on the Garden Ring and moved to America.

She could not have imagined what it would feel like to be alone in New York City. She was living near the Manhattan branch of the university, amid the skyscrapers of Midtown and next to the edgy neighborhood she learned was called Hell's Kitchen. The only person she knew was the daughter of a Russian oligarch who had just graduated from a New York college and was now working for a consulting company. Her work week averaged eighty hours, and she told Zhanna that this was her future too. Then, within two weeks of Zhanna's arrival, the city's streets filled with cars with blaring sirens, people in respirator masks, panic. Zhanna walked downtown, as far as she could before hitting a police cordon, and saw the second of the two towers crumple. Then there were flyers everywhere, with addresses where people could go to donate blood. Zhanna walked to one of those addresses.

She called her grandmother, the pediatrician. The call would cost ten dollars, maybe more, so she had to make it fast.

"Grandma, tell me quickly, what's my blood type?"

"O negative."

Zhanna hung up. On the other end of the line, Dina Yakovlevna imagined unimaginable things happening to her granddaughter in the city seized by terror. In New York, Zhanna stood in line for four hours to give blood. She was told that hers was a precious, much-needed type of blood and the maximum allowable amount would be drawn. She left the hospital woozy, dragged her body to a deli, and sat there for an eternity, eating herself back to her feet.

She asked Boris not to tell anyone about the blood donation—she could tell over the phone that he was bursting to—but he was so proud of her that he told the story anyway. Komsomolskaya Pravda, the propaganda broadsheet turned tabloid, carried the headline "Zhanna Nemtsova Shed Blood for America."¹

After September 11, the solitude of the foreign college freshman in New York proved intolerable. Zhanna managed another month before she asked Boris to book her a ticket back to Moscow. He was thrilled.

He also pulled some strings to get Zhanna admitted to the Institute of International Relations, home to the children of the nomenklatura headed for careers in diplomacy and international trade. Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that in the wake of the terrorist attacks Zhanna had been shunned by her classmates for being a foreigner.²

Her first evening at home, an oligarch friend of Boris's, Mikhail Fridman, was visiting. Father and daughter's joy at their reunion made him furious. "Idiots," he sputtered. "You are insane." Meaning, anyone who forfeited the chance at an American future in favor of a Russian one had to be crazy.

there was something disturbing in the way Russians were reacting to the terrorist attacks in America. Gudkov had long been thinking about the way Russia's self-concept was reflected in its attitudes toward the United States, and now he watched all the resentments and anxieties about America come to the surface. The wave of intense hatred with which Russians had reacted to NATO's Kosovo bombing campaign of 1999 had died down within a few months, returning the country to a sort of baseline level of anti-American sentiment, but now Gudkov was seeing it return, incongruously, in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Initially, the polls showed, Russians had reacted with sympathy and compassion, but very soon those feelings gave way to something else: the search for a way to blame the Americans themselves for the tragedy.

Part of this surely had to do with a sort of habitual insensitivity Russians as a society had developed in response to the wars, the terror, the violence, and poverty of its own twentieth century. This insensitivity, in turn, was tied, as both cause and effect, to the lack of social or cultural institutions that help process feelings. All of this was equally true of the ways Russians reacted to their own grief: they dulled it and moved on. But the resentment coming to the fore now was specific to the way Russians felt about Americans.

The Soviet Union had historically defined itself in opposition to the United States. The century of identification consisted of several

distinct periods. First, early Soviet Russia based its revolutionary push to industrialize on the American model and on American machinery. During the Great Depression, American-made industrial equipment became affordable—American tragedy worked in synergy with Russian need. Stalin said, "Dogonim iperegonim Ameriku" ("We shall catch up to America and overtake it") and Soviet factory machines were often inscribed with the letters DIP in honor of this aspirational slogan.

During the Second World War the competition was set aside in favor of military cooperation. The two countries were allies. But with the beginning of the Cold War the United States had ceased being a partner or even a rival: it became the enemy—indeed, an existential threat. This image had shaped the final four decades of the Soviet Union's existence, had been the bedrock of its system of mobilization and control.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russians did not stop looking into the American mirror. What they saw now was humiliating: the United States was giving Russians handouts, sending them "Legs of Bush" and other food that Americans themselves did not want to eat. America was not just wealthier than Russia—so were many other countries, and some of them, like Switzerland or Saudi Arabia, were wealthier than the United States itself. But unlike an old European country, America did not apportion its wealth according to an entrenched class structure: it was a country of achievement and possibility for all—or so it claimed, and Russians believed this part. Nor was it a tiny oil dictatorship like the Saudis. America was the very definition of modernity; it was the country that Russia had failed to become. Here was a sterling example of Soviet-style doublethink: America was attractive and threatening at the same time, worth emulating and eminently hateable.

Hatred for the United States had become a Soviet political and social tradition. And now Russia's search for its own traditions infused this hatred with new potency. "I hate, therefore I am," Gudkov wrote, trying to describe the driving force behind this new anti-Americanism. September 11 fueled the hatred because it engendered anxiety. Surveys were showing that Russians feared that a third world war would result from the attacks, though there was no consensus as to who the parties in this war might be. It was nonetheless—or all the more—a terrifying prospect, and it was America's fault.

More than half the respondents said that the time had come to increase defense spending, even if this meant that cuts had to be made elsewhere. For a country that was barely—almost imperceptibly for most people in 2001—climbing out of a deep economic depression, this seemed a bizarre result. But then this aggressive anti- American stance was most pronounced among the better-educated, more-well-off respondents. This was the position of the newly emergent elite—the men in uniform and the neotraditionalists whom the Putin presidency had elevated.³

in the absence of political institutions such as parties or established electoral preferences, and in the absence, too, of political experience, the new elite came to rely heavily on people who called themselves "political technologists." They were like Western political consultants magnified to the point of caricature. They created presidents, parties, and platforms from scratch. They employed small armies of people who produced logos and websites, photo ops and miles of political jargon. Many, though not all, of the soldiers and officers of these armies were very young—often still at university. Together and separately, they made a lot of money.

Neither the political technologists nor the politicians they represented had many—or sometimes any—ideas of their own, and part of the technologists' task was to find and incorporate ideas generated by others. The top political technologist of them all, Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Moscow editor who manufactured Putin's public persona in advance of his election, found Dugin and promoted his ideas. Dugin had a knack for putting the generalized anxiety of the elite into words, and these words sounded smart. After September 11, he said on television, where he was part of a political round table with six other men:

A deep crisis of the liberal democratic system has been exposed, a crisis of values. The liberal-democratic complex consists of two components: liberalism and democracy. We usually perceive them as synonyms. But if we look at the history of the West, we will see that the democratic component was used actively in the battle against the Soviet Bloc, as a tool of opposition to totalitarianism. But when the Soviet system collapsed, democracy lost its fundamental strategic function. Liberalism retained its function. I believe that liberalism does not have to be combined with democracy. It can mean simply free trade, market mechanisms, which, as we know, can exist perfectly well in the strictest of authoritarian regimes, even in almost totalitarian ones.

He went on to predict that the United States, in the wake of September 11, would abandon its democratic experiment.⁴ Dugin was misusing the term "liberalism"—as though it existed solely to denote the opposite of a command economy—and it was not clear what he meant by "democracy" when he claimed that America was on the verge of disposing of it. But his statement perfectly encapsulated the worldview Gudkov's surveys were reflecting. In this picture, the United States defined itself by its relationship to Russia, just as Russia defined itself in opposition to and in comparison with America. In this picture, it made sense for America to give up on democracy now that the Soviet Union was no more. Most important, this picture affirmed the idea that building a market economy and an authoritarian—"almost totalitarian"—regime at the same time was not just possible but also right.

A few months earlier, in April 2001, Dugin had held the founding congress of a new political movement. He had long since split with the National Bolshevik Party; as a political technologist he had helped to shape Putin's Unity Party and a short-lived Kremlin-backed spoiler party called Russia, but now he decided to start a movement of his own. The congress was held at a supper-club-like establishment called Honor and Dignity, which belonged to the counterterrorism shock-troop arm of the FSB, called Alpha. Several Alpha veterans were elected to the new movement's board, and many more men from the uniformed services were in attendance at the congress.

Dugin called the new movement Eurasia, and the event stressed its ties to the Kremlin. There were two large banners in the room. One said, "Russia Is a Eurasian Country. V. V. Putin." The other said, "Eurasia Above All." Predictably, one of the newspaper reports on the congress—all the papers wrote about it—was called "Eurasia uber Alles."

"Eurasia above all," repeated Dugin at the conclusion of his address to the congress. His speech had been devoted to the idea that the world, or at least Russia, was being pulled apart by opposing forces: Eurasian and Atlanticist. Even Yeltsin had started to see the futility of the Atlanticist way back in the 1990s, said Dugin, but "it was the rule of Putin that spelled the true victory of Eurasianist ideas." For that reason, he said, "We support the president totally, radically. That places us at the total and radical center."

It was an incomprehensible and mesmerizing phrase, like the "violets blooming on the lips" line he had used on Evgenia a decade and a half earlier. The new movement's youngest member, Igor Nikolaev, from remote Yakutia, spelled out the Eurasian self- perception more clearly in his presentation, which he said had started out as a high school essay. "Individualism and the independence of opinion are traits characteristic of Europe, where we don't belong," he said. "Obedience and love for one's leader are the traits of the Russian people."⁵

"can eurasianism save russia?" was the title of a political round table that aired on television in June 2002. Dugin had graduated from discussant to headliner, and Eurasianism from a fringe political movement to a universal solution. It offered an alternative view of Russian history, in which a century and a half of Mongol-Tatar rule had been not an age of destruction but, on the contrary, a vital cultural infusion that set Russia on a special path, distinct from Europe's. Explaining Eurasianism to the broad public, Dugin referred to a 1920 book by Nikolai Trubetskoy, a Russian prince in exile. Trubetskoy, a linguist (he was one of the founders of structural linguistics), focused on what he called "the magic of words." He

argued that by using words like "humanity," "universality," "civilization," and "progress," Europeans—or, more precisely, Germans—had fooled the world—or, more precisely, Slavic nations— into buying the cosmopolitan idea. In fact, argued Trubetskoy, by "humanity" Germans meant themselves and those who were like them, and their concepts of "universality," "civilization," and "progress" were equally solipsistic—or, as Trubetskoy put it, "egocentric." By buying into the cosmopolitan idea, therefore, Slavs risked losing their identity and culture.⁶

Trubetskoy's book was called Europe and Humanity, and summarizing it for a television audience eighty-two years later, Dugin said that the prince had deemed Europe a threat to humanity. Since then, he explained, things had changed: Europe was not a threat to humanity any longer, but the United States was. "The Western- society project is being forced onto all other nations," said Dugin. "The Eurasianists will continue to oppose the West as long as the West persists in its pretensions to the universality of its own values, in forcing those values onto people, and in attempting to dominate, whether by means of colonization or by means of neo-colonization, which is what globalization is."⁷

This rang true to the broad television audience. The West was expanding. Even as Russia grew disillusioned with all things American, its neighbors began, unexpectedly, to edge westward. In 2003, a bloodless revolution led by young Western-oriented political activists brought down the government of Georgia. There was no love lost between Putin's Kremlin and the ousted Georgian president, Eduard Shevardnadze, who had once served as Gorbachev's foreign minister, but the revolution was nonetheless disturbing for Moscow. Putin dispatched his foreign minister to the Georgian capital to help negotiate the transfer of power, but he, and the Russian media, insisted on calling the events there a "coup" rather than a revolution. Speaking to his cabinet, Putin issued an indirect warning to the new Georgian leadership by stressing, "Russia has had a brotherly relationship with the people of Georgia for many centuries."⁸ In fact, Georgia had been a part of the Russian Empire for centuries, except for three years of independence between 1917 and 1920, and the dozen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The phrase "brotherly relationship" harked back to the Soviet "friendship of the peoples" rhetoric, as it was meant to. It was also meant to remind the Georgians that Russia was still "first among equals" on its old stomping ground.

Twelve years after the end of the USSR, Russia still perceived its former subjects as parts of itself. Unlike clearly distinct foreign countries, former Soviet republics were referred to as the "near abroad" (Helsinki and Vienna are closer to Moscow than Kiev and Tbilisi, but the designation referred to psychic and political rather than physical distance). Relations with the "near abroad" were not even part of the foreign ministry's purview: they were handled by the presidential administration itself. This was perhaps the most striking example of a Soviet institution that had been claimed by Russia in 1991 and preserved against the logic of time and space. "In essence, this maintained the Soviet system in which the Union republics reported to the Central Committee of the Communist Party," Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar has written. "And since the presidential administration occupied the very same building in Staraya Square as the Central Committee of the Communist Party had, it so happened that the tradition had been maintained for decades, even though the Soviet Union no longer existed."⁹ The tradition was one of exerting control over the nominally independent constituent republics (which were no longer constituent) and of appointing their leadership from Moscow.

In 2004, the year after the Georgian revolution, Moscow firmly took control of elections in Ukraine. Russian political technologists flooded Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. Their job was to prevent the election of the pro-Western challenger to the current regime, which Moscow had found agreeable. Three days before the election, the pro- Moscow government staged a parade to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Kiev's liberation in the Second World War (the actual anniversary was nine days later, but they could not wait that long). Putin came, and took his place in the stands next to Leonid Kuchma,

the outgoing president, and Viktor Yanukovych, his handpicked successor, whom Moscow was backing. The Victory Flag—the red flag that Soviet soldiers had placed on the Reichstag in 1945—was brought to Kiev for the occasion.¹⁰ Putin was lending the pro-Moscow Ukrainian candidate his own authority, Russia's chief national myth, and the most important physical symbol of the myth.

None of it worked. Yanukovych lost at the polls. He still claimed victory, but this did not work either: Ukrainians took to the streets. They set up camp in Kiev's central square and refused to disperse, braving the November cold and then the December cold until Ukraine's supreme court stepped in and ordered a revote. Viktor Yushchenko, who positioned himself as pro-Western and entirely independent from Moscow—and who was even married to a Canadian woman—was elected president.

masha found yushchenko unlikable and his anti-Moscow rhetoric personally insulting. She was surprised to discover that she cared so much. "Darn, this is the first time I've been so worked up about other people's elections," she wrote on her blog in November 2004. "I'll say more. This is the first time I've been worked up about any election anywhere."

"It's just that in Russia and in Moscow all the elections of our age have had a foregone conclusion," a friend wrote in the comments.¹¹

This was true. At twenty, Masha had been old enough to vote in just one local, one parliamentary, and one presidential election, and the outcome had been known each time. Putin could not have lost his bid for reelection in 2004; Moscow's mayor, who had been in office since Masha was in primary school, was similarly entrenched; and Putin's United Russia party would, it seemed, be in control of parliament forever. Masha did not even know that she or anyone she knew could be passionate about elections these days—until Ukraine showed her.

All Russia was transfixed by the spectacle in Kiev. The year before, the Georgian revolution had drawn relatively little attention here, but now the Ukrainian revolution made people suspect—or hope for—a

pattern. Could it happen in Russia too? The imagination ignored key differences between the two countries. In Ukraine, for example, electoral institutions had been developing while Putin had eviscerated Russian ones during his first term in office. And in Ukraine there was a functional, independent supreme court to step in to resolve the standoff, whereas the Russian equivalent, the Constitutional Court, had been effectively subsumed by the executive branch.

Boris Nemtsov was inspired by the turn of events in Ukraine. Since losing his parliamentary seat in December 2003, he had been at loose ends. It was the first time he had been defeated in an election since he entered politics in 1990—indeed, he had once been used to landslide victories. He had taken an executive-level job at a bank, well-paying and dull. But now there was Ukraine, with real political battles and actual high-stakes activism. He started shuttling back and forth to Kiev. He took a volunteer position as an adviser to Yushchenko. He wore a scarf the color of the revolution—orange— and spoke in the square on the first day of the protests. A few days later, in a television interview in Moscow, he held up Ukraine as an example for Russia:

In the past, people in Kiev used to look to Moscow. And now an awful lot of Muscovites, and not only Muscovites, Russians in general, will probably be looking to Kiev to see how people are

fighting for their rights, fighting for truth and freedom.¹²

The political technologists who had been dispatched to deal with Ukraine returned to Moscow and explained their failure: it was the Americans' fault. The Americans—by which they generally meant the United States government and George Soros—had been financing and organizing Eastern European revolutions beginning with the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia in 2000, the story went. Then they hit Georgia, followed by Ukraine. Here it was: every fear of the American expansion was confirmed.

Putin had long been speaking about an external threat to Russia. Most recently he had mentioned it in the wake of the siege of a school in Beslan, a town in the Russian Caucasus, where more than three hundred people—most of them children—had died in September 2004. Less than two weeks after the attack, for which Chechen terrorists were held responsible, Putin announced new sweeping changes to Russia's political system. Governors would from now on be appointed rather than elected. All the seats in the lower house of parliament would from now on be apportioned to political parties based on their percentage of the vote nationwide (before the announcement, half the seats had been distributed among parties while the other half went to popularly elected representatives of 225 territorial districts). Putin explained that these measures would consolidate political institutions, creating the cohesion needed to protect the country from external threat—of which the school siege was the unlikely example. Like most of his earlier reforms, these measures affected formal political institutions and had consolidation as their aim. But to counter the perceived threat of an American-run, Soros-sponsored popular revolution, the Kremlin needed to focus on the public sphere, which it needed to mobilize for the preservation of the regime. A few years later, Australian political scientist Robert Horvath coined a term to describe this process: "preventive counter- revolution."¹³

as if to affirm the Kremlin's fear of a revolution, mass protests broke out in cities across Russia in the winter of 2005. Tens of thousands of people were protesting a new series of measures called the "monetization of entitlements," whereby people who received public assistance—women over fifty-five, men over sixty, early retirees, and the disabled—would no longer have access to unlimited public transportation and other in-kind benefits but would receive fixed sums of money instead. This was a cost-cutting measure, and aid recipients perceived, accurately, that despite what they were told, the money was not equivalent to the value of their old benefits. They were losing assistance that, for many, was essential for survival.

The Kremlin had not expected this backlash. The protests were the stuff of nightmares. The protesters were the elderly and the feeble, and the state could not use force against them even when they were blocking roadways, as they did in cities across the country, or when they set up tents in the streets, as happened in St. Petersburg.

Nor were the retirees the only people protesting. A slew of youth organizations seemed to appear out of nowhere. Some were radical, like the National Bolshevik Party, which had been rejuvenated by an influx of young people all over the country; they were demonstrating alongside or on behalf of the pensioners. Others were youth spin-offs or splinter groups of conventional political parties; these tended to model themselves, aesthetically, on Otpor ("Resistance"), the Yugoslav youth movement that had been instrumental in toppling Milosevic. They staged small guerrilla-theater actions.

Finally, chess champion Garry Kasparov, one of the best-known people in the entire country, announced that he was quitting the sport to devote himself to political struggle. He formed an organization called the United Civic Front, an umbrella coalition that could unite the pensioners, the Otpor imitators, and the National Bolsheviks and their ilk, simply because they all opposed Putin and the authoritarian regime he was building. Together, they staged marches, which they called the Marches of the Dissenters.

It was during the Ukrainian elections that Masha had started blogging on livejournal.com, a platform that in America was popular among teenagers but in Russia was spontaneously repurposed to become a rudimentary social network (though the term was not yet in use). By spring 2005, Masha had her bearings on the network and was reading and talking to several people involved with the youth political groups. She went to a couple of meetings of Oborona ("Defense"), a group formed by a young man named Ilya Yashin. Oborona was designed to resemble Otpor in every way, including the sound of its name. Then Sergei objected: he did not want his wife involved with political hoodlums. By the end of the year, Masha was pregnant, and she complied.

Only a small number of people took part in the protests or even knew about them. With the exception of the National Bolsheviks,

who had created a wide network of local activists, each of the youth groups counted just a handful of active members. The protesting pensioners were relatively numerous. But Russians who did not desperately need state assistance were mostly occupied with their own lives, which were very, very good. Thanks to skyrocketing oil prices, in 2005 Russia entered its sixth year of unprecedented economic prosperity.

Money was what the Kremlin used to defuse the protests of the disenfranchised: pensions were raised dramatically, and Putin declared a new commitment to social-program spending. Then the government cracked down on the young protest organizers, and on civil society in general. A law placing onerous registration and reporting requirements on nongovernmental organizations was passed. Civil society groups fought the law as well as they could, and the United States Congress even expressed concern about the law, in a nonbinding resolution—thereby affirming the Kremlin's view that Russian nongovernmental organizations were agents of Western subversion. In response to the push-back, the legislation was softened slightly: provisions that would have made it impossible for foreign organizations, such as USAID or Soros's Open Society Foundations, to function in Russia were removed. Still, the bill that Putin signed in January 2007 condemned nongovernmental organizations to useless paperwork designed to sap their resources.

The Marches of the Dissenters faced a physical crackdown rather than a paper one. Police began rounding up activists hours or days before a planned march. Those who managed to attend were first beaten by baton-wielding riot police and then detained. Activists braved these battles for a couple of years, but in early 2008 the marches ceased.

As the Kremlin forced out of the public sphere those people and organizations that it saw as threatening, it stuffed the empty space with supporters. Back in the Soviet era, public space had been monolithic, filled with the Communist Party and its age-appropriate subsidiaries. Instead of nongovernmental organizations, it had entities like trade unions run by the state trade union authority. Now political technologists began manufacturing organizations that created an illusion of plurality. The Kremlin instituted its own foundation, which would give grants to organizations of its choosing. In itself, a system of government grants is not necessarily an instrument of repression—many European countries have civil- society sectors that are primarily funded by the state—but the explicit assumption here was that Kremlin-funded groups would do the Kremlin's bidding. Political technologists cranked out youth groups designed to protect the Kremlin, including fighting for it in the streets if it came to that. They had names like Nashi ("Us," as opposed, clearly, to "Them") and the Young Guard, a name borrowed from a mythologized group of Soviet teenage anti-Hitler guerrillas. A group of students in Moscow put out a few issues of a newspaper called Aktsiya ("Action"); the new manufactured groups responded with a newspaper that had offices, a well-paid staff, and a regular print schedule. They called it Reaktsiya ("Reaction"). The new groups had training camps and cool T-shirts, and in some smaller cities they organized dances and other leisure activities for young people where none had been available. They staged street actions, including an unironically named March of the Consenters to counter the March of the Dissenters. Fifteen years earlier, a prominent perestroika politician, historian Yuri Afanasyev, had called this "the aggressively obedient majority."

In this context, Dugin's promise of creating a "total and radical center" began to make sense. He now positioned himself as a leader in the fight against the "orange menace," which he described as part of the Atlanticist plot against Eurasia and even an American jihad against Russia. The Eurasian movement spawned a youth wing, the Eurasian Youth Union, which placed itself in the vanguard of the Anti-Orange Front, an entity that Dugin claimed included twenty-five thousand people. What Russia really needed to prevent an orange revolution, said Dugin, was a new oprichnina, the reign of terror for which Czar Ivan IV was remembered as the Terrible.

In the process of reengineering the public sphere, the Kremlin changed the calendar. One of the four big public holidays of the year —along with New Year's Eve, May Day, and Victory Day—had been November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Yeltsin had renamed it Reconciliation and Agreement Day. Now Putin, apparently concerned that revolutionary organizations might be tempted to use the day to stage protests, abolished the holiday. Russians would still get a day off in November, but it would now be on the fourth of the month and it would mark an event that had not been part of Russia's historical imagination: the expulsion of Polish occupiers from Moscow in 1612. As the intellectual and the historian among the leaders of the "preventive counter-revolution," Dugin took ownership of the new holiday. On November 4, 2005, the Eurasian Youth Union led a march through central Moscow. They called it the Russian March. Eurasian Youth activists walked in the vanguard, carrying a banner emblazoned with the words "Russia Against the Occupiers!" The Eurasianists were joined by several other groups, whose slogans were explicitly racist: "We need a Russian Russia!" one speech concluded. "Glory to Russia!" Another declaimed: "How long are we going to put up with this vermin, with all these 'Latvias,' 'Polands,' and 'Georgias'? We declare this the day of the people's anger. Russians, rise up!"¹⁴

"By giving a green light to the [Eurasian Youth Union's] anti- Western xenophobia, the authorities had created opportunities for adherents of more extreme variants of ultranationalism," writes Horvath. "As the moderate opposition was driven to the margins, ultranationalists gained admission to Russia's public sphere."¹⁵

"i have a brilliant idea!" Boris shouted into the phone when he called Zhanna in Portugal in the summer of 2005. "You should run for office." His logic was simple: he had met Oborona activists, and the events of that year so far had convinced him that young—very young —people were the future of politics. His daughter had a leg up on everyone else because she carried his famous last name, to which he now referred as a brand.

Zhanna was not interested. She was not interested in much, frankly: she still, or once again, lacked ambition. She had just graduated from the Institute of International Relations, where she had done well enough, despite minimal engagement either with her studies or with fellow students. For much of her time in college her social life had revolved around a group of slightly older gay men—the people who had the best time at the best new clubs in town. Then, during the winter of her last year of studying, she got a call from a friend of her mother's: "Come on over, I'll introduce you to a very cute banker." The banker's name was Dmitry, he was indeed very cute, but he was also fifteen years older than Zhanna and on his second marriage. By spring, though, he was separated and he and Zhanna were living together. Dmitry was worldly, attentive, a good cook, and a great entertainer. Zhanna's friends loved him, and so did her parents—Dmitry had a way of making people feel important. The only wrinkle in their relationship was Dmitry's love of all things glamorous—he wished to see Zhanna in expensive dresses and imposing high heels at all times. But he had a trait that far outweighed her discomfort in high heels: he liked all Zhanna's ideas. This was why they were in Portugal now. Zhanna had taken Portuguese as her second foreign language at the Institute, and she wanted to spend the summer after graduation practicing it among native speakers. It was the best place and the best summer, and Boris was intruding with his insane suggestion.

"Margaret Thatcher ran for office for the first time at age twenty- two," was Boris's ultimate argument, and, unreasonably, it succeeded in convincing Zhanna. She returned to Moscow and declared her candidacy for the city legislature. She and Boris told everyone that the idea was hers and that her father had misgivings about seeing her seek office. Zhanna told reporters that she was "more moderate" than Boris, which journalists generally took to mean that she was not a die-hard opponent of Putin.¹⁶ It seemed that Boris believed the legend himself: he told Zhanna that she had to raise her own money. He did lend her about $20,000 to cover the "electoral collateral"— money that went into escrow pending election results. If she got less than 5 percent of the vote, the state would keep it.

Zhanna talked a college classmate into being her campaign manager. A friend of her mother's, Olga, joined too. Olga was very good at talking to people. Dmitry, supportive as ever, paid for a photo

shoot. The photo of Zhanna in a wholesome white blouse, airbrushed to make the candidate look not quite so ridiculously young, went up on billboards. Her tagline was "Zhanna Nemtsova: The United Candidate." The billboards listed five political organizations that had lent Zhanna their support. All of them were pro-democracy groups at some stage of the transition from the mainstream to the margins.

It was not much of a political platform. Her father was fond of talking about what he called "democratic values," but this seemed hopelessly old-fashioned to Zhanna. Nor did "democratic values" seem to be what concerned the residents of her district in northern Moscow. Zhanna studied conscientiously, meeting with residents and the single long-term local politician who had not been washed out by the wave of Putin's new nomenklatura. Chief concerns here were transportation—the Metro did not reach this far north, and buses were unreliable—and housing stock. Thousands of people were living in dilapidated buildings that had once been planned as temporary.

Boris connected Zhanna with Mikhail Prokhorov, co-owner of the metals giant Norilsk Nickel. Maybe he would want to contribute to the campaign. Prokhorov spent an hour bombarding Zhanna with quiz-like questions designed to draw out her political views. Then he said that he would be willing to give her money if she changed districts. He was bankrolling a ruling-party candidate in southern Moscow, and he would pay for Zhanna to challenge him. He wanted to be entertained. She was indignant. He called Boris and said, laughing, "Your daughter is a socialist."

There was no single moment when Zhanna realized that the game was fixed. By the time the vote came about, she felt like she had always known it. The incumbent, a nondescript man with an unmemorable name, would win because he belonged to Putin's party, United Russia. On election day Olga observed the vote at one of the precincts and saw soldiers bused in to stuff the ballot boxes. This was one way it was done. Another was saturation: the United Russia candidate's name and likeness were everywhere, even if no one really knew who he was. If it had been an honest contest, Zhanna figured she probably would have lost to the Communist Party candidate. As it was, the Communist came in second and Zhanna was third—with 10

percent of the vote, enough to recover her "electoral collateral." Zhanna was proud of this, especially because Boris was. But he said that he had now realized something else: "A name is not enough—a politician has to have a biography. You've got to work."

This is all nothing but strange games, an imitation of democracy. The candidates are copying each other's platforms. You can tell ahead of time what they are going to say. What they are really doing is creating a one-party system, which is the road to authoritarianism. We'll probably see parties that will pretend they are the opposition, or the quasi-opposition, and they will by turn kowtow to the government and criticize it. But their true function will be to prop up the one-party system. If the Bolsheviks had been smarter, they would have done this themselves—created a dozen such little bedbugs that will run up and down the body of society.

alexander nikolaevich yakovlev had never before let himself sound so testy in public. But in April 2005 he had just finished a lecture tour that had taken him across Russia, sapping his will and his wish to sound civil. "We are laying down a nationalist future for ourselves," he told a journalist. The word "nationalist" remained one of the most damning in his vocabulary. "I am seeing Stalin's mug displayed everywhere, every day, and people are eating it up. It is the face of a nationalist, a chauvinist, a murderer. But we are being told that if we look into it, he wasn't so bad."

"Are you sorry that you and Gorbachev did not disband the secret police?" asked the journalist.

Back in the day in the Central Committee we used to pretend that we were in charge. But it was the CheKa,* the KGB who were always really in command. We couldn't even go abroad without their permission. Take me—I was a member of the Politburo. I was watched over by fifteen KGB agents. Two cooks and the housekeeper had the rank of officers

Has the center of power moved from the Kremlin to the FSB?

It was there all along

Why do so many people idealize the past?

It's the "leader principle."* It's a disease. It's a Russian tradition. We had our czars, our princes, our secretaries-general, our collective- farm chairmen, and so on. We live in fear of the boss. Think about it: we are not afraid of earthquakes, floods, fires, wars, or terrorist attacks. We are afraid of freedom. We don't know what to do with

it That's where the fascist groups come from, too—the shock

troops of tomorrow.

Is the orange revolution possible here?

We are not going to be like Ukraine. . . . We still live with a simple trinity. The state is on top, and we keep making it stronger. Society is suspended somewhere beneath the state. If the state so wishes, the society will be civil, or semicivil, or nothing but a herd. Look to Orwell for a good description of this. And the little tiny individual is

running around somewhere down at the bottom.¹⁷

This was Alexander Nikolaevich's last major interview. He died in October 2005, a few weeks short of his eighty-second birthday. His son continued to work with the documents Alexander Nikolaevich had been publishing. Forty-three books had come out, but many more remained to be compiled and edited. This project, too, had become a source of frustration for Alexander Nikolaevich, because a new kind of response had become prevalent: people were writing letters saying that the stories told by these documents could not possibly be true. But the books had to continue coming out, especially because many of the documents had once again been made inaccessible in the archives.

Seryozha, though, felt that he no longer had an obligation to help. With his grandfather gone, he was free to go anywhere he wanted. He picked Ukraine. There was a girl there, and Kiev happened to be the place everyone wanted to live now.

after losing her election, Zhanna reverted to the state of having no ambition. This was fine: she was newly married, and with Dmitry's income she did not need to work.

Everyone around her was making money and then more money with that money. Her father and her mother, separately, had started playing the market; her mother proved particularly good at it. Dmitry was the vice-president of a bank, and most of his friends were in finance. After watching them for about a year, Zhanna decided to try for herself. She got a job at an investment firm, and learned to buy and sell. Making money was the easiest thing in the world. All the Russian market did was grow, and finding the stocks that would grow fastest was a fun game.

Starting in 1999, the growth curve of oil and gas prices had roughly the same shape as the curve of Putin's popularity rating in fall 1999: a vertical straight line. The Russian economy did not become more efficient—in fact, if anything, it became less efficient—but it grew sharply nonetheless. The "virtual economy" problem described by Clifford Gaddy was not solved: about half of Russian industry continued to lose value. But these companies were not represented on Russia's tiny stock market, which was dominated by oil and gas companies—so the stock market grew and grew. By 2005, the oil and gas rents far exceeded the needs of the federal budget, which allowed money to be deposited in a reserve fund, which, in turn, could be used in an emergency—like when the fires of the pensioners' protest had to be put out.—

masha gave birth to a boy in September 2006. They named him Alexander, Sasha for short. When the baby was five days old, Masha started hemorrhaging. She was taken to a hospital by ambulance. A burly nurse examined her—it hurt more than giving birth had, and Masha screamed.

"I bet it didn't hurt when you were fucking!" shouted the nurse.

Masha spent the next two weeks in one of the worst hospitals in a city full of bad hospitals. Her roommates numbered between three and five, placed on sagging metal cots in a room with no dividers. The hospital had only the most rudimentary medicines and equipment that dated back to the middle of the twentieth century. One of Masha's roommates had a pregnancy that had become nonviable at twenty-six weeks, but the drugs used to induce labor were ineffective or insufficient and she lay in the room for days, struggling to give birth to her dead baby.

After a few days, Masha figured out that she was part of the hospital's corrupt survival strategy. Russia had instituted a system of mandatory health insurance, a state-run policy that reimbursed hospitals. But this was a facility that no one would voluntarily choose, so at night, ambulances would deliver policyholders to this hospital in exchange for kickbacks. This was what had happened to Masha. Once she was hospitalized, the doctors placed her under an infectious- diseases quarantine, making it impossible to transfer to another facility.

Back at home, something strange happened to Sergei. Instead of doing what any normal husband would do in this situation—asking his mother or Masha's grandmother to come and take care of the baby—he bonded with his son. When Masha came home, she got the sense that Sergei was now more of a parent than she was. He let her join in, and they stayed home for the next year, mothering their baby and running their website.

After that Masha went to work for a distribution company. This was a bit of a misnomer: the line of business she entered probably should have been called "corruption facilitation."

Putin had responded to the pensioners' protests by announcing mammoth government investment in social services. The investment was divided into four different "priority national projects." The first year, Russia invested about $2 billion in the four projects, and the following year the amount went up. The largest share of the money went to National Project Health. It was designed to radically modernize Russian medicine.¹⁹

Health care and research institutions began importing vast amounts of medical equipment and the chemicals and parts required for it to function. Because the funds were federal, all purchases had to go through the health ministry, where kickbacks accounted for 80 to 90 percent of the expenditures. But foreign suppliers, bound by their national laws, could not accommodate the kickback schemes or pay the bribes at customs. This was where the "distribution company" stepped in. It was Masha's job to ensure that the corruption premiums were paid but the paperwork looked clean. She got an excellent salary.

thirteen

ALL IN THE FAMILY

the first time Lyosha saw another gay man was in December of his first year at university. The man had come to visit one of the girls at the dorm. His name was also Alexei, he was also from Solikamsk, and it was all such a wonderful coincidence that Lyosha immediately fell in love.

He also immediately moved in with Alexei. After that, all was not exactly as Lyosha had expected. Alexei was older—twenty-one to Lyosha's seventeen—and a college dropout. His tiny apartment was filthy. Lyosha spent the first couple of days scrubbing it down and setting it up for domesticity: Alexei had apparently never cooked. The apartment was very close to Perm's lone gay club, and many of Alexei's friends were used to crashing there after a night of drinking, alone or with someone. There was a lot of drinking. Some of Alexei's friends had cirrhosis of the liver. Someone died of it. Someone else committed suicide. The sex was rough and painful, and Alexei had sex with other people too. Still, the most important thing was that Lyosha had a boyfriend.

Now was the time to come out to his mother. When Lyosha went home to Solikamsk for New Year's, he got right to it.

"Mama, we have to talk."

They sat down at the kitchen table.

"Mama, I love you," said Lyosha, and started sobbing uncontrollably.

Galina waited for him to collect himself. He could not.

"Are you trying to tell me that you like boys?" she asked finally.

"Yes."

"I must have done something wrong," she concluded dispassionately.

Galina said nothing else for three days, but at family holiday gatherings on each of those days she would down three shots of vodka in quick succession. Normally, she did not drink.

Things were difficult for the next six months, though Galina had resumed speaking to Lyosha and continued giving him money for rent. He knew that she had stared down the choice between Lyosha and society, and had chosen her son. Now she was acclimating to the consequences of that choice. Among family, whenever someone tried to engage her in teasing Lyosha about his not having a girlfriend yet— at the ripe old age of eighteen now, when other young men were considering marriage and children—she cut the conversation off with a stern, "He'll do what he wants when he decides it's time." She also made it clear to him that she did not want to know any of the details: she asked no questions, welcomed no confidences, but also never said anything pejorative. Still, things felt a bit better after Lyosha broke up with Alexei. Galina seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.

What had happened was that Alexei had brought someone home when Lyosha was there. Lyosha had reluctantly agreed to an open relationship, but this was unbearable. Lyosha ended the relationship, but he also made a promise to himself to rid himself of jealousy. It was an unproductive emotion. If he ever had a boyfriend again, he would be mindful of the need for a variety of experiences and would be tolerant of indiscretions as long as the boyfriend did not fall in love with another person. The relationship with Alexei had made Lyosha wiser. Back in the dormitory now, he became a bit of a love guru: female students came to him for advice, and so did the mother of one of his female classmates.

Lyosha met Sasha during one of his visits to Solikamsk. Actually, he did not meet him, but he saw him: Sasha sold music CDs and VHS tapes from a permanent stand at Orbita, the new shopping center. It was perhaps a quarter of the size of the shopping malls that had opened up in Perm, but it had the same blinding neon lights and slippery tiled floors. Someone told Lyosha that Sasha had had a lover,

an older and perhaps wealthy man. Someone else told Lyosha that Sasha wanted to meet him.

Lyosha started spending time at Orbita. He came to Solikamsk for all school breaks and some weekends, and he loitered. He met all his friends there, and when they were not available, he went to Orbita alone. Sasha would walk over and ask for a light, but he always did it with a girl on his arm or when Lyosha was speaking to someone else. Technically, they still had not met.

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

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

Nothing changed after the party. Lyosha still took the bus, five hours each way, to hang out at the mall almost every weekend, and Sasha still asked him for a light. Lyosha finally devised a plan to talk to Sasha alone. He waited at the bus stop outside Orbita until Sasha left work and boarded the bus. Lyosha got on the same bus without being seen—the crowd and the winter darkness made this easy. He got off at Sasha's stop and caught up to him on foot after a short distance.

"Sasha, we have to talk."

Sasha did not seem at all surprised. He did seem to have his answer prepared in advance.

"You shouldn't give in to your fantasies," he said. "Don't believe what people say."

Lyosha poured his heart into a letter and had a mutual friend hand it to Sasha at the mall. Sasha called. This time, he did not tell Lyosha not to believe what people say. He did not even say that he was not gay. All he said was, "I can't," over and over, for an hour and a half.

Lyosha decided that what they needed was to speak in person, not in the mall or in the street, but in private. Sasha just needed to feel safe. Lyosha found a classified-ad newspaper in which people offered apartments for rent by the day. He called, he paid, he picked up the key and called Sasha with the address. He cooked supper and waited. Sasha came.

He said, "I can't."

He said, "I'm sorry. I should not have let this go on. I can't. I hope you can forgive me."

Lyosha said, "Don't ask me to forgive you. I just hope you can forgive yourself."

Lyosha thought it was all too much like a movie, and a very long one: somehow, it took them four hours to say those things to each other. Then Sasha left, and Lyosha left too, because the last thing he wanted now was to spend the night in this apartment.

it was January 2006 when the Sasha story ended. In the three years since his gay life began, Lyosha had had sex with one man, loved two, and had explored the entire range of options available to him: the closet and the gutter. Or at least those were the options available to his gay body and his gay heart. His gay mind could still soar. He decided that he would be gay in the academy.

The following year Lyosha defended his senior thesis, titled "Sexual Minorities as a Political Issue." Getting the topic approved by the department was difficult, but he managed, and then went to Moscow for research. At the Russian State Library, which everyone still called by its old name, the Lenin Library, the repository of every periodical ever legally published in the country, Lyosha saw gay and lesbian magazines from the early 1990s. It turned out that there had once been people who wrote in Russian about gay rights, the movement, legislation, a political agenda. They sounded freer and

better-informed than anyone Lyosha knew now. They seemed to inhabit a public space that Lyosha could barely imagine, to be connected to efforts that trusted their own importance—this was particularly true of a woman named Evgenia Debryanskaya, a lesbian activist so outspoken the whole country seemed to have heard of her back when Lyosha was in first grade. She was now an entrepreneur, like several other activists of old; others had left the country, and a couple had died.

"The threat of social divisions based on sexual orientation in contemporary Russian society is no less relevant than the threats of the spread of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism," Lyosha wrote in the introduction to his thesis. He wrote that acceptance of sexual minorities, though it had increased in the 1990s, was on the wane— this was more of a hunch than something that he could support with evidence, so he might have skipped a footnote here.¹ He pointed to legislation that had been proposed in 2003—two parliament members had wanted to ban "propaganda of homosexuality."² The bill failed, but Lyosha argued that it signified an anti-gay backlash. The thesis might have struck Lyosha's professors as a bit alarmist and perhaps solipsistic—it seemed hard to observe a backlash against something they barely believed existed—but it was one of the most erudite, best- argued theses they had seen.³ As an outstanding scholar, Lyosha was offered the opportunity to stay at the department for graduate study.

There was a caveat: Lyosha had to broaden his subject. He could, for example, include other minority groups in his research. He had to agree, especially because the entire class was fretting about its future: in previous years graduates had found work as political technologists, but with the withering of public politics, demand had plummeted. Still, during his first year Lyosha proposed the following research topic: "Sexual Minorities in Political Discourse."

"I like it very much," his adviser said. "But you must understand that our academic council is very conservative, some members are very religious, so I'm afraid they won't allow you to dissertate on this topic." She spoke in jargon to him, because he was now a member of the academic club. They finally settled on "Minority discourse in

public politics." Lyosha would be looking at sexual and ethnic minorities, and at women as a minority group in politics.

Lyosha started teaching, helping a slightly older friend who taught the university's lone seminar on gender theory. He started publishing: the department's annual included his paper on women as a political minority. His research was exhilarating. He discovered the word "queer," wrote a paper on the evolution of the concept, and decided that it applied to him.

In the fall of 2009, Lyosha presented his dissertation for preliminary review. In the end, his adviser's demand that he broaden his topic had served a subversive purpose she hardly could have intended: Lyosha wrote about different minority groups as though they were equal to one another. He did point out that homosexuals in Russia had been granted only the bare minimum of legal rights—the right not to be treated as criminals—and had not yet reached full equality with the majority. Still, he wrote about gay people the same way that he wrote about women and ethnic minorities and his dissertation stressed the assumption that he was describing a process of inexorable legitimation and institutionalization of the various groups, all of which would eventually realize their potential to become not only the objects but also the subjects of politics.⁴

Lyosha spoke for twenty minutes and then faced an unprecedented hour and a half of questions from the twelve-member committee.

"Are you aware that homosexuality is a taboo topic in our country?" asked one.

"But it exists," responded Lyosha.

This was the only question that concerned Lyosha's actual topic. A lone committee member, whom Lyosha thought to be a closeted gay man, made a helpful suggestion on sources. The rest were anxious free-association queries. Members of the committee sounded angry with Lyosha, so angry that they could not or would not bring themselves to engage with his work. Their comments showed that they did not think a study like this should exist.

"I just attended a conference in St. Petersburg where they said that gender was no more," said one.

"What are 'minority groups' anyway?" asked another.

Lyosha sweated and used every trick he could think of to keep his rage from showing.

A few weeks later, he heard that the professor who had been helpful during the defense had been seen waving a copy of Lyosha's dissertation summary booklet during his own seminar, shouting in outrage, "This is ideological propaganda! This is propaganda of sodomy!" Lyosha was almost shocked a few weeks later to learn that the committee had cleared him for his defense.

The defense was, by all accounts, brilliant. The vote was unanimous.

Lyosha's academic triumph immediately translated into administrative power. He took over the one gender studies course he used to help teach, and redesigned it to include an LGBT component. Older faculty who had shunned him earlier were now polite, and made a production of welcoming his input. He sensed that they were vicious in what they said about him behind his back, but he chose to interpret this as a symptom of their powerlessness in the face of his newfound authority.

it was a great time to be a young academic in Perm, for reasons that originated in Moscow. In 2008, Putin had handed the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev. Putin had served the two consecutive terms the Russian constitution allowed, and did what authoritarian rulers the world over do in such situations: he ceded the post without ceding the power. Putin became prime minister, and Dmitry Medvedev, a longtime member of his staff, became the country's nominal president. The center of power shifted to the cabinet, now run by Putin. Overnight, the president's office became ceremonial: Medvedev had only a tiny staff and no practical means to wield the power that was granted to him by the constitution. Still, Medvedev's office obliged him to maintain a public presence. "For Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, Russian citizens are not voters, but an

audience," Russian journalist Maxim Trudolyubov wrote in 2009. "The big difference between Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev is that they work with different audiences." Putin played to the majority: middle- aged and older, middle-income and poorer, the broad audience of the television channels. Medvedev addressed the better-educated, better- off minority that had been largely ignored during Putin's two terms.⁵ Starved for attention, this audience responded to Medvedev's overtures with enthusiasm ranging from cautious to ecstatic. They quickly dubbed the new era "the Thaw."

The term referred to an earlier epoch, the Soviet Union of the late 1950s and early 1960s—the period between Nikita Khrushchev's speech denouncing the cult of Stalin and the Party coup that deposed Khrushchev himself. That had been the time the first fortochkas opened: some previously banned writing was published and a small degree of open discussion and an even smaller degree of self- organization were allowed. The term "Thaw" now betrayed low expectations: the original Thaw had not brought about fundamental change—it had merely made the system somewhat less brutal. It had also been followed by the Brezhnev freeze, which did not return the terror of Stalinism but which put an end to any civic initiatives and, more important, any hope for change. The term "Thaw" reflected the belief that the Putin system of one-party rule and ever-shrinking space for civil society, media, and protest was entrenched. That made whatever short-term opportunities the new Thaw did present all the more precious.

Perm happened to produce such an opportunity. The capital of an oil-producing region, it had seen its fortunes rise exponentially during the boom of the 2000s. It also had a governor possessed of Western-style ambition. A Putin appointee, Oleg Chirkunov came to politics from the KGB by way of the retail business. He had worked in Switzerland, and his family stayed there even after he became a public official.⁶ He was a quintessential representative of the Medvedev audience: moneyed, Western-oriented, and with a taste for art and culture as Europe understood them. Federal reform undertaken by Putin during his first term deprived Russia's constituent regions not only of much of their political independence but also of their money. A resource-rich region like Perm was handing an ever-increasing share of its tax revenues to Moscow. Quality of life, as a result, dragged far behind regional economic growth. When Garry Kasparov first went on a speaking tour as a politician, this issue—the center's sucking the regions dry—was a major part of his message. But Chirkunov was not looking for a way to confront Putin: he was looking for a way to improve Perm's quality of life and create an alternative source of income without confrontation with Moscow. When oil prices took a dive in 2007, his search for a solution became urgent. He decided that culture would be Perm's salvation.⁷

Chirkunov's partners in his culture project were two wealthy art lovers from Moscow. One was Sergei Gordeev, who had made a billion or more in Moscow real estate. His passion was contemporary architecture: he had paid generously to preserve Moscow's Constructivist landmarks. Chirkunov appointed Gordeev one of the two senators from Perm. Putin's new system, in which all high-level regional officials were appointed rather than elected, lent itself to these kinds of transactions. Chirkunov could give Gordeev power, at least symbolically, and influence, in exchange for his investment in the Perm project. Gordeev never lived in Perm or even learned much about it: when he visited the city, he stayed at a hotel. One night, four years into his senate term, he spent four hours wandering the city because he could not get his bearings and could not hail a cab either, for all he had in his wallet were five hundred-euro notes.⁸ Still, he promoted Perm faithfully and showed up for high-profile events in the city.

The other Muscovite who came to Perm was Marat Guelman, an art dealer turned political technologist. He had played a key role in creating Putin's public image in 1999-2000, and he had stayed an insider. But with the near-extinction of electoral politics, political technologists were no longer in demand. The market for Russian art, too, collapsed during the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Perm, where life and real estate were cheap and the regime was friendly, offered

Guelman a perfect Thaw-style cultural-political-economic opportunity. The three men pooled their—and the region's—influence and money in the hope of multiplying both. They promoted what they were doing unironically as a "cultural revolution." Their avowed goal was to have Perm chosen as a European Cultural Capital, a title bestowed by the European Union but available to cities that are not located in a European Union member country. The title would bring tourism to the city and money and fame to the men.

Gordeev invested, and Guelman curated. A museum of contemporary art opened in a hastily renovated old river port. An experimental theater followed, and a rejuvenated opera theater. At the center of it all stood a summer festival, an entire month of exhibits, performances, and panels that reached far beyond the arts into media and economics. Almost every night, police cars with flashing lights escorted buses ferrying dozens of visiting dignitaries from the Perm airport, where they had been delivered on a chartered plane from Moscow, to newly renovated hotels. The festival, called White Nights, was "overwhelming by design," wrote American anthropologist Douglas Rogers, who spent twenty years studying Perm.

At the center of White Nights in Perm was a fenced-in Festival Village erected in front of the Regional Administration building on Perm's esplanade. Just over three hectares in size, the Festival Village included two small and one large outdoor stages for concerts and other performances; numerous alleys for small shops and displays; two restaurants and two cafes; and a Festival Club for nearly fifty planned discussions and presentations. In order to cope with inevitable summer muddiness, boardwalk-style walkways were constructed to funnel crowds from space to space; they were repainted white nearly every night. Booths arranged alongside these walkways provided spaces where folk artisans and other culture producers could display and sell their wares, and the grassy spaces between the walkways hosted small-scale performances and exhibitions, from clowns to blacksmiths. Everywhere there were nooks and crannies—many of them in two massive towers at one end of the Festival Village—where little exhibits or performances sprang up. Most stunningly to many observers, there was even a "festival beach": a large circular pool, suitable for dozens of children at a time, erected within a raised platform that could accommodate hundreds of sunbathers. Showers and changing rooms were located

in a sandy area beneath.⁹

It was as if the entire city was, without changing location, transported from its eerie everyday identity as a former military- industrial city closed to outsiders to some shiny Europe of the imagination. In exchange, Europe would someday put Perm on its map—as a capital, no less. This frantic ambition was contagious, especially because Chirkunov and his people made it clear that their vision reached beyond the arts: the governor promised to forge a new "economy of the intellect, where we will create not with our hands but with our heads."¹⁰

The university, too, developed a vision of itself as a European institution. Lyosha knew that he fit in it well. His own vision was that he would soon be running Russia's only LGBT Studies program. For now, he and Darya, the friend who had been teaching the one gender studies course, launched a gender studies center. It helped that Darya's father was the dean of another department at the university. Darya and Lyosha got some funding for hosting conferences and publishing the proceedings. Their publications had no official status in the university, but this meant that they did not have to face an academic-review board.

Lyosha was lucky. He had heard that a legal scholar in Novosibirsk had not been allowed to defend her dissertation on LGBT rights.¹¹ In 2010, Lyosha presented at a conference at Moscow State University. His paper was titled "Gender Gaps in Political Science." Only one person—a professor from St. Petersburg—had a question for him.

"Are you aware," she asked, "that there are no lesbians in Russia?"

"I've also heard," said Lyosha, "that there was no sex in the Soviet Union. Yet you are here."

When the conference collection was published in book form, his paper was omitted.

people did not say those sorts of things at Moscow State—not what Lyosha said to the professor from St. Petersburg, nor what he had said in his paper. The social sciences here sounded very different.

Back in the early 1990s, when the department of sociology was first established at Moscow State, its founders reached out to Western colleagues far from the liberal academic mainstream. One person they sought out was Allan Carlson, an American historian who taught at ultraconservative Hillsdale College in Michigan. Carlson was a follower of Pitirim Sorokin, one of the Russian thinkers exiled on the Philosophers' Ship in 1922. Sorokin went on to found the sociology department at Harvard. His prolific writings included doomsday warnings about the descent of Western civilization into decadence, and it was on these ideas that Carlson had based his own thinking. Carlson's books numbered half a dozen, all had the word "family" in the title, and each argued that the family was the bedrock of civilization and the sole key to the continued survival of humankind.¹²

Carlson visited Moscow State University in 1995, a year when the topic that dominated the social sciences—and much of the media— was Russia's demographic crisis. The country's population had been declining for half a century. People were having fewer children and dying earlier. Male life expectancy was among the lowest in Europe— by the early 1990s, it was in the mid-sixties—and it would stay at that level for a decade and a half.¹³ This meant that most adult Russian men living in the 1990s and 2000s would not live past age sixty-five.

American economist Nicholas Eberstadt has written extensively about Russian demographics. A chapter in his book on the Russian population crisis is titled "Russia's Ominous Patterns of Mortality and Morbidity: Pioneering New and Modern Pathways to Poor Health and Premature Death." He showed that no modern country had ever seen people die at the same rate in peacetime. According to 2006 figures, wrote Eberstadt, male life expectancy at age fifteen in Russian compared unfavorably with that in Ethiopia, Gambia, and Somalia. Two things appeared to be killing Russians

disproportionately: diseases of the cardiovascular system, and external causes, such as injuries and poisoning, including suicide.

Eberstadt scrutinized all the usual suspects: poor diet, smoking, lack of exercise, environmental pollution, economic shock and subsequent poverty, and, of course, vodka. But none of these factors explained enough of the problem, and even together they added up to barely half an explanation. True, Russians ate a fatty diet—but not as fatty as that of Western Europeans. Plus, Russians appeared to overeat less. Yes, Russia had taken abominable care of its environment, but it was seeing only a few more deaths from respiratory diseases than did Western Europe—and fewer deaths of diseases of the kidneys, which would be expected to result from pollution. Russians had lived through severe economic upheaval, but there was no indication that economic shock in a modern society leads quickly, or at all, to increased mortality—the Great Depression, for example, did not. Nor would a sudden drop in health-care services offer an explanation: Russia's health-care spending was roughly comparable to that of less-affluent Western European countries. Russians smoked a lot, but not as much as Greeks and Spaniards did while living on average as long as other Western Europeans. Russians did drink a lot, but not as much as Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians, whose life expectancy started improving soon after they broke off from the Soviet Bloc.¹⁴ Vodka and other alcohol played an important role in the high rates of cardiovascular, violent, and accidental deaths —but not a large enough role to explain the Russian demographic predicament. In fact, while vodka was the most popular explanation, it was also the most contradictory. Some studies actually showed that Russian drinkers lived longer than non-drinkers.¹⁵

Another scholar of Russian demographics, American anthropologist Michelle Parsons, suggested an explanation for the apparent vodka paradox: for what it is worth, alcohol may help people adapt to realities that otherwise make them want to curl up and die. Parsons, who called her book Dying Unneeded, argued that Russians were dying early because they had nothing and no one to live for. Eberstadt also ultimately concluded that the explanation had to do with mental health. He used longer-term statistics to demonstrate that what Russians were calling a "demographic crisis" had in fact been going on for decades—birthrates and life expectancy had been falling for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Only two periods stood out as exceptions to this trend: Khrushchev's Thaw and Gorbachev's perestroika, the brief spells when Russians anticipated a better future. The rest of the time, it seemed, Russians had been dying for lack of hope.

Allan Carlson's explanation was entirely different: Russians were dying because what he called the "natural family" was on the wane. During his visit, he and members of the sociology department decided to organize a conference to discuss what Russia and other countries could do to resist the attack on the family waged by the decadent West. The conference would be called the World Congress of Families. The gathering, held in Prague in 1997, drew about seven hundred people. Western participants were primarily representatives of conservative religious organizations mobilized against advances in gay rights. Eastern European participants came from newly independent nation-states, some of them very small and all of them struggling with cultural and economic change; they were driven by existential panic—and so were the Russians.

Inspired by the turnout, the organizers turned the World Congress of Families into a permanent organization dedicated to the fight against gay rights, abortion rights, and gender studies. The headquarters of the new organization was in Illinois, but its spiritual center was in Russia, at the sociology department of Moscow State University.¹⁶ Over the next decade the Russians, who had started out as Carlson's disciples, became the senior partners in the organization: with the backing of the government and the Russian Orthodox Church, they could deliver the political muscle.

In his 2006 state-of-the-federation address, Putin called depopulation the country's most pressing problem. "I am going to speak about the most important thing now," he said. "What's the most important thing? At the defense ministry they know what it is." In Putin's language of macho humor, the phrase was supposed to signal that he was about to speak about something that soldiers—real men—think about all the time.

Yes, I am indeed going to talk about love, about women and children. About the family. And about contemporary Russia's most

acute problem: demographics You know that our country's

population shrinks, on average, by seven hundred thousand people a year. We have talked about the issue many times, but have yet to

do anything of substance about it.¹⁷

Putin proposed a financial solution: more money to National Project Health (the one where Masha was facilitating the payment of 80-to-90-percent kickbacks), more money for birthing clinics, and, most important, more money for mothers. He instituted a onetime payment of the equivalent of over $8,000 to any woman who gave birth to a second child (Russian women were having an average of 1.3 children¹⁸). The "maternal capital," as it became known, would remain an act of unparalleled generosity on the part of the Russian state toward its citizens, showing just how highly the president valued his subjects' willingness to reproduce.

In the 2000s, the World Congress¹⁹ established positions for what they called ambassadors—lobbyists at various international and European organizations, including the United Nations. The jobs went to Russians, who used the weight of the Russian delegation's backing to organize informal coalitions to press for anti-gay initiatives and oppose measures that advanced LGBT rights.²⁰ In the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center designated the World Congress a hate group.²¹

back at the sociology department at Moscow State, students received a steady diet of ultraconservative rhetoric—and nothing else. "As a graduate of the department, I can tell, based on my own experience, that the education students received there could never stand up to either academic or practical scrutiny," a 1996 graduate said in a 2007 interview. The graduate, Alexandre Bikbov, did what Moscow State students had done back in the Soviet period if they wanted to learn: he educated himself, as Gudkov and Arutyunyan had done one or two generations earlier. "Back then it was possible to go to the library or to another department in the university in order to compensate for the lack of knowledge that the sociology department systematically produced," said Bikbov, speaking about the 1990s. "And then, at the crucial moment of the exam, I could almost always count on unassailability if I could demonstrate that I knew the subject well." In the 2000s, though, said Bikbov, things deteriorated. "Now there is open anti-intellectual censorship at exams: when students show that they 'know too much,' they get lower grades and are threatened with more severe punishment. The same thing happens during seminars, when some faculty tell students not to read [French sociologist Pierre] Bourdieu or when they cut off any and all discussion in the most demeaning manner."²²

Bikbov was unusually persistent in studying the sociology that Moscow State University did not want to teach him. He taught himself French and translated Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, a classic of modern sociology, into Russian. He started publishing internationally. He became a professor—not at the sociology department of Moscow State, which was no place for someone like him, but in the philosophy department of Russian Humanities University, a much smaller and far younger institution that did not have its own department of sociology. There he launched his own standing seminar, which, like Levada's seminar in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, served to give young sociologists access to knowledge they were not getting through official channels. Dozens of Moscow State University sociology department students who figured out, soon after matriculating, that the department was, in Bikbov's words, "a commercial enterprise with an extremism complex," came to Bikbov's seminar to learn.

In 2006, Bikbov organized a conference on the sociology of prisons. Two prominent French academics presented, as did Bikbov's seminar participants and several young people who volunteered at Memorial, the organization founded in the 1980s to tell the story of the Gulag. The combination of the subject matter and academics and students and activists in one room proved combustible. The students resolved to demand change at Moscow State's sociology department.²³

For a semester in 2007, students staged a series of protests. "Education at the department is a lie!" proclaimed their first flyer. The flyer claimed that staff faculty were forbidden to do original research: instead, they had to use multivolume textbooks written by the dean, Vladimir Dobrenkov, as the basis for all instruction.

The schedule is full of ridiculous mandatory classes, including religious upbringing!

Outside researchers and faculty are not allowed inside the sociology department. The administration does everything in its power to block students' access, practical knowledge and interesting classes!

The administration conceals information on any talks given [in Moscow] by foreign scholars and bans student exchange with colleges abroad.

The flyer listed some recent incidents at the department, including:

All students were required to read a brochure distributed by the dean's office. Titled "Why Are Russian Lands Being Cleansed," it accused the Freemasons of "starting world wars and initiating the creation of the atomic bomb" and claimed that "the Zionist lobby . . . determined the foreign policies of the United States and Great Britain, holds in its hands the world financial system, including the printing of dollars, practically controls all the leading mass media and means of communication." Russia is called a "righteous nation" and America a "beastly nation" and The Protocols of the Elders of

Zion is quoted earnestly, as a reliable source.²⁴

The protests lasted through the spring, becoming the first sustained and highly public protests in Russia since Putin's "preventive counter-revolution." Such vocal action at the nation's

leading university compelled the presidential administration to respond by commissioning a report on the department. A group of experts concluded that the level of instruction at the department was not up to university standards and that Dobrenkov's textbooks were replete with plagiarism.²⁵

The other side retaliated. A group called the Union of Orthodox Citizens, which counted several well-known politicians among its leaders,²⁶ issued a manifesto in defense of the sociology department: "There is no doubt that a concerted effort to foment an 'orange revolution' at Russia's most important university is what stands behind the actions of radical youths and the students they have conscripted," they wrote. Indeed, the sociology department was to provide a "training ground for a youth 'maidan'"—Ukrainian for "square" but referring specifically to Kiev's Independence Square, the geographic center of the Orange Revolution. This maidan would then spread to other institutions of higher learning. Along with Marches of the Dissenters, and, the manifesto added, "parades of sodomites," the student rebellion "has every chance, come fall, to change the color of Red Square, turning it into an all-Russian rainbow 'maidan.'"²⁷ The statement was perfectly in keeping with the improbable assertion Lyosha had made in his thesis: a chasm was opening up in Russian society along the lines of sexual identity. The specter of gay liberation had emerged as a bogeyman much like the Freemasons, the Zionists, and the American financiers.

In the fall of 2007, the department cracked down. A half-dozen leaders of the protests were expelled.²⁸ The following June, the department hosted an international conference titled "Societal Norms and the Possibilities of Societal Development." Dean Dobrenkov opened the conference by warning against the dangers of homosexuality:

Issues of virtue and morality have to be at the forefront today.

Without that, Russia has no future How can we talk about the

rights of homosexuals and lesbians in light of this? All these attempts to organize gay parades, the introduction of sex education in schools—all of this aims to defile our young people, and we must say a clear and definitive "no" to that! Otherwise, we will lose

Russia.²⁹

"All these attempts" referred to a single effort, by a young Moscow lawyer, to force a public conversation on LGBT rights by applying for a permit to hold a Pride march in Moscow. The permit was denied, and the lawyer was taking his case through the courts. The handful of people who showed up for Pride in Moscow in May 2007 were first beaten and then arrested; among the detainees was an Italian member of the European Parliament who had come to lend his support.³⁰

The star of the conference was American Paul Cameron, who urged Russia to learn from American mistakes. "It is the homosexuals who are bringing about a demographic catastrophe," he said.

They cause huge and immeasurable harm to society. According to our data, one third of inmates in the state of Illinois are sexual predators or their victims. And twenty to forty percent are

homosexuals or their victims According to official data, thirty to

fifty percent of Illinois residents have had sexual relations with children, primarily as a result of their homosexual proclivities. Twenty percent of such crimes take place in adoptive families.

Cameron was citing Illinois because it was his home state and, he pointed out, the home state of then presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Russia has every chance to avoid the sad fate of Western countries, which have accepted homosexuality as morally normal, and to choose its own traditions and moral values. I want to ask you: Do

you want to be as stupid as we have been?³¹

Introduced in Moscow as a prominent American academic, Cameron had been expelled from the American Psychological

Association in 1983 and the American Sociological Association in 1986. The latter organization gave the following reason: "Dr. Paul Cameron has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism."³² In September 2008, the sociology department inaugurated a new research project, to be headed by a new member of the permanent faculty: Alexander Dugin would run the Center for Conservative Studies. Launching the center, Dugin explained what it was not: "It is not a liberal intellectual group, but also not a Soviet-Marxist one." Both the Soviet idea and the liberal idea that had followed it in Russia had failed, he explained. "And yet there is no conservative intellectual or academic center in Russia in the American or the European sense of the word. This despite the fact that both the people and the regime feel conservatively." Now the country's most important university would take on the mission of generating ideas to fit those feelings:

The goal of the Center for Conservative Studies is to become the

center of development of conservative ideology in Russia We

also need to train a conservatively minded academic and government elite, there is no reason to hide this fact. They must be conservative ideologues. And we must place people in power and in

positions of authority in the academy.³³

The college dropout had worked hard to get to this point. He had long ago achieved public prominence and apparent political influence, but he wanted academic credentials. He defended his dissertation in December 2000 in Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia, and his second dissertation—it is Russian convention to obtain first a sort of junior doctorate and then a senior one—in 2004, at another Rostov- on-Don institution. A German political scientist, Andreas Umland, noted in 2007:

For an understanding of the Dugin phenomenon, Dugin's eagerness to become a fully accepted member of academia is particularly revealing. It speaks about both, how he understands himself as well as what the long-term prospects of his role in

Russian society might be. Whether Dugin will be in a position to enter the Ivory Tower, make his pamphlets into textbooks and become accepted in scholarly circles are major issues in assessing

his project as he himself understands it.³⁴

Less than a year after Umland posed this question, Dugin was installed at Moscow State's sociology department. His classes would now be mandatory for department students. The arrangement was profitable all around: Dean Dobrenkov was importing political muscle that accrued to Dugin—no one would touch him now, whatever the official commission might have concluded about his plagiarism and the low quality of education at the department. Dugin, on the other hand, got the intellectual legitimacy and the pulpit he had long been seeking.

compared with moscow state university or, really, any other university in Russia, Lyosha's position in Perm might have looked so privileged as to be unsustainable. A realist would have said that it was only a matter of time before a small oasis like Perm State University's political science department was stomped out, the way all difference in Russia was being stomped out. But an optimist would have said that it was at provincial universities and in small, self-contained spaces of experimentation that Russia's future was being made. Lyosha did not stop being an optimist until he went to Ukraine.

In 2011 he won a competition to take part in a three-year seminar for teachers from post-Communist countries. His track was "Gender, Sexuality, and Power." The seminars were funded by Soros's Open Society Foundations, which were no longer functioning in Russia— but this was a regional program, and the meetings would be in Ukraine. They met for the first time in Uzhgorod, a tiny border town in Western Ukraine, and for the first time, Lyosha was with his people. He was not the queer among academics or the academic among the queers—he was with people who were thinking and talking about the same things he was, and feeling some of the same things too. He was alone only in his epiphany: unlike him, the other participants—Brits, Americans, and Ukrainians—lived and worked with others who were like them. Ukraine, he learned, had thirty- seven registered LGBT groups. The number boggled his mind. He had always thought of Ukraine as Russia's simple provincial cousin, but this country had gender studies and queer studies theorists at several of its universities. And they were not revolutionary explorers like Lyosha: they had teachers. Lyosha had Darya, who was just a couple of years older—a peer, and a friend supportive enough that he sometimes forgot that she was the daughter of a dean, and straight. But then he remembered. The people here had mentors who had studied in the West in the 1990s. Lyosha felt not unlike Arutyunyan had felt nearly twenty years earlier, when she attended the training seminar abroad that delivered her "narcissistic blow." Like her, he saw people standing on the shoulders of their predecessors who stood on the shoulders of their predecessors who stood on the shoulders of giants—while Lyosha stood all alone.

He returned to Perm troubled but inspired: he felt he now had a vision of what his work might become. "I'm glad you are going to these seminars," his department chair told him. "It's like a retreat for you. But when you come back, you should be mindful of where you are." This was her way of broaching the subject of Lyosha needing to refocus his research. The 2012 department annual would not include his paper otherwise.

"There is no future here," Lyosha said to himself. He was not sure what this meant he needed to do now, but he knew that the phrase was true.

what lyosha had seen in Ukraine was, contrary to his expectations, a different culture. Yes, his Ukrainian colleagues spoke Russian, most as their first language, but they had a different educational background, different cultural references, and vastly different political expectations than he did. The Orange Revolution had not brought the change that the revolutionaries had demanded—indeed, Viktor Yanukovych, the once failed pro-Moscow candidate, had finally

been elected president in 2010—but nevertheless, Ukraine had left the Soviet Union.

Farther west, all three Baltic states had joined both NATO and the European Union in 2004. Several other post-Soviet states, including Ukraine and Georgia, were negotiating with these international organizations with an eye to possible ascension. Russia was moving in the opposite direction. In his state-of-the-federation address in April 2005, Putin stressed that Russia had to "first of all acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. . . . Tens of millions of our countrymen ended up outside our country's borders." The rest of that speech was a mishmash of familiar rhetoric—including the assertion that Russia was a European country that valued human rights and civil society— but the statement of grand regret framed the speech, and Putin's politics.³⁵ To soften the impact, the Kremlin's English translators cast the phrase as "a major geopolitical catastrophe of the century,"³⁶ but in another two years such pretense had been set aside. Speaking in Munich at an international security conference in February 2007, Putin said:

The format of the conference enables me to avoid superfluous politesse, the need to speak in smooth, pleasant, and empty diplomatic cliches. The format of the conference allows me to say

what I really think about international security issues.³⁷

Conference participants, who included German chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates, were taken by surprise: it seemed no one had expected a confrontation.³⁸ Putin railed against NATO's acceptance of new members:

I think it's obvious: the process of NATO enlargement has nothing to do with the modernization of the alliance itself or with raising the level of security in Europe. Just the opposite: it is a seriously inflammatory factor that lowers the level of mutual trust. And we have a justified right to ask openly: Who is NATO enlarging against? And what happened to the assurances given by Western partners after the Warsaw Pact was dissolved? What happened to those declarations? No one even remembers them. But I will dare remind the audience of what was said. I'd like to quote from NATO Secretary-General Worner's speech in Brussels on May 17, 1990. He said then: "The very fact that we are ready not to deploy NATO troops beyond the territory of the Federal Republic [of Germany] gives the Soviet Union firm security guarantees." Whatever

happened to those guarantees?³⁹

The quote indeed came from a speech by NATO Secretary-General Manfred Worner, but it had hardly amounted to the promise Putin was saying had been betrayed. First, Worner had been careful to use vaguely conditional language: he had said that NATO was "ready not to" expand—not that it would never expand. More important, the conditional guarantee he appeared to be extending applied to the Soviet Union, a country that ceased to exist a year and a half later. Russia was now separated from Germany by a double belt: a ring of former Soviet constituent republics—Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states—and then a ring of former Warsaw Pact countries—Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and others. A clear majority of these countries had, in the intervening years, explicitly asked—and sometimes begged and pleaded—for NATO protection.

Documents that were declassified in the United States around the time of Putin's Munich speech provided the context for the Worner statement. It had been made in the midst of multilateral talks on German reunification, which lasted from February to July 1990. The Soviet Union wanted to see Germany neutral—part of neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact; NATO and the new German government, elected after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, wanted to see Germany a full NATO member. In the final agreement, Germany became—or, some might say, remained—a NATO member but former East German territory remained free of NATO military presence. Worner's statement, like the negotiations from which it stemmed, had nothing to do with the issue of NATO expansion to former Warsaw Pact countries, because the participants assumed at the time that the Warsaw Pact would continue to exist (it dissolved a year and a half

later, in March 1991).^° Putin, who was a KGB officer serving in East Germany at the time of reunification talks, probably understood the contract well, but in his recollection the negotiations were the beginning of "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century"— and were part of the story of Western treachery. The message of the Munich speech was that Russia would no longer accept the post- Soviet, post-Warsaw Pact condition.

within weeks of the Munich speech, it became clear what the new disposition meant. The Estonian government unwittingly provided the occasion. On April 30, 2007, it moved a monument known as the Bronze Soldier from central Tallinn to the city's military cemetery. The Bronze Soldier was erected by Soviet authorities after the Second World War—one of dozens of such monuments placed in the capitals of Eastern Europe to commemorate the Soviet victories there. In Estonia's reading of history, however, what the Soviets considered liberation was actually occupation. Estonia based its post-Soviet laws and policies on the premise that the country had been illegally occupied between the years of 1940 and 1991—first by the USSR in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, then by Nazi Germany, and then by the USSR again. Among other things, this meant that only people who had been Estonian citizens before 1940 and their descendants automatically became citizens of independent Estonia; all others—presumed occupiers and their descendants—would have to pass Estonian language and history exams to become citizens. Even though the noncitizens were treated just like citizens for the purposes of public benefits and even had the right to vote in local elections, most of the country's sizable Russian-speaking minority—about a quarter of the population—considered the citizenship law discriminatory. The disagreement was fundamental: the Russian speakers did not and would not see themselves as occupiers, so to them the difference in treatment appeared based on ethnicity. Russia objected to the citizenship laws, and after Putin's 2005 "geopolitical catastrophe" speech, in which he called out to "our countrymen abroad," the criticism ramped up. The Bronze Soldier in Tallinn became, increasingly, a gathering spot for radical groups—both those who wanted the monument demolished (and frequently defaced it), and those who called for the restoration of the Soviet Union. The government decided to move the Soldier out of the city center.

Riots broke out in Tallinn. In Moscow, Nashi, the Young Guard, and at least two other pro-Kremlin youth groups began a siege of the Estonian embassy, demanding that the ambassador go home. The police did not intervene, and the consulate was forced to cease operations. After a week, the ambassador flew to Tallinn for what was, officially, a vacation. The youth groups proclaimed victory and lifted the siege.⁴¹ "The siege of the Estonian Embassy in Moscow . . . risks becoming a classic example of a violation of diplomatic law that will later be found in textbooks alongside descriptions of other unlawful incidents involving embassies, including ones as serious as the Tehran hostage crisis in 1979-1981," an Estonian defense analyst wrote later that year.⁴²

In addition to the riots and the embassy siege, a novel sort of attack took place: a cyber one. A flood of electronic requests designed to paralyze servers—a DDoS attack—shut down all Estonian government ministries, two banks, and several political parties, blocked all credit card transactions, and impaired the functioning of parliament. NATO and European Commission investigators could not definitively trace the attacks to Russia,⁴³ but two years later Nashi claimed credit for the act of cyberwarfare, which the movement said had been carried out by a mass of volunteers armed with computers.⁴⁴ The attacks had hit Estonia's point of particular pride— it was arguably the most computerized society in the world—and transformed it into a vulnerability, showing that the small nation, no matter how modern it had become and how well integrated into Western international organizations, could still be trampled by the large one, with its myriad soldiers.

Russia's next war also involved a cyberattack, but at its core it was conventional and almost old-fashioned. On August 8, 2008, Russia invaded Georgia.

Tensions had been mounting ever since the 2003 Rose Revolution, when an exuberantly pro-Western government took over. In 2006, Russia banned the import of Georgian mineral water and wine—a source of substantial revenue for the tiny nation—and began restricting the supply of gas to Georgia. It also started amassing troops on the border. These and other actions were primarily directed at continuing to inflame longstanding conflicts in two of Georgia's separatist regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Both were self- proclaimed independent republics with close ties to Russia. Both had existed in a state of neither war nor peace, neither independence nor integration, since the early 1990s. Weak, embattled central governments of the 1990s and early 2000s made this stalemate relatively easy to maintain. The new Georgian government, however, tried both carrot and stick to bring the republics back into the fold; Russia retaliated with redoubled support for the regions and intensified hostilities with the Georgian government. One apparent goal was to torpedo Georgia's attempts to join NATO—and in April 2008 Georgia's application was denied, with unresolved conflicts cited as at least one of the reasons. Two weeks later Putin—legally, in his last two weeks as president—signed a decree establishing economic and political relations with South Ossetia and Abkhazia that were essentially similar to Moscow's relations with the regions of Russia. Then, following a summer of assorted skirmishes, a full- fledged war broke out, with artillery fighting on the ground and Russia attacking from the air.

Ten days into the fighting, France and Germany brokered a cease­fire agreement, which Russia promptly violated. By the end of August, when the fighting stopped, Russia effectively controlled a large portion of Georgia and had issued Russian passports to local residents, turning them instantly into "countrymen."⁴⁵ On paper, Abkhazia and South Ossetia had declared independence, and Russia had recognized it, as had Nicaragua, Venezuela, and the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru.⁴⁶ The message to Georgia—and any other post-Soviet country that might have wanted to follow its example— was, If you try to ally with NATO, you will lose lives and territory and will be assured NATO limbo in perpetuity.

A separate message was intended for the West and for Russian citizens: South Ossetia and Abkhazia were just like Kosovo, which had seceded from Serbia because it had a closer affinity with neighboring Albania. NATO had intervened on behalf of Kosovo, giving Russia the moral right to intervene on behalf of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In 2008, Kosovo, which had been a de facto protectorate since 1999, was about to declare independence—and it was clear that the requisite majority of United Nations member countries would presently recognize it as a state. Russia perceived Kosovo's ascendance as an affront, just as it had perceived the 1999 NATO intervention as an insult—and now it was in a position to retaliate. Just days before Kosovo's announcement, Russian officials summoned South Ossetian and Abkhazian leaders to Moscow for talks and the Russian foreign minister issued a statement that said, "The declaration and recognition of Kosovar independence will make Russia adjust its line toward Abkhazia and South Ossetia."⁴⁷

It was right after the invasion of Georgia that Dugin launched his Center for Conservative Studies. He gushed about the war in his opening address: "We have conducted an intervention, and now we are saying that we didn't just conduct it as an exceptional case but we will continue to commit acts of intervention whenever we deem appropriate."⁴⁸ Causes for an intervention would include the perceived need to protect "countrymen abroad," the eternal need to resist a unipolar world, and the necessity of asserting Russia's interests in what it considered its sphere of influence.

If the president says that Russia's friendly regions represent a zone of privileged interest, that means that this zone is under Russian control. And anyone who tries to challenge that is challenging not only that specific country but Russia, with all its nuclear arms.

Dugin claimed to be interpreting and forecasting Russia's foreign policy, and his claim was now credible. That summer, he had gone to

South Ossetia and posed in front of a tank with a Kalashnikov in his hands. That summer had also marked the first time he had seen one of his slogans catch on and go entirely mainstream, repeated on television and reproduced on bumper stickers. The slogan was, "Tanks to Tbilisi!"* Dugin had written, "Those who do not support the

slogan 'Tanks to Tbilisi!' are not Russians 'Tanks to Tbilisi!'

should be written on every Russian's forehead."⁴⁹

The slogans, and the war, worked: according to Levada Center polls, Putin's popularity rating shot up to 88 percent, its highest point ever. Medvedev's hit 83 percent, also unprecedented.⁵⁰

PART FIVE

PROTEST

fourteen

THE FUTURE IS HISTORY

in march 2008, Seryozha flew to Moscow to vote in the presidential election. He had been living in Kiev for a year, barely following Russian politics, but he knew he had to vote. His grandfather would have said so. Alexander Nikolaevich always talked about how lucky Seryozha was to have been raised with elections. Perhaps this was why Seryozha felt he had to fly to Moscow and cast a ballot at his local precinct rather than vote at the embassy in Kiev.

It was an hourlong flight. From Sheremetyevo International Airport, Seryozha took a shuttle, a rickety minivan, to the nearest Metro stop. The vans ran one after another, and so did the slower large buses, so the Metro station was always full of travelers, most of whom looked tired from journeys much longer than Seryozha's had been. Seryozha got in line to the ticket booth: of course, everyone had just come in from someplace else and no one had the multiple-ride cards that saved Muscovites time in line. The Metro station was stuffy and loud, the air full of everyone's travel dust. Bags made it feel even more crowded than it was. Tired children complained. Tired adults snapped at them. The line seemed interminable.

Actually, it lasted fifty minutes. If Seryozha was tired by the time he reached the ticket window, what must it have been like for everyone else?

"Sixty rides, please," he said, pushing a thousand-ruble note through the window. According to a typed price list posted on the ticket booth, sixty rides was the highest-denomination ticket available. It cost 580 rubles, or about twenty dollars.

When he had the ticket, Seryozha walked over to the turnstiles and said as loudly as he could:

"I have just stood in this line for fifty minutes! I don't want you to have to stand in line for fifty minutes too, just because you came here from another town! I have purchased sixty rides! Please go through on this ticket."

There was a pause. Many people seemed to have heard him but not believed him. Then one woman walked over. Seryozha fed his ticket into the turnstile, it spat out the ticket and flashed green, and the woman went through. Then one more person went, then a couple, and then a young police lieutenant was pushing his clean-shaven face into Seryozha's.

"You have to come with me."

Seryozha went. The lieutenant led him through one of the black metal doors in the lobby into the station's own police precinct, where a more senior officer sat. His completely bald head was red and beaded with sweat, and though he was sitting there behind his metal desk, he looked and breathed like he had just been climbing stairs. As soon as they entered, the sweaty man started shouting at Seryozha, a barrage of obscenities. No one had ever shouted at Seryozha like this, and it must have shown on his face, because the young lieutenant now led him back out of the room. Out of earshot of the sweaty man, he tried to use his own words to tell Seryozha that what he had done with the ticket was wrong. He could not really make a logical case, or even a coherent sentence, and this made Seryozha want to help him.

"Look," he said, "there was no fraud here. I did get a discount for buying twenty rides at once, but I am not profiting from it and I saved everyone time and trouble—including the cashier!"

"The resale of tickets is illegal," said the lieutenant.

"I wasn't reselling them."

"You could have gotten the cashier in trouble. She could get fired."

"Why would she get fired? She did nothing wrong! No one did anything wrong."

"What do you think you are, God?"

Something changed right then. Seryozha felt a calm and clarity. The word "zen" floated into his mind, followed by a perfectly formed

phrase: "This man's mind works in a way that I will never be able to understand."

"I understand," said Seryozha, and walked away from the policeman. He fed his ticket into a turnstile, walked through, and then stuffed the ticket into the hands of the first person to pause long enough in response to Seryozha's "Excuse me, please." Seryozha had no use for the remaining fifty-five rides.

He went directly to his polling place. It was set up in a school: a half-dozen makeshift booths and two transparent plastic ballot bins in the center of the room. He took his ballot and stopped short of entering a booth. The first name and bio on the ballot were:

BOGDANOV, ANDREI VLADIMIROVICH. Born in 1970, resident of

Moscow. Place of work: Democratic Party of Russia, political party.

Job title: Central Committee Chairman. Place of work: Solntsevo

Municipal Council, City of Moscow. Job title: Deputy, part-time.

Nominated by: self. Registered on the basis of voter signatures.

Party affiliation: Democratic Party of Russia, party leader.¹

This made Seryozha mad as the lieutenant had not, and his sweaty-headed boss had not, and all their made-up rules had not. This was outright mockery. An independent candidate—one who was not already a member of parliament—was required by new Putin-era laws to submit two million voter signatures in order to be registered as a candidate, with no more than fifty thousand signatures coming from any one region of the country.² This demanded either a lot of money or a large nationwide grassroots network of activists—preferably both. Many people had tried that year. Garry Kasparov could not even convene the required public meeting of an initial group of supporters, because no one would rent him space for such a meeting, for any amount of money. Boris Nemtsov had dropped out of the race to help another candidate, former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, but Kasyanov's signatures were arbitrarily thrown out.³

But here was some guy named Bogdanov, whom no one had ever heard of, who was ostensibly representing a party that had in fact

been dormant since the early 1990s, whose political experience consisted of being a part-time member of a tiny powerless municipal council, and even this was probably fake—and Seryozha was supposed to pretend to believe that this clown had collected two million signatures? This felt just like the time when Seryozha thought everyone was crazy suddenly to accept that nobody, Putin, as the president-apparent. Except this felt worse. It was even more of an offense to human intelligence than the spectacle of Putin handing the presidency over to Medvedev like it was his to lend. Seryozha dropped his blank ballot into one of the bins and walked out. He took a cab back to the airport.

The Central Election Commission reported that Bogdanov got 1.3 percent of the vote. Medvedev won in the first round with 70.28 percent. The two perennial candidates—Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov and the Liberal Democratic Party's Vladimir Zhirinovsky (who, as members of parliament, were exempt from having to collect signatures to get on the ballot)—split the rest.⁴

both of the things that happened to Seryozha that day were examples of krugovaya poruka—"circular guarantee"—or what Levada had called "collective hostage-taking," one of the most effective and, he had written, morally abhorrent Soviet institutions. It turned everyone into an enforcer of the existing order, independent and often outside of any law. In the case of the Metro queue, the police officer instinctively sensed that it was his job to ensure that all passengers remain in a state of equal misery, and to prevent any attempt at self- organization. At the polling place, the ballot—with the absurd, almost virtual candidate in first place—turned every voter into a co­conspirator. By casting a ballot one affirmed the legitimacy of the exercise. By voting for Medvedev in the absence of a believable alternative, one agreed to pretend to be an active supporter, symbolically entering the circle—krug in Russian—on which the system of "circular guarantees" is based. (In previous years the ballot had included the option of voting "against all candidates," but a 2006 law eliminated this option.)

Much earlier, soon after Putin's first election victory, Gudkov had decided that he needed to take time out of analyzing survey results to write about something else: a concept. The concept was totalitarianism. The word had not been used much in the last decade. It had been thrilling, in the late 1980s, to hear Soviet leaders—first Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev and then Gorbachev himself—start using the word to describe the Soviet system. These had been moments of epic honesty and openness. But then, after the Soviet regime appeared to have collapsed into a pile of dust, the word became instantly irrelevant: totalitarianism had ended, and the topics of the day were reforms, the economy, and the new system Russia was assumed to be building. Even the few people who stubbornly insisted on reckoning with the past generally chose to focus on one specific period in Soviet history—Stalinism—and one element of the Soviet system: state terror. But since the Levada studies continued to show that Homo Sovieticus was thriving and reproducing and the initial hypothesis about the withering of Soviet institutions had long been debunked, it seemed like a good idea to return to thinking about the nature of the system that had produced the institutions and the man.

The term "totalitarianism" first came into use in the late 1920s, soon after the first totalitarian regimes formed. At the beginning it was simply descriptive, used by both opponents and supporters of regimes that aimed to totally transform societies, as did the Soviet, Italian, and later German leaders. In fact, the first person to use the phrase "totalitarian state" may have been Benito Mussolini, in a 1925 speech in which he extolled the virtues of concentrating all of society in a single state entity. At that point, "totalitarian state" was a vision rather than a system, but it was a vision clearly opposed to Western democratic arrangements, which it saw as weak. By implied definition, a totalitarian state would draw its strength from concentrating all power—including the power of every individual's support for the regime—into a single whole. Both the Germans and the Italians saw the Soviet Union as a successful model of achieving such concentration. Before the Second World War, a few thinkers attempted to describe what made totalitarian regimes different from any that had come before. In 1936, Luigi Sturzo, an Italian priest and politician in exile, identified four key characteristics of the totalitarian state:

Administrative centralization is carried to extremes—the suppression not only of all local autonomy . . . but also of the autonomy of all public or semi-public institutions, charitable

organizations, cultural associations, universities The

independence of the legislature and judiciary has completely disappeared, and even the government is reduced to a body subordinate to a leader, who has become dictator under the euphemisms of Duce, Marshal, or Fuhrer. . . .

The Party is militarized. Either it dominates the army or the army allies itself with the prevailing power and the two armed forces cooperate or amalgamate. The youth of the country is militarized, collective life is felt to be military life, dreams of revanche or of empire, conflicts at home and abroad, penetrate the whole social structure. . . .