The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Everyone must have faith in the new state and learn to love it. From the schools up to the universities conformity of feeling is not enough; there must be an absolute intellectual and moral surrender, a trusting enthusiasm, a religious mysticism where the

new state is concerned A whole new moral environment must

be created in addition to the work of the school. Hence the official textbook, the state inspired and standardized newspaper, the cinema, the wireless, sports, school societies, the grant[ing] of prizes, are not only controlled but are directed toward an end—the worship of the totalitarian state, whether its banner be nation, race or class. The whole of social life is continually mobilized in parades, festivals, pageants, plebiscites, sporting events, calculated to capture the mind, the imagination, the feeling of the populace. And to excite this collective spirit of exaltation the worship of the state or class or race would be too vague in itself. The vital focus of emotion is the man, the hero, the demigod—Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini—whose person is sacred and whose words are the works of a prophet. . . .

(d) It is impossible for the totalitarian state to allow economic freedom to either capitalists or workers. There is no room for free trade unions or free employers' associations. Instead there are state syndicates or corporations, with no freedom of action, controlled

and organized within the state and for the state.⁵

After the war, another exile, this one from Germany, published the most detailed and definitive description of totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt's three-volume The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951. For Arendt, the key characteristics of a totalitarian state were ideology and state terror. The substance of the ideology, to the extent that ideology has a substance, was unimportant: any ideology could become the basis of a totalitarian system if it could be encapsulated and coupled with terror. The terror was used to enforce the ideology but also to fuel it. Whatever premise formed the basis of the ideology, be it the superiority of a particular race or of a particular class, was used to derive imagined laws of history: only a certain race or a certain class was destined to survive. The "laws of history" justified the terror ostensibly required for this survival. Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space—in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely. This, she wrote, was the product of the marriage of ideology and terror. In this model, Mussolini's Italy was no longer considered a totalitarian state, whatever Mussolini himself might have said. Arendt wrote about Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, though she had much more knowledge of the former.⁶ The first edition of Origins was devoted to the roots and causes of totalitarianism, not to describing the resulting state: she wrote the last chapter, "Ideology and Terror," in 1953.⁷ That year, another German exile, Carl Joachim Friedrich, speaking at a conference on totalitarianism (at which Arendt was also a speaker), offered a concise five-point definition of totalitarian society:

1. An official ideology, consisting of an official body of doctrine covering all vital aspects of man's existence, to which everyone in that society is supposed to adhere at least passively. . . .

A single mass party consisting of a relatively small percentage of the total population (up to 10 per cent) of men and women passionately and unquestioningly dedicated to the ideology and prepared to assist in every way in promoting its general acceptance, such party being organized in strictly hierarchical, oligarchical manner, usually under a single leader and typically either superior to or completely commingled with the bureaucratic governmental organization.

A technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of control . . . of all means of effective armed combat.

A similarly technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of control . . . of all means of effective mass communication . . .

A system of terroristic police control, depending for its effectiveness upon points 3 and 4 and characteristically directed not only against demonstrable "enemies" of the regime, but

against arbitrarily selected classes of the population.⁸

In another three years Friedrich and his student Zbigniew Brzezinski, an exile from Poland, published Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, a much slimmer volume than Origins, that attempted not so much to describe as to define totalitarianism. They added a sixth point to Friedrich's earlier list: a centralized, controlled economy.⁹

Friedrich, like Arendt, stressed that the Nazi and Soviet regimes were essentially similar, which justified placing them in the same category, apart from all the other countries of the world. In the years that followed, most of the concept's critics focused on this very premise. Some, like another German exile, Herbert Marcuse, argued that all industrialized countries carried in them the seeds of a system like Germany's.¹⁰ Others, especially Western Sovietologists who hailed from the Left, argued that a model based on the study of Nazi Germany did not fit the facts of Soviet life very well, and perhaps even existed solely to discredit the Soviet regime. After the fall of the Soviet Union made it easier to study the country that had been, academics began noting how much richer private life had been in the USSR than they had once thought, how inconsistent and how widely disregarded the ideology, and how comparatively mild police

enforcement became after Stalin's death. All of this appeared to contradict the model. A group of scholars led by Australian-American historian Sheila Fitzpatrick put together a collection of papers specifically looking at the differences between Nazi and Soviet systems. They called it Beyond Totalitarianism.¹¹

The concept had fallen out of use not only in Russia but also among those who studied Russia in the West, but Gudkov had the idea that it was time to revisit it. If you thought about it, the problems with the definition of totalitarianism were built in from the start. First, even though all the original scholars of totalitarianism were exiles from the totalitarian countries, they produced their descriptions on the outside. Certain distinctions were inaccessible to them. Looking from the outside in, one cannot see, for example, whether people attend a parade because they are forced to do so or because they so desire. Researchers generally assumed one or the other: either that people were passive victims or that they were fervent believers. But on the inside, both assumptions were wrong, for all the people at the parade (or any other form of collective action) and for each one of them individually. They did not feel like helpless victims, but they did not feel like fanatics either. They felt normal. They were members of a society. The parades and various other forms of collective life gave them a sense of belonging that humans generally need. They were in no position to appraise the risks of non- belonging in comparison with such risks in other societies, to think about the fact that being marked as an outsider in the Soviet Union carried immeasurably greater penalties than being marked as one in a Western democracy. They would not be lying if they said that they wanted to be a part of the parade, or the collective in general—and that if they exerted pressure on others to be a part of the collective too, they did so willingly. But this did not make them true believers in the ideology, in the way Westerners might imagine it: the ideology served simply as a key to unity, as the collective's shared language. In addition, the mark of a totalitarian ideology, according to Arendt, was its hermetic nature: it explained away the entire world, and no

argument could pierce its bubble. Soviet citizens lived inside the ideology—it was their home, and it felt ordinary.

It stood to reason that up close the two pillars of totalitarianism— ideology and terror—looked different than they did from a distance. It stood to reason, too, that researchers might overestimate the weight of ideology, because their objects of study were texts, and texts reflected the ideology more than anything else. Intellectuals were always falling into the trap of mistaking the written word for a true mirror of life.

In the Soviet Union, the ideology proved mutable. The official line shifted radically, from internationalism to the "friendship of the peoples," from viewing the family as a bourgeois anachronism to seeing it as the essential unit of Soviet society. What did not change was the importance of mobilization around whatever the ideology was, and the idea that the country was exceptional. What if ideology as such was not quite so important a component of totalitarian society? And what of terror? Arendt wrote her book soon after the Holocaust; Stalinist terror was still claiming hundreds of thousands of people a year. But the Soviet Union survived for decades after mass terror ended in 1953. Perhaps terror was necessary for the establishment of a totalitarian regime, but once established could it be maintained by institutions that carried within them the memory of terror?

Around 2004—toward the end of Putin's first term—Western journalists began, cautiously, to apply the word "authoritarian" to the Russian regime. Arendt had argued that authoritarian regimes were essentially unlike totalitarian ones and more like tyrannies, because they demanded the observance of certain knowable rules and laws rather than total subjugation from their subjects. A different distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes was later proposed by Juan Jose Linz, a double exile. The son of a German father and a Spanish mother, Linz had left Germany as a child and Franco's Spain as an adult. As a sociologist at Yale, he wrote a book called Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, in which he suggested the following three differences: in authoritarian regimes, the boundary between state and society was not diminished;

authoritarian regimes had mentalities rather than ideologies; authoritarian regimes, unlike totalitarian ones, had low levels of societal mobilization. The subjects of authoritarian regimes were, according to Linz's definition, passive: they simply accepted one-party or one-person rule. Authoritarian regimes were profoundly apolitical.¹²

This did not seem the right category. Everything had become political. Russia under Putin was mobilizing—the rhetoric, the renewed military parades, and, more than anything else, the Kremlin's youth movements with their training camps—all existed for this purpose. The boundary between state and society, faint as it had once been, was now obliterated: the takeover of the media and the attack on civil society had served that purpose. There was another issue with calling the Russian regime "authoritarian": it did not take into account the Soviet legacy, which Gudkov increasingly thought was key to understanding the nature of the current regime. He also happened to think that, contrary to what many Western Sovietologists believed, Soviet society had in fact been closest to matching the theoretical model of totalitarianism in real life. And as evidence mounted that Soviet social institutions had been preserved and were resurgent, Gudkov began to think of Russia as a permutation of a totalitarian system. To understand it, Gudkov decided to propose his own definition of totalitarianism, based on the Soviet experience. It contained seven points:

The symbiosis of Party and state . . . Society is organized in a strictly hierarchical way. It is constructed from the top down. . . . Society is thus turned upside down: the powerful upper layer will sooner or later become the least competent and least informed stratum, devoid of potential to develop or make its work more efficient. Every changeover brings a less active, less competent individual to the top

A forced societal consensus, created through a monopoly on mass media, combined with strict censorship. This creates the conditions for chronic mobilization of the population, always

prepared to carry out the decisions of the party-state The

subjects' attention is focused predominantly on events inside the

country, which is isolated from the outside world; hence the sense of exceptionalism, a focus on "us," and a powerful alienation barrier, a refusal to know or understand events "on the other side."

State terror, carried out by the secret police, special services, extrajudicial paramilitary structures . . . The existence of the secret police and concentration camps on the one hand and official propaganda and cultural production on the other, create the conditions for "doublethink." . . . The scale and character of the terror can vary greatly, from the Great Terror in 1918-1922 and the 1930s through the 1950s to the persecution, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of dissidents, whose number and influence were relatively small.

The militarization of society and the economy . . . The activities of mobilizational structures that pierce society from top to bottom, from all educational institutions . . . to sporting clubs etc. . . . are intended less to prepare the population for battle against an external enemy than to systematically train the population . . . to carry out any and all of the regime's initiatives, because the "leader knows best."

A command, distributive economy and the concomitant chronic,

inevitable shortages of goods, services, information, etc

Shortages are not mere deficits but also a way of organizing society through official hierarchical structures of access to goods and services . . . supplemented by informal shadow economy structures.

A chronic state of poverty . . . Totalitarianism takes hold under the conditions of increasing poverty—when a large part of the population has no hope for a better future and projects hope on some extraordinary political measures. Totalitarianism is sustained by maintaining a very low standard of living.

A static population, strict limits on both vertical and horizontal social mobility except that which is carried out by the state for its

own purposes.¹³

Gudkov did not include ideology on his list of characteristics of totalitarianism: he had concluded that ideology was essential only at the very beginning, for the future totalitarian rulers to seize power. After that, terror kicked in. Later, the drive to conform would take a leading role. This produced what Gudkov meant by "doublethink": it was not the bizarre state described by Orwell but rather a habitual, almost passive fragmentation, when people thought different, often utterly contradictory things at different times and in different situations—whatever they needed to think in order to conform at that particular moment. This, more than anything else, guaranteed that no effective resistance was possible in the Soviet Union: fragmented people could not form and sustain relationships of solidarity and could not imaginatively plan for the future, which is essential for any group effort.

The purpose of defining the Soviet totalitarian regime was to gain more clarity on what Russia had inherited. The inventory was long. On paper, one-party rule had been abolished—but the people remained. The old nomenklatura continued to dominate the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy continued to dominate society, maintaining its upside-down structure. If anything, the upheaval of the 1990s had sped up the process of rotation, as a result of which ever less informed and less competent people were brought to the top. Censorship had been abolished, but after a brief period of freedom, mass media were being monopolized by the state. The KGB had been renamed and had lost some of its reach (some functions, like border control, were taken away), but the judiciary continued to serve the executive power, rule of law had not been established, and law enforcement saw its function in protecting the state. To the extent that society had been demilitarized, Putin had reversed this process—indeed, on the day Yeltsin's resignation made him acting president, Putin found the time to sign a cabinet measure reintroducing military training in secondary schools.¹⁴ The economy was no longer ruled by a central planning authority, but it retained its distributive nature: the Kremlin apportioned assets and access during the privatization of the 1990s, and when Putin came to office he got to work redistributing companies and wealth. Lower down the food chain, this distributive way of functioning was usually called corruption, but it was not exactly that, since the issue lay not with any individual bureaucrat but with the very system of limiting and distributing goods and services. This, in turn, rested on the institution of collective hostage-taking—a system that reinforced lowered expectations, like the Metro Seryozha encountered, which was not selling a service but distributing it.

What should the Russian system be called, then? It was no longer the totalitarian regime it had been, but after disassembling some of its totalitarian institutions—like the Party-state or total militarization —it had started re-creating them, or something that resembled them. But these struck Gudkov as being more like imitations of totalitarian institutions. Western journalists were using the word "authoritarianism" because they seemed to think that authoritarianism was totalitarianism-lite, but the regime was not authoritarian either. Gudkov thought it might be called "pseudototalitarianism." One thing was certain: this regime was not going to develop into a functioning democracy. In fact, it did not seem capable of developing at all. It probably could not re-create the old systems of terror and complete mobilization. Its sole purpose, or so it seemed to Gudkov when he was writing about this in 2001, was to stay afloat, to maintain just enough inertia. In this, its main resource was the Russian citizen weaned on generations of doublethink and collective hostage-taking: the Homo Sovieticus.

back when sociologists and political scientists were defining totalitarianism, psychoanalysts and philosophers were trying to understand and explain it. Gudkov had little patience for much of their writing, in part because they were, generally speaking, Marxists, and in part because several of them were German exiles with a mission—to warn the rest of the Western world that it could happen there. They had seen fascism rise to power in a functioning democracy, and they wanted their knowledge to serve as warning. Gudkov's experience was different—at this point he was less interested in how totalitarianism came to be than in how it refused to end—but some of what he was trying to describe when he wrote about Homo Sovieticus had been noticed by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm seventy years earlier.

Fromm had fled Germany in 1934, and in 1941 he wrote an urgent book called Escape from Freedom, in which he attempted to describe the psychological origins of Nazism, though he was careful to note that "Nazism is a psychological problem, but the psychological factors themselves have to be understood as being molded by socio-economic factors; Nazism is an economic and political problem, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds."¹⁵

To make his case, Fromm went back to the Middle Ages, when

a person was identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, artisan, or knight, not an individual who happened to have this or that occupation. The social order was conceived as a natural order, and being a definite part of it gave a feeling of security and of belonging. There was comparatively little competition. One was born into a certain economic position which guaranteed a livelihood

determined by tradition.¹⁶

This description also fit late Soviet society, which, as Gudkov had observed, used limits on social mobility as one of its most important instruments of control. People generally moved neither up nor down the socioeconomic ladder—nor were they likely to work in a field very different from their parents'. Seryozha, who did not encounter a single child from outside the top level of the nomenklatura until after the Soviet Union collapsed, grew up behind a series of literal walls, but the invisible walls separating other Soviet citizens from members of different groups were just as effective. People who transcended these boundaries, as, for example, Lyosha's mother did when she left the village to go to university, did so through great effort and determination and were invariably exceptions—as Galina was even within her own family. Still, she was able to move but a step up and one sideways from her initial station: she became a schoolteacher in the small town closest to the village where her mother had worked at the collective farm.

Back at the beginning of the Reformation, wrote Fromm, the individual gained the ability to determine his own path—and at the

same time lost his sense of certainty in place and self. Fromm divided newfound freedom into two parts: "freedom to" and "freedom from." If the former was positive, the latter could cause unbearable anxiety: "The world has become limitless and at the same time threatening. . . . By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life."¹⁷ Along came Martin Luther and John Calvin with remedies for this anxiety: "By not only accepting his own insignificance but by humiliating himself to the utmost, by giving up every vestige of individual will, by renouncing and denouncing his individual strength, the individual could hope to be acceptable to God."¹⁸ In other words, the individual could in one swoop regain his certainty in the future—it would now be in God's hands—and rid himself of his most unbearable burden: the self.

In Fromm's view, a new kind of character was thus inaugurated and soon became prevalent among the middle classes of some societies. He described this character as someone who by an individual psychoanalyst might be diagnosed as a sadomasochistic personality but on the level of social psychology could be called the "authoritarian personality"—in part because sadomasochistic tendencies in individual relationships are usually understood as a pathology while similar behavior in society can be the most rational and "normal" strategy. The authoritarian character survives by surrendering his power to an outside authority—God or a leader— whom Fromm called the "magic helper." The "magic helper" is a source of guidance, security, and also of pride, because with surrender comes a sense of belonging. The authoritarian character is defined by his relationship to power:

For the authoritarian character there exist, so to speak, two sexes: the powerful ones and the powerless ones. His love, admiration and readiness for submission are automatically aroused by power, whether of a person or of an institution. Power fascinates him not for any values for which a specific power may stand, but just because it is power. Just as his "love" is automatically aroused by

power, so powerless people or institutions automatically arouse his contempt. The very sight of a powerless person makes him want to

attack, dominate, humiliate him.¹⁹

Another key trait of the authoritarian character is his longing for and belief in historical determination and permanence:

It is fate that there are wars and that one part of mankind has to be ruled by another. It is fate that the amount of suffering can never be

less than it always has been The authoritarian character

worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation—and creation is always a miracle

—is outside his range of emotional experience.²⁰

Fromm and thinkers who wrote about the threat of totalitarianism after he did—Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno——believed that this character was common in modern societies. Periods of great social and economic upheaval had the ability to make the authoritarian character dominant in society and to carry an authoritarian character to the top. Germany after the First World War was in just such a state. Old certainties were gone, social structures were in disarray, and a chasm appeared between generations:

Under the changed conditions, especially the inflation, the older generation was bewildered and puzzled and much less adapted to the new conditions than the smarter, younger generation. Thus the younger generation felt superior to their elders and could not take them, and their teachings, quite seriously any more. Furthermore, the economic decline of the middle class deprived the parents of their economic role as backers of the economic future of their

children.²²

This passage described the Russian 1990s as precisely as it did the German 1930s, about which it was written. Arendt described this state as "homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness of an unprecedented depth."²³ A void opened up where certainty had been; the burden of freedom became unbearable. Hitler emerged as a quintessential authoritarian character with a program that appealed to other authoritarian characters. He hated the Weimar Republic because it was weak, just as his audience hated their elders. Fromm did not see the substance of Nazi ideology as important—indeed, he saw no substance in the ideology at all. Arendt also stressed that the premises of Hitler's—and Lenin's—ideologies to outsiders "looked preposterously 'primitive' and absurd."²⁴ Fromm observed no logic whatsoever in the ideology: "Nazism never had any genuine political or economic principles. It is essential to understand that the very principle of Nazism is its radical opportunism."²⁵ What Nazi ideology and practice did have, according to Fromm, was ritual that satisfied the audience's masochistic craving:

They are told again and again: the individual is nothing and does not count. The individual should accept this personal insignificance, dissolve himself in a higher power, and then feel proud in

participating in the strength and glory of this higher power.²⁶

And for the sadistic side of the authoritarian character, the ideology offered "a feeling of superiority over the rest of mankind" that, Fromm wrote, was able to "compensate them—for a time at least —for the fact that their lives had been impoverished, economically and culturally."²⁷

in the spring of 2008, the biggest national television channel announced an online contest to choose the greatest Russian who ever lived. It was called the Name of Russia. By mid-July, with nearly two and a half million votes cast, contest organizers announced that they had temporarily put a halt to the voting because someone—or some group—had rigged the results to make Joseph Stalin the winner. Once voting resumed, the results changed dramatically, to make Nicholas II, the last of the czars, come out on top. But then the organizers said

that this, too, had been the result of a hacker attack.²⁸ After a few weeks, the winner was announced: rather than either of the two popular frontrunners, it was Alexander Nevsky, a thirteenth-century prince known to most Russians as a vague memory from the history books and as the leader of Russian troops in the epic ice battle in Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film Alexander Nevsky.

Lyosha was furious. Everyone could see what had happened: the television executives were mortified by Stalin's popular victory and decided to falsify results the same way real voting officials wrote up whatever was required of them. Except they must have gotten their signals crossed: they thought that Russia's last czar was a safe choice, but they failed to consider what he stood for because he had abdicated, giving in to the Revolution. He had been weak, and now he was despised. Worse, Yeltsin had once publicly repented for the Bolsheviks' murder of the czar and his family, admitting a legacy of guilt—and this admission, too, in the new disposition looked like weakness. So Alexander Nevsky, who had not even been in the running, looked like a safe political choice: all anyone knew about him was that he had fought wars.

"What kind of historical hero is he?" raged Lyosha. "He has no place at all in the Russian historiography!"

"But he fought the Germans!" said the other Lyosha. "And won."

The other Lyosha was, it would seem, Lyosha's boyfriend. He had started messaging Lyosha earlier that year on the VKontakte social network. Lyosha played hard to get. He actually was hard to get. His sublimation strategy, implemented two years earlier, was working. He was happy with his research and his friends. He spent all his time working on his dissertation. He shared an apartment with a female friend and her husband. He stayed away from the gay crowd, because it scared him: it felt like the abyss.

The other Lyosha would not give up. After a couple of months Lyosha agreed to meet. Then he relented. He figured he was strong enough now to allow himself to feel something. What he felt, very soon, was flummoxed. The other Lyosha had his own particular way of conducting a relationship. He would come to Lyosha's apartment

every day after work. It was all Lyosha could do to prevent the other Lyosha from moving in, but for all purposes the other Lyosha now lived in his apartment. The other Lyosha said they were a family. Lyosha said that he was opposed to the traditional model of family, but the other Lyosha said that he was Russian Orthodox. He wore a cross around his neck, and he talked about tradition. What kind of tradition could two gay men have in a country where they were utterly invisible? The kind of tradition in which Lyosha, who was twenty-three, was expected to be in every way the dominant partner to the other Lyosha, who was twenty. Or so the other Lyosha said— even though it was Lyosha who felt dominated.

They argued all the time. These were strange arguments. The other Lyosha simply contradicted everything Lyosha said. Lyosha soon realized that the other Lyosha goaded him to get attention, but he could not restrain himself, because, more often than not, the other Lyosha picked fights about things Lyosha genuinely cared about and understood. The other Lyosha said that he liked Putin.

"How can you like Putin?" asked Lyosha.

"I am just starting out in my career, and Putin's Plan is an appropriate plan," the other Lyosha responded.

The answer seemed nonsensical on every level. First, there was no such thing as Putin's Plan: it was a phrase used during the parliamentary campaign, but there was no book or even flyer that contained whatever plan this might be. It was like every Russian was supposed to know intuitively what Putin's Plan was, like it was divine providence, like it was the natural law of things. And the other Lyosha said it was an "appropriate" plan like it was a thing that actually existed—and had something to do with his career! The other Lyosha worked as an assistant to a liberal member of the Perm legislature, Nikita Belykh, a leader of the Union of Right Forces Party that Nemtsov had founded. Lyosha considered asking the other Lyosha why, if Putin's Plan was so "appropriate," he worked for Belykh, but realized that he did not want to know the answer. He figured that the other Lyosha would say that he worked for Belykh for the money, and what was worse, that would be a lie, because his was an unpaid assistantship: in contemporary Russian, "money" could be the polite

word for "power." Also, the other Lyosha was a member of the pro- Kremlin youth movement Young Russia—the one that had, among other things, laid siege to the Estonian embassy the previous summer. He and his best friend, a young woman, attended the militarized summer training camps at Lake Seligher.

The other Lyosha never ran out of things to argue about. He picked a fight about Gorbachev, whom he hated for destroying the Soviet Union—and kept arguing, even though he was too young to remember even a day of life under Gorbachev. He called Yeltsin "nothing but an alcoholic." During one of their fights Lyosha lost it. He hauled off and hit the other Lyosha.

He could not believe what he had done, and broke up with the other Lyosha on the spot. But, true to his inexplicable self, the other Lyosha seemed to revel in the incident. For months afterward, he bragged to their mutual friends that Lyosha was a "tyrant."

fromm would have found nothing mysterious about the other Lyosha: he was a walking caricature of the authoritarian character, right down to his automatic readiness to worship a thirteenth-century military leader.

Gudkov found nothing mysterious or surprising in the Name of Russia contest. The Levada team had been asking respondents to name "the greatest people who have ever lived" from the beginning of the Homo Sovieticus project. Results had differed only slightly over the years. Stalin had risen steadily—from 12 percent in 1989 to 40 in 2003 (he dropped four percentage points in 2008, which may have been related to the discussion of the supposed hacking of the Name of Russia site). Stalin had not made it into the top five in 1989, but in every subsequent survey he was among the leaders, coming in fourth in 1994 and 1999, and third in 2003 and 2008. Others in the top five were, consistently, Peter the Great, Pushkin, and Lenin. Napoleon and Georgy Zhukov, who commanded the Red Army when it entered Berlin in 1945, made appearances in different years, as did Mikhail Lomonosov, remembered as the country's first scientist, and Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. Putin, who was first named in 2003

by 21 percent of the respondents, by 2008 was at 32 percent, which made him number five among the greatest people who ever lived.²⁹

To Gudkov, the list looked bad from the beginning and worse with every passing survey. Russians apparently saw great people as having been almost exclusively Russian—and with the exception of Catherine the Great, they had all been men. By choosing primarily military leaders and heads of state (who were also generally appraised as military leaders), they showed that they equated greatness with power. (Albert Einstein, one of the few foreigners, started out at 9 percent in 1989 but quickly slipped while Hitler gained on him.)

It all fit. The love of power, the focus on Russia to the exclusion of the rest of the world—with an exception made perhaps only for a Napoleon or a Hitler, whose power trumped even their enemy status but who were made relevant by the fact that they had invaded Russia —this and other survey results added up to a totalitarian mind-set. The only consideration that gave Gudkov pause was what seemed like an utter lack of a concept of the future. He had been taught that totalitarianism presupposed the image of a glorious future. But as he researched both Communist and Nazi ideologies, he came to the conclusion that the appeal of the rhetoric in both cases lay in archaic, primitive images: a simple society, a world of "us," a tribe. Fromm, in fact, rejected the very idea of an image of the future in Nazi ideology and stressed the "worship of the past."

it may be more accurate to say that the Soviet system offered not a vision of the future but the ability to know one's future, much as tradesmen did in feudal times, and to make very small-scale, manageable decisions about the future. Arutyunyan thought about this when she researched her family history. How could her great- grandmother, a peasant woman before the Revolution, have imagined her future? How would she have known that all her sons would die from drink but her daughter would become an academic and a member of the Central Committee? So incomprehensible was this future that she could not fully understand it even after it had happened: of her daughter she knew only that she was "an important person."

But by the time Arutyunyan was growing up in the 1960s, the future stretched out before the Soviet citizen like a narrow but relatively well-lit hallway. If one was born to an educated family, like Arutyunyan was, one went to university. Her grandmother had been a historian, her parents were social historians and sociologists, and Arutyunyan received a degree in psychology, worked at the Institute of Sociology, and married a sociologist. There were, however, choices to be made, chief among them: whether to join the Party. Joining promised greater career advancement and possible perks, up to the ability to travel abroad. Not joining seemed to offer a small degree of autonomy. Each professional field had its own sets of minor choices as well. A theater actor from Moscow, for example, could choose to stay in a repertory in the capital or move to the provinces and become the lead at a local theater.

In the 1990s, the narrow hallway exploded into wide-open space. For Arutyunyan, this was exhilarating, the very essence of freedom. True, life became unpredictable and sometimes felt hard—for a few years in the early 1990s Arutyunyan was the sole breadwinner in her family of four adults and two children. Her parents and husband stubbornly stuck to their social sciences even as their colleagues looked for ways to earn money elsewhere. But Arutyunyan was learning to be a psychoanalyst, like she had always dreamed, and she was traveling abroad, like she had barely dared imagine. In Fromm's classification, all she experienced was "freedom to."

In a few years she saw more and more patients who were suffering from the unbearable burden of "freedom from." Much of their pain was regret: the 1990s looked darker in retrospect, and the roads not chosen weighed too heavily. One patient had left academia—he had been a biochemist—to work for a pharmaceutical company. The company went bankrupt, he could not find another job, and now he was driving a taxi for a living. He could not stop thinking about where he had gone wrong. Should he have stuck it out in academia? His former colleagues who had, seemed to have done better.

There was a specific Russian expression: budushchego net, "There

is no future." As though it could indeed be canceled. People said it when a particular vision of the future collapsed. For many people— many more than Arutyunyan realized at the time, when she was reveling in her "freedom to"—the future ended when the Soviet Union collapsed and the narrow hallway disappeared. Others struggled on, but the anxiety caused by uncertainty rendered them incapable of meaningful action. In the early 2000s, with the arrival of Putin, whose simple rhetoric made the world comprehensible again, and with inflation receding under the force of high oil prices, many of these patients felt better. They could function again. They were sure that Putin had something to do with it. "Stability" was the magic word of the day—the opposite of fear and anxiety.

The naughts were a time of stability for Arutyunyan too. In 2005 she became a fully credentialed member of the International Psychoanalytical Association—one of only eleven Russians with that status. The same year, the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society was authorized to be a study group—taking it one step closer to full membership in the world of psychoanalytic societies—and Arutyunyan became its chairperson. For her, too, the future was acquiring more definite contours—but she had never longed for this, and was only now realizing how much of an outsider this made her in Russian society.

fifteen

BUDUSHCHEGO NET

"there is no future here," Zhanna said to her mother in the fall of 2008. It had to do with money, and Zhanna and Raisa were, uncharacteristically, fighting, blaming each other for money that had been lost. Money had turned out to be Zhanna's calling. Not in the sense that she wanted to be super-rich. She was like her father that way: they enjoyed good vacations and big parties, and Boris liked his duplex apartment with a view of the Kremlin, and his Range Rover, but compared with his oligarch friends with their yachts and fleets of cars and multistory wine cellars, the Nemtsovs thought of themselves as simple people. Zhanna liked money the way her father liked physics: it made her brain rev up. To make money, you had to be quick and attentive and know when the moment came to bet against majority sentiment. In this sense playing the markets was the opposite of politics, and this was where Zhanna and Boris differed: she liked the one, and he liked the other.

It helped that the work was virtually free of risk. In 2007, when Zhanna went to work for Mercury Capital Trust, the Russian market only grew and grew, and the task was to grow a bit faster than the competition. Zhanna thought about money all the time. She started studying for a chartered financial analyst exam. At the end of 2007, the Russian market reached an all-time high.

In August 2008, Zhanna and Dmitry were on vacation in Thailand. It was late morning there when the markets opened in Moscow. Zhanna would take a look, maybe move a few things around, and go to the beach. On August 8 she saw something that made her think

that a computer somewhere must be broken. The Russian stock market was in free fall.

Zhanna had actually seen the market fall once before, just two weeks earlier. That day, Putin held a meeting in Nizhny Novgorod; the subject was the state of the metals industry. One of the metals moguls was absent, and Putin—now officially merely the prime minister—was not pleased. He said that the Federal Antimonopoly Service should check into the activities of Mechel, the company whose majority owner had failed to show up. "Or perhaps even the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor's Office should look into it," he said. "We have to figure out what's going on." He accused the company of exporting raw materials at below-market prices, causing the state to miss out on tax revenue. Mechel's owner was absent because he had been hospitalized. "Of course, an illness is an illness," said Putin. "But we may have to send a doctor over to him to take care of all his problems."¹

Putin had not singled out a company or an entrepreneur like that since he jailed Khodorkovsky and took his company. Within hours of the threat, the value of Mechel stock on the New York exchange dropped by a third. The following morning, when the Moscow exchange opened, the company continued losing at home. Other companies followed. The Russian stock market reverted to levels at which it had been four months earlier, while the Moscow currency exchange lost nearly two years' worth of growth.²

That had been bad, but Zhanna had figured the market would recover. She even ignored Raisa's advice to unload all metals companies. Now she was ignoring more than that: she knew, in theory, that if the market was in free fall, you had to sell, but she could not believe it was happening. She was not selling. She was just watching the Russian market collapse.

That day, the day the war with Georgia began, the market lost more than 6.5 percent. In another few days, as it continued falling, it became clear that there was no recovery in sight. Western markets were holding steady or growing—despite the unfolding housing crisis in the United States. Oil prices were even. So it was clear that the collapse was a product of the war.³ The market was falling in reverse proportion to Putin's soaring popularity. It was this that made Zhanna say Budushchego net—"There is no future here." This, and the fact that she and Raisa had lost all their money.

Zhanna and Raisa had been a two-person family unit for about six years. On the last day of 2001, that awful year when Zhanna moved to New York and then came home, there had been a phone call. Raisa picked up. The caller introduced herself as Katya Odintsova. Raisa knew who she was—a television personality from Nizhny Novgorod— and she knew what she looked like: long blond hair, long legs. She was about ten years younger than Raisa.

"Do you know?" asked the caller.

"Know what?"

"I have a child with your husband, and I am expecting another."

"So?" asked Raisa.

"So, something must be done."

"Then I suppose you should do something," said Raisa, and hung up. Then she called Zhanna on her cell phone. Raisa was not sure what to do. In her generation and her social circles—among both the slightly bohemian intellectuals of Nizhny Novgorod and the powerful and the rich of Moscow—marriage did not necessarily carry the assumption of fidelity, especially on the part of the men, but indiscretions were supposed to be discreet. The phone call, the fact that there was a first-grader in Nizhny Novgorod who looked like her husband, and the unavoidable conclusion that Boris had been having a relationship for years—all of this broke the unspoken compact. Still, Raisa was proud that she had kept her cool during the phone conversation.

Zhanna, who was seventeen, saw no valor in her mother's reserve, and no two ways to interpret the situation. She rushed directly to her father's office at parliament, barged in, and told him everything she thought of him and his behavior. After she left his office, she realized that she could not remember what she had said, but it had definitely been angry and she had certainly been right. She told her mother to get a divorce. Both of her parents thought it was a bit too radical a

step—her father had no desire to go live with the mother of his other children—but Zhanna had words of principle and conviction where her parents had uncertainty and indecision, so she won.

They separated, though they did not bother legally getting divorced, and her father moved into a rental apartment. He left them the large flat on the Garden Ring and a sum of money. Now this money, which Zhanna and Raisa managed together even after Zhanna got married, was gone. They did not even have the money to pay maintenance on the Garden Ring flat. The only possible solution was to rent it out, but with the economy in the state that it was, who would rent an opulent 185-square-meter four-bedroom apartment in the center of the city?

The answer, as it turned out, was someone who worked at a state bank. During the crisis, government banks took over failing smaller private banks. The process provided many opportunities for the well- positioned employee of a state bank: siphoning off funds was made that much easier by the bureaucratic mess of the takeovers and the panic that surrounded them. A state banker rented the apartment in January 2008 for $3,000 a month. Raisa moved back to Nizhny Novgorod. She and Zhanna split the money, and it was enough for each of them for the time being.

Zhanna had learned a lesson: there was no future here. She was not thinking much about the politics of it—the fact that it was the Kremlin that had sent the market tumbling both times—but she was thinking that hers was a country where this kind of thing would happen again and again. She insisted on selling the apartment once it regained its value. That happened in 2010. Boris—who, unlike Zhanna, was very much talking about the politics of it but still insisted that Russia had a future—tried to convince Zhanna to buy a new place in Moscow. She would not hear of it. She held on to the money until she saw an opportunity: as the Eurozone crisis unfolded, Zhanna dispatched Raisa to explore Greece, Spain, and Italy. Then they both traveled to a village on Lake Garda in Italy, where Boris was on vacation. They decided to invest there. In 2013, Zhanna and Raisa invested the money from the large Garden Ring apartment in a smaller one in the lakeside village. Zhanna started studying Italian—

this was an investment in her future. Before she learned much, during the first summer she and Raisa spent on Lake Garda, their electricity was shut off because they had not understood the notices. The next-door neighbor came to the rescue, light was restored, and Zhanna and the neighbor became fast friends. Zhanna imagined that someday she might live here. In any case, she and Raisa would be spending their summers here for years to come—this was Zhanna's permanence, her future, even if she continued to work in Moscow.

Other things, besides the Garden Ring flat, ended in 2010 too. Zhanna and Dmitry divorced. She had seen her husband lose interest in other people—his friends and her friends—and go from present to absent like a switch had been flipped. Then she saw his absence happen with her, and she probably should not have waited for him to tell her. But once he did, she moved out that very day. She went to stay at a minihotel—really, a rental room in a converted apartment on a pedestrian street a block from the parliament building where her father no longer worked.

Boris was now a full-time political activist. After he lost office in 2004, everyone, including him, thought that he could have a lucrative career in GR—government relations. He knew everyone, after all, and everyone knew how important it was to know people. The bureaucracy was becoming more powerful by the year, regulations were changing constantly, and someone who could navigate the opaque structures of the Russian government could save a business. Boris took a job as a GR specialist at a bank. But GR required more diplomacy than he could muster. He stuck it out for a year, made a little money, bought his duplex overlooking the Kremlin, and quit.

He teamed up with Kasparov and other people, most of them unknown to the media and the public. In 2008 they cofounded an organization and called it Solidarity, in honor of the Polish anti- Communist resistance from the 1980s. His friends made fun of him. They were men who used to be called oligarchs. Now, under Putin, they had forfeited their political power, and they held themselves up as exemplars of the art and wisdom of compromise. Strategic concessions could save one from landing in jail like Khodorkovsky, or in exile, stripped of your assets. You ceded some access or assets to those whom Putin wanted to advance, gave up a little to retain a lot. If you were smart, these deals were cut in subtle ways, negotiated in indirect language—and the effort enabled Boris's friends to feel clever while yielding to the stronger party. What Boris was doing was precisely the opposite: unsubtle and reckless. They made fun of him for his earnestness and naivete. He laughed along, heartily, because, Zhanna knew, he did not want to appear either naive or earnest.

In October 2009, Boris turned fifty. He put Zhanna in charge of organizing the party. He liked delegating. She liked being put in charge. She rented a restaurant with beige walls, white tablecloths, and plush gray chairs. It looked out on the green lawn of a golf club, like this was not Moscow at all. About 150 people came, the rich and the beautiful crowd. A well-known television journalist, Pavel Sheremet, made a half-hour film called Nemtsov: An Accounting. The title was a takeoff on Boris's latest occupation: he had started compiling and publishing reports. His first one, printed in February 2008, as Putin was winding down his second presidential term, had been called Putin: An Accounting. The slim booklet consisted of nine chapters:

Corruption Is Eroding Russia

The Military, Forsaken

Roads in Disrepair

Russia Is Dying [on depopulation]

The Pension System in Crisis

Corrupt Justice

Stomping on the Constitution [on the elimination of elections and of Russia's federal structure]

The Failure of "National Projects" Everyone Is an Enemy, Except China⁴

The report did not break new ground—most of what it contained had been reported by other people—but taken together, the information added up to a damning picture strikingly different from the Kremlin's

triumphant reports and from the popular picture of a stronger, healthier, wealthier Russia.

Boris's next report was called Luzhkov: An Accounting. It detailed the activities of Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who had turned the megalopolis into a fiefdom. Boris and Solidarity activists handed out the reports near Metro stations. Often they would set up a folding table and Boris would autograph books, writing dedications in sprawling script and basking in the brief moments of the familiar adoration of a crowd.

Footage of these signing sessions was in the film, as was footage of Boris walking down streets, Boris showing off his athletic prowess —using an elliptical machine in the exercise room in his apartment overlooking the Kremlin, kite-surfing on an unidentified ocean, and using the pull-up bar at a country house. The house was where his current girlfriend, Irina, was living with his youngest daughter, Sonya. The film showed all the children—there were now four—but omitted the fact that they had three different mothers. The narrator said, "He has a large family, in a good way." At the end, the narrator reneged on the title of the film. It was too early for an accounting, he said. Boris might become president of Russia yet, perhaps in the year 2025.⁵

Boris's rich and powerful friends praised him in the film: he was fun, he was brave, he was honest. They came to the party too. Then, having paid homage that they might have thought of as their debt of friendship, they faded away. Only one of the wealthy—metals mogul Mikhail Prokhorov—came to Boris's fifty-first birthday party, in 2010. Truth be told, these men had been coming around less and less since Boris left his GR job and became a full-time activist in 2005. The fiftieth birthday had been their last and finest effort. Even Mikhail Fridman, the oligarch who used to have tea in the Garden Ring flat's kitchen several times a week—the one who told Zhanna she was crazy when she came home from New York in 2001, because "there is no future here"—had long ago told Boris that being associated with him was "toxic" for his business. No one, he said, would ever believe that he was not the one bankrolling those "accounting" reports.⁶

Zhanna noticed that her father was more comfortable with the activists than he had ever been with the oligarchs. His old friends carried themselves like they owned the world; his new allies managed to look shy and ready for battle at the same time. They wore cheap clothes and always looked slightly disheveled. One worked with severely autistic children. Another was a scientist who had been on the barricades continuously since the late 1980s. Then there was a crowd of skinny young men with spectacles and terrible haircuts. Boris had endless patience for phone calls with them, for detailed and repetitive planning of protests, to which only they showed up. At some point Zhanna understood that what she thought was patience was, in fact, desire. Boris enjoyed the phone calls, the planning, and the tiny, isolated protests. The process of planning and discussion— the same process that she remembered from the political discussions in their Nizhny Novgorod kitchen before Boris became a politician, and the physics discussions that preceded them—engaged and sustained him more fully than did kite-surfing and excellent wine.

on December 31, 2010, Zhanna went to a protest with her father. For a year and a half now, activists had been gathering at Triumfalnaya Square in central Moscow on the thirty-first day of every month that had thirty-one days. They gathered to demand observance of Article 31 of the Russian Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of assembly. Sometimes they got roughed up, sometimes they were detained for several hours. But recently the police had seemed to let up a bit—perhaps because the previous New Year's Eve they had managed to hurt Ludmila Alekseeva, at eighty-two Russia's oldest and best-known activist. This New Year's, the city even issued a permit for the protest, ensuring that it would be calm and uneventful. Alekseeva was planning to come again, wearing a New Year's costume: she would be dressed as Snegurochka.* It was practically going to be a party. Boris suggested that they go together and then continue to Irina's house in the country, the one where he had been filmed flipping his body over the pull-up bar, for a New Year's celebration. Zhanna put a long puffer coat on over a dress and heels,

and so did Angelica, a new friend, an insurance company employee, also newly single, and they went to Triumfalnaya Square.

"Everyone was acting like it really was a party," Boris wrote in his blog later.

Speakers wore red hats, and Alekseeva was in full Snegurochka glory, in a shiny blue embroidered long coat that looked like it weighed more than she did. Her voice shaky, she spoke for only a couple of minutes:

If you think about it, all our constitutional rights have been taken away, with one exception: the right to leave the country and return

That is why it is so important to stand up for Article 31 of the Constitution. That is why it is so important that for the second time in a row we are able to assemble here, in Triumfalnaya Square, undisturbed.

This has been accomplished by those who have been coming here stubbornly on the thirty-first of the month, even though they

knew that the riot police were waiting for them here.⁷

This time there were no riot police—only a couple hundred protesters and a few dozen police who looked bored and peaceful. Minutes after Alekseeva left, most of the participants were still milling around, chatting in that way people do when they want to make an event feel more substantial than it has seemed. The riot police appeared out of nowhere, and charged the crowd. Zhanna grabbed Angelica's hand and they ran—first just a few yards, to hide behind a kiosk, and then, after Zhanna peeked around it and saw the police tackling people to the ground and dragging them into prisoner transports, they ran like they did not know they could run. They covered a kilometer and a half—the distance to the next Metro station —in five minutes. How had they managed this, in heels?

They took the Metro back to Zhanna's new temporary rental apartment. Zhanna called Irina to tell her that Boris had been detained and they would not be coming. It turned out that Dmitry, Zhanna's ex-husband, was there at the party, with his new girlfriend.

Irina had apparently planned some sort of grand family reunion. Now Zhanna was relieved that she was ringing in the New Year lying on her bed, watching the news on television to see if they would report on the protest. They did not.

Boris rang in the New Year in solitary. After two days, he managed to smuggle out a handwritten note:

The cell is a concrete box about 1.5 meters [5 feet] wide and 3 meters [9 feet] long. It has no windows, no bed or mattress. It's just a concrete floor, and nothing else.

I have been charged, absurdly, under Article 19.3 of the Administrative Code, for supposedly disobeying police orders. It carries a maximum sentence of 15 days in jail

The authorities have a problem, though: there is a video recording of my arrest, in which you can see the police doing as they wish, ignoring everything: the law, the holiday, and the fact that we had a permit for the protest. I know that they are just trying to scare us. They are trying to scare the opposition, and my family. This was the first time my daughter Zhanna had joined the protest, and that makes me very proud.

I know that the regime is scared. It's furious, and it doesn't know what to do with the opposition. It's scared, it's flailing, and it's bringing shame to itself and to Russia. We have no right to give up now. We will not give up.

Happy New Year, my friends!

Boris was brought to court on January 3. Everyone in Russia was on vacation—it was the dead week between New Year's and Orthodox Christmas, when everything, including the stock exchanges and all banks, shut down—but one judge, a woman about Zhanna's age, had to come to work. Zhanna came, of course, and Angelica came too, even though the experience of it all, and now the sight of activists sitting on the floor in the hallway—chairs had been removed to discourage their presence—was unlike anything Angelica could imagine, even now that she was witnessing it. There seemed to be a

general chair crisis in the courthouse: there was only one chair at the defense table, and Boris, who had spent three days inside the concrete cube, now spent four hours standing up, because his defense attorney was elderly and entitled to sit. The judge called more than a dozen witnesses and ignored their answers, and then read out her sentence, speaking so fast and so softly that no one could understand. Boris got fifteen days' jail time.

Zhanna went home to cook for her father. She wanted to spoil him, so she made the fanciest dish she could imagine: chicken sauteed with prunes. But when she brought it to the detention center the next day and an oddly friendly starstruck policeman brought her father down to the lobby to hang out with her, Boris confessed that jail made him want simple stuff: peasant food—meat and potatoes— and junk-food sweets from the Soviet era.

When his sentence was over, Zhanna came to get Boris, bringing with her a change of clothes, and they went directly out to dinner. She listened to his stories about jail. He had spent two weeks in a cell with five other men, three of them violent offenders with long sentences and two who had been picked up for misdemeanors. He had turned all of them on to politics.⁸ He was laughing now, reveling in his new hero status. Zhanna told him that she was no hero. She was never going to go to another protest as long as she lived. She would still support his work, of course. She said that from now on she would pay to have his reports published.

When they walked out of the cafe, a couple of young men charged Boris and tried to catch him in a large scoop-net, the kind used for fishing. Boris twisted around and managed to push one of the attackers away. This sort of thing had been happening for at least three years. Back in 2007, in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Boris had turned the weapon against his attacker, a skinny, pimply kid who confessed that he had flown all the way from Moscow to try to humiliate the politician. He would not, however, admit to being a member of one of the Kremlin's youth movements.⁹ In 2010, in Sochi, three young men threw ammonia in his face. In 2011—a few months after the fishing net—it happened again: a toilet was thrown

over the fence onto the roof of his car in Moscow. The police came out but refused to write it up.¹⁰ Zhanna never would have imagined that her father could keep his cool the way he did.

masha said budushchego net in Moscow, when she left a child neurologist's office. Sasha was four years old, and he was not talking. He had had evaluations, brain scans, and all sorts of tests that involved attaching wires to his blond head and all over his tiny body. The doctors said that his brain did not look good. They said they saw fluid, and the parts that should be small looked large and ones that ought to be large were small. Masha sort of believed them, because it was a fact that Sasha was not talking and this was the reason she had brought him in for tests in the first place. At the same time, she did not believe them. Her son was not just her baby: he was her friend. They did things together, like swim in the pool, and when she asked him for something, he was always happy to do it—even when she jokingly asked him to get her a drink from the open bar at an all- inclusive resort in Turkey. She told everybody about it, not just because it was funny but because it definitively proved that there was nothing wrong with her son's brain. So, mostly, she did not believe the doctors.

And now, this famous child neurologist, whom she had spent months trying to get in to see and whom she was terrified of seeing, leafed through Sasha's chart, full of damning test results and specialists' opinions, examined Sasha, and said, "There is nothing wrong with your child." Then she said, "You are doing everything right. Just keep doing what you are doing. And lose this chart." She handed the thick binder back to Masha.

Masha understood perfectly well what the doctor meant. The pile of diagnoses that had been heaped on Sasha meant that he would never be accepted to a regular school. If Masha did not want him shunted to the mentally disabled track, she had to shred his medical records, bribe someone to make him a pristine but believable new chart, and then make sure that by the time he was about to enter first grade, he was speaking like any other six-and-a-half-year-old.

Or maybe she said budushchego net a bit later, when Sergei made it clear that he had not signed up for this. A four-year-old kid who could not speak, with all the questions this brought forth from others, and all the exercises and activities that Masha was fishing out of the Internet that were supposedly going to fix this broken boy—Sergei could not take it anymore. He had another woman, and he was going to go live with her now.

Maybe that was not actually when Masha said budushchego net. Maybe that was when she said, "Fine. Alimony." She had a very large sum of money saved up—upward of $100,000—and between that safety net and alimony, she could afford to quit her job and start graduate school in pedagogy. She had a plan: she would become a teacher at a good school. That way Sasha could study there too. Her workday would be short, allowing her to give Sasha the attention he needed.

Over the course of the 2010-2011 school year, Sasha learned to speak, but Masha learned almost nothing—except that Moscow was not the place to learn to work with children, even though she was about to be awarded a degree in this area. Other things she did not see happening in Moscow or in Russia: a new husband—she was nearly twenty-seven and had a child, so this was a foregone conclusion—and a good education for Sasha. She devised a plan that Tatiana would have approved, which was probably one reason it felt self-evident. She would go to Oxford to study educational psychology. Then she would become a science teacher in England. But even before that, Sasha would be in the environment he needed in order to develop. She would be in such an environment too—one where a mother like Masha could ask for help instead of having to falsify her child's medical chart to give him a shot at a future. She took all the required tests, and she placed Sasha in an English-language preschool program: he was speaking well enough now that he could start learning a second language.

Sergei said no. He would not sign the papers to allow her to take Sasha out of the country. That was when she thought, Budushchego net. There is no future.

sixteen

WHITE RIBBONS

masha had not been alone in her plan to emigrate. A friend set her sights on Humboldt University in Berlin at the same time. Another friend followed Masha's lead—to be more precise, Masha talked her into applying to Oxford. In May 2011, the first friend left for Germany and the second for England. Masha had one other close friend, but they had a falling-out. When Masha took an accounting of her larger circle of acquaintances, she realized that most of them had left earlier, for graduate or postgradute studies at the famous or not-so- famous universities of the West. Even her ex-husband, Sergei, had done graduate work in America. Now he relented—partly—and told Masha that he would agree to her going abroad to study, and taking Sasha with her, as long as it was temporary. Masha signed up for a sociology summer school in Malta. The school was interesting, the island country was tiny and crowded, and the military planes overhead, on their way to drop bombs on Libya day after day, reminded Masha that there was a big world out there, full of politics, people, and passion—while she had to return to Moscow at the end of the summer. She had no idea what she was going to do there. The only thing she knew was that she would not go back to working as a broker of kickbacks and bribes.

In September, she tried becoming a housewife—a single mother could be one too. Her job was ferrying Sasha to karate, drawing, and violin lessons and the English-language preschool. At karate and drawing the other mothers could spend hours discussing the best container in which to pack lunch for their husbands. At violin, Masha waited alone. The mothers at the English-language preschool were more interesting—several of them were journalists—but the most they would do was chat over a croissant and cappuccino before either disappearing into their laptops or taking off for work, leaving their children for the nannies to collect.

On September 25, the preschool mothers were outraged. The previous afternoon, Putin and Medvedev had made a joint announcement: at the next election, scheduled for March 2012, Medvedev would hand the presidency back to Putin and return to his post as prime minister. "Can you believe this?" the mothers asked one another. "They don't even try to keep up appearances anymore." They meant the appearance of an election. Masha was not exactly shocked. She was devastated. All she could think was, Now everyone is going to leave the country. Every last person.

In the evenings, after Sasha was asleep, Masha hung out with her two closest friends, at Humboldt and Oxford—by Skype. They opened bottles of wine in parallel in front of their web cameras. Masha's friends did their academic work; Masha roamed the Internet.

This was how she learned of the case of Vladimir Makarov. It seemed unbelievable at first. After she read all she could read about it, she knew it was true, but she still found it incomprehensible. In fact, she knew she would never be able to understand it. An innocent man was going to prison for years on charges of molesting his own daughter.

vladimir makarov was a young civil servant. He had moved to Moscow in 2009 to take a job at the transportation ministry. His wife and young daughter joined him once he had fixed up a rental apartment. In the summer of 2010, Makarov's seven-year-old daughter fell off a home climbing wall, fracturing a vertebra. A lab technician thought she saw traces of sperm in the girl's urine sample when she was brought to the hospital by ambulance. A nurse reported it. Later tests of the same sample failed to confirm the results, a physical exam produced no evidence of sexual abuse, and neither the little girl nor her mother nor anyone else gave any testimony that

could be interpreted as confirming the charge against Makarov. Nonetheless, he was jailed, held in pretrial detention for a year, and sentenced to thirteen years behind bars for raping his own daughter.¹

He appealed, and on November 29, 2011, Moscow City Court downgraded the charge from rape to indecent assault and reduced his sentence to five and a half years.² This was probably the worst moment in the whole awful story: by removing the rape charge, the court was disavowing the only basis for the entire case—the supposed finding of traces of sperm in the girl's urine. And still this man, who had done nothing wrong and had already spent a year in jail, would be staying in prison for four more. Why?

Because. Ella Paneyakh, an American-educated Russian sociologist who had for years been studying law enforcement, wrote a piece she titled "And Now the Most Frightening Thing of All Has Happened." It began, "And as is its habit, disaster struck where we least expected it." Paneyakh used the term "the Red Wheel" to refer to the force that had plowed Makarov down. The Red Wheel was the title of a trilogy by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in which he described the destruction of the Russian state by the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution. Paneyakh used the term to refer to Russian law enforcement. Her point was that it, too, was an inexorable disaster.

It has forgotten what it's like to encounter resistance. It lacks a built-in function for compromise, retreat, even for saying something like "released upon a closer examination of the evidence." All the mechanisms that could have been employed for this purpose have long since rusted out for disuse. In fact, the

machine's only possible response to resistance is a crackdown.³

Makarov was doomed as soon as he was first suspected, falsely, of having sexually abused his daughter. His attempts to fight the charges—he asked for further tests, mounted a thorough defense, and then appealed his sentence—only made the law-enforcement machine pursue him harder.

This was not a new mechanism. Law enforcement and the courts had functioned this way for a long time—in fact, they had functioned this way in the Soviet era, and the system was never dismantled, only temporarily weakened in the 1990s. But for most of the post-Soviet period, the punitive force had been applied almost exclusively to a few clearly defined groups of people: entrepreneurs engaged in property disputes, select politicians (who were also, more often than not, entrepreneurs engaged in property disputes), and radical political activists. In other words, people risked being crushed by the Red Wheel only after they ventured into the public realm. What had changed now, wrote Paneyakh, was that "the state has once again found the time, means, and energy to insert its tentacles into a person's private life—a lot deeper than the average person . . . is prepared to let it." The process had been under way for some time, but most Russians had not noticed—in part because they had grown accustomed to feeling separate from the state.

While they were not paying attention, the state had begun regulating what people ate and drank, often introducing seemingly arbitrary rules for political reasons, like when it had banned wine imports from Georgia or sprats from Latvia. The regulating agency invariably justified its decisions by the need to protect the population from potentially dangerous products.

The parliament had been discussing restricting abortion. It had hardened drug laws to the point where pain relief had become virtually inaccessible, even for people with documented severe pain. Roughly half of more than a million inmates of Russian prisons were serving time for drug offenses, because even a minuscule amount could land one behind bars. As new laws piled up, political discussion, such as it was, centered on the need to protect children: from drugs, from abortions, and, perhaps most important, from pedophiles. Masha could not remember when she had first heard about the pedophile menace—it seemed like background noise that had always been there.

lyosha had been watching for years as the idea of the pedophile threat took shape. He had written about it in his undergraduate thesis. Prominent Perm factory owner and politician Igor Pastukhov, a United Russia member, was first accused of raping a sixteen-year- old boy in 2003. Soon after, the charges were dropped and the politician's accuser seemed to vanish. But a second teenager came forward in 2005. Rumor in Perm had it that another powerful local businessman had manufactured the case to discredit Pastukhov. But Lyosha met young men who told him that it had happened to them too: Pastukhov's people were in the habit of hunting down very young men in and around cruising areas and either luring or, if that failed, forcing them into cars and delivering them to Pastukhov and his friends, who raped them.

When Pastukhov faced trial, Perm newspaper headlines were: "Perm Has Been Overtaken by the Gay Lobby"; "Faggots Think They Are Above the Law"; and "Administration Had Better Straighten Its Orientation." What little evidence was presented at the trial was circumstantial, and Pastukhov's accuser was never identified. Pastukhov was sentenced to six years' imprisonment.⁴ Lyosha struggled with the Pastukhov story in his thesis. On the one hand, the trial was a travesty. On the other, Lyosha was convinced that Pastukhov was guilty of just these sorts of crimes. Then there was the problem of the media coverage, which equated pedophilia and sexual violence with homosexuality. Later, Lyosha learned how to separate these facts and ideas from one another. The Russian courts listened to the prosecutor and accepted thin evidence, bad evidence, or no evidence at all, but this did not mean that everyone they sentenced was innocent—it just meant that no one, including the guilty, ever got a fair trial. In this case, the fact that charges against Pastukhov involved same-sex contact was what had excited the media: similar violence perpetrated against girls and young women was more likely to be seen as a normal attribute of power. For example, a Pskov bank owner and politician, Igor Provkin, was accused of rape by several different young women over the course of six years. He finally faced charges after he lured a young woman into his car in central Moscow and raped her right there. He confessed and was given a suspended sentence of four years. The case drew scant media attention.⁵

By 2008, the year after Lyosha defended his thesis, the pedophile menace was becoming a commonplace of public rhetoric. Dugin called for Russian men to kill pedophiles on sight. In St. Petersburg, a retired boxer, Alexander Kuznetsov, faced charges for killing a nineteen-year-old man whom he said he had caught trying to rape his eight-year-old stepson. No evidence of the attempted rape was ever produced, but the boxer—who, despite a long arrest record, was not placed in pretrial detention—became an instant celebrity. "It is hard for him to walk down the street in Petersburg," reported Izvestia. "People stop him to shake his hand and ask for an autograph."⁶ Dugin told journalists that he supported Kuznetsov. "He stood up for his child," he said. "I believe that all Russians, all normal people should act in that exact way. If you see a crime like this happening, you should intervene. And if there is a way to kill the lowlife, then it is necessary to kill and then sort it out later. That's the only way we can change public opinion, the only way to get lawmakers to respond."⁷ The headline of the article in which Dugin was quoted was, "What Is to Be Done with Pedophiles: The Death Penalty or Castration?" Such were apparently the terms of the proposed debate—and the debate was framed in a way familiar from the Soviet era, when "concerned members of society" demanded restrictive measures against particular groups or individuals (such as members of the worldwide Zionist conspiracy, or the writer Boris Pasternak) and the state apparatus obliged.

Kuznetsov served just over a year behind bars.⁸ By the time he was released in 2010, the debate was raging. A group of parliament members filed a bill that would increase penalties for sexual crimes against children. The bill was so hastily drafted that different passages specified different new penalties for the same crimes.⁹ This delayed the bill, prompting the chairwoman of the parliamentary Committee on the Family, Yelena Mizulina, to accuse United Russia of harboring a "pedophile lobby." Mizulina herself was a member of A Just Russia, the latest party created by the Kremlin to imitate a

populist electoral alternative. United Russia countered that the latest political pedophilia scandal had concerned a Just Russia member (this was the case of a parliament member's assistant in the city of Volgograd who managed to escape from police who were arresting him). Whichever party was speaking—and whichever party it was blaming—a consensus emerged in parliament: they had in their ranks a "pedophile lobby" that was sabotaging the protection of children. A parliament member from the Communist Party lamented that many of her colleagues had been ensnared by a "secret powerful pervert organization."¹⁰

The pedophilia accusation became a potent weapon of political warfare. While parliament members were hurling accusations at one another, political scientist Andreas Umland discovered that Russian and Ukrainian media were reporting that he had been charged with sex offenses against children. The reports were full of details about Umland's legal troubles, all of them imaginary. Umland traced the original report to a Russian online news agency, which, in turn, could be traced to IP addresses used by Dugin and his Eurasian Movement.¹¹

Dugin's media had been attacking Umland since he wrote his Oxford dissertation, in which he compared Dugin's movement to Nazism. "Most liberal sociologists in Germany are homosexuals," reported one of the articles on Umland. "And as we know, sixty percent of them are infected with HIV. So the question arises: Why are homosexuals with AIDS telling us what's right and what's wrong?"¹² A follow-up piece claimed that "Umland, who has pedophile proclivities, has been fired from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford for making homosexual advances to his colleagues."¹³

In the Russian parliament the crusading members never managed to clear up the textual contradictions in their bill, so the Kremlin introduced its own. Legislation increasing penalties for sex offenders was passed in the fall of 2011.¹⁴ Repeat offenders would now face life imprisonment—the maximum penalty possible in Russia for any crime—but the crusaders were not satisfied and continued to insist on chemical castration. The new law introduced a new concept: that of a

person afflicted with pedophilia. A defendant diagnosed with pedophilia was now subject to compulsory psychiatric treatment. Psychiatrists had to be trained to diagnose "pedophilic sexual orientation."¹⁵ Letters went out to every psychiatric clinic in the land.¹⁶ Large psychiatric hospitals dispatched doctors for training sessions in Moscow at the Serbsky Center for Social and Court Psychiatry, once infamous as the place where Soviet dissidents were sent for punitive treatment. Participants in Serbsky seminars were taught that perversions were often diagnosed together—for example, pedophilia frequently went with homosexuality.¹⁷

Even while the parliament was debating new anti-pedophile measures, the police redoubled their efforts. In July 2011, the minister of the interior reported that law enforcement was pursuing 128 different cases of online distribution of pornographic images of minors, that this was just for the first three months of the year and the number represented a 20 percent increase over the year before.

Activist citizens began looking for pedophiles too. A twenty-one- year-old college dropout in Voronezh devoted herself to the hunt full­time. Anna Levchenko claimed to have identified the names and IP addresses of eighty pedophiles in the space of six months. "The number of sex offenses against children has nearly doubled in the last year," declared her livejournal.com page. A manifesto full of boldfaced emphasis followed.

Pedophiles are afraid of nothing and no one They are

everywhere. They are united. There are hundreds of thousands of them. . . . They have cast their nets over the entire world. They challenge our entire society and they are laughing at us. They are trying to tell us that no one will ever be able to protect our children from them. I will prove them wrong. If law enforcement can't deal with it, then society itself must rise up in defense of the children. I identify pedophiles on the Internet and collect evidence against them. I make sure that criminal charges are filed. I work with a group of like-minded people. We write dozens of reports every week. Thousands of people read my blog every day. We need your help, too. You can join our team and help us catch those who are killing our children

Only if we unite our efforts will we be able to defeat this threat. Any

support you can lend will help us save hundreds of children's lives

and prevent new crimes.¹⁸

Levchenko developed her own entrapment techniques and then trained other young people to use them. She attended the Kremlin youth training camp at Lake Seligher in the summer of 2011 and was granted an audience with Medvedev so that she could tell him about her work. She informed the president that her movement included three hundred volunteers. Medvedev praised Levchenko's efforts and suggested incorporating her group into the Investigative Committee— the federation's central anti-crime unit—by creating a special anti- pedophile project there. The president's children's rights ombudsman, Pavel Astakhov, perhaps fearful of being left out of the loop, immediately offered Levchenko an assistant position, albeit an unsalaried one.¹⁹

It was in this context that the Makarov case was unfolding.

seryozha was not sure when he first heard about the case—it was fairly soon after he moved back to Moscow from Kiev in 2010—but at some point he became obsessed with it. There was no other word for it. He had to know everything. He read every article about the case several times over, to make sure he grasped every detail. This was how he started reading Novaya gazeta, a Moscow weekly that specialized in human rights issues and investigative stories. Several of the paper's reporters had been killed—including Anna Politkovskaya, who had been covering Chechnya for the paper—but though he had heard of Politkovskaya's murder, the existence of the paper had not registered with Seryozha until now. He joined an online community called the Makarov Case, downloaded every document that other members made available, and wrote detailed commentary. It did not take long to understand that the charges were bogus, but Seryozha still felt that the documents could shed light on something. There was a genetic study, done by a scientist who had taken part in identifying the remains of the czar's family—that had to count for something, right? The forensic geneticist's conclusion was that there was nothing in the urine sample that indicated sexual contact. The study was not admitted into evidence. In the end the only expert opinion acknowledged by the court came from a young psychologist who had asked the alleged victim to draw a nonexistent animal—a common task in psychological screening tests—and then concluded that the drawing, of a black cat with a disproportionately large and bushy tail, suggested that the girl had been molested.

Seryozha learned what he could about Makarov's family. They were good people. They loved each other and their daughter. Makarov spent more time with his daughter than a typical Russian father. Somehow, this made it feel even more tragic. Seryozha had not seen that many families who seemed simply, intuitively happy, and this one was being destroyed. And the little girl, the girl all the prosecutors and police and the psychologist were supposedly trying to protect—she was being destroyed too.

Once he started reading Novaya gazeta, Seryozha became aware that this case was not unusual. The paper was publishing a lot of articles about Sergei Magnitsky, an accountant who had been tortured to death in a Moscow jail in 2009. His former employer, an American- British financier, was running his own investigation, which was making it clear that Magnitsky had inadvertently stepped on the toes of high-powered officials who were embezzling state money. For this, he had been jailed and killed. It was a wrenching story, but it made at least some sense: Magnitsky had stood between men and money. Makarov had not been in anyone's way. His life and his family were being destroyed just because hospital workers had been instructed to be on the lookout for pedophiles, and because, once set in motion, the Red Wheel could not stop, and just because. Seryozha felt exactly like he had when he saw Lars von Trier's film Dancer in the Dark, in which a helpless woman is falsely accused of a crime and executed. The movie had left Seryozha physically sick for days. The Makarov case was happening in real life. There had to be a way to do something. Right?

one of the members of the online Makarov Case community wrote that three people were needed to put in a request for a protest. Masha called him—it had taken a bit of investigative work to get hold of his number. She wanted to volunteer her name and her time. It was now late November, she had been a single-mother housewife for nearly three months, and she had to find another way to live. She had hired a nanny and was going to start looking for work, but for now, she could be useful at a protest—even if she and everyone else knew that protest was futile.

That man never followed through on the protest idea. Makarov received his final sentence—five and a half years—on November 29. A week later an old acquaintance, someone who had been involved with the protest youth group Oborona back when Masha wanted to get involved but Sergei said no, called to invite Masha to a protest. It was about the elections rather than the Makarov case, but Masha went.

The parliamentary elections had taken place the day before. It was the usual setup with four parties: Putin's United Russia, the Kremlin's puppet populists A Just Russia, the Communists, and the Liberal Democratic Party. In parliament the Communists and the so- called Liberal Democrats reliably voted with United Russia while A Just Russia, too small to change any outcome, was occasionally critical of the Kremlin—as it was, for example, in the ongoing campaign to protect children from the imaginary pedophile lobby. Any criticism was better than no criticism, and many of the people whose blogs Masha was reading had voted for A Just Russia. By official count, A Just Russia got just over 13 percent of the vote, or 64 out of the 450 seats in parliament. United Russia would continue to hold more than half the seats, though not quite as many as it had had in the previous parliament.²⁰

The point was not so much the outcome of the election, which had the usual suspects seated in the usual proportions, as this very predictability. The Kremlin did not allow any strangers on the ballot, so the election did not need to be fixed. And still it was fixed. Ballot boxes were stuffed, numbers were doctored, phantom precincts reported, and conscripts were bused in to vote early and often. Not that it even mattered who got into parliament, which existed only to rubber-stamp the Kremlin's policies. But the bad theater of it all, in which you were invited up onstage for a millisecond and not allowed to open your mouth, was insulting. The parliamentary election was also a preview of the election scheduled for March 2012, which would rubber-stamp the reversion of the presidency to Putin.

Masha dressed nicely for the demonstration. This was the first social occasion after three months of her single-mother housewifedom, so she put on heels. It was raining, and the ground in the park where the protest was held quickly turned to gross black mush under thousands of pairs of feet. Masha's heels were sinking. She found herself standing with a group of women wearing fur coats. Maybe they had thought it would be colder and they would stand here, chanting—or whatever people did at these things—for hours. Or maybe they had also dressed up. Whatever, it was now raining on their fur coats. No one was chanting. There were speakers, but they could not hear or see them.

"Do you know what we are supposed to be doing?" asked Masha.

"No idea. This is our first time too," answered the wet fur coats.

Now there was a speaker who was finally loud enough. It was Alexei Navalny. Masha had been reading his blog. He wrote about corruption. Many people did, including Nemtsov, but Navalny had a trick. He dug through publicly available information to expose, repeatedly, exactly two shocking kinds of transactions: the absurd amounts the Russian government spent on the simplest and cheapest things—like, say, toilets; and the real estate and cars that Russian officials owned that they could never afford to buy on their official salary. Masha knew perfectly well how this worked, since until recently she had been a link in the corruption supply chain, but she could not get enough of the blog. Sometimes, though, it made her feel two opposing emotions at the same time: outrage, because this was her tax money that Navalny was talking about, and shame, because the system he was describing had included her. He called this system, the one that determined how Russia functioned, the "Party of Crooks and Thieves."

Navalny led the crowd in a chant of "One for all and all for one," or

he tried to—only a couple of hundred seemed to pick it up, and it died down quickly. Then he shouted, "Let's march to Lubyanka!"

Lubyanka was the square, a fifteen-minute walk away, that had once held the giant monument to Dzerzhinsky and that still housed the headquarters of the FSB as well as the Central Election Commission. Masha was unsure which of those buildings was Navalny's intended destination, but she was certain that she did not want to march. Not in heels. Masha headed toward the Metro, but there were thousands walking in that direction—it would be worse than rush hour. She turned left, onto Myasnitskaya, the street that led to Lubyanka, and realized that she was now a part of Navalny's march. Rather, she was among the people who had intended to be part of the march. These people were being grabbed by riot police, thrown against walls, or tackled to the ground and then dragged along the wet street. Masha pressed her body into a building wall and crept along it to the next side street, then dived in.

There was a text from Anastasia, the friend who had invited Masha to the protest. She was at a cafe that happened to be at the end of this particular side street. Now Masha marched. She barged into the cafe, a low-key hipster joint of the kind she did not even know existed in Moscow.

"Where do I sign up to be an activist!" she announced. It was not a question. "Because what's going on out there is fucked!"

Anastasia said there was talk of another protest being planned for tomorrow, in Triumfalnaya Square.

"I'm going," said Masha, as if she were issuing a threat to Anastasia and her friends.

zhanna watched the protest on television. She knew just how extraordinary this was. She was now working in television herself. When she first became a trader, she started watching RBK, a cable financial news channel. All the traders watched it. The people who worked there were financial geniuses. They could riff off the numbers live, for fifteen minutes on end, and it made Zhanna feel like they knew how the world worked. She wanted to be one of them. When

she studied for her chartered financial analyst exam, it was with an eye to getting a job at RBK. She did. At first everyone was sure that she was there only because she was her father's daughter. She actually overheard one of the executives comment to another that stupid celebrity daughters are not known for passing CFA exams. After a few months, she was allowed to go on air live and riff off the numbers. It made her feel like a genius.

RBK was a financial news channel, but it was still part of the television world, and in this world showing protests on the air was unthinkable. But now there they were on Channel 1, the big state channel. Zhanna felt a pang: Why was she not there?

She knew why. That one experience of running away from the police while her father got arrested had been quite enough. Also, she wanted to get married. This had been Zhanna's goal ever since her divorce, and she pursued it as single-mindedly as she had pursued her job at RBK. She started seeing someone within weeks of the divorce, and it was this man that she intended to marry. She told him about this often, whenever she was not talking about having children together. He was impervious, and she was insistent. But also, he was the kind of man who wanted to be where they were at this moment, at a country club outside Moscow, with the television on, and he was the kind of man who would not take kindly to Zhanna's desire to drop everything to rush to the city to join the protest. Eyes on the prize, she chased the thought away.

Her father was there, in the cold rain. It was his organization, Solidarity, that had secured a permit for the protest—like it had for dozens of protests over the last five years. Those earlier ones had drawn a couple of hundred people—on the good days. So when they applied for a permit this time, anticipating two weeks ahead of time that the election would give reason to protest, they wrote that they expected three hundred people. They were being optimistic, despite the miserable weather and the December wind-down, which had already begun. By Boris's estimate, ten thousand people showed up. The police counted three thousand—still ten times as many as the permit said. One of the skinny bespectacled Solidarity activists, Igor Gukovsky, whose name was on the permit, was fined for the discrepancy and then also jailed for fifteen days for good measure. But his arrest drew little attention, even among the people who had come to the protest, because they had never heard of him. The best- known of the protesters, Navalny and Oborona leader Ilya Yashin, were also sent to jail for fifteen days, as were several dozen other people who had been arrested on Myasnitskaya Street. Altogether, the police had made about seven hundred arrests that night. Probably because the courts and holding facilities could not handle that many people at once, a majority were allowed to go home following a night spent in a standing-room-only cell.²¹

seryozha read about the planned protest on the Novaya gazeta website but could not go: he was on deadline for an app he was writing. Once he read about what had happened, though, he decided to go to Triumfalnaya the following day. The regime had to be called to order. Seryozha was a realist, and as a realist he recognized that a certain understanding had taken hold in Russia over the last dozen years. It was an understanding Seryozha's grandfather would not have liked, but it was there. Russians had agreed to live under a sort of dictatorship in exchange for stability. But they assumed that it was a soft dictatorship, which could negotiate if the need arose. Seryozha imagined that this was the way it worked in China, or at least this was how the papers made it look: the Communist Party had all the power, but if, say, peasants in some village rebelled, then the local bosses would be removed. Pressure and restrictions were a given, but the exact amounts could be adjusted. Right now, the pressure seemed excessive to Seryozha, and it looked to him like other people thought so too. The blatant election-fixing was insulting, and the Makarov case was just too painful to watch. So it was time for an adjustment. Seryozha imagined Putin saying, not in so many words, "All right, let's see what we can do here. What do you say I keep my billions and you keep your lives as you know them?" Then the state would pull back where it had overstepped. "Stability" would be a word for everyone just being left alone—everyone including Makarov and people who might suddenly find themselves in his shoes. This was

what Seryozha wanted to communicate when he went to Triumfalnaya Square on December 6, 2011.

there was no permit for the protest at Triumfalnaya—permits had to be obtained two weeks in advance, with the observance of all sorts of byzantine procedures. This was just a protest staged by people reacting to what they had seen the evening before. These people seemed to fall into two categories: the diehards who had been roughed up and detained on numerous occasions and who simply felt it was their duty to respond publicly to injustice, and those who had no concept of permits and regulations. Between these two groups was a thin layer of well-informed occasional protesters who weighed their risks every time. They had seen others detained by police, or had been detained themselves, and knew that not having a permit meant that the police felt they had license to be as rough as they wanted to be. Which, after the protest and the attempted march the night before, would probably be very rough.

Neither Seryozha nor Masha knew anything about permits. But Masha had now been to one protest, and she felt she had learned a thing or two. When the police moved in, which seemed to happen instantly, she whipped out her iPhone and started shouting into it in English. The police must have taken her for a foreign correspondent or a tourist—they moved on. Masha ran into a nearby park, which had an American-style diner. One of the first such restaurants in the city, it had catered to expats in the 1990s. Masha ran into the diner and plopped onto the first empty seat she saw, in a booth with three young men who were also just pulling off their coats.

The police were not far behind. They started grabbing people from their seats. Masha repeated the trick that had worked minutes earlier: she turned to the table and started speaking English. The men readily picked up. After the police finished, leaving a dozen shiny red leatherette seats empty in their wake, the group switched back to Russian and did the introductions. Masha's new friends were all second-day protesters like she was. All three had been educated

abroad—Stanford, MIT, and the London School of Economics. This was probably why they had known to seek refuge in the diner.

They did not know what they were supposed to do now. All pulled out their phones. Masha read on Twitter that Elena Kostyuchenko, a young openly lesbian Novaya gazeta journalist, had been detained. The tweet had the address of the detention center where she had been taken. Masha went. There she met a man named Ilya Ponomarev, who told her he was a parliament member from A Just Russia and a protest organizer. Then she met two young women who said they were members of a group she had never heard of. It was called Pussy Riot. Masha liked the name. Masha had been an activist for twenty- four hours, and her social circle had already quadrupled.

boris nemtsov had been willing this moment to come for years, but who would have known that it would come now—or what to do with it now that it had happened? People he knew well and some whom he barely knew gathered together now, at the Solidarity office, and said that they would coordinate the protests. But they were not the only ones. A few blocks away, Ilya Ponomarev, the parliament member who had come out of nowhere, held a town-meeting-style gathering to discuss the protests. Groups were popping up on Facebook and VKontakte, with thousands of people expressing their desire to protest some more. The questions were, where, when, and how, exactly?

Virtually none of the new self-identified activists knew that the authorities had long ago placed extensive restrictions on protest. Some of them, like Masha, had heard about the Marches of the Dissenters, but many more, like Seryozha, had not been paying attention at all. The permit system was just one example of the restrictions—the most pertinent one at this point. In Moscow, a permit could be obtained only within a specific time window, which in practice meant filing an application in the morning of the day twelve calendar days before the planned action. If you asked early, the application would be denied, and if you asked late, you would be told that someone already had dibs on your spot. This meant that activists had to arrive at city hall before daybreak, to ensure that they were physically the first people to walk through the door of the permits- issuing office several hours later, when the city opened for business. Then there would be negotiations with police. If the application was successful and a permit was issued, the police would erect cordons around a space large enough for the anticipated number of people and set up metal detectors at the entrance to this cordoned-off space. The organizers and the police negotiated the specifics of inspection: Would people be able to bring in plastic water bottles? What about placards on wooden planks? What about metal ones? If the applicants turned out to have underestimated the number of participants, they would face not only a fine but also problems in their relationship with the police, so important for the success of future applications.

The newbies did not know any of this and might not be prepared to understand this. They might also be unwilling to wait for a new application to go through—their desire to protest, which had come out of nowhere, might dissipate just as quickly. Nemtsov, Navalny, several other men, and a couple of women who now felt they had to harness this newfound energy gathered to discuss the predicament. There was unexpected good news: someone had already secured a permit for a protest on December 10—less than a week away. The bad news was, the permit was for three hundred people who were expected to gather in a small square across from the Bolshoi Theatre. In theory and symbolically, this was a good location: the Bolshoi was a short walk from Red Square, separated from it by an area called Revolution Square. A larger protest would fit nicely there.

The prospect of tens of thousands of protesters in Revolution Square was evidently not one Moscow authorities were willing to entertain. Nor were they willing to negotiate with the women who had secured the permit. They reached out to Nemtsov and to several other prominent men whom they believed to be associated with the protests, and proposed an alternative: Bolotnaya Square. Boloto means "swamp." The square in question used to be just that; now it was an island, separated by the Moscow River from the Kremlin on one side and by a canal from a residential neighborhood on the other. Nemtsov's apartment happened to overlook Bolotnaya Square from

across the canal. The police liked Bolotnaya for obvious reasons: it was easy to cordon off; access and egress would be naturally slowed down by the geography of the place. All the men agreed that a demonstration involving tens of thousands of people would be more orderly at Bolotnaya. They shook on it, and even shared a bottle of whiskey.²² Nemtsov was convinced that the protesters would be safe only if they complied. He wrote an appeal on his blog:

Dear friends! For me the safety and security of people are more important than Twitter and Facebook. It's not only experienced opposition activists who are planning to come to the protest but also a huge number of people who have never been to a protest before. It would be a low, provocational, and criminal thing to do, to have

them end up beaten by riot police. I could never let that happen.²³

Nemtsov and two other activists also recorded a video putting forth this position and specifying the demands of the upcoming protest at Bolotnaya Square: the release of all political prisoners— they meant the casualties of the last two protests, when nearly nine hundred people had been detained and scores of them had been sentenced to fifteen days in jail—and new elections.²⁴ Tens of thousands of people were clicking "I'm going" on the social network pages created for the protest, and the activists felt it was important that they go to the right place and make the right demands. It was for their own good.

the night before the protest at Bolotnaya, Masha was hanging out with her new friends from Starlight Diner and her childhood friend Tolya, whose family had emigrated to Canada almost twenty years before. Tolya was now a computer scientist working for a Russian company in Moscow. Everyone was planning to go to the protest the next day, and no one could understand why they were supposed to go to the island rather than Revolution Square. Consensus was, this would be a wasted opportunity: for the first and quite possibly the last time in their lives, these people, who had been weaned on profound disgust for any sort of collective action, were moved to join one. They naturally assumed this was true of all other newly minted protesters. How could they allow such a chance to be wasted by going to a place where they would be neither heard nor seen, except by one another?

Masha said that she had been reading about Occupy Wall Street, and it was obvious to her that Occupy was the right model. Go to Revolution Square, set up camp, refuse to leave. Or go to the Central Election Commission, which was just a block away from Revolution Square, and occupy that, demanding new elections. In fact, that was what the Ukrainians did in 2004, long before Occupy Wall Street, and it had worked for them.

"When I was a student at Oxford," said one of the young men, and he launched into a long description of the tactics he saw used by student activists there. "But you need a leader to follow for that."

Did they have a leader? The group began tossing names around. Nemtsov was a holdover from a previous era. Yashin was always trying to get people to take him seriously, because they did not. Another self-proclaimed leader, Sergei Udaltsov, had orthodox Soviet views and generally seemed to want to be a 1920s commissar. That left Navalny. They liked Navalny, though his nationalist views and what they called his "Komsomol ways"—including his love of chanting slogans such as "One for all and all for one"—made him less appealing. Still, they would be willing to follow him if he called them to a good protest. But Navalny was still serving his fifteen-day sentence.

"He should make a statement from jail," said someone. But it was too late for that.

"I think you should go and talk to the organizers and tell them they are wasting an opportunity," said someone. Masha realized that they were addressing her. All of them, in fact, seemed to agree that Masha would be a good person to deliver this message. But she did not know how to contact any of the organizers. So the next day they went to Bolotnaya. So did about fifty thousand other people, making it the largest Russian protest since the Soviet Union collapsed.

there was a stage, and speakers on it—apparently, people always had this at protests. Looking at them—he could not really hear them— Seryozha realized that he had been to a protest once before, more than ten years earlier. In April 2001, after almost a year of threats, police raids, and court disputes, the journalists of NTV, the independent national television channel, had been told that the company was now under the control of the state gas monopoly. They called for a protest in the street in front of the television tower, where all the broadcasters had their offices. Seryozha wound his way out there—the television tower was far from the Metro, and Seryozha had trouble navigating the buses in an unfamiliar neighborhood of Moscow. Then he stood in the pouring rain, watching his favorite television anchors, people whose faces had been on the screen as long as he had been aware of television news, come out and speak from the temporary stage. Some of them looked like they were crying, though it was hard to tell in the rain. It had seemed like the end of the world.

Since then, one of the anchors had demonstratively quit journalism to take up the traditional dissident occupation of stove- stoker, another had moved to Ukraine and had his own show there, but the rest of those journalists had found some accommodation within the new, entirely state-controlled television world. Some were enthusiastically stumping for Putin, while others confined themselves to culture and apparently innocuous social issues. The city had built a monorail road to the television tower. And Seryozha forgot about that protest. If someone had asked him, the day before he went to Bolotnaya Square, whether he had ever been to a protest, he would have been adamant that he had not. He would have said, in fact, that up until a few months ago, when he first learned of the Makarov case, he had had no argument with the regime.

Now someone very loud on or near the stage began shouting, "Down with Putin!" A few hundred people picked up the chant. Seryozha did not. Something about it made him uncomfortable. He had not come here to bring down Putin. He did not want to think of himself as a revolutionary—to his grandfather, that had been a dirty word. All that had gone wrong, Alexander Nikolaevich believed, had been the result of drastic action taken without forethought. Good change could be only gradual and intentional. Also, Seryozha did not want to chant. Chanting put one in mind of either Communist-era parades, which Seryozha remembered, or perhaps felt like he remembered, or of the Kremlin youth movements, which sought ecstasy in unity and aggression. Seryozha did not want ecstasy. He wanted to register his existence as someone separate and different from the state. For this purpose, he wore a white ribbon. Somehow, over the last few days, white had become the color of this protest. It was a symbol like Ukraine's orange, but also its opposite. White was pure, it was nonaggressive, and it was every color. It was important to Seryozha and to the people he was now meeting here that this was not a protest of any political party or movement. They preferred to think of it as not being political at all.

alexandre bikbov, the sociologist who had been providing an educational alternative for students of Moscow State University's sociology department, now turned his seminar into a mobile survey unit. Their goal was to ask people what they were doing, and why, while they were doing it. Both the Kremlin and the media in Russia and abroad quickly accepted the understanding that the protesters were members of the middle class who opposed Putin. One commonly used phrase was "angry city dwellers," where "city dweller" implied affluence and youth. The Levada Center conducted surveys that showed that the protesters were not in fact predominantly affluent—they included some poor people, many people of moderate means, and some rich people. Nor were they predominantly young: just slightly more than half were under forty, but 22 percent were older than fifty-five.²⁵ Bikbov found that they were also not particularly angry. They liked to joke, and they loved a good funny banner, like i didn't vote for these assholes, i voted for the other assholes, the runaway favorite among the many visual and textual gags held up on handwritten placards at Bolotnaya. The humor,

Bikbov concluded, served a dual purpose. On the one hand, it defused the feeling of having been violated: one is less of a victim if one can laugh about it. It also signaled that the protesters were not dangerous. Revolutionaries do not kid around. By cracking jokes the protesters shifted their focus from the Kremlin to one another. The protest seemed like a contest in which like-minded people looked for the wittiest person among them.²⁶ Afterward, participants combed social networks to see if their particular placard had become an audience favorite.

"White, the color of our protest, is a good symbol," wrote Nemtsov in a euphoric blog post on December 10. "It means that protest participants can harbor no 'dark' thoughts." The blog post began with the words, "I am happy. The 10th of December, 2011, will go down in history as the day of resurrection of civic dignity and civil society. After ten years of hibernation, Moscow and all of Russia have awakened."²⁷

It was all of Russia indeed. On or around the same day, nearly a hundred Russian cities and towns—which is to say, all of Russia's cities and towns—saw protest rallies, demonstrations, or marches. In several places, the relative number of participants—the percentage of a town's population that came out to protest—far exceeded that of Moscow.

In his blog post, Nemtsov announced that the protesters had "unanimously adopted" a list of demands. There had been no vote at Bolotnaya, and most of the participants could not hear the speakers, but the last time Nemtsov had attended a protest this large—over twenty years ago—there had been lists and demands. That seemed to be the way these things worked. There were six demands. One was to release "all political prisoners," meaning the people arrested at last week's protests, and five concerned the parliamentary elections— annul the results; fire the chairman of the Election Commission; investigate reports of vote-rigging; allow opposition parties on the ballot; and hold new, open, and fair elections. Putin's resignation was not on the list, nor did the list include any mention of the upcoming presidential election. The demands did not explicitly include Mikhail

Khodorkovsky, who had been in jail for eight years, or Vladimir Makarov, unknown to most of the protesters. The demands made no mention of the killings of opposition journalists, or of media freedom at all. The demands were intentionally minimal, apparently easy to carry out. They were modeled on the logic of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Gorbachev's Politburo, weak and uncertain, might have been open to compromise and reason. The Communist parties of the Soviet Union's satellite countries had sat down to negotiate with protesters in response to similar kinds of demands during the "velvet revolutions" of 1989. To Nemtsov and his co-organizers, Putin's government seemed, suddenly, to be in the same sort of teetering state as those governments had been.

"Suddenly" was the operative word. Then again, those old enough to remember the fall of the Soviet Union remembered that the regime had seemed eternal until one day it did not. But what had happened now? Why had people taken to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, people of different ages and income levels, all over the country? Social scientists who wrote about the protests invariably used the word "mystery."

A Russian-born, Western-educated German sociologist undertook probably the most thorough attempt to crack the mystery. Mischa Gabowitsch based his study on interviews with dozens of protesters all over the country as well as on a close examination of the posters, slogans, and forms of protest. His evidence debunked the idea that this was a middle-class protest or even a protest primarily driven by middle-class values such as the desire to protect private property and receive good government services in exchange for one's tax rubles. Gabowitsch concluded that the critique of corruption, and especially Navalny's narration of it, created the preconditions for protest. Navalny's term "Party of Crooks and Thieves" supplied the language. Protesters talked about many things being stolen from them—not only money and government services but also votes. Nemtsov put a number on it: he claimed that thirteen million votes had gone missing. The most blatant vote-fix of them all—Medvedev's handover of power to Putin—could also be framed as a manifestation of corruption.

At the same time, noted Gabowitsch, seeing the protests as solely a reaction to witnessing the blatant fraud in the parliamentary election would be wrong.

Compared with the reforms of electoral law and the elimination, intimidation and pre-selection of opposition candidates, the vote- rigging on election day itself may not be a trifle, but they are no more than the last cog in the power vertical's steering mechanism. This distinguishes the situation in Russia in December 2011 from that in Serbia in 2000, in Georgia in 2003, in Ukraine in 2004 or in Kyrgyzstan in 2005. There electoral manipulation had been the decisive tool to prevent the victory of a candidate who was popular or at least supported by a broad coalition. In Russia, by contrast, the preceding reforms had made the emergence of such a candidate or coalition unlikely. Why, nevertheless, was it a rigged election that

led to spontaneous mass protest in Russia?²⁸

He suggested that part of the answer lay in the ritual of elections, which had been painfully violated. In other words, it was precisely the obscene manner of the rigging, not the fact of it, that caused the outrage—like what had caused Seryozha to throw a blank ballot in the bin in disgust, after flying all the way from Kiev to Moscow to cast it. If the protesters were objecting primarily to what had felt to them like public indecency—not just at the voting booth but also earlier, in September, when Putin and Medvedev publicly shook on the presidency—then it stood to reason that they did not call for Putin to be deposed and did not confront the regime with its gravest crimes. Held on a cordoned-off island, the protest was not confrontational at all. Some of Bikbov's respondents said that they were demonstrating for stability—using the keyword of the Putin era, turning it into their demand. Or their request.

Even though the protesters belonged to different age groups, Putin had now been in power long enough that a majority of them had spent all or most of their adult lives in the era of supposed "stability." Some of them had expected the Putin era to be like the Soviet past they remembered or imagined, the object of national nostalgia.

According to these memories, that time was slow, predictable, and essentially unchanging. But in Putin's era of "stability," things refused to stay the same. The markets crashed because Putin said or did something. Innocent, randomly chosen people went to prison just because the government had declared a witch hunt against pedophiles. The spectacle of the Putin-Medvedev handoff and the experience of the farcical election served as reminders of how powerless Russian citizens were to affect any aspect of life. The protests were an attempt to renegotiate, to reclaim a little bit of space from the ever-expanding party-state—and it so happened that the party was the one of crooks and thieves.

on December 15, Putin held his tenth annual hotline, a show during which he answered questions from a carefully screened audience and an equally well-screened selection of callers. Even though Putin had not formally been president for the last three years, these shows, starring Putin, had continued on schedule. Seryozha watched as for the first twenty minutes Putin fielded softball questions about the protests. He seemed a little unnerved at first, but then Seryozha thought that might have been wishful thinking on his part. Putin grew more confident as he talked. He even took credit for the protests: his regime had produced many active citizens. He promised to place a web camera at every polling station to assure the public that there would be no fraud during the upcoming presidential election. This was ridiculous: web cameras would be useless against most of the falsification practices. But at least they had forced him to respond. Maybe he was scared, after all.

The show's host had once been a brave young reporter at NTV. Seryozha remembered seeing him at that protest, when everyone found a way to promise never to give up. Now he was ten years older and twenty kilos heavier, sitting behind a desk at a state-channel studio, tense and eager next to Russia's most powerful man. The host read a question from a laptop screen in front of him:

During the protests in central Moscow people put on white ribbons. Those ribbons are almost like the symbol of a looming "color revolution" in Russia. Do you agree with this assessment? . . .

As far as "color revolutions," I think everything is clear. They are an established practice of destabilizing societies, and I think that this practice did not come out of nowhere. We know what happened during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. By the way, some of our opposition activists were in Ukraine at that time and held official positions as advisers to then president Yushchenko. They naturally try to transfer this practice to Russian soil. But to be frank, when I saw, on the screen, that some people were wearing something on their chest, I'll tell you honestly, even though it's inappropriate, but I thought that this was AIDS education, that they had, I'm sorry, that they had pinned contraceptives to their chests. I just couldn't understand why they had taken them out of their wrappers. But

then I got a closer look.²⁹

It got worse. Putin went on to claim that people had been paid to attend the protests and that the "opposition leaders" had humiliated them by calling out, "Sheep, go forth!" But Seryozha barely heard this, because he was already livid—at the obvious reference to Nemtsov, whose work in Ukraine was described as something akin to treason, but more than that, by the stupid condom joke.

From this point on, Seryozha was driven by rage. His rage focused on producing as many white ribbons as possible. There was a shortage. Retail shops all over Moscow had run out of white ribbons. People were wearing ribbons not just to protests but every day, to work and in the streets. They pinned them to their coats, tied them to their bags and to the antennae of their cars. Seryozha found wholesalers and bought large heavy rolls of ribbon, an inch wide and hundreds of yards long. Cutting the ribbon into tens of thousands of roughly six-inch strips was no trivial task. He invented a technique. He wound the ribbon around the back of a bentwood chair, thirty to fifty times over, and then made two strategic cuts—for as many as a hundred pieces at once. Then the ends of the strips had to be singed with a lighter, to keep them from fraying. Before the next planned protest, on December 24, Seryozha set up a workshop at his apartment. Several people he had met at a gathering called the Protest Workshop came to help. They also produced an instruction video and uploaded it to YouTube.

masha went to every action, protest, planning meeting, and related social occasion. Within two weeks of becoming an activist, she had started a new job, as press secretary to parliament member Ilya Ponomarev of A Just Russia, who had been speaking at the protests. She had joined the protest art group Pussy Riot. The all-woman open- membership collective staged guerrilla performances and posted videos online. In December, they sang on a garage roof outside the detention center where Navalny and other protesters were held. In January, they sang in Red Square; the song was called "Putin Pissed Himself." That time, like many other times, they were escorted to a police station and allowed to leave after a couple of hours. Next, Masha wanted them to stage an action in the parliament chamber. They would descend from one of the side boxes, in their mismatched multicolored tights and balaclavas, when the parliament was in session.

This action turned out to be harder to organize than Masha could have imagined. On February 21, Pussy Riot performed instead at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the gaudy giant wedding cake of a church near the Kremlin. They sang a song called "Punk Prayer," in which they pleaded with the Virgin to "chase Putin out." Their message was directed at the protesters as much as at anyone else. Rather than assemble in cordoned-off spaces, it said, be confrontational—go where you are not supposed to go and say what you are not supposed to say. In this case, they were confronting the church and state where church and state became one. The presidential election was two weeks away. The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church was campaigning for Putin.

On March 4, just before the polls opened, two members of Pussy Riot were placed under arrest on suspicion of felony hooliganism, a

charge that could carry up to seven years in prison. Masha was not one of them because she had not made it to the cathedral that day.

lyosha happened to be in kiev the first weekend of March, at a seminar in the Gender, Sexuality, and Power series. The election looked even more bizarre from a distance. Putin declared victory in the first round with 63 percent of the vote, and the white-ribbon crowd in Russia seemed shocked by this predictable outcome.

On March 8, International Women's Day, the participants staged a march down Kiev's main avenue. They marched for gender equality, LGBT rights, and freedom for Pussy Riot. There were maybe 150 of them, twice as many police, and, it looked to Lyosha, four times as many counterdemonstrators. It was the first time Lyosha marched for LGBT rights. It was also the first time he saw police protecting protesters rather than threatening them. He felt oddly inspired, despite having had to march through a tunnel of police in riot gear.

When he returned to Perm, his dean said nothing about the march. But she did suggest that it would be wise to change the title of the seminar when he put in the paperwork for where he had been.

seventeen

MASHA: MAY 6, 2012

in the morning Masha went to church. It was Sunday, the day before Putin's inauguration. The city was quiet—in the early days of May, Muscovites tend to their dachas, opening them up for the summer. Masha had borrowed an icon from one of the hundreds of people she had met in the last few months. He was a very wealthy man with good connections, one of many such men who were hedging their bets by helping the protests. They wanted to maintain useful relationships no matter who was in power. They gave generously to the online account opened by the protest organizers, so that after the December 10 Bolotnaya rally there was always good sound equipment and beautifully printed banners. This man kept saying to Masha that he would like to do something together—something, she took it to mean, protest-y. So she asked to borrow an icon from his famous collection of sixteenth-century Russian religious art. The man sent an icon and a bodyguard, who in this case was working as an icon-guard.

Masha took the icon and the guard and walked over to the church at the Monastery of the Holy Mandylion, a small and pretty church just by the Kremlin. She was going to engage in a fairly standard Orthodox practice, whereby an icon is brought to church for communal prayer: others pray to it and kiss it, and then it is, some believe, holier when it is returned to its regular home. While this was happening, a photographer, or a few photographers, were to snap pictures, and then Masha would explain what this was: a Prayer for the Constitution, Against Obscurantism.

People were praying. Masha was waiting for journalists to arrive, but they must have been running late. The owner of the icon called to scream at Masha for not warning him that this was an action related to Pussy Riot: in his calculus of hedging, this was too risky. The phone call meant that news of Masha's action had already leaked. She still did not have a good shot. She would have to consider this an unsuccessful action. Masha felt strangely serene despite her failure and despite being yelled at over the phone. It must be because I'm in church, she realized.

Just then, men in civilian clothing entered. Even the church caretaker recognized them: her lips curled in, changing her expression instantly from blissful to hostile. The men took Masha to the nearest police station, where they started shouting at her.

"You are defending those bitches, those whores who danced naked on the altar with their guitars! You belong with them!"

"Faggots!" Masha shouted in response. "It's faggots like you who are destroying Russia!"

Masha had worked out this technique over the course of five months and seven detentions. The first few times she found herself at a police station, she had tried to reason with her captors. Then one time she lost her cool and saw that shouting right back at them was much more effective. It destabilized the situation. Police officers did not expect detainees to scream at them, and Russian men did not expect women to scream at them, so the shouting broke their pattern. If she shouted in their language, hurling at them the same sorts of insults that they hurled at her, it worked even better.

They stopped shouting, and released her after three hours—the maximum amount of time they could hold her without booking. This was a relief, because Masha had a lot of work to do for the big march and rally planned for the afternoon.

masha was now an experienced, well-known, and occasionally jaded activist. In the winter, she got to observe the workings of the political machine, or what passed for one in Russia. As Ilya Ponomarev's press secretary, she attended the meetings of A Just Russia in parliament.

They were still talking about pedophilia. One of the deputies insisted that they needed to continue to push for chemical castration of convicted pedophiles. Yelena Mizulina, chairwoman of the Committee on the Family, was opposed. The other deputy accused her of caving to the pedophile lobby. She responded that she did more than anyone to protect the children. She had been the driving force behind the Law for the Protection of Children from Information That Harms Their Health and Development. The law had been passed back in 2010, but most of its provisions were going into effect later this year. All media, including books, magazines, and films, would need to be marked with a target age group—to prevent children from consuming harmful information. Now Mizulina was working to extend these restrictions and regulations to the Internet. This, and not chemical castration, was what protecting children was all about, she argued. Masha's sympathies were with Mizulina at these meetings.

Masha got to observe how money worked in the parliament. Members were either wealthy or kept. The state budget gave each parliament member 200,000 rubles a month for a staff of five. That worked out to just over $1,000 a month for each staff member, in a city that now prided itself on being among the world's most expensive. Rich parliamentarians paid their extensive staffs out of their own pockets, while the less rich accepted what they called "sponsorship" money for their aides and press secretaries. They were also likely to have a shadow staff of assistants who did not work or draw a salary but paid the parliament member themselves, in exchange for government credentials.

For Masha's boss, politics was the family business. Ponomarev hailed from Soviet nomenklatura stock: his grandfather was a diplomat and his father's brother was a member of the Central Committee leadership. Ilya himself became active in Soviet politics as a teenager, rising to the post of a city-level functionary in the Young Pioneers organization of Moscow. In the 1990s the entire family, including teenage Ilya, went into private business, to return to politics under Putin. Ilya's mother was an appointed member of the

upper house of parliament, and Ilya himself got a seat in the lower house in 2007 on A Just Russia's list.

In 2006, Ponomarev carried out a textbook preventive- counterrevolution operation when he staged an officially sanctioned gathering of anti-globalism activists in St. Petersburg during a G8 summit there. The Kremlin feared that protests would disrupt the summit but also did not want to stage an obvious crackdown on that occasion. So the police detained activists when they arrived in St. Petersburg by train and transported them to a suburban stadium, where Ponomarev was chairing the forum. Many of those who were delivered to the stadium were not anti-globalism activists at all, and members of Kasparov's United Civic Front were even ejected for chanting anti-Putin slogans, but for all the world to see—if anyone in the world could be bothered looking—St. Petersburg had a stadium full of anti-globalism activists gathering openly and legally, and Ilya Ponomarev was their leader.

On paper, most of Ponomarev's income came from consulting fees from state-funded institutions. In 2011, he declared an income of about $330,000, and in 2012 it went up to about $370,000^ But most of the money that Masha saw was in cash—stacks, piles, and briefcases of it—and it was not going to be reported on any income reporting forms. Ponomarev was surrounded by men Masha never would have taken seriously, especially because they were so impossibly serious themselves about their task: revolution. As far as she could tell, they thought that if they staged one, they would get laid. Some of these men said that they were anarchists, some said that they were hard-core communists, and some insisted that Masha should read a book called A Blow from Russian Gods. She looked it up. It was an antisemitic screed.² Masha figured that Ponomarev was spending time with these men because the more visible protest activists, knowing his history as a protest spoiler, tried to avoid him. It was either that or Ponomarev was purposefully siphoning off money and energy from the protests, like when he had started a parallel organizing committee back in December. At one point Masha

grew convinced that at least some of the money circulating through the office was coming from the Kremlin. She quit her job in March.

A few days later, a new amendment was proposed to the Law for the Protection of Children from Information That Harms Their Health and Development. This one would ban "propaganda of homosexuality." Now the "pedophile lobby" would finally be vanquished. Ponomarev supported the amendment.

of course masha had not expected that the protests would change the outcome of the presidential election, in which Putin was effectively unopposed. And yet she had. There were many protests in the three months between when she had declared herself an activist and the election. After Bolotnaya there was another rally, even larger than the first one. Then there was the White Ride, when cars decorated with white ribbons circled the Garden Ring, then a march, and then the White Ring, when people stood on the sidewalks of the Garden Ring, encircling the center of town. Then there was the election, which made it all feel useless and embarrassing. The protest held in Moscow on election day felt more like a wake.

People were talking about emigrating again, but Masha realized that for perhaps the first time in her life she wanted to stay in Russia. It was interesting here—even more interesting than doing a degree in educational psychology at Oxford might be. Not that Sergei would let her take Sasha out of the country to live. But her son was doing well in preschool, and Sergei, now that he was remarried, had resumed his parenting responsibilities. After Masha quit her job at Ponomarev's office, she and Anastasia went to India on vacation. They lay on the beach in Goa, but Moscow kept pinging. The multimillionaire with the icon collection wanted to start an organization called Russia for All, and wanted Masha to run it. A friend from Solidarity wanted to organize a protest. Everyone wanted to organize a protest, in fact. The big one. The one that would finally make a difference. It seemed there was only one chance left for that: the inauguration.

The city issued a permit for a march and rally on the eve of the inauguration. They would allow protesters to walk down Bolshaya

Yakimanka, the street that ran from the giant Lenin monument to Bolotny Island, and then to a rally at Bolotnaya Square.* Udaltsov, the guy who seemed to think he was Lenin, named the protest the March of Millions. People around the country were raising money so they could attend, but this was unlikely to make it large enough to justify the name. And what could the organizers do to make this one count, aside from giving it a grandiose name? As it was, they were having trouble convincing people to speak at the rally. "What's there to say?" they heard again and again. Two days before the march, five men— Kasparov, Navalny, Nemtsov, Udaltsov, and Yashin—gathered to discuss. Someone suggested staging a sit-in. Nemtsov and Udaltsov shot the idea down. Nemtsov refused to challenge the ethos of the nonconfrontational protest; Udaltsov frowned on the idea of passive resistance.

Masha's job was to get journalists to the press area in front of the stage. She was good at this: she knew all the reporters, all the reporters knew her, and she had a loud voice. She stood by the stage as people wandered in slowly from the march: there was always this moment of idleness, when everyone was trying to decide whether to stay for the rally or go to a cafe instead. A few teenagers from the Protest Workshop stationed themselves at the turnout from the street to the island with a couple of megaphones, and shouted out funny rhymed slogans to keep protesters entertained. Then there was commotion to Masha's right, just where the crowd was meant to turn. It seemed big. Or bad. The volunteers' two-way radios stopped working. Cellular networks were either jammed or overloaded—the phone was no use. Masha made her way over.

Navalny was sitting on the ground. He was surrounded by journalists with cameras and microphones. This did not suit his purposes. The journalists refused to either sit down or move out of the way. No one could see Navalny's sit-in, so no one was joining in. Masha looked at her iPhone: it was a little after five in the afternoon. The rally was supposed to start now.

Then there were blows. It did not feel serious—Masha had seen worse back in December—but the riot police had their rubber batons out and blows were landing. A baton reached over the shoulders of

people standing behind Masha and hit a woman on the head. The woman slumped and crumpled on the ground. Masha heard herself screaming.

"Call an ambulance!"

She turned around to face a helmeted head.

"Call an ambulance!"

A face behind the glass of the helmet came into focus.

"We don't have orders," it said.

Masha started screaming louder.

Someone threw a smoke grenade. How in the world had they managed to bring it in, through the metal detectors, the bag search, and the double cordon? Someone threw another object, which broke on contact with someone else's shoulder. It was a thermos liner, guaranteed to break into a thousand brittle pieces. Police were pushing from the back and from the sides. In front of Masha, Navalny and several other men, including Nemtsov and Yashin, were sitting on the ground. The woman was lying on the pavement. Masha was pushing back in every direction and screaming like she had never screamed before. The line of riot police parted for a moment and Masha was squeezed out to the other side, as the cops carried the unconscious woman out. The police closed ranks behind her. Masha stood in an emptiness. She was no longer screaming, and it was almost quiet.

Behind Masha, behind a ring formed by the riot police, fighting seemed to continue. In front of her, four rows of interior troops— eighteen-year-old conscripts in gray uniforms—stretched across the bridge that led over the Moscow River to the Kremlin. Behind them, orange street-washing vehicles formed another barrier. They were so afraid of the protesters in the Kremlin apparently that they thought they needed to wage war just to protect themselves. Masha walked toward the interior troops, holding up her iPhone to film them as she got closer.

"Russia has a constitution," she said to the conscripts. "You are violating it. The orders you've been given are criminal. After the Nuremberg trials, generals who gave criminal orders were hanged.

And our soldiers hanged German soldiers who had followed criminal orders. That's what happens to people who commit crimes."

"Orders are not to be discussed," said several of the conscripts in unison.

"Oh yes they are," said Masha. "They are too to be discussed, if they contradict the law of the land."

"No talking!"

The voice came from Masha's left. The conscripts visibly clammed up. She was now just a few steps from the front row of soldiers. She stopped and held her iPhone above her head, and kept filming.

"Step forward!" the invisible voice commanded.

The conscripts, arms linked, about 150 across, took a step toward her. Then another. Masha kept talking.

"You are violating your oath. You are just like the czar over there."

Masha became aware that she was being filmed by someone else, apparently a journalist. She could not see him, but she could hear his voice. He was worried for her. "Don't," he was saying. "They won't understand."

She kept talking.

"You guys are so young, much younger than I am, though I am not that old yet. You have no idea how frightening it is to live in this country, with that czar that you are guarding now, when you have a child."

"Step forward!"

"One more!"

Masha still had her arms up in the air, holding the iPhone aloft, and the boys' shoulders were now brushing her bare underarms. She could feel their titillation. She kept talking. She talked for another four minutes straight. The boys stood still and silent. Finally, a lieutenant came up, a blond guy with a heavy jaw, scarcely older than his soldiers.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"Where do you get your information?" Masha asked what seemed at the moment a logical question.

"There," said the lieutenant, and he nodded at the pavement for some reason. "Television," he added a moment later.

"Who controls the television?" This was the journalist with the video camera speaking.

"The authorities do," said the lieutenant.

Masha tried to point out to him that getting information about the authorities from the authorities might not be wise. After a few minutes, he asked the journalist to turn off his camera. Then he told Masha that the truth was found in the book Blows from the Russian Gods, the screed that had been recommended to Masha once before. It purported to "uncover the real crimes of the Jews," who had taken over the world. One subsection was called "The Sexual Traits of the Jews." It began with homosexuality: "Not only was homosexuality widespread among the ancient Jews but it was known to take over entire cities, such as Sodom and Gomorrah, for example." The lieutenant told Masha that every soldier in his platoon had received a copy of this book.³

may 6 was a long day. It began with being dragged in to the police for praying for the wrong things, continued with an intimate conversation with six hundred interior troops, and went on to another police station, where Navalny and Nemtsov had been taken. Some people from the protest had walked here on their own and were milling around outside. One had a megaphone: the Protest Workshop had bought more than a dozen of them at one point. Masha took the megaphone, fished a copy of the Constitution out of her shoulder bag, and began declaiming, starting with Article 31. She was carried right into the station. Nemtsov and Navalny were in the holding cell, and Masha was instructed to wait outside it, in what might have been called the lobby. She put the Constitution back in her bag, fished out a copy of Time magazine's "World's Most Influential People: 2012" issue,⁴ opened it to the page with Navalny's picture on it, handed it to him, and told him to look serious. It was a good photograph, with Navalny's forearm stuck through the bars, his hand holding the magazine, his face somber and a little wistful. She e-mailed it to her boyfriend, who was a photographer with the Associated Press. The following day the picture was published all over the world.⁵

Maybe the most important thing that had happened to Masha since she became an activist was that she had fallen in love. Sergey was somewhere out there today, documenting the carnage. It went well into the night, when police continued to chase people down side streets. More than six hundred were detained, more than fifty hospitalized, though many more had been injured.⁶ The day never ended, in fact. Most people were released, and some continued to protest the following day, all over the center of town. Riot police detained people merely for wearing white ribbons. Groups of police in bulletproof vests and helmets chased groups who seemed merely to be strolling through the town, loaded them onto buses, took them to police stations, released them three hours later without booking, and started all over again. Nemtsov was detained while drinking coffee at a sidewalk cafe; riot police turned over tables in the process.⁷ Masha spent the day riding around on a kick scooter. She read the Constitution to riot police, got detained, gave interviews, got detained. Meanwhile, in the Kremlin, Putin was inaugurated for his official third presidential term.

masha was in love. The cat-and-mouse game with the police continued for another couple of weeks. For a few days, people even set up an Occupy-style camp (though without the tents, because that would be illegal), and then that was broken up. And Masha was still in love. She took Sasha to her mother-in-law, who had a dacha a couple of hours outside Moscow, and then she and Sergey went on their first trip together. He was photographing the European Cup, which was held in Ukraine and Poland that year. Masha liked Donetsk, the eastern Ukrainian city where a new stadium had been built for the tournament⁸ and the airport had been refurbished.⁹ The city looked like a glossy-magazine version of Europe. Masha had a seat in the fan zone. She had never imagined that she would find soccer mesmerizing, but she did. She told Sergey that she could physically feel the release of testosterone all around her. It was an awesome trip.

masha flew back from Poland on June 10, because she was scheduled to attend the summer session of the Moscow School for Political Studies, a gathering of like-minded journalists and social scientists held just outside the city. Masha's phone rang at eight-fifteen on June 11. It was Nemtsov's assistant.

"Everyone's apartment is being searched," she said. Police had come to Navalny's, Udaltsov's, Yashin's, and other activists' apartments. They had come to Nemtsov's, too, but he was out of town.— Masha had an excruciating hangover. She had told Aishat, the nanny, not to open the door if anyone rang the bell—even though Sasha was at his grandmother's dacha for the summer, Aishat, who had fled Baku in 1990, when her husband was killed in the pogroms there, always stayed the summer with her employer. Aishat was not picking up. Masha lay on the bed, waves of sleep and nausea floating over her.

Her phone rang again. She did not recognize the number.

"Hello, Maria Nikolaevna. This is Captain Timofei Vladimirovich Grachev from Head Investigative Directorate. You are suspected of inciting, organizing, and participating in a riot. A subpoena has been left at your place of residence, with Baku native Aishat." He pronounced the nanny's patronymic and last name: "Who appears to be residing there without proper registration."

"Go fuck yourself," said Masha, and hung up.

Aishat still was not answering. Masha lay on the bed some more, then sat up and called the investigator back.

"Look, I haven't seen any subpoena. I'll think about whether I want to talk to you after the weekend." It was the Monday of a long holiday weekend—the next workday was two days away.

It was past noon by the time Aishat picked up. She said she was very sorry: she knew she was not supposed to open the door, but the police were banging on it with something heavy and she thought they might break it down. She was very sorry, but she was quitting. Masha said she was very sorry too and would pay Aishat three months' severance.

Masha was most concerned that the police had found her stash of pot. As it turned out, they had not taken it. Nor had they taken any of a number of financial documents that would have been sufficient to slap together a case against her. What they did take: fifteen white ribbons, a bag of black round buttons with pink triangles—activists had started wearing them to signify their opposition to the proposed "propaganda of homosexuality" amendment—a copy of Nemtsov's Putin: An Accounting, and an old laptop where Masha stored Sasha's study aids and all the photographs she had taken of him since birth. They took printed photographs too: Masha's pregnancy, Masha's marriage, and every single photo of Tatiana that Masha had.

captain grachev was a lanky guy around Masha's age, with good hair and a lousy haircut. He had been dispatched to Moscow from the prosecutor's office in the Tver region, three hours away, to help investigate the Bolotnoye case. It was apparently going to be big. He told Masha that he had just arrived in Moscow when he was sent to search her apartment.

"When I saw those pink triangles, I thought it was some children's game or something, and put them back," he said. But there was a more experienced Moscow officer there. "He says, 'Are you kidding? That's the LGBT movement.' I was like, 'What's LGBT?' He goes, 'Just take it.'" A few weeks into their frequent meetings Masha and Captain Grachev were so comfortable with each other that Masha asked him why he had not taken the marijuana as evidence from her apartment.

"We didn't even take cocaine from another search," he explained. "That's not what we were there for. They told us to look for political propaganda."

Masha and Captain Grachev were using the informal pronoun to address each other. He even allowed Masha to visit her son at the dacha. Other defendants in her case—she did not know them, but she knew that they existed—were under arrest, and Masha was lucky simply to be restricted to staying in Moscow. She had been unable to go to a friend's dacha on the tenth anniversary of Tatiana's death: she

hated the idea of being alone or with the wrong people that day, but she hated the idea of asking for permission even more. But later she grew more comfortable, and she missed Sasha so much.

Masha's mother-in-law, like Masha's ex-husband, was a chemist. She worked for an applied-science institute that was not high on the academic socioeconomic ladder, which meant that the village where its staff researchers were allotted plots was a fair distance from Moscow, all the way in the Tver region. In fact, the institute ruled over only half the village—the other half belonged to the prosecutor's office. This was how Masha's mother-in-law came to spend her summers next door to a colonel from the Investigative Committee in the city of Konakovo, Tver region. Masha had met the colonel over the course of several summers. Her name was Natalia, she was forty or so, and she took care of her sixty-year-old mother and eighty-year- old grandmother as well as two kids: her own young daughter and a boy Sasha's age, the son of Natalia's sister who had a bad drug problem. Natalia seemed to work like a dog without taking any interest in the substance of her work: she cared only that she had a lot of mouths to feed. When she was not working, she was sleeping. In between, she smoked cigarettes, a habit that she kept secret from her mother and grandmother. Masha was her smoking buddy.

"Hey, you are part of the Bolotnoye case, aren't you?" she asked when they were having a cigarette Masha's first night at the dacha. It was cool and quiet and you could see the stars.

"Yeah," said Masha.

"Who is your investigator?"

"Grachev."

"Ah, Timokha!" Natalia's voice sang with the joy of recognition. "He is one of mine. I had to send three people. It's a big case. He doing his job?"

"Oh, he is doing his job, all right."

"Good. Say hi to him there."

The following morning, when Masha woke up in her loft bed, there were three six-year-old children playing below. She listened to their voices. They were playing with Legos. One of those children is my son and another is the son of the boss of the man who will send

me to prison for two years, she thought. It sounded complicated, but it was so simple: she was passing to another side of existence easily, surrounded by familiar faces all the way.

she had to report to Captain Grachev's office twice a week, at ten in the morning. He would name names and ask Masha if she knew the person. If she had the person's permission, she would say yes. If not, she would say that she did not recall—and often, she did not. Captain Grachev would give her things to look at: "Please familiarize yourself." Then he would place an object in front of her—like, say, the flag of the Libertarian Party. Why? She did not know, and he probably did not either. Then there was an endless parade of police photographs. Sheet after sheet of typing paper with two or three photographs glued to each. Other people's bedrooms, desks, closets, letters, pictures, other people's white ribbons. They belonged to Masha's co-defendants. The photographs were taken during searches of their apartments. Somewhere else in this building, or across town, a dozen strangers were looking at pictures of Sasha's bedroom and pictures of pictures of Tatiana. Then there were photographs of all the material evidence recovered at Bolotnaya, the debris of thousands of people under attack: broken cigarette lighters, crushed Bic pens, lost passports that had been stomped upon by a thousand feet. Object after object that had no meaning to Masha, in poor resolution, under a flickering neon light. The point of this is to drown me in senselessness, thought Masha.

Starting on December 20, Masha was required to appear at Captain Grachev's office daily. She dropped Sasha off at the English- language preschool, had coffee with the journalist mothers, and then they went to work while she went to the Investigative Committee. She was no longer living in the apartment where she grew up. There had been many reasons to get out after the search. One was that a woman from social services had come around and told Masha that she had information that Masha was bisexual and therefore an unfit parent. Another was that the logistics of her life no longer allowed her to live so far from the center of the city. At first she stayed with

Sergey, but, of course, Sergey had not signed up for this—the constant surveillance, the telephone harassment, and a girlfriend who could not leave the legal limits of the city. So now Masha was renting an apartment in town.

She was reading the case, one giant binder at a time. It amused her at first, this experience of viewing what had been her life for six months—the protests and the people in them—through the eyes of people who could not comprehend it. Everything seemed sinister to them. They were scared of white ribbons and Twitter. But this got tired fast. The binders kept coming. The drowning sensation intensified. Masha wanted to sign the forms without reading, but the investigator who was in the room with her at all times told her this was not allowed. This guy was a senior lieutenant—one step below Captain Grachev, and a couple of years younger—sent there from Bryansk, in southwestern Russia. Masha's eyes hurt from reading, so she kept talking with him. He and his wife had been trying to get pregnant for years, and it was not working. Now they were on to IVF, and it still was not taking. Masha had had this experience herself. She tried to reassure the senior lieutenant.

At the end of winter her savings ran out. She went to ask Nemtsov for a job. She needed an employer who could understand her unconventional schedule, and she knew that Nemtsov's organization was getting some money from an American democracy-building fund. He said that there was not enough money to hire her but he could introduce her to a friend who ran a restaurant chain. Masha was willing to wait tables, but even at a restaurant she could not make her hours work. She posted in an online community for foreign correspondents in Moscow: "I want to work as a fixer." Many of these people knew her and knew that she spoke English and could get access to anyone and anything. She started getting some work. It was not enough, and friends lent her money too. Once she had watched a few journalists at work, she realized that she could try doing what they did. She started writing for a Moscow city magazine and then for TV Rain, an independent television channel that, since its founding just a couple of years earlier, had assembled an audience of millions

even though the channel was available only to cable and satellite viewers.

The trial began on June 2, more than a year after the protest at the center of the case. Masha saw her co-defendants. Ten men, ranging in age from college student to retiree, were squeezed into a plastic aquarium. They stood, holding their hands behind their backs, the way inmates do when they face law enforcement. All of them had spent the last year behind bars. Another co-defendant, eighteen at the time of her arrest, had spent the year under house arrest. Masha felt piercing guilt. How could she have been feeling sorry for herself, feeling like she deserved other people's sympathy and help, when she had been allowed to walk around and see her child every night this last year?

The trial did not feel that different from the investigation. Masha had seen the women of Pussy Riot on trial a year earlier. That had been bizarre, a veritable witch trial, but it had a dramaturgy to it. This trial had no rhythm, no beginning or end. Most days passed in arguments between lawyers and the judge about admissibility, order of admissibility, and the like. None of it seemed connected to the case, absurd as the case was. The defendants' charges ranged from "participation in public unrest" to "use of force against authorities," with potential sentences of up to five years. There were too many defendants and too many lawyers, and they were all too different to be able to coordinate their actions. At first, they tried. When the oldest of the men in the aquarium, Sergei Krivov, declared that he was boycotting the court and refused to answer any questions, the rest of them went silent too. But the next day Krivov broke his pledge without warning.

Journalists soon grew tired of the proceedings—there was nothing to report—and stopped coming. Every so often, Masha would write an outraged Facebook post to the effect that these twelve people had been abandoned, and some journalists and activists would show up for a day or two. Then they would return to their lives.

Sasha started first grade at one of the better public schools in town. Fortunately, the school was on the same Metro line as the

court. But then the trial was moved to a courthouse on the outskirts, and the length of Masha's morning commute tripled.

Everyone referred to it as the Bolotnoye case—the "swampy case." Exactly. Even the drowning was protracted and amorphous. Masha's body began to betray her. She developed sores. By November she was throwing up blood. The doctors said they could find nothing wrong with her.

PART SIX

CRACKDOWN

eighteen

SERYOZHA: JULY 18, 2013

after may 6, 2012, there was shock, then the fog of the summer and the Bolotnoye arrests—within a few months, more than two dozen people had been charged (their cases were subdivided and they faced trial in smaller groups). It took about six months for the shock to subside and the fog to settle sufficiently for activists to conduct their own investigation of what had happened.

In December 2012, a group of twenty-six people assembled into an investigating committee. They included actors, scholars, a poet, former dissidents, and several journalists. Each was known to be a person of integrity. Their task was to review thousands of pages of documents, including about six hundred eyewitness interviews collected by activists, media reports, amateur and professional video, and the Bolotnoye case itself.

The committee determined that nearly thirteen thousand troops had been assembled in Moscow that day, more than eight thousand of them in and around Bolotnaya Square. This included over five thousand riot police and about twenty-five hundred interior troops; the rest were traffic police or police academy cadets. There were probably three unarmed protesters, at most, for each armed man in uniform. Troops had been brought in from as far away as the Russian Far East.

Unbeknownst to the protest organizers, police had set up a second row of metal-detector frames at the turnoff from the march route to Bolotnaya Square. A large part of Bolotny Island that had been used during past rallies was cordoned off. Between these two measures, the police had created a bottleneck that first slowed the march down and then brought it to a standstill. Speakers could not physically get to the stage. This was why Udaltsov and then Navalny had called for a sit-in.

It was clear from the video footage reviewed by the committee that Navalny was not the only or even the first person to sit down, as it had seemed to Masha; at least a hundred people were sitting down at one point or another, but their actions were not planned or coordinated. They were separated by groups of people who continued standing, and they themselves kept sitting down and getting up, apparently unsure of what was happening and what should be done.¹ But the police had received orders to start arresting people even before the sit-in began—this the committee gathered from one officer's testimony at the Bolotnoye case trial. In other words, contrary to what Masha and many other protesters had thought, they had not brought it upon themselves: the police had acted first. The question was whether the violence had been planned in advance. Many eyewitnesses reported seeing young men who they thought had infiltrated the protest. Some said that these men had been waved through by the police, bypassing the metal detectors and the searches. These young men seemed to be the ones who had brought in the smoke grenades and breakable bottles that helped spark the violence. The committee concluded that the violence had been planned and instigated by the authorities.²

on may 7, 2012, as riot police continued to hunt down people with white ribbons in central Moscow, Putin was inaugurated. That day he signed twelve decrees, including one in which he directed the foreign ministry to pursue a policy of vigilance in relationship to the United States and NATO; one in which he directed the cabinet to introduce a mandatory Russian-language and history exam for migrant workers; and one in which he ordered the cabinet "to secure a rise of the cumulative fertility rate to 1.753 by the year 2018."³ Then Putin met with International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge. The meeting, held in the Kremlin, was Putin's first after formally retaking office.

"In spite of what has been happening in our internal politics, I want to reassure you that the presidential administration, the cabinet, and I personally will make preparations for the 2014 Olympic Games our top priority," said Putin. "We consider this very important. Our work together will continue."⁴

Putin had scarcely mentioned the protests in the months since December, but speaking to Rogge he betrayed the fear that to foreigners Russia must appear to have descended into chaos. Putin had personally traveled to Guatemala City back in 2007 to present Russia's bid for the 2014 Winter Games—in English and French. It had been a bizarre speech—following the standard promises of world- class facilities and an emphatic reminder of how popular winter sports are in Russia, Putin had brought up the losses Russia had suffered in history, if not in sports: "Let me point out that after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia has lost all sports venues in the mountains. Would you believe it? Even today our national teams have no mountain venues in Russia for training."⁵

Giving the Olympics to Russia, it would follow, was a form of compensation for its losses, a way to restore its physical sports facilities and its national grandeur. The symbolic significance of such a project warranted meeting with the head of the International Olympic Committee before anyone else, as soon as Putin became president again.

Then Putin played hockey. He had taken up this winter sport just a year and a half earlier, but, playing for a team of amateurs against Russia's all-star team, he managed to score two goals and bring his team to victory.⁶

The following day, Putin asked the parliament to confirm Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister. "We did everything openly," said Putin, referring to having declared the intention to swap offices back in September. "There was nothing about it that could be construed as manipulation." He did not mention the protests directly, but his reference to their accusations of electoral fraud and general theft was clear: How could something be crooked if it was obvious? After the parliament confirmed Medvedev, Putin stayed and talked business. Business was mostly the economy and demographics. On the economy, Putin reproached parliament members for proposing legislation that showed a lack of understanding of basic economic facts. On demographics, Putin praised himself, Medvedev, and the parliament for having raised the fertility rate. "This is the result of sensible policies," he said, referring to the cash payments to women for having a second child. He suggested that it might be time to consider paying women in some parts of Russia to have a third child too.⁷

Next day was Victory Day. The podium from which Putin spoke in Red Square was erected closer to the multicolored St. Basil's Cathedral—Putin did not stand on the Lenin Mausoleum like the Politburo used to, but otherwise the look and feel of the Soviet-era military parade had been restored. So had the scale and the symbolism: the parade once again served to demonstrate Russia's might and affirm its right:

We have the great moral right to be principled and insistent in defending our positions, because it was our country that bore the

brunt of the fight against Nazism The young people of today are

the heirs of the true freedom fighters We will always be faithful

to their valor, and that means that we have a future.* . . . Glory to Russia!

Fourteen thousand men shouted "Hooray!" three times in perfect unison, and the Russian national anthem—the restored Soviet anthem—began playing.⁸

The Victory Day Parade had evolved since Yeltsin renewed the practice in 1999 and Putin took the reins in 2000. In his first parade speech, Putin had focused on the importance of the holiday to all Russians. At his second parade, in 2001, he ended the speech with "Glory to Russia!"—a slogan that until then had been the mark of fringe ultranationalist organizations. As the years wore on, the focus of the speech shifted to the present day, to the need to be vigilant.

The number of troops grew, from about five thousand in 2003 to eight thousand in 2008 and fourteen thousand in 2012. In 2007, the year of the Munich speech in which Putin accused NATO of betrayal and aggression, he used his parade speech for the first time to make a transparent reference to the United States. He did not name the country, but said that, just as in the times of the Third Reich, there was a country that has "pretensions to global exceptionalism and command." In 2008, the year of the war in Georgia, a parade of military equipment—a long procession of tanks and rockets—was added to the Red Square pageant for the first time since the Soviet era. This was also the year Medvedev formally became president, so he and Putin now stood together at the podium, microphones distributed to both of them as though both were speaking at the same time. It was Medvedev who gave the speech for the next four years, though. He did not end it with "Glory to Russia," opting for "Happy Day of the Great Victory" instead. In 2010, the sixty-fifth anniversary of victory, foreign heads of state joined in the celebration in Red Square. That day, an air show was added to the parade, the evening fireworks were extended from ten to fifteen minutes, and for the first time an "all-Russian Victory Day Parade" was declared—full military parades were held in nineteen cities and smaller military marches in fifty-two. The air show was repeated every year after that, and so was the all-Russian parade, in an ever-growing number of cities.⁹ The day after Victory Day, Putin flew to the Urals to visit UralVagonZavod, a factory that had just received a large new military contract. The factory made armored personnel carriers, tanks, and modified tanks called Terminator, with two guns instead of the usual one plus two grenade launchers, and Terminator-2, with two guns and four rockets on two launchers. Back in December, Putin's marathon televised hotline—the one that began with his confession that he had mistaken white ribbons for condoms—ended with a video call-in question from the factory floor of UralVagonZavod. In a colorized re-creation of the Soviet industrial aesthetic, about sixty men had stood together, wearing identical black-and-orange

uniforms, freshly ironed, and one man standing in the middle spoke for them. He wore a tie under his uniform jacket.

I am Igor Kholmanskikh. I am head of the assembly shop. . . . I have a question that's causing me heartache. Back when we were having a hard time, Vladimir Vladimirovich, you came to our plant and helped us. Today . . . we treasure our stability and we don't want to go back in time. I want to say something about those protests. If the police don't know how to do their jobs, if they can't do anything about the protests, then my men and I are prepared to come out in defense of our stability.

"Come on over," Putin had said, smiling.¹⁰ The men of the factory had gone on to form a committee in defense of Putin, who, they wrote in their manifesto, was under attack from "do-nothings in Moscow."¹¹ In fact, protests were also under way in Nizhny Tagil, the city of roughly three hundred thousand where UralVagonZavod was located: between a hundred and a hundred fifty people had come out on December 10, the day of the first big Bolotnaya protest in Moscow.¹² Sticking to the narrative that protests were staged only by the idle rich of the big cities, the men of UralVagonZavod had planned to mount their tanks and ride to a pro-Putin counter-rally in the nearest large city of Yekaterinburg. They were asked to leave the tanks home,¹³ but now that Putin was once again president, his first visit outside Moscow was one of gratitude—to UralVagonZavod. The men at the plant wished Putin Happy Victory Day, praised his hockey game, and mentioned the protesters again.

"They are just doing their jobs," said Putin, meaning that protesters were working for money—state television channels had by this time aired a series of reports claiming that the protests were bankrolled by the U.S. State Department.

"The country needs stability, and you are certainly the only person who can give it to us," said one of the men.¹⁴ A week later Putin appointed Kholmanskikh his plenipotentiary in the Urals—a miraculous career move for the head of the assembly shop. In the past, only trusted senior officials, a majority of them retired military brass, had been appointed to these posts. Kholmanskikh was now in charge of six Russian regions with a total population of over fourteen million, and their six governors.

On May 10, while Putin was at UralVagonZavod, the parliament was asked to pass a set of amendments to the Law on Public Gatherings. They raised the fines for violating rules on public gatherings to as much as the equivalent of $1,500—backbreaking for most Russians—and they changed the definition of "public gathering" to allow the police to classify any group of people as engaging in one. The bill sped through parliament like probably no piece of legislation ever had. It became law on June 9, three days before a protest march planned to commemorate Russia's 1990 declaration of sovereignty.¹⁵

The crackdown proceeded swiftly. After the law on public gatherings came a law that required nongovernmental organizations that received foreign funding to register as "foreign agents," which, in turn, would subject them to paralyzing financial reporting requirements and would serve as a scarlet letter: such organizations would have to add "foreign agent" to all their public communications, which would presumably range from business cards to op-ed articles. In August, the women of Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years' imprisonment for "hooliganism," becoming the first people to receive years in jail for peaceful protest. All along, more people were being arrested in the Bolotnoye case. In September, the Law for the Protection of Children from Information went into effect; by this time, it had been amended to extend to the Internet. In November, laws on espionage and high treason were amended so that their wording reverted to that of the 1930s, when thousands of people were executed on trumped-up charges. Under the new law, working for an international organization whose activities Russia considered to be hostile could open one up to charges of high treason. A month earlier, Russia had ordered the United States Agency for International Development to cease operations in the country—now the new law could conceivably be used against any of the organization's Russian employees or its numerous Russian associates. The new law also made it possible to apply espionage charges to people who obtained classified information without intent to share it with a foreign state, and those who culled information from open sources.¹⁶ In December, ostensibly in response to a new American law introducing sanctions against Russian officials guilty of "gross violations of human rights"— the so-called Magnitsky Act, named for the accountant who was tortured to death in a Moscow jail—Russia passed a law that forbade the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans and also gave the government the right to summarily shut down nongovernmental organizations if they received any funding from American organizations or individuals. The international monitoring organization Human Rights Watch called the developments of 2012 the "worst crackdown since the Soviet era."¹⁷

The new laws were the perfect tools of a crackdown: vague enough to put millions on notice, they could be applied only selectively. But the laws, and the discussions in parliament and on television that accompanied their passage, served as messages. They signaled that the Kremlin was in charge, that strict order was being reconstituted. They also seemed to signal to the people of Russia that it was time for them to become enforcers. In Yekaterinburg, a group of parents formed a committee to demand that a number of books be removed from stores and their publishers prosecuted. The books included Israeli author David Grossman's young-adult novel Someone to Run With, in which one of the characters is a teenage heroin addict; American authors Lynda and Area Madaras's "What's Happening to My Body?" books; and three other books about puberty. A court eventually threw the case out, but by this time one of the publishers had pulped the pressrun and the others had spent fortunes on mounting a defense of their books. Similar cases began popping up around the country. To survive, publishers—especially the publishers of children's books, who risked running afoul of the new Law for the Protection of Children from Information, had to stop publishing books for which they might get dragged into court. The new law, among other things, forbade any mention of death in books for children under the age of twelve. "Naturalistic" description of the human body was also off-limits. Publishers, who could be destroyed by one big lawsuit or even a few pulped pressruns, were well-advised to exercise an overabundance of caution. With vigilant citizens throwing fits in the stacks in one city after another, bookstores and libraries also had to err on the side of caution.¹⁸ Self-censorship was collective hostage-taking in one of its purest forms. It had kicked back in.

yuri levada had theorized that periodic protests did not change the structure of Soviet society. Gudkov had developed this idea further: periodic protests were in fact essential to maintaining the structure of society. No matter how restrictive the Russian regime was in any given period, after a while some tension would accumulate between institutions of authority and society (for lack of a better word—in a country with a nearly absent public sphere Gudkov wished there were a term for "society" that did not immediately call to mind a Western society). This tension represented society's potential for change. At times like these, argued Levada, society would go from a state of calm to a state of arousal. The regime invariably responded by using force.

Force could be used inside the country, as when people were arrested, institutions shuttered or purged, and laws became more restrictive; or outside the country, when war was waged. The effect was the same either way—society, which had become more complicated, reverted to a radically simplified state: us, them, and our leader, who shoulders all our responsibility and has all our trust. This made society as a whole feel better. Calm was restored. Change was prevented. Troublemakers were stopped. Gudkov started calling the process "abortive modernization." Crackdowns occurred at regular intervals during the Soviet period, as did wars. Gudkov's own research career, and Levada's project of creating a sociology school, were aborted by one such crackdown in the late 1960s—following the protests in Prague and demonstrations of support for them in Moscow. There were only a few arrests then—most people were punished by having to give up or curtail their intellectual work. The rest simply fell into step. This was the way state terror worked after Stalin: it was enough to punish a few to neutralize the many.

The periodic eruptions, followed by use of force that precluded change, continued after the Soviet Union collapsed. Gudkov was now rethinking the history of that collapse. If one viewed the period of perestroika and the first post-Soviet year as a period of societal "arousal," then the show of force occurred in 1993, when Yeltsin shelled the parliament building. It had the effect one would expect: society felt radically simplified, Yeltsin affirmed his role as leader— though the Russian vozhd' or even the German Ftihrer was really the word Gudkov had in mind—and, as always happens in times of radical simplification, nationalism flourished. This explained the success of Zhirinovsky's party in the 1993 election. The war in Georgia, in 2008, served a similar function. Wars were almost as good as crackdowns because they discredited anyone who wanted to complicate things. This was Gudkov's depressing and, he had to admit, radical idea: the last century could be viewed as a continuity, with periodic bumps of "aborted modernization," and the society he had been studying his entire adult life had stayed essentially the same. What made this idea radical was that no one wanted to hear it.

if the people who took to the streets all over Russia in 2011-2012 were protesting, whether they used the word or not, the totalitarian essence of the society in which they found themselves living, then the form and slogans of the protests were not as illogical as they had seemed to Masha. If one of the features of a totalitarian regime is that it politicizes every aspect of life, then protest that strove to be apolitical was an appropriate response. If a feature of a totalitarian regime was that it eliminated all space that belonged to people apart from the state, then holding protests in cordoned-off spaces was not such a strange idea: the very ability to negotiate such a space could be a victory. It stands to reason that the crackdown began with the annulment of that negotiation and the physical destruction of the protest space.

Even the use of the word "stability" by both the protesters and their opponents had a long history in the theory and reality of totalitarianism. Arendt pointed out that both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes conducted periodic purges or crackdowns, which she called "an instrument of permanent instability." Constant flux was necessary for the system's survival: "The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop—one which might, after a time, lose its bastard qualities and take its place among the widely differing and profoundly contrasting ways of life of the nations of the earth." Indeed, she wrote, "The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability."¹⁹

When protesters were asking for their "stability" back, it was this normalization that they demanded. But when a Putin foot soldier from UralVagonZavod said that the protesters must be crushed because only Putin could guarantee stability, he was reaching for the vision of the leader, literally asking to be mobilized by him then and there.

social scientists both inside Russia and outside it scoffed at the word "totalitarian" as applied to post-Soviet Russia. Even "authoritarian" was controversial. Soon after the crackdown began, the phrase "hybrid regime" came into vogue. The original term, coined by journalist Fareed Zakaria in a 1997 essay, was "illiberal democracy." Zakaria emphasized the distinction between democracy, a way of selecting governments through free and open elections, and liberalism, the political project of safeguarding individual freedoms. The two did not necessarily go together. Political theory had long acknowledged the existence of liberal autocracies, such as the Austro- Hungarian Empire, for example. It was time to recognize that the corollary could also exist. Zakaria cited the examples of Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Peru, among others, as countries where democratically elected leaders had consistently violated constitutional limits of power that had been put in place to safeguard individual freedoms. He noted that Russia, too, was at risk:

In 1993 Boris Yeltsin famously (and literally) attacked the Russian parliament, prompted by parliament's own unconstitutional acts. He then suspended the constitutional court, dismantled the system of local governments, and fired several provincial governors. From the war in Chechnya to his economic programs, Yeltsin has displayed a routine lack of concern for constitutional procedure and limits. He may well be a liberal democrat at heart, but Yeltsin's actions have created a Russian super-presidency. We can only hope

his successor will not abuse it.²⁰

The obvious issue with the idea of "illiberal democracy" was that, once a democratically elected government began curtailing freedoms, it was unlikely to continue having truly free and open elections—even if, technically, elections occurred at regular intervals. After all, even the Soviet Union had elections, which, according to the constitution, were direct and conducted by secret ballot: "No control over the expression of will of the voter is allowed," said Article 99. And there was never a more literal illustration of Arendt's thesis that totalitarian regimes rob their subjects of will: every candidate on the Soviet ballot invariably ran unopposed.

In Putin's Russia, most elections had been eliminated altogether: governors and senators were now appointed and the lower house of parliament was formed by parties, through a largely depersonalized form of voting. The candidate for president also in effect ran unopposed in every election beginning with the year 2000. Still, there were banners, billboards, concerts, and other accoutrements of a campaign, and there were ballots. It looked more like a Western democracy, but felt more like the Soviet Union. After a while, the term "hybrid regime" supplanted "liberal democracy."

In Russia, the term "hybrid regime" was popularized by Ekaterina Shulman, a young political scientist. She wrote that

a hybrid regime is the authoritarian regime in the new historical moment. We know the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes: the former rewards passivity and the latter rewards mobilization. A totalitarian regime demands participation: if you do not march the march and sing the songs, then you are not

a loyal citizen. An authoritarian regime, on the other hand, tries to convince its subjects to stay home. Whoever marches too energetically or sings too loudly is suspect, regardless of the

ideological content of the songs and the direction of the march.²¹

Shulman was reiterating Juan Linz's definition of the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, but omitting his distinction between the all-political nature of totalitarianism and the nonpolitical nature of authoritarianism. Hybrid regimes were fakers, wrote Shulman, but Western observers tend to focus on only one aspect of the fakery: that of democracy. "It's easy to notice that the facade of democracy is made of papier-mache," she wrote. "But it's harder to understand that Stalin's mustache is glued on." The amount of force applied by the Putin regime, she argued, was negligible by the standards of the twentieth century. A few dozen political prisoners was to totalitarian terror what the quadrennial election of Putin was to functioning democracy. The hybrid regime survived by imitating both democracy and totalitarianism strategically in varied measure, she argued.

Other terms used to describe the Putin regime were "kleptocracy" and "crony capitalism"—variations on Navalny's theme of the "Party of Crooks and Thieves." A Hungarian sociologist named Balint Magyar rejected these terms because, he stressed, both "kleptocracy" and "crony capitalism" implied a sort of voluntary association—as though one could partake in the crony system or choose not to, and proceed with one's business autonomously, if less profitably. The fate of Khodorkovsky and the exiled oligarchs, as well as of untold thousands of jailed and bankrupted entrepreneurs, demonstrated that this was a fallacy.

Magyar, who was born in 1952, grew up in Hungary, a relatively less repressive Eastern Bloc country. This allowed him to be well educated as a sociologist. But in the late 1970s Magyar became active in underground opposition politics and was duly punished: banned from teaching at the university and banned from traveling to the West. Eastern European societies became his area of specialization. In the late 1980s, as a founding member of the Alliance of Free

Democrats—Hungarian Liberal Party, Magyar was part of the democratic transition in his country. In the 2000s, the party gradually lost ground and finally ceased to exist, and Magyar returned to sociology. Under the new regime of Viktor Orban, he was once again persona non grata at the university, and once again focused on a study of Eastern European societies.

He had an intense dislike for terms like "illiberal," which focused on traits the regimes did not possess—like free media or fair elections. This he likened to trying to describe an elephant by saying that the elephant cannot fly or cannot swim—it says nothing about what the elephant actually is. Nor did he like the term "hybrid regime," which to him seemed like an imitation of a definition, since it failed to define what the regime was ostensibly a hybrid of.²²

Magyar developed his own concept: the "post-communist mafia state." Both halves of the designation were significant: "post- communist" because "the conditions preceding the democratic big bang* have a decisive role in the formation of the system. Namely that it came about on the foundations of a communist dictatorship, as a product of the debris left by its decay."²³ The ruling elites of post- communist states most often hail from the old nomenklatura, be it Party or secret service. But to Magyar this was not the countries' most important common feature: what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power. Consolidating power and resources was relatively simple because these countries had just recently had a Party monopoly on power and a state monopoly on property. This created unique conditions:

In the case of other autocratic systems, either . . . private property is converted to property quasi belonging to the state, or the formal distribution of property is left more-or-less untouched. . . . However, no historical example can be found of an instance where state property is transformed en-masse on the basis of dubious norms—at least so far as their social acceptance is concerned. When the intention is to create a layer of private owners, it seems as if they

were intent on producing fish out of fish soup.²⁴

The property and the power these groups were usurping had no other apparent legitimate holders. That made the job particularly easy.

A mafia state, in Magyar's definition, was different from other states ruled by one person surrounded by a small elite. In a mafia state, the small powerful group was structured just like a family. The center of the family is the patriarch, who does not govern: "he disposes—of positions, wealth, statuses, persons."²⁵ The system works like a caricature of the Communist distribution economy. The patriarch and his family have only two goals: accumulating wealth and concentrating power. The family-like structure is strictly hierarchical, and membership in it can be obtained only through birth or adoption. In Putin's case, his inner circle consisted of men with whom he grew up in the streets and judo clubs of Leningrad, the next circle included men with whom he had worked in the KGB/FSB, and the next circle was made up of men who had worked in the St. Petersburg administration with him. Very rarely, he "adopted" someone into the family, as he did with Kholmanskikh, the head of the assembly shop, who was elevated from obscurity to a sort of third-cousin-hood. One cannot leave the family voluntarily: one can only be kicked out, disowned and disinherited. Violence and ideology, the pillars of the totalitarian state, became, in the hands of the mafia state, mere instruments.

the post-communist mafia state, in Magyar's words, is an "ideology- applying regime" (while a totalitarian regime is "ideology-driven"). A crackdown requires both force and ideology. While the instruments of force—the riot police, the interior troops, and even the street- washing machines—were within arm's reach, ready to be used, ideology was less apparently available. Up until spring 2012, Putin's ideological repertoire had consisted of the word "stability," a lament for the loss of the Soviet empire, a steady but barely articulated restoration of the Soviet aesthetic and the myth of the Great Patriotic War, and general statements about the United States and NATO, which had cheated Russia and threatened it now. All these components had been employed during the "preventive counter­revolution," when the country, and especially its youth, was called upon to battle the American-inspired orange menace, which threatened stability. Putin employed the same set of images when he first responded to the protests in December. But Dugin was now arguing that this was not enough.