The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

At the end of December, Dugin published an article in which he predicted the fall of Putin if he continued to ignore the importance of ideas and history.²⁶ That is, in Dugin's view, Putin's treatment of ideas and history had been so sporadic and inconsistent as to indicate that he thought them unimportant. In February, Dugin was invited to speak at the Anti-Orange Rally, a Kremlin event organized to coincide with a large protest demonstration in Moscow. This was Dugin's most mainstream appearance ever: from a stage mounted at Poklonnaya Mountain, Moscow's repository of monuments to its victories over invaders from Napoleon to Hitler, he addressed tens of thousands of people, at least some of whom had been bused there from other cities and towns:²⁷

Dear Russian people! The global American empire strives to bring all countries of the world under its control. They intervene where they want, asking no one's permission. They come in through the fifth column, which they think will allow them to take over natural resources and rule over countries, people, and continents. They have invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. Syria and Iran are on the agenda. But their goal is Russia. We are the last obstacle on their way to building a global evil empire. Their agents at Bolotnaya Square and within the government are doing everything to weaken Russia and allow them to bring us under total external control. To resist this most serious threat, we must be united and mobilized! We must remember that we are Russian! That for thousands of years we protected our freedom and independence. We have spilled seas of blood, our own and other people's, to make Russia great. And Russia will be great! Otherwise it will not exist at all. Russia is everything! All else is nothing!

This chant was picked up by other men on the stage. They pumped their right fists in the air.

Russia is everything! All else is nothing! Glory to Russia!²⁸

It was well below zero in Moscow that day. The protesters at Bolotnaya Square still came out, and the "anti-orange" demonstrators were bused in, but the speeches had to be kept short. Still, Dugin's two-minute statement hit the main points of the ideology he was proposing: Russia is great and it is all that stands between the world as we know it and the Global States of America. It contained the "worshipping of the past" that Fromm had believed to be key to fascist ideology. By calling the imagined American empire "evil" (casually reversing Ronald Reagan's usage), the speech hinted at Russia's unique goodness. This idea was expressed more clearly in a document Dugin cosigned a few days later with a dozen other high- profile men, called the "Anti-Orange Pact." It began:

We are united in our understanding of the need to resist the attack of the Orange, who are targeting our common fundamental

values.²⁹

The word "values" was new, and it was key. The fledgling ideology now had all its components: the nation, the past, traditional values, an external threat, and a fifth column.

dugin's proposed frame fit the crackdown, uniting the arrests, the "foreign agents" law, and the new, communally enforced censorship. It was all in the name of rooting out the fifth column and protecting Russian values. It stood to reason that Pussy Riot, who embodied both the fifth column and an apparent disrespect for traditional Russian values, were the first people sentenced to imprisonment in the crackdown. They had been arrested for protest but tried, in effect, for blasphemy. Court testimony centered on whether they had crossed themselves properly and how much skin they had exposed in church. There was some discussion of whether they were possessed.

Here the state described by Magyar met the society described by Gudkov. When the state used force and ideology as mere tools, society responded as it had over the course of previous generations to both force and ideology: by mobilizing. Russia had a mafia state ruling over a totalitarian society.

"Abortive modernization" continued as more and more people were arrested in the Bolotnoye case. These arrests served the same purpose as selective arrests had in the Soviet Union: they issued a warning. Bolotnoye inmates seemed chosen almost at random. None was a protest leader, and most, in fact, were less known, even in protest circles, than Masha. This communicated the message that protest was risky for the rank and file. As always happens in cases of apparently random arrests, people tried to discern their logic. A common belief took hold that people who had been detained during other protests, and those who had been captured on video from the Bolotnaya riots, were the ones targeted. A number of young activists fled the country, seeking haven in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and countries like Sweden and Finland. Still, there were hundreds of people with records of police detentions, and hundreds who had been captured on Bolotnaya video, and most of them were not arrested. That is how terror works: the threat must be credible yet unpredictable.

Protest leaders also needed to be neutralized. Here the Kremlin was cautious, perhaps weary of causing more protest by pushing too hard. Udaltsov was placed under house arrest. The terms of his confinement prevented him from communicating with anyone other than his household members, and from using the Internet. Yet, unlike several dozen lesser-known activists, he had the luxury of sleeping on sheets, sharing a bed with his wife. Few people could be roused to protest the treatment of Udaltsov. After more than a year, when Udaltsov had reliably faded from public view, he was convicted of organizing a riot and sentenced to four and a half years behind bars.³⁰ Kasparov was pressured to emigrate—or face persecution; he moved to New York City. Nemtsov received a barrage of death threats. Navalny became a defendant in a bizarre embezzlement case.

He was accused of having used his position as an unpaid consultant to the liberal governor of the Kirov region to arrange to

steal huge quantities of timber from the region's state-run forestry company, causing half a million dollars in losses.* The charges were similar to those lodged against Khodorkovsky when he went up for trial the second time—he was convicted of stealing crude oil from his own company. Navalny was also accused of doing something both impossible and absurd. The state could not even produce evidence that the money ever went missing. But on July 18, 2013, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.

The social networks filled with expressions of outrage and, above all, disbelief—even though the case, the conviction, and the sentence conformed to the overall logic of the crackdown. Seryozha had read that people planned to meet at Manezhnaya Square, just outside Red Square, the night of the sentencing. That was what everyone had been calling it: "a people's meeting," like a town meeting. Whoever scheduled it had, of course, anticipated that the court's decision would be unfair. But when news of the actual sentence came, it was shocking. Strange how that worked: something could be unsurprising and shocking at the same time.

Seryozha went to Manezhnaya around six in the evening. He was among the first couple of thousand to arrive. Police sealed off some of the early arrivals on a portion of sidewalk and shut off the nearest Metro exit, but people kept coming from other streets, joining a crowd that was divided into three or four large segments. There were about ten thousand people in all. There was no permit for this "meeting." Everyone there was risking detention and a crushing fine. Seryozha had never seen people act like this. The last time this happened—the last time Muscovites took to the streets, at great potential peril, because they could not stay home and let things happen—had been in August 1991, when Seryozha was nine.

Seryozha had spent so much time thinking about people and protests. After the crackdown began, he took stock. He realized that he had stopped working entirely. He had been cutting white ribbons full-time. That might have been an exaggeration—he also did things like design posters and banners and help out with other projects, and attend the Protest Workshop. He was lucky that he could afford to: he

had an apartment he had inherited, and a lucrative-enough profession that had allowed him to save up.

Then the rules changed and protest had become an almost impossibly high-stakes game. Seryozha still believed in protest. Or, he still believed that all a citizen can do, when the right to vote has been perverted and the courts have been usurped—all a citizen can do, and must do, is go out into the streets. But he also felt that he had no moral right to say this. He searched for this right, he dug into his soul for the source of his authority to call on people to take the risk and protest, and he did not find it. For a person to tell other people to risk their freedom, to risk Russian jail, he had to be beyond reproach. Seryozha was not beyond reproach.

But now all these people had come without asking anyone's permission and stayed without asking anyone's direction. It looked like the beginning of a new era. People stood. At first they stood with their arms linked, in a staring contest with a row of riot police in front of them. Then, after an hour or two or three, the protesters relaxed. Some sang songs, including great rousing Russian war songs—one called on people to rise up, which seemed appropriate. One woman took a book out of her bag and stood there, reading. Periodically, chants would start up. "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" or "Putin is a thief!" or "We are not afraid!" At one point, news spread that the prosecutor's office had asked the judge to suspend Navalny's sentence, but no one believed it—at least, Seryozha did not believe it —and everyone stayed. They plastered the facade of the parliament building with round red "Navalny" stickers. People climbed onto the ledge of the elevated first floor of the parliament building and stood there, unafraid of the police, or of the fines, or of falling. This protest felt like nothing had ever felt before. This one was not about making jokes or talking to like-minded people or staking out an apolitical space: this one was about fighting. This one was beyond reproach.

Around eleven in the evening the police seemed to get their orders. They began charging the crowd, grabbing people, throwing them to the ground, and dragging them into prisoner transports. They shouted at the rest to disband. Some people walked away. Seryozha was with a group, maybe a hundred people altogether, wedged

between lines of police. They resisted happily at first. The riot police pushed them down the street—their batons were painful against one's back—but these people, most of whom Seryozha did not know, laughed and walked, pretending to be out on a summer night's stroll, then doubled back and took up their protest again. But the group kept thinning, and the number of people in the square kept dwindling. A little after midnight Seryozha was the last man standing. But was he beyond reproach?

He went home. The next morning he learned that about two hundred people had been detained and that Navalny was going to be released. What had happened was legally impossible: there was nothing in the law that enabled the prosecutor to ask for a sentence to be suspended after the sentence had been announced, in the absence of an appeal from the defense. On the face of it, the protesters had won. But it did not feel like it. It felt horrible that morning, like there was no future.³¹

nineteen

LYOSHA: JUNE 11, 2013

in august 2012, Lyosha got a call from a university administrator informing him that he needed to obtain a police clearance to be allowed to continue teaching. Everyone was getting these calls, including a friend of a friend who worked in the toy section of a department store. Such were the new rules, the administrator explained, nothing personal.

The Russian labor code had always forbidden convicted felons to teach. It had just never before occurred to local authorities to extend the rules to people who sold toys or taught at the university level. Now a few things had changed: the country was on the lookout for the "pedophile lobby"; in the spring of 2012 the parliament had passed a law adding convictions for "crimes against the state" to the list of reasons to ban someone from teaching; and everyone had become an enforcer.¹ Lyosha went and got himself certified as never having been convicted of violent, sexual, or political offenses.

In August he was feeling all right. A ban on "propaganda of homosexuality" had passed in St. Petersburg in November 2011,² but he thought that maybe it would not pass at the federal level. It was not the first such city law in Russia, after all. Still, this was the country's second-largest city, and it was Putin's city. Also, the law had a particularly prominent advocate there, a local legislature member, Vitaly Milonov. As a scholar, Lyosha could not stop watching Milonov. As a gay man, he felt sickened and terrified by him in a way he had never experienced before. Flamboyant and at times effeminate, Milonov read as gay—though, obviously, not to his current audience. Lyosha knew that the world had seen this before. Milonov introduced the St. Petersburg law, which prescribed fines for "propaganda" from roughly $100 to about $1,500, by saying that "the wave of popularity of sexual deviations has a negative impact on our children." His fellow legislators did not simply support him: they immediately wanted to go further. "Children who have been crippled by pedophiles jump out of windows, they commit suicide," said another legislator during the discussion of the bill. "Pedophilia is a threat to a child's life. That sort of propaganda should be punished by at least twenty years in prison." Other legislators picked up from there, making Milonov look like a moderate.³

Once the law was passed, Milonov tried to get Madonna fined for alleged propaganda during her August 2012 St. Petersburg concert.⁴ Other legislators wanted to ban a chain of drugstores called Rainbow and a popular brand of cheese with a rainbow on the package.⁵ Milonov kept raising the stakes. He teamed up with an organization called Parental Control and went hunting—his word—for pedophiles. It was the old entrapment technique: "hunters" posing as teenage boys met men on social networks and scheduled a date, to which they showed up accompanied by television reporters. The mark was made to confirm, on camera, that he had written the messages to the fictional minor, whereupon he was delivered to a police station and written up on "propaganda" charges.⁶ Under the new law there was no need to demonstrate that the messages were sexual in nature: as innocuous a message as "It gets better—you can be gay and happy" was plainly a violation. For his next legislative initiative, Milonov wanted to introduce a mandatory psychological test for teachers to weed out the pedophiles—a reasonable enough idea, now that psychiatrists across the county were learning to diagnose "pedophilic sexual orientation."⁷

The ban on "propaganda of homosexuality" was introduced at the federal level in March 2012. Yelena Mizulina, head of the parliamentary Committee on the Family, took up the mantle—and now she, too, finally shot to national fame, edging out Milonov. This would be her project, an amendment to the Law for the Protection of

Children from Information.⁸ The parliamentary office of legal review seemed dubious about the bill, though: it noted that Russian law did not provide a clear definition of the word "homosexuality."⁹ Lyosha thought that maybe this was an elegant legalistic way of scuttling the bill. But then Mizulina fired back with a long letter:

Propaganda of homosexuality is widespread in Russia today: there are gay parades, demonstrations, and television and radio programs in support of same-sex unions that are broadcast on all channels in the daytime.

Such widespread distribution of propaganda of homosexual relations exerts a negative influence on the development of a child's personality, dilutes his concept of the family as a union of man and woman, and practically creates the conditions for limiting a child's freedom to choose his own sexual preference

when he grows up.¹⁰

Clearly, only the pedophile lobby could advocate delaying the passage of the bill, which in the federal parliament was referred to as a ban on "propaganda that negates traditional family values."

On television, the debate centered not on whether "gay propaganda" should be banned but, as in the St. Petersburg city legislature, on whether this measure would be enough to protect the children.

It is not enough to fine gays for propaganda to teenagers. We need to ban blood and sperm donations by them, and if they should die in a car accident, we need to bury their hearts underground or burn

them, for they are unsuitable for the aiding of anyone's life.¹¹

This was one of the country's best-known television hosts, speaking at the beginning of an hour-and-a-half special on the largest state television channel. The show was structured as a debate, or a mock court: two opponents and three witnesses on each side, all of them famous and all of them straight. It also so happened that

everyone on the ban-the-gays side was an ethnic Russian while their opponents were two Jews, a Georgian, and an American citizen, the old dissident Ludmila Alekseeva. The pro-ban side rehearsed the proud history of anti-homosexuality laws of the twentieth century. Both Stalin and Hitler persecuted gays, both saw them as probable spies, and both saw them as bringing moral decay to their armies. Anti-gay laws, it seemed, were an attribute of strong state power. A priest on the pro-ban side pointed out that it is indeed easier for an intelligence agency to recruit a homosexual, so the perception of gays as spies was rooted in fact. No wonder West Germany kept the ban, in the form in which the law had been redrafted under Hitler, even after the war—it was sound policy. But Russia had foolishly rushed to get rid of its sodomy ban as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed.

"They are unable to reproduce," said Dmitry Kiselev, the famous TV host and the leader of the pro-ban team. "This forces them to steal children from the healthy majority." Gay propaganda was a tool of this theft.

A lawyer on the pro-ban side read out the Constitutional Court's definition of "propaganda of homosexuality": "information that can cause harm to the physical or spiritual development of children and create in them the erroneous impression of social equality of traditional and nontraditional marital relations." In other words, the ban was explicitly meant to enshrine second-class citizenship in law.

The anti-ban side tried valiantly, but reason was helpless against demagogy. Nikolai Svanidze, a historian and also a prominent television personality, who led the anti-ban team, tried saying that all this talk of homosexuality was a maneuver to draw attention away from important issues.

"Are you saying that children are not an important issue?" the pro- ban side erupted. "We are talking about children! Our children!"

In his closing statement Kiselev said, "This is a time when we especially need to protect the children we have borne. We all want them to be loved, to live a long time, and to bring us the joy of grandchildren. Sexual minorities have a different plan."

Svanidze asked the audience to "imagine that your very own child has a nontraditional sexual orientation. Will you love him less? Will

you want him to be bullied?"

Svanidze's vote counter, which had been ticking slower than Kiselev's all along—viewers could call in to vote for one or the other throughout the show—stopped dead. Russian television viewers were not willing to imagine that they had a gay child. Svanidze's side lost, 7,375 votes to 34,951.

Gays were shaping up to be the perfect scapegoat: they were spies, they were bad for the army and dangerous to children, and whatever acceptance they had gained was a mistake made in 1993, under pressure from the West. Banning the gays, or at least shutting them up, was a shortcut to health and power, a rebuke to the West, and a guarantee of a populous and healthy nation.

Still, when the bill lingered in parliament, when there had been no vote on it half a year later, Lyosha convinced himself that it might not pass.

oleg chirkunov, the Perm governor, resigned in April 2012: he had been under attack from state television for some time.¹² The funder of his "cultural revolution" project pulled out of Perm: Gordeev faded from view, having resigned his senate seat and sold his companies. Guelman, the art dealer and former political technologist, continued to run the PERMM, the contemporary art museum. For the White Nights festival in 2013 he organized several shows. One, called Russian Baroque, was shut down by the city when it was discovered that it featured photographs from the 2011-2012 protests. Another show, Welcome! Sochi 2014, satirized the preparations for the winter games. This one was shuttered as soon as it opened. Soon Guelman was fired as director of the museum. A short time later he moved to Montenegro, together with his family and his curatorial projects.¹³

In September 2012, teaching started as usual, except it was harder. Lyosha submitted a chapter to the department's annual. It was called "Queer Identity in Russia and the Discourse of Human Rights." People in the department gave him good notes. Everyone liked it, and Lyosha was happy with it and happy with his colleagues, who were just being good academics, like there was no madness on television.

Then there was a review meeting, and all the same people trashed the paper. They said it was politics, not scholarship. Lyosha said that he would be willing to rework the paper, but consensus was that the paper was beyond repair.

The department chair's recommendations to tone down his research became an order. Lyosha would no longer be allowed to travel to LGBT studies conferences, even if the other side paid for the trip—he was free to travel in his personal capacity, that is, but he should not mention the university. The department had a new grant to study social media. Lyosha was welcome to travel to international conferences under the auspices of this project—all he had to do was change his topic. He did. He started writing about social media. Then he went to conferences in Switzerland and Berlin and delivered papers on "social networks as the new closet." Back in Perm, no one said anything. Except once a friend texted him from a conference: she was sitting next to their department chair, who was complaining that Lyosha was exposing the department to risk. "That's what I get for taking a faggot under my wing," the chair said, and the friend put her phrase in her text message.

It was all true. Lyosha was a faggot, and the chair had had him under her wing. She had been very kind to him. She had cared about him, and she had confided in him. He felt like he had been slapped.

He and Darya still had their gender studies center. They still had the money to hold the annual Gender Aspects of the Social Sciences conference, buy tea and cookies for the participants, and print three hundred copies of the collection of conference papers.

That fall he and Darya were called to a department meeting to talk about the work of the center. They decided that Darya would talk about their work in general and Lyosha would talk about its LGBT aspects. He was better at keeping his cool.

"You and I," said Lyosha, addressing fellow faculty members, "we say that we produce knowledge. LGBT people exist. Their experience is a factor in politics."

No kidding. If you so much as turned on the television, you would get the impression that LGBT people were the only factor in politics. The department listened in silence. It was a horrible, angry and sticky

silence, but they did not say anything and this meant that the gender studies center continued to exist, for now.

Much of the center's work happened outside the university. Darya and Lyosha had long ago agreed that educating the public about gender was part of their mission. Darya maintained a public page on VK.com, the Russian social network that used to be known as VKontakte. This started to get tricky. People were writing hate messages. Some of these commenters were their former students, who were now accusing Lyosha and Darya of propaganda. Every time this happened, Darya wanted to take down their page. The messages did not scare her—she really was fearless—but they hurt. Lyosha talked her down. This was work. They were producing knowledge.

lyosha's idea of "social networks as the new closet" had a connection to his own life, much of which was happening online. Soon after he broke up with the other Lyosha, a man named Mitya wrote to him on VK. They had seen each other once, during one of those big Perm "cultural revolution" events. Mitya had an incomprehensible- sounding job—he was a marketing coach—and an exotic Moscow lifestyle. He meditated, rode his bicycle for exercise, and watched what he ate. He was driven and ambitious, and he pushed Lyosha to seek recognition by entering his poetry in competitions. He also demanded that Lyosha start taking care of his body, especially because Lyosha's kidney problems—the aftereffects of that playground gay-bashing in Solikamsk—had been flaring up. They messaged about everything—what they did, what the world was like, and what love was. They did not see each other, though. More than a year after they started messaging, Mitya invited Lyosha to spend a couple of days in his native Nizhny Novgorod. It was a great two days and three nights. The weather was brutally cold, but they went for walks anyway. Talking to each other was easy and fun, as was the sex. But then they did not see each other again for about a year, and then another year after that. In between, Mitya sometimes disappeared for weeks or a couple of months at a time, only to pop back up on Skype as though he'd never been gone.

Andrei showed up during one of Mitya's absences. He had graduated from Perm State University the same year as Lyosha. Lyosha had had a crush on him during their first year, but they never really talked: Andrei came from a wealthy family and traveled in different circles. Now he was a lawyer in Geneva. They ran into each other when he was visiting Perm and soon started Skyping every day. Lyosha talked about the pressure at his department.

"What are you still doing there?" asked Andrei, meaning, What are you still doing in Russia? "You've got to get out. And you've got to start learning English."

Andrei kept complaining about his girlfriend, who lived in New York, until one day he confessed that this was actually a boyfriend.

"I knew that," said Lyosha.

After that, Lyosha spent a couple of months coaching Andrei through his coming-out process.

Maybe it was not exactly a closet, but Lyosha's social and emotional life was neatly compartmentalized. In Perm, he had his work and a close friend and collaborator in Darya. His romantic life happened in messages, and, during the periods of Mitya's disappearance, in his imagination. His emotional support came from Andrei via Skype.

In the fall of 2012, Lyosha swung by Geneva to visit Andrei after delivering his paper on "social networks as the new closet" at a conference in Basel. He had just arrived back in Perm when he went to meet a friend for dinner. The friend brought another friend, and Lyosha could not stop talking—about the conference, his paper, Geneva. He might have felt self-conscious afterward, had he not heard from his friend's friend immediately. His name was Ilya. He messaged Lyosha that he was impressed.

Ilya was a few years younger, a recent chemistry department graduate working as a waiter. Dating him was easy. There was none of the anxiety, competition, or obsession that Lyosha had experienced in his previous involvements. There was no talk of love. They did not move in together. They just enjoyed each other.

on January 25, the parliament took the first of three required votes on the "propaganda" bill. A couple of members, including Masha's former boss Ilya Ponomarev, questioned whether the measure was necessary.

"You shouldn't treat this issue so lightly!" objected Mizulina. "Just two years ago seventy percent of all sexual crimes were committed against girls. Now many of them are committed against boys! Think about why that is!"

In the end, only one parliament member abstained from voting for the bill and one voted against it—although this member, a novice who had just recently been called up to fill an empty seat, soon said that he had accidentally pushed the wrong button. Three hundred eighty- eight voted in favor. Several, including Ponomarev, left the hall to avoid the vote.¹⁴

At the entrance to the parliament, LGBT protesters were outnumbered by thugs who threw Nazi-style salutes, tossed eggs and excrement at the protesters, and beat them. A protester's nose was broken. The police watched for a while and then arrested the protesters, not the thugs. A small group of supporters stood to the side of the protesters—they had no banners or pink-triangle buttons, and they kept the physical distance necessary to avoid beatings and arrest. One of them, a biology teacher from a prestigious Moscow high school, was caught on camera trying to reason with one of the thugs. The following day, the teacher, who was straight and married to a woman, lost his job.*

In the spring the Levada Center tried to take a measure of public opinion toward LGBT people. Seventy-three percent of respondents said that they wholeheartedly supported the law. The figure was shocking—for more than two decades the Homo Sovieticus surveys had shown the level of aggression toward "sexual minorities" gradually subsiding. What did this 73 percent mean, and what did people think they were supporting? It occurred to Gudkov that his staff did not know what they were measuring. He asked them to take another look at the questions they had been asking. Every phrase used in the survey had been beaten to death on television, and

including these phrases in questions predetermined the answers. Gudkov asked the young sociologists to redesign and re-administer the survey. They tried. They brought in advisers—LGBT activists they knew. They got stuck.

There were only so many ways to say "gay." The Homo Sovieticus survey had traditionally used the phrase "sexual minorities," but the advisers were adamantly opposed to it: they thought the term was demeaning. Perhaps more to the point, it dated back to a time before gays became a topic of political conversation in Russia, had fallen out of use, and probably was not the best term to measure current attitudes. "LGBT" would be incomprehensible to most Russians. "Nontraditional sexual orientation" was the term the state used, so it would inevitably frame the question and the answer. By equating "homosexual" with "pedophile" and proposing to burn gay hearts, television had appropriated those terms for the propaganda campaign as well. "Queer" was even more obscure than "LGBT." They could think of no other way to ask the questions: the Kremlin had hijacked the language.

on may 9, 2013, Lyosha turned twenty-eight. He cooked dinner for seven or eight friends that evening at his apartment—he had been living alone for over a year now. Ilya was working the late-night shift; he left after the dinner, to return in the wee hours.

That morning Putin shouted "Glory to Russia!" Eleven thousand troops marched through Red Square and across television screens, followed by at least three kinds of armored vehicles and tanks, five kinds of missile launchers, and sixty-eight different helicopters and airplanes.¹⁵ The city of Volgograd also held a parade. Earlier in the year, the local legislature had voted to use the city's old name during

the festivities, so that day it was Stalingrad.¹⁶

All over Russia, there were fireworks that night. The people of Volgograd/Stalingrad watched them from the city's Volga embankment. When the fireworks ended, a little after ten, a twenty- three-year-old named Vlad Tornovoy and his friends left the embankment to start the long trek home to the working-class outskirts. It was after midnight when Tornovoy was drinking beer with two friends on a bench in a playground in their neighborhood. Then his friends killed him. First they beat him and kicked him, then, while he was lying on the ground, they pushed a half-liter empty beer bottle up his anus. Then another. The third bottle went in only halfway. Then they kicked him some more, and one of the bottles popped out of his body. They threw a flattened-out discarded cardboard box on him and set it on fire, but the fire went out quickly. Then one of them picked up a forty-pound boulder and threw it at Tornovoy's head five or six times. Tornovoy died. Then his friends went home and went to sleep.

The killers were arrested the next morning. They explained that they had killed Tornovoy because he was gay. Television reported that the killers said his homosexuality "offended their sense of patriotism." Other news media got hold of a video in which an investigator was interrogating one of the suspects.

detective: Why did you do it? suspect: Why? Because he is a homo. detective: Is that the only reason? SUSPECT: Yes.

It turned out that there was an eyewitness, a man who happened on the scene, sat down on the bench, and watched the murder happen. "I don't feel guilty," he told a reporter. "But I do still feel kind of queasy inside. . . . They killed him, you know, because he was gay." The eyewitness faced no charges.¹⁷

Ilya came to Lyosha's apartment from work in the early hours of the morning, wished him a happy birthday again, and went to bed. Lyosha got up, sat down at the computer, and read about the murder of Vlad Tornovoy. It had been a year since the televised anti-gay campaign began, and many people made the connection. A barrage of posts on social networks asked Mizulina, the backer of the "propaganda" bill, if this was what she wanted.

"If you accuse crime fighters of creating more crime, then we will never be able to defeat crime," she told journalists, responding to the social media storm. "That's just dumb."¹⁸ In other words, Tornovoy was killed because he had been flaunting his sexuality—exactly the thing she was trying to ban. She pledged that she would get the law passed in the next few weeks. Now Lyosha believed it.

the parliament voted for the ban in its second and third readings on June 11, 2013. A few dozen activists staged a protest at the entrance to parliament and were beaten by counterprotesters while police looked on. Eventually the police pushed the LGBT protesters onto paddy wagons and drove them to a precinct. The counterprotesters stayed and beat up two young gay men who had been left behind.

Masha was late for the protest: she had overslept. When she got there, she saw the paddy wagons pulling out. She walked to the nearest police precinct—she had spent time there before, so she knew the location and the drill: bring water for the detainees, who might be stuck in an unventilated room for many hours. She saw two plainclothes cops walking out with a man she recognized. He was the thug who had broken a protester's nose back in January. The men turned the corner. She followed them. She was not sure what she was going to do, but she had to do something.

One of the men stopped abruptly and turned around. He was tall and athletic. Then Masha must have passed out. She came to on the ground, on the sidewalk around the corner from the police station. The men were gone. Her abdomen hurt like something huge and hard had been slammed into it. It was a sunny summer afternoon in the very center of Moscow; office workers were coming back from their lunch breaks. Someone called an ambulance.

At the Sklifasovsky trauma center Masha could not produce a urine sample. She could not pee. The doctors were nice about it: they inserted a catheter. After the X-rays and ultrasounds they said there was no permanent damage and in a day or two she would pee for herself again.

two days after the law passed, the parliamentary committees on the family and on foreign relations held a joint session attended by five foreign guests. Brian S. Brown, head of the National Organization for Marriage, formed a few years earlier to pass legislation against same- sex marriage in California, and French National Front activist Aymeric Chauprade were among them. The foreigners had come to praise the Russians and urge them to use their momentum to go further. Said Chauprade:

You must understand that patriots of countries the world over, those committed to protecting the independence of their nations and the foundations of our civilization, are looking to Moscow. It is with great hope that they are looking to Russia, which has taken a stand against the legalization, the public legalization of homosexuality, against the interference of nihilistic nongovernmental organizations which are manipulated by American secret services, and against the adoption of children by homosexual couples.

Ladies and gentlemen, members of parliament, Russia has

become the hope of the entire world

Long live the European Christian civilization! Long live Russia!

Long live France!¹⁹

Gays had become Public Enemy Number One: foreign agents, the foot soldiers of a looming American takeover, a threat to the foundational values of the European civilization. One hardly had to mention pedophilia anymore to communicate that gays were dangerous. The fight against them, on the other hand, positioned Russia as the European civilization's bastion of hope.

The joint committee resolved to pass legislation that would ban adoption by same-sex couples or single people from countries where same-sex marriage was legal. They stressed that even this measure would be insufficient, because there was no foolproof way to ensure that Russian children adopted by heterosexual foreigners would never be re-adopted by homosexuals. After the meeting, Mizulina told

journalists that she would also devise a way to have biological children removed from same-sex families.²⁰

The adoption ban was passed just a week after the ban on "propaganda"—in time to become law before the parliament went on summer break. Both bills passed unanimously. A bill to enable the removal of biological children was introduced as soon as the parliament went back into session in September.²¹

That year Putin hosted his tenth annual Valdai Club, a weekend junket at which he made his case on a topic of choice to a select group of foreign Russia experts. This year he spoke about Russian sovereignty and national identity:

Russia is facing a serious challenge to its identity. This issue has aspects of both morality and foreign policy. We can see many EuroAtlantic countries rejecting their own roots, including Christian values, which form the foundation of Western civilization. They reject their own moral foundations as well as all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even gender. They pursue policies that place large families on an equal footing with same-sex partnerships, and faith in god with satan worship. An excess of political correctness has led to the point that there is talk of registering political parties that promote pedophilia. In many European countries people are ashamed and frightened to talk about their religious affiliation. . . . And this is the model that is being aggressively forced onto the entire world. I am convinced that this is the road to degradation and primitivization, a deep

demographic and moral crisis.²²

Satan, pedophilia, American aggression, the death of the Christian civilization, and, of course, a demographic threat: it was all about the gays now.

The following September, it had been announced, the Kremlin and the Church together would host the World Congress of Families, the organization founded at the sociology department back in 1995. Its headquarters were in Illinois, and its meetings had been held in Europe, the United States, and Australia. In the United States, people who monitored far-right organizations perceived it as an American political export.²³ But Russians, with their money and the high stature afforded their cause by the state, were taking leadership roles in the organization,²⁴ which would now be coming home in high style. Congress sessions were slated to be held in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, inside the fortress walls, and a small distance away, at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the country's largest—where Pussy Riot had staged their "Punk Prayer" in 2012.²⁵

lyosha was in new york when the law passed. He and Ilya were on vacation together. They had been seeing each other for more than half a year. It was still the most companionable relationship Lyosha had ever had. Ilya was a bit immature, but he knew his limitations, and both of these traits made him a perfect weekend-and-holiday partner. That, the distance, and the splendor of New York kept Lyosha from spending too much time thinking about the passage of the law.

Teaching began again in September. Budget cuts had led to some changes in the department. When Lyosha was an undergraduate, all students had been required to take a set of core courses common to the given area of specialization in all Russian universities—this was called the "federal curriculum"—and at least one elective a semester, out of a small number on offer: the "regional curriculum." Now the regional curriculum had been cut down to two courses, and in September each student was asked to pick one. The course chosen by more than half the students would be the only one offered—an elective in the sense that there had been an election of sorts. All the students in a particular specialty would be required to take it that semester.

This was how Lyosha ended up with two groups of more than twenty students in his Gender Approaches in Politics course. He was teaching it twice a week, once to international relations majors and once to political science majors (he was also teaching a "federal" course, Political Processes in Contemporary Russia, which met twice a week). The political scientists were a joy, but some of the international relations students made it clear that they did not want to be there. One student rose and left the room every time the subject

of sex came up—as when Lyosha had them discuss The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, the classic feminist essay by the American Anne Koedt. Then there were two young men, both of them straight-A students, who always sat together and took turns standing up to object every time Lyosha made reference to the patriarchy.

"It has been proven historically that men are the stronger sex," one would say. "What you are saying now harms the institution of family."

Lyosha would calmly try to steer them back to the text under discussion.

"But those are Western studies that you are citing," the other would get up and say. "They are always trying to foist their values on us."

Lyosha had the class watch and write about The Times of Harvey Milk, a 1984 documentary about the openly gay San Francisco city supervisor who was assassinated by another legislator. One of the two young men in the class turned in a paper arguing that gays, not being real men, could not be politicians. The paper dripped with homophobia, but unlike the comments the same student left on the gender studies center's VK page, it contained no obscenities. Lyosha gave the student an A: within its framework, the paper was well argued.

later in the fall Lyosha got a text message from Darya.

"A friend has been entrapped by Occupy Pedophilia." Lyosha had heard something about this. Occupy Pedophilia was the skinhead version of the online entrapment movement. He knew it was operating in different cities, but he did not know about incidents in Perm. Lyosha looked up the Occupy Pedophilia/Perm page on VK.

"Our next safari will take place on Thursday. Open to all. Entry fee 250 rubles."

The group included more than two thousand members. Lyosha recognized many of the names: he had graded their papers.

He clicked on a video. It showed Darya's friend Valeriy*—Lyosha had met him too. He stood against a tiled wall—it looked like a pedestrian underpass or perhaps the basement of a shopping center, flanked by two large young men. At the beginning of the clip he stated his full name, age, and place of work: he was thirty and taught at a trade school.

"We used to treat pedophilia with urinotherapy," one of the thugs said about halfway through the ten-minute clip. "But especially for you, we have chosen the banana treatment. This is a sacred banana."

From that point on, Valeriy stood with a half-peeled banana in his hands.

first thug: Have you been gay a long time? valeriy: Since I was eighteen. first thug: What made you that way? valeriy: Nothing.

second thug: How is that possible? Did you grow up with both of

your parents? VALERIY: Yes.

second thug: Maybe something went wrong for you with a girl?

valeriy: Not really.

second thug: Do you believe in God?

VALERIY: Yes.

first thug: What's your religion? valeriy: I am Orthodox. second thug: What was it that Jesus said? first thug: His kind must be stoned.

There was a splice and then you could see Valeriy squatting, as instructed by the thugs, and eating the banana as they guffawed.²⁶

In another clip the thugs had filmed themselves barging into the apartment of Mikhail, an older man Lyosha had seen around for years. The clip had been edited down to twelve minutes and fifty-six seconds from what must have been a much longer ordeal. In that time, the man went from telling the thugs sternly to get out to begging for mercy. Lyosha could see repeated flashes of a taser gun. Most of the clip had been filmed through the open apartment door. At

one point, someone must have been walking up or down the stairs, because the thugs called out: "Hey, did you know you have a pedophile living here?" That was when Mikhail looked terrified for the first time and said for the first time, not yet pleadingly, "That's enough."

A few minutes later in the clip Mikhail was on the floor. He had been beaten. The words "I'm fag" had been written in ballpoint pen on his bald head. The thugs pulled him up and propped him against the wall because he could no longer stand on his own. Then they took him around the building, knocking on doors and informing neighbors that he was a pedophile. The thugs introduced themselves as representing "the social movement to prevent pedophilia." The neighbors were receptive. One man in a T-shirt and jeans, with a good haircut—he looked like a young banker or maybe a marketing executive—took down the name of the site where he would be able to watch the video. An older woman in a housecoat popped out of her apartment to testify: "I've seen it! He's got young men coming around all the time!"

The clip ended with Mikhail on his knees, promising never to correspond with boys and saying, "Long live Occupy Pedophilia." He also said, "Death to blacks," and "Glory to Russia."²⁷

The was also a clip shot on a sunny afternoon on a busy Perm street. Another acquaintance, Andrei, was being held, yelled at, and tasered by two thugs while two more looked on in view of the camera. Andrei kept calling out to passersby, asking them to call the police. No one stopped, it seemed. But Andrei kept refusing to answer questions about his sexual orientation, or about what he thought of people from the Caucasus. The taser gun kept crackling, and he kept saying, in response to every question, "What does it matter." In the end, the thugs called the police themselves. The clip ended with Andrei being pushed into the back of a police car by two officers and two Occupy thugs.²⁸

The thugs in each clip were different. They must have taken turns starring. And then there were the people off-camera, who had paid 250 rubles (roughly eight dollars) a pop to watch.

Lyosha got up and checked the door. Living alone had all at once lost all sense of accomplishment and romance. The door was locked, but it looked useless to Lyosha now. It would take but a few minutes to break down this door, and no one would know.

Darya told him that Valeriy went to the police to try to report having been kidnapped and tortured, but the police threatened him with arrest. He resigned his job at the trade school without waiting for the video to be posted online.

that fall the university got a new staff member. He was in his mid- forties, had close-cropped gray hair, and always wore a suit. His job title was Security Adviser. There had been someone in that role before him, a retired military man of advanced age. He had had no presence and, as far as Lyosha knew, no job title. This one was different. "I think we've got our First Department now," Lyosha said to Darya.

"First Department" in the Soviet Union existed in all organizations that had anything to do with state secrets—which, in that country, covered many if not most organizations—as well as organizations engaged in what was called "ideological work," such as the media or any educational institution. First Department staff reported to the KGB rather than the head of the organization where they ostensibly worked.

In October, Darya went on maternity leave. This left Lyosha alone in charge of the gender studies center. It also meant that Lyosha temporarily took over the administrative duties of assistant dean. He was told that in this capacity he needed to have an introductory meeting with the new security adviser, whose name, as it turned out, was Yuri Gennadyevich Belorustev. He had an office in an old dormitory building. Lyosha recognized the office: a wall of shelves crowded with thick binders; stained wallpaper on the other walls; two well-worn chairs with wooden armrests; a not-quite-matching desk; a potted plant; and white lace curtains on the windows. Lyosha's uncle and cousin, military officers both, had identical offices. This one seemed too small for Yuri Gennadyevich. Or too old. Or a stage set.

"Let's use the informal pronoun with each other," said Yuri Gennadyevich. "This is a friendly conversation."

Lyosha waited. You cannot say no when someone older than you proposes switching to the informal pronoun. Yuri Gennadyevich had a peculiarly soft, treacly voice.

"Do you have students in your department who are restless?"

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"You know, nationalists, radical communists, homosexuals—"

"I don't think keeping abreast of students' personal lives is part of my job description."

"Well, you just make sure to let me know."

Yuri Gennadyevich called Lyosha once a week after that. Lyosha tried not to say a word that could be interpreted as meaning anything. That was difficult to manage on the phone. Sometimes, Yuri Gennadyevich asked Lyosha about a particular student, who Lyosha knew was troubled. It was hard not to notice, but Lyosha pretended to be oblivious. "Do you think he needs psychological help?" Yuri Gennadyevich would ask.

Not from you, Lyosha would think. He would say, "I'm not sure what you mean."

He saw Yuri Gennadyevich every day. The old security adviser must have spent his days sleeping in an armchair in his office. Yuri Gennadyevich was everywhere all the time.

In December the gender studies center held its annual conference. Lyosha chaired the panel on queer identity. As he was exiting the room, he bumped into Yuri Gennadyevich.

"What do you have here?"

"Our annual conference."

Yuri Gennadyevich took a printed program. "Looks very interesting."

Two weeks later Lyosha realized that he was under surveillance. When he came home, there were always plainclothes men milling near the building entrance. As soon as he walked up, the intercom would ring, then the landline, then his cell. A man's voice would repeat the same phrase over and over:

"Your kind deserves to die."

Sometimes Lyosha was sure that the omnipresent "security adviser," the men at the door, and the calls were connected. Sometimes he thought he was paranoid. Whichever was the case, he could not survive intact much longer: if he did not get killed, he would go crazy.

"you are moving in with me," said Stas. He said it as if they had discussed it.

It was a good option for both of them. Stas had just ended a destructive relationship after four years, and nights alone in his apartment were unbearable. But Stas's apartment was in a secure building with a fence, cameras, and guards. Stas was a wealthy executive. He told Lyosha not to tell anyone where he was living, and he had his personal driver ferry Lyosha wherever he needed to go, which was just to work and then back to the apartment in the evening. Stas and Lyosha cooked for each other. Over dinner, night after night, they told each other everything. Stas talked out the details of his awful relationship. Lyosha obsessed about the university and his future. They cried like neither of them had cried before, two grown men terrified of their lives, their hearts breaking for each other. They had sex once or twice, but this clearly was not why they had each other, even though Lyosha's companionate relationship with Ilya had ended: Ilya knew when he was out of his depth, and he left as easily and kindly as he had come. After a couple of months, Lyosha realized that he had a family now, someone who made him feel safe.

in april 2014, Lyosha was getting ready to go to work when he got a message from a friend, an administrator at the university: "Lyosha, what is this? Yuri Gennadyevich has brought it to the rector's attention."*

Lyosha clicked on the link. It was a VK post called "What Is Perm Thinking? Propaganda of Sodomy at Perm State Research University." The post went on to describe the gender studies center and ended with a call to action:

How long can this abominable situation go on? Avowed enemies of the Motherland and of morality are using our money to corrupt students in every sense of the word. When will we put an end to this?

Draw community attention to this! Write to the Perm [State] University rector; file complaints with the police! We are Russian patriots! Victory will be ours!

Photos of Darya and Lyosha were pasted below.²⁹

"You are going to have to leave," said Stas that evening. Lyosha already had a ticket to New York: he had liked it so much the previous year that he wanted to resume that vacation. He started living on two tracks. On one, he submitted his lesson plans for the coming fall semester. He took part in worrying about further budget cuts and lamenting the fact that the state had no interest in political science anymore. On the other track, he was wrapping up research and friendships. The telephone threats continued. Yuri Gennadyevich kept calling too, asking, "Why don't you ever come and see me?"

In May, Stas threw a birthday party for Lyosha and invited all his friends. No one had done this for him before. In June, they packed up Lyosha's stuff. In July, they drove out to Solikamsk to drop off many of his things and tell his mother that he was leaving.

"What are you going to do there?" asked Galina.

"I like that boy," said Lyosha's aunt. "I hope you bring him around again."

Wouldn't you know it: they had finally accepted him.

STAS GAVE LYOSHA $18,000.

"It's an investment in my future," he said. "I plan to retire in America. You go and get things ready."

It was enough to pay a year's rent in Brighton Beach, where apartments were cheap and the landlords spoke Russian and did not care if you had a credit history. There were many Russian queers in the neighborhood—mostly men around Lyosha's age, single and in couples. All of them had fled Russia in the last year. Everyone had a

story, and they taught Lyosha how to package his into an asylum claim and how to find a lawyer, and how to apply for a work permit when the time came. Then Lyosha helped teach people who came after him.

In August, he wrote to the department: "I had no choice but to leave the country."

The chair responded with a perfectly mixed message: "Did you stop to consider what kind of trouble that would cause here? Now I have to find someone to take over your teaching load. I always knew you were going to do it. I wish you luck."

Then he heard from Darya and another friend: Yuri Gennadyevich had been calling people in for talks, grilling them about Lyosha. The words "foreign agent" were said. Also, they had figured out that the person who wrote that "What is Perm thinking?" post was someone who had attended the Soros-funded seminars in Ukraine with them.

Then he heard from the department chair again: "We have informed the administration that you are obtaining postgraduate education in the United States. Kindly conform to this story."

lyosha started putting together his asylum case. He wrote to a close friend, a former student, who had gotten a phone call from the FSB in the spring of 2013.

"Whom do you have in your department at the university who engages in the propaganda of homosexuality?"

"Are you kidding me?" she had responded. "I graduated a million years ago."

Now Lyosha messaged this friend asking if she would put this story in an affidavit.

"Dear Lyosha," she wrote in response. "I don't know what you are talking about. I never got any such call, and you should be aware that libel is a criminal offense."

Lyosha mentally crossed another friend off the list. The rate of attrition was staggering. He still had Andrei in Geneva, and Stas, who had moved to Moscow. For a while, he continued to correspond with Darya. She had shut down the gender studies group on VK. "I have no

desire to continue to do gender studies," she wrote. About eight months after Lyosha left the country, they just did not seem to have anything left to talk about.

twenty

A NATION DIVIDED

in the fall of 2013, Masha spent her days in court and her evenings at cafes and bars, sometimes working on foreign reporters' assignments or on her own, often not. She was almost always angry and often, by the end of the evening, drunk. There were many arguments that she remembered only because her throat felt scratchy in the morning.

The faces at those cafes were familiar from the protests. Now they had all gone back to their regular lives at television channels, advertising agencies, and, in more than a few cases, in government offices. They were often drunk by the end of the evening too— especially the men from the government offices. One night one of them patted the chair next to him with his pudgy hand: he had something to tell Masha. He said there would be an amnesty— nominally tied to the twentieth anniversary of Yeltsin's constitution, but really intended to make Putin look better in advance of the Sochi Olympics. Amnesties always applied to women, especially if they had small children. So Masha's ordeal would soon be over, he said.

She believed him. Her friends told her it was wishful thinking. They pointed out that Putin was not acting like he cared one bit about improving his image for the Olympics. The women of Pussy Riot were still behind bars—one of them had declared a hunger strike to protest starvation rations and sixteen-hour workdays at her prison colony, and though her open letter had been published the world over,¹ the state appeared willing to let her starve to death. The country's most famous inmate, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was approaching the tenth anniversary of his imprisonment, with no end in sight. And in

September, Russian troops in unmarked uniforms had hijacked a Greenpeace ship flying a Dutch flag in international waters, towed it to the port of Murmansk, and deposited its multinational thirty- person crew in jails there.² Just because the ruthlessness of Russian law enforcement defied the imagination, these friends argued, was no reason to disbelieve its threats—quite the opposite.

"I am not going to prison," Masha took to saying to them, like a mantra. "I am walking between the raindrops and staying dry." It was an idiomatic expression, customarily used in the third person, but that fall she made it her own. Still, that was the fall when she started throwing up blood.

In December, Western leaders began backing out of going to the Sochi Olympics. German president Joachim Gauck was the first to announce his non-attendance, followed by the presidents of Poland, Estonia, and France, and the prime minister of Belgium. Finally, American president Barack Obama chose his delegation. It included no high-level politicians—something that had not happened in almost two decades—but, in a well-calculated affront, did include two openly gay athletes.³ The next day came the amnesty: Masha would not go to prison, the women of Pussy Riot would be released, and so would the thirty Greenpeace activists.⁴ And at the end of his annual press conference, on December 20, Putin made an announcement that no one, including his inner circle, expected: he would release Khodorkovsky.⁵ Within hours, the former oil tycoon was transported out of the prison and out of the country—to Berlin, where his mother lay gravely ill. A clear condition of Khodorkovsky's release was that he would not return to Russia—unless he wanted to be arrested again. With his company and most of his fortune gone, he would have to reinvent himself on foreign soil. He landed in Germany wearing an airport crew jacket that someone had given him en route, to replace his black prison robe.⁶

Masha, on the other hand, was still in her own city, wearing her old clothes. No one was going to transport her to her new life now that she was no longer a full-time defendant in a political trial. What was she supposed to do with herself now?

over her year and a half of living as a de facto political prisoner, Masha had not been paying much attention to the outside world. The most important event in this outside world was the ongoing protest in Ukraine. The president there had backed out of signing a partnership agreement with the European Union, and Ukrainians had been protesting since November. Like the Orange Revolution nine years earlier, the protests united people of vastly different political views. Cosmopolitans who wanted to see their country become a part of the European community came together with nationalists who wanted to break free of Moscow's influence. Once again, protesters occupied the center of Kiev and settled in for however long it was going to take. Just like nine years ago, everyone in Moscow seemed to think of Ukraine solely as Russia's looking glass. A group of more than fifty Russian writers wrote an open letter to the protesters. "We hope that you succeed," it concluded. "For us that would serve as a sign that we in Russia can also win our rights and freedoms."⁷

The Russian parliament unanimously passed a resolution calling for the protesters in Ukraine to disband. Before the vote, the chairman of the parliament's foreign relations committee said that if Ukraine were to sign the association agreement with the European Union, "that would increase the sphere of influence of gay culture, which has become the official policy of the European Union."⁸

Moscow shut down for the interminable winter holidays, but the protests in Kiev continued. Here was an important distinction between Ukraine and Russia: precisely two years earlier, the Russian protesters had retreated after their biggest demonstration, taking their long-planned vacations or simply commencing the customary two weeks of eating and drinking, as though revolutions kept office hours.

Just as the Russians were waking up from their holiday, the Ukrainian parliament passed a series of laws aimed at designating the protests as illegal; some of these were textually similar to the bills passed at the beginning of the Russian crackdown. The protesters prepared to defend themselves. They built barricades, using car and truck tires, stones, pieces of pavement, and ice that they chopped up with axes and loaded into sacks. They armed themselves with hunting rifles, slings, and Molotov cocktails. The first shots were fired on January 22. Two protesters were killed and one wounded.

It seemed that Masha was a journalist now—she was not anything else, and she was cohosting a popular-science show on TV Rain—and, following the amnesty, she was free to travel. She went to Kiev.

She was the last to arrive. Every other Moscow journalist was already there. Everyone knew everyone else, everyone had a routine and a hangout, and everyone was an expert. The lay of the land was uncomplicated: a couple of blocks of government buildings were sealed off and heavily guarded; the main city square—Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), the one referred to simply as the Maidan, was occupied by protesters, as were a couple of adjacent streets. In the rest of the city, life went on as what must have been normal. Everyone spoke Russian. It was hard to believe that this was a different country, especially one where someone had died for its independence from Moscow. Except when Masha was among the protesters, when they stood together, as they did every hour, to sing the Ukrainian national anthem—then she believed, and she very much wanted them to succeed.

All the stories about the Maidan were being written by the self- confident, experienced journalists who had gotten there before Masha. They had cultivated their heroes and their sources among the protesters, and all their stories starred them. The one thing no one was doing was talking to the soldiers who guarded the government— the ones who, everyone said, had fired the shots that killed the protesters the day before Masha arrived in Kiev.

Masha put on heels and makeup. Lots of makeup. She thought of it as war paint. She went to the Maidan, where the barricades constructed of huge old tires had been set aflame. It seemed to her the protesters were trying to make the square look like revolution— the French one, from the movie of Les Miserables. Not that there had been tires at the time of the French Revolution, but the stench and the flames fit her mental picture. Masha crossed the protesters' barricades.

She was in no-man's-land now, a strip of snow that separated the Maidan's burning-rubber barricades from the government's police- fence barricades. Men in long black robes—Orthodox priests—stood here. Masha saw the giant gray shape of a cross in the snow—the long shadow of a small cross held up by one of the priests in the yellow light of a streetlamp. Here, where neither side ventured, Masha's heels sank into the snow. The priests, she realized, were praying for life on both sides of the barricades. She knew at that moment that there was a God and that there would be war.

"You can't go through," said an officer on the government side. He was wearing riot gear. "You need a helmet."

"What if I'm a journalist?"

"You'll still get yourself killed."

"Don't worry, the bullets won't get me." She had almost said, "I'll walk between the raindrops."

"All right," he said, pulling back a section of the barrier. "But don't go near Berkut. You'll get yourself killed."

Berkut—"golden eagle" in Ukrainian—were the special forces. People on the Maidan said that it was Berkut who had killed people. On this side too, Berkut were clearly known as the killers. Masha recognized them by their black ski masks. She edged closer to Berkut's bonfire. Everyone had a fire, on both sides of the barricades, and everyone had hot tea, and everyone shared both. Even Berkut.

"What's your name?" asked a black ski mask.

"Masha."

"Mine is Sergei too." The mask laughed, showing two rows of large teeth. He had no way of knowing that Masha's husband and the one man she had loved passionately were both named Sergei—he must have meant simply that they were alike because they had unremarkable Russian names. She had come from the other side wearing war paint, he was wearing a black mask, but they came from the same people.

Berkut did not want to be interviewed. Masha would not leave. By three in the morning they started talking. By five, Masha had what she had come for: she felt she understood. Berkut officers thought they were there to protect the peace. They were convinced that the

protesters were a handful of troublemakers. They were not particularly devoted to Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, but they believed in order and strong power. A real leader would never have let riffraff burn tires in the capital's central square. This sort of thing would never happen in Russia, for example. They even mentioned Bolotnaya. Masha tried to tell them that Bolotnaya had been nothing like the Maidan. They said that was a good thing. She was not so sure. But she was certain that whatever was happening here in Kiev would end differently from the protests in Moscow.

"Ukraine is some sort of parallel-reality Russia," she wrote in the conclusion to her dispatch. "Everything is completely different there."⁹ TV Rain's online magazine, Slon, published the article as submitted: none of the editors objected to referring to Ukraine as a sort of alternative Russia.

masha was the only Russian to have interviewed Berkut. She came back to Moscow a real journalist.

A day after she returned, Masha cursed out loud when she was reading Twitter. Then she made a screenshot and sent it to TV Rain's web editor with a question: "WTF?"

The tweet originated with TV Rain. It said, "Should Leningrad have been surrendered to the Germans if that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives?"

It was the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Siege of Leningrad. The siege had lasted 872 days and claimed over a million lives. Masha had been around long enough to know how much trouble this tweet could cause: she had seen battles to the death break out in the Russian blogosphere over less. She knew that no question about Soviet conduct in the Second World War ever went unpunished—and this was a question that suggested that the country's greatest and most mythologized sacrifice in that war could and should have been avoided. She also knew that the new social media manager at TV Rain was in his late teens and that he was about to learn one of the hardest lessons of his life.

The tweet was live for all of eight minutes—the time it took for the channel's web editor to come out of the shower at the gym where he happened to be, open his locker, see outraged and worried messages from Masha and countless others, and delete the tweet. It was too late. The firestorm had begun. In the next few days, the St. Petersburg city legislature called for the channel to be shut down. A federal deputy prime minister publicly backed the demand.¹⁰ Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, declared war on the channel:

I want audience reaction to be absolutely merciless here. Because the moment we start becoming even the least bit tolerant of such surveys, our nation will begin to erode, our memory will erode, the genetic memory of our people. I am certain that other countries would give an even harder time to a channel that crossed this kind

of moral and ethical red line.¹¹

When Masha came to work, she was greeted by members of the youth group Nashi, who were picketing TV Rain. They had brought plastic bags filled with excrement, to spread in the channel's courtyard and to toss at the occasional employee.

Less than two weeks later, all the channel's satellite carriers had dropped it and most of its advertisers had canceled their contracts. The channel's director general, who together with her husband owned TV Rain, called a staff meeting. She announced that there would be layoffs and that those who kept their jobs would have to take a 30 percent pay cut. Masha did a quick mental calculation. She could barely make ends meet as it was—a 30 percent pay cut would mean she had to find another job to supplement the income from the journalism that she had originally entered in order to survive as a political defendant. She decided to quit—by leaving on her own, she could at least make the editor in chief's job a little bit easier. The director general was still talking.

"With all that's been going on, I haven't seen my children at all," she said. "So, starting tomorrow, I'll take a short vacation—we had long planned a ski holiday in the Swiss Alps, and this will dovetail nicely with Davos."

The director was not yet finished talking when a camerawoman named Alya sent out an all-staff message: "Does anyone have a couch I can sleep on? Looks like I'll have to move." Masha knew that Alya had a kid Sasha's age who was living with Alya's mother—even on her old salary, Alya, who was not originally from Moscow, could afford to rent only a small room in the city. Masha herself had been renting out her two-rooms-plus-kitchen apartment ever since it was raided, and renting a similar one closer to the center. Who said she and Sasha could not share a room? The director general was still talking. Masha waved to Alya across the room and pointed to herself with two thumbs, then messaged: "I've got a spare room. Enough for you and the kid."

A lot of people moved in the next few days. One TV Rain on-air personality was spotted wheeling his belongings down the Garden Ring in a supermarket shopping cart. His cat sat on top of his clothes. Alya hailed a cab over to Masha's. That evening both of them changed their Facebook relationship status to "in a domestic partnership."

the sochi Olympics opened on the day of that staff meeting. Foreign correspondents flooded the social networks with photos of filthy tap water and descriptions of absurd malfunctions in hotels that were still under construction.¹² But the opening ceremony was spectacular, and Russia garnered the highest number of gold medals: thirteen. If Masha had felt less disoriented and besieged, she would have felt more patriotic.

In Ukraine, there was more bloodshed on the Maidan. More than a hundred were now dead, including several government troops. On February 21, over a hundred thousand gathered in the Maidan to mourn the fallen protesters. By evening, the square was threatening to storm government buildings unless the president resigned. President Yanukovych fled the capital, seeking refuge first in eastern Ukraine and ultimately in Russia. The following day, Masha got a phone call from Kiev: one of the Berkut officers from that night in January was calling to let her know that his partner had been killed.

She had interviewed the partner too. It felt strange, almost like she was somehow responsible.

A friend called from Crimea: everyone was there now, and Masha should come. She went. The day after she arrived, she realized that something had changed overnight. The streets were full of armed men in unmarked uniforms. They walked around smiling. Within a few hours, they were joined by ordinary Crimeans, who had come out to take pictures with the men. No one could know for certain, but the sense was, these were Russian soldiers who had come to save the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking Black Sea peninsula from the Maidan. That was what people were saying: "Save us from the Maidan." With men in unmarked uniforms now in the streets, everyone sounded ecstatic and looked radiant.

Moscow journalists, who really were all there, kept filing dispatches that their editors rejected. Moscow had not confirmed that the armed men were under its command, so the journalists' descriptions of what they were seeing could not be published. Masha was not even sure that she was a journalist now—her media career might have ended as soon as it began—and she would be hard-pressed to explain why she was in Crimea. She wrote a column for the American magazine New Republic. It began, "Right now in Crimea, the strangest war I've seen in my 30 years is unfolding."¹³ She had not actually ever seen a war before, but you did not have to have seen one to know that this one was unlike any other.

On March 1, Putin asked the upper house of the Russian parliament to authorize the use of force beyond the country's borders —and got its unanimous approval the same day. The armed men were already in Crimea by then. The streets of Crimea filled with billboards showing a swastika and barbed wire on the left and a Russian flag on the right, with the caption, "On March 16, we will be choosing between this and this." That day, at a hastily convened referendum, 96.77 percent of Crimeans voted to join the Russian Federation.¹⁴

the history of Crimea had been as violent as that of any part of the former Soviet Union but perhaps more confusing than that of most of

them. From the time the empire first annexed Crimea in 1783, it was a part of Russia for nearly two centuries. In 1944, Stalin ethnically cleansed Crimea: Tatars, who had made up a large part of the peninsula's population, were deported, as were the local Armenians, Belarusians, and Greeks. This left the ethnic Russians, the only people Stalin trusted in the wake of the Second World War. Then, in 1954, Khrushchev, who had just been installed as Soviet leader, redrew the borders of constituent republics, assigning Crimea to Ukraine. No explanation was offered at the time and none could be found later—at least none that could be convincingly documented.

Khrushchev had once been the Party boss in Ukraine, and this led to conjecture that he wanted to give the republic a lavish gift—or, conversely, that he was atoning for the sins committed there (he had taken charge after the man-made famine of 1932-1933, but plenty of blood had been shed on his watch). Harvard historian Mark Kramer has suggested that Khrushchev used Crimea to secure control over Ukraine after the war. Soviet Ukraine had been occupied by the German army for nearly three years. The postwar division of Europe allowed the Soviet Union to keep most of the territory it had annexed under the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. What was now the western part of Ukraine had thus been occupied three times: by the USSR in 1939, by Germany in 1941, and again by the USSR in 1944. Soviet rule there was new and uncertain, making the division between the newly occupied western lands and the eastern part of the republic all the more pronounced. Adding ethnically cleansed Crimea to Ukraine may have been a colonizing strategy: the republic gained nearly a million new residents, all of them Russian-speaking ethnic Russians.¹⁵

Back in 1954, most Russians had no reason to wonder about Khrushchev's motives. For one thing, most acts of the Soviet leadership appeared arbitrary to the citizens and, for another, this one made no difference in everyday life. Russians continued to think of Crimea as their country's most important resort, and to use it. Crimea, in its way, was an equalizer: someone who came from extreme privilege, like Seryozha, spent his summers in an elaborate castle there while Masha's mother could rent an apartment in season

and Lyosha's mother could rent a bed for herself and one for her son. Every Russian story began in Crimea: it was the place where childhood friendships were struck, romances were kindled, virginity was lost, drugs were tried, and all sorts of memories were made. Those who had not yet spent a summer there thought that someday they would. It was the universal Russian aspiration. The realization that the all-Russian summer dream could belong to someone else— another country—came rudely in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ethnic Russians still made up the majority of the population there, but now they used a different currency and Russian citizens needed foreign-travel passports to enter. Over the years, many Russians discovered that the Black Sea resorts of Bulgaria and Turkey were more comfortable and more affordable, but Crimea remained the symbol of summer and youth.

On March 18, two days after the Crimea referendum, Putin gathered members of both houses of parliament as well as governors and other dignitaries in the Kremlin for an extraordinary address. He spoke for more than forty minutes. He was interrupted repeatedly by applause and by standing ovations. At the end, Putin and three representatives of Crimea—one of them wearing a thick black turtleneck sweater, as though he had just returned from an imaginary Spanish Civil War—signed a treaty conjoining Russia and Crimea, and the men and a few women in the room stood up to the sounds of the Russian national anthem. As Putin and his cosigners exited, the room erupted in yet another standing ovation, and a chant: Spasibo! —"Thank you!"—Spasibo! Spasibo! Spasibo! It was a chant one might have heard at the end of a rock concert. The roomful of officials was responding not as it might have to a leader who had led the country to victory—that chant would have been "Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!"— but, in keeping with the "mafia state" model, as it would to a patriarch who had just given members of his clan a grand gift.

Putin's speech laid out Russia's case for Crimea. His first argument was historical, and it echoed every other historical claim to territory ever made. Putin said that Crimea was the cradle of Russian civilization (much like Serbia had always claimed that Kosovo was the

cradle of its civilization). He acknowledged the ethnic cleansing of Crimea, sort of:

Yes, there was a time when Crimean Tatars, like some other peoples of the USSR, were subjected to injustice. I'll say one thing: millions suffered from repression in those times, and most of those people

were, of course, Russian.¹⁶

This was not true of Crimea, but the statement was factually accurate for all of the Soviet Union, if for no other reason than that ethnic Russians far outnumbered all other groups. Through this rhetorical sleight of hand, Putin dismissed the pain and fears of Crimea's ethnic minorities and repositioned Russians as the victims:

What had seemed impossible became a reality, alas. The USSR

collapsed And it was when Crimea suddenly turned out to be

part of another state that Russia realized it had been not simply stolen from but robbed. . . . Millions of Russians went to sleep in their own country only to awaken in a different one. Overnight, they had become ethnic minorities in former Union republics. The Russian people became one of the largest, if not the largest, divided nations in the world.

The difference in meaning between the terms "stolen from" and "robbed" was subtle and unclear, but the implication of violence was unmistakable. In the story that Putin was telling, Russia had recognized the post-Soviet borders that made Crimea a part of Ukraine under duress, because it was too weak to object. Later, under Putin, Russia sacrificed its national interests and deep desires for the sake of peace in the region, and did not contest the post-1991 borders. But after being forcibly moved to another country, without physically moving, the Crimean Russians found themselves citizens of an unstable state:

Russians, like other Ukrainian citizens, suffered from the ongoing political and the permanent government crises that have been

seizing Ukraine for more than twenty years.

This was a reference to both the Maidan and the Orange Revolution, and this was the point where Putin's speech turned away from Russia and toward America—or, rather, from what Russia had lost to what the United States had gained. The United States, he said, had funded the Maidan, and once the Maidan won, it would crack down on its opponents:

Crimea—Russian-speaking Crimea—was the first in line for the crackdown. Because of this the people of Crimea . . . asked Russia to

protect their rights and their very lives Of course, we had to

respond to this plea. We could not abandon Crimea and its people to their plights. That would have been a betrayal.

Not only were Russia's actions right, continued Putin, but they were based on precedent created by the United States itself, when it facilitated Kosovo's secession from Serbia. The only difference between Kosovo and Crimea, he argued, was that the former had had the backing of the United States, which felt that it could make the rules in the post-Cold War world. "They had us all with that," he said. In fact, he said nagnuli, a crude expression most accurately translated as "They had everyone up the ass," conjuring the clear image of homosexual rape. The Kremlin's translators rendered it in English as "had everyone agree."¹⁷

Putin continued the litany of grievances against America: after Kosovo "there was an entire chain of 'color revolutions' managed from the outside"—Ukraine's were just two of many. Countries where these revolutions were "orchestrated" were then "forced to accept standards unsuitable for the way of life, tradition, and culture of the people":

They lied to us time after time. They made decisions behind our backs and then had us face a fait accompli. That's what happened with NATO's eastward expansion, when military outposts were

placed at our borders. They kept saying to us that it's none of our business. Easy for them to say.

Russia could no longer take it. "Like a spring that had been wound too tight," it had uncoiled:

We will clearly face opposition from the outside. We have to decide if we are prepared to stand firm in protecting our national interests or if we are forever going to be giving in, retreating when there is nowhere to retreat to. Some Western politicians are already threatening us not only with sanctions but also with problems inside the country. I wonder what they mean: are they placing their hopes in a fifth column, national-traitors of various stripes, or are they figuring that they will be able to have a negative impact on the Russian economy, thereby sparking popular unrest? . . . We must take appropriate action.

This was a war speech, though Putin laughed off concerns about war even as he spoke:

They are talking about aggression, about some sort of Russian intervention in Crimea. That's odd. Somehow, I can't recall any historical example of an intervention that went off without a single shot being fired, with no casualties.

Really? Gudkov could readily think of such an example. Hitler's Anschluss of Austria in 1938 was one. His takeover of the part of Czechoslovakia known as Sudetenland was another. That involved not a single gunshot—instead, it employed a plebiscite and a speech, among other bloodless tools. In his September 1938 speech Hitler decried the hypocrisy of Western democracies, which he said refused to recognize the true will of the people. He mentioned that France's sole interest in Czechoslovakia was in using it as a base for launching an attack on Germany. Most important, he mentioned the ethnic- German minority in Czechoslovakia, which, he said, was "robbed of its right to self-determination in the name of [Czechoslovak] self- determination." Germany, he said, had put up with this state of

affairs—and with borders that divided its nation—first because it was weak in the wake of the First World War and later in the interests of peace and stability in Europe, but this had been "misinterpreted as a sign of weakness." Now, he said, Germany was finally asserting itself by fulfilling its sacred duty to the oppressed Germans of Czechoslovakia.¹⁸

Most of the elements of Putin's Crimea speech were familiar from his earlier statements: the tragedy of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hypocrisy of the United States, the treachery of NATO, the idea that America organizes revolutions and then forces its values on traditional cultures, the obligatory below-the-belt reference, which these days also had to be homophobic, and even the enemy within— the "fifth column." But the idea of a divided nation and a moral duty to countrymen abroad that superseded laws and national boundaries had a different antecedent—it recalled Hitler's Sudetenland speech directly. This got Gudkov reading or rereading thinkers who wrote about Nazism. It occurred to him that all this time his thinking about ideology had been wrong. He had been taught that totalitarian ideology had to include a vision of the future. But this was never a key characteristic of Nazism. Its vision had been archaic, and its promise was simplicity, the return to an imaginary past when laws were instincts and the nation was a tribe.

So maybe this was it. Crimea was Russia's ideology. This was why it pulled together every theme that Putin had floated before. And judging from the reaction to Putin's speech, and from survey data, it functioned as an ideology: Crimea mobilized the nation. Levada Center polls showed that 88 percent of the population supported the annexation of Crimea and only 1 percent said that they were "definitely opposed." This fell below the survey's margin of error: it was as if these people—people like Gudkov—did not exist.¹⁹

Hannah Arendt wrote that an ideology was nothing but a single idea taken to its logical extreme. No ideology was inherently totalitarian but any ideology contained the seeds of totalitarianism—it could become encapsulated, entirely divorced from reality, with a single premise eclipsing the entire world. Totalitarian leaders, she

wrote, were interested less in the idea itself than in its use as the driver and justification of action. They derived the "laws of history" from the single chosen idea and then mobilized the people to fulfill these imaginary laws.²⁰

Now that there was, apparently, an ideology, Russia checked off all the boxes on any of the traditional lists of totalitarian-society traits— except, perhaps, Gudkov's own list, which included enforced poverty.

Maybe this was how it worked when a totalitarian society was reconstituting itself rather than being shaped by a totalitarian regime: the ideology congealed last. Gudkov thought of Russia's totalitarianism as a recurrent totalitarianism, like a recurrent infection; as with an infection, the recurrence might not be as deadly as the original disease, but the symptoms would be recognizable from when it had struck the first time.

another person to whom Putin's speech sounded familiar was Dugin. He recognized himself. It had been just over five years since Dugin declared his intention to become his country's lead ideologue, and it was happening: Putin was using Dugin's words and his concepts, and he was carrying out his predictions. Back in 2009, Dugin had prophesied the division of Ukraine into two separate states: the eastern portion would be allied with Russia and the west would be forever looking toward Europe. Dugin saw Ukraine as inhabited by two distinct nations—the western Ukrainians, who spoke Ukrainian, and the people of the east, a nation that included ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians who were, nonetheless, Russian in language and culture. The two nations, in Dugin's view, had fundamentally different geopolitical orientations. This meant that Ukraine was not a nation state. It also meant that its division was preordained—the only question was whether it would be peaceful. There might be war, he had warned back then.²¹

This was about much more than Crimea, much more than Ukraine, and Putin's speech made that clear. Dugin had spent years waiting for Russia to claim its place as the leader of the anti-modern world. The idea, like Dugin's other ideas, had been gaining traction, and Dugin had been accumulating powerful allies. When the protests in Ukraine created an opportunity to be heard, one of these allies, a billionaire who had been supporting ultraconservative groups, delivered a memorandum to the Kremlin. It proposed using the chaos in Ukraine to launch the process of annexing Crimea and southeastern Ukraine. Written before Ukrainian president Yanukovych was deposed, the memo predicted his demise. It also attributed the Maidan to Polish and British Secret Services and proposed that Russia beat the West at its own game: organize unrest on the ground in southeastern Ukraine to justify its intervention. Many of the words and ideas in the memo belonged to Dugin.²²

In late February, Putin's administration started organizing and financing anti-Kiev, pro-Moscow protests in cities in south and eastern Ukraine. By design, once people could be roused to storm and occupy government buildings, and while there to adopt resolutions asking for Moscow's help, Russian intervention would begin.²³ Top- level Kremlin officials gave orders and doled out money to local organizers; Dugin stayed in contact with activists, advised on strategy, and issued reassurances. Russia would not stop at Crimea, he told his contacts: it would help southeastern Ukraine fight against Kiev. Sitting in a tall black leather chair in his home office, with hundreds of books for his backdrop, he would conduct long Skype sessions with Ukrainian activists. "This is only the beginning," he would say. "Those who think that it all ended with Crimea are very wrong."²⁴

In early April, the protesters in Donetsk and Luhansk, two regional centers in eastern Ukraine, began taking over government buildings. Some of them were armed with weapons looted from a local armory.²⁵ On April 7, protesters convened a government of what they called the People's Republic of Donetsk and passed a resolution asking Russia to intervene. Fighting began with isolated battles in some other eastern cities—Ukrainian government forces were able to prevent the takeover of more government buildings—and then it became war.²⁶ The United States, which had imposed sanctions on Russia after the occupation of Crimea—including visa and business bans on several businessmen and officials—threatened further

sanctions. Europe hesitated.²⁷ Russia failed to rouse large enough uprisings in the south, but Ukrainian forces failed to restore Kiev's authority in the east.²⁸

On April 17, Putin held his annual televised hotline. Before he entered the studio, one of the two hosts set the stage:

If things were different, I might have said that this will be yet another conversation, but on this day we have a different country listening to us. Russia is now united with Crimea and the City of Sevastopol.* We have been waiting for this moment for twenty- three long years, ever since the Soviet Union fell apart. For this reason every question today will be either directly related to Crimea

or will have a subtext colored by Crimea.²⁹

The show lasted nearly four hours. A lot was said. The annexation of Crimea was placed in line with Russia's great Second World War victory. Russians who opposed the annexation were condemned as traitors. One such opponent came to the show to make amends. It was Irina Khakamada, who back in 1999 had been one of only two Union of Right Forces founders to oppose Putin's candidacy for president—Nemtsov had been the other. A month before this show, she had also opposed the annexation. But now she said to Putin:

I have come to say the following. Crimea has always needed to have

a Russian identity. I have often been to Crimea They always

wanted to be a part of Russia. It happened the way it did, so be it. You are the victor. You really did pull off that operation without firing a single shot.

The opposition—the barely perceptible 1 percent—was surrendering. Only one member of parliament—Masha's former boss Ilya Ponomarev—had voted against ratifying the Russian-Crimean union treaty. He had since been forced to leave the country.³⁰ Now Nemtsov remained the only person with any name recognition who opposed the annexation.

To Dugin, the most important parts of the show were ones in which he recognized his own influence. There were several points when Ukrainians who remained loyal to Kiev were referred to as "nationalists" and even as Nazis—and Putin pointed out that "such was the historical past of these territories, these lands, and these people." The implication was that the west had been permanently contaminated by the German occupation of 1941-1944. The east, on the other hand, he said, was "connected to Russia at the root, and these are people with something of a different mentality." At the conclusion of the show Putin expanded on the idea of this mentality:

There are certain special characteristics, and I think they have to do with values. I think that a Russian person, or, to speak more broadly, a person of the Russian World, thinks, first, about the fact that man has a moral purpose, a higher moral basis. That is why the Russian person, a person of the Russian World, is focused not so much on his own self. . . .

Putin trailed off and rambled for a bit, revealing to the attentive listener that he had not yet fully assimilated the ideas he was putting forward. But in a few moments he picked up the thread:

These are the deep roots of our patriotism. This is where mass heroism comes from in war, and self-sacrifice in peacetime. This is the origin of mutual aid, and of family values.

The phrase "Russian World" was Dugin's. It was a geographically expansive concept, the vision of a civilization led by Russia. Putin was right to circle around to "family values"—the idea was precisely that the Russian World, whatever its borders, was united by values. The point that Dugin had been making for years was that the very idea of universal human values is misleading: the West's idea of human rights, for example, should not apply to a "traditional-values civilization." One of Dugin's best phrases was, "There is nothing universal about universal human rights."

At another point in the show Putin referred to something that Dugin had been working on for years: making connections with people and organizations that shared the Russian World's values even though they were located in Europe:

I think we are indeed witnessing the process of reevaluating values in European countries. What we call conservative values is starting to gain traction. Take Viktor Orban's victory in Hungary or Marine Le Pen's success in France—she came in third during a municipal election. Similar tendencies are growing in other countries, too. It is obvious, just absolutely obvious.

Absolutely. In the last few years Dugin had revitalized his contacts with the West: he had built bridges with French ultraright activists— ones who were too radical for Le Pen's National Front—and with Hungarians to the right of Orban, as well as many other groups, including ultraconservative European and Israeli Jewish organizations. What united these activists and groups, disparate as they were in conventional political terms, was their political opposition to Brussels and philosophical opposition to modernity.³¹ His work was now effectively recognized by the president. It had attained the status of a national project.

The following day, Dugin was the guest on the country's most popular interview show. He had been interviewed on television many times, but this was a first. The show was run and hosted by Vladimir Posner, a Jew who had once worked in the United States. This was by far the most liberal, pro-Western show on Russian television—and the fact that Dugin was invited meant that he had acquired the kind of political weight that made him an essential, unavoidable guest. The tone of the interview was antagonistic—Dugin even told Posner at one point that he thought that he, Posner, should be banned from television—but it provided a platform for conveying his views to the widest possible audience. Dugin was able to say that the events of the last couple of months—Crimea and, now, a war in eastern Ukraine— constituted a Russian renaissance, a "Russian Spring." "We are starting to feel pride in our country," he went on. "Russians are

beginning to realize that they exist in the world not only as passive objects but as subjects of history. And the more we show that we care about the Russians and Russian speakers outside Russia, the stronger we make our society, the more we emerge from a sleeping state to a state of mobilization. . . . Look at the people who have come from Crimea: this is an entirely different sort of people than our officials or Ukrainian ones. These are people of a new generation, a new brand."

posner: Are you saying that these people are making our nation healthier?

Dugin concurred. Then Posner asked him to expand on a phrase he had seen in Dugin's recent writing: "Greater Russia."

dugin: Greater Russia is the Russian World, the Russian civilization. I think the territory of Greater Russia roughly coincides with the territory of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, give or take. . . . posner: So let me ask you. Is the Caucasus a part of it? Georgia,

Armenia, Azerbaijan? dugin: Certainly, of course. These are parts of Greater Russia.

But that does not mean that— posner: What about Central Asia? dugin: Central Asia—of course, certainly. posner: The Baltics?

dugin: I don't think so. I think perhaps parts of the Baltics and

western Ukraine, under certain circumstances— posner: But everything else is—

dugin: Greater Russia. Look, civilization doesn't have those kinds of borders.

It devolved into an argument on civilizational exceptionalism. Posner was a difficult interviewer. Still, there it was, an hour-long interview for one of Russia's largest television audiences on the idea of the Russian World. Dugin also mentioned traitors and, pressed by

Posner, said that they should be annihilated, and, pressed further, he said their names: Navalny, Nemtsov, Kasyanov, Ryzhkov.* He said what he believed to be true of them, and what he believed all Russians should know: that these men were employed by the Americans.³²

Dugin was giving many interviews and writing many articles—the urgency of the situation amplified his already superhuman efficiency. He was writing that America was waging war against Russia, that Russia was finally stepping up to the challenge, and that the entire world might be on the verge of erupting into its third giant war.³³ But by the end of May, he was growing impatient and even disappointed with Putin. Rather than embark on an open, all-out war, the Kremlin seemed intent on creating a quagmire. What was the point of that? It was true that a slow war in the east would serve the purpose of destabilizing Ukraine, sapping its strength and weakening its new government, but these were petty, tactical goals. Dugin wanted Putin to invade Ukraine openly, using regular troops, and to aim for a glorious victory that would expand Russia. Indeed, it would be only the beginning of Russia's expansion. But when this failed to happen, Dugin knew the reason: Putin was being held back by his moderate, fundamentally pro-Western advisers. He invented a term for them: "sixth column." If the "fifth column" were people like Nemtsov, who Dugin believed were working directly for the United States, then the "sixth column" were traitors to their civilization, not their country. They hid in plain sight, in the Kremlin.³⁴

Dugin had always told his supporters, "We seek not power but influence." Now he used the same juxtaposition to assuage their disappointment. "Our power is negligible," he said, "but our influence is immense."³⁵ This became something of a slogan among his closest allies. It helped that they kept hearing their words repeated by top Russian officials: the evidence of their influence was there for all to witness, if they knew what to listen for. The fact that Putin's actions were not keeping up with their words should only strengthen their resolve.

Outwardly, Dugin's status shifted too. His right-hand man, Valery Korovin, became a member of the Presidential Civic Chamber, the body created to rule civil society. Dugin was no longer a fringe activist. Even if he now found himself used as a foil to make Putin's views and actions look moderate, this served to legitimize Dugin's own positions too.

in late april, Khodorkovsky gathered about three hundred people in Kiev for what he called a "dialogue." It was a strange list of names: famous writers, not-so-famous activists, and people who were important to Khodorkovsky. Masha was invited, probably because she had been charged in the Bolotnoye case and because she had corresponded with Khodorkovsky when he was in prison. Behind bars, he had become something of a village elder: people wrote to him with their questions and their grievances. Masha had had grievances: she had felt betrayed and abandoned. Khodorkovsky's response emphasized the virtues of patience, of rising above the fray, and of taking the long view. Masha no longer remembered what she had written, but Khodorkovsky must have, since he invited her.

In his opening address at the congress, Khodorkovsky emphasized the long view again:

People have been asking me, What's the point of this conference? . . . I give my usual answer, one that saw me through my ten long years [behind bars]: Do what you must and come what

may I have learned over the last ten years to think long-term

and to remember that darkness will always cede to light and dreams

that seem most unrealistic today will become reality tomorrow.³⁶

As far as Masha could tell, everyone at the congress had the same dream: to get onto Khodorkovsky's payroll. Word was, he wanted to bankroll an entire shadow society. Everyone got in line. Masha decided that she wanted no part of what everyone wanted. She actually had a scheduled appointment with Khodorkovsky, but it was at ten in the morning, following a night she had spent drinking, so she canceled. But Khodorkovsky sought her out himself, in the hotel lobby. They talked. She liked him more than she had expected, a lot more. They were oddly alike—and unlike most of the people at the congress. They were both reluctant dissidents. Masha thought Khodorkovsky really wanted to be the establishment—he wanted to be the president, not the president's Enemy Number One. Most people who fight tyrants do not seek power themselves. Khodorkovsky did, and Masha liked this about him. She would have liked to be a general in his army, or at least an official in his administration.

A couple of weeks later Khodorkovsky's people invited her along to the Donetsk region to see what was happening there. It was terrifying. She had liked Donetsk when she was there in another life, two years ago—when Sergey the photographer took her along for the European Cup. The beautiful airport was still here—all of Donetsk was still here, in fact—but in place of the measured traffic of everyday, there was hectic motion now, and clumps of tense, angry, armed men. Here in Donetsk they had not fired a shot yet, but you knew that they would.

In and outside the city, men were building checkpoints, placing flags on them. The men had tremors, which Masha recognized, as any Moscow bar regular would: amphetamines. The men stayed up on speed. Masha talked to men on both sides. They spoke the same language, and they hated each other. Each side thought the other was less than human. Their guns were loaded and had no safety catches.

Masha called her mother-in-law to tell her that she was in Donetsk: the older woman had grown up there. The mother-in-law launched into an anti-Kiev tirade. As far as she was concerned, the new government was made up of Nazis.

Two weeks after Masha left Donetsk, anti-Kiev fighters seized the airport. The Ukrainian army took it back after a day of fighting. Four months later, it was attacked again—and then, after weeks of fighting, it belonged to the separatists. But all that was left were ruins: mountains of rubble, chunks of aircraft, and many dead bodies.³⁷

Masha finally took a job with Khodorkovsky's organization. She would coordinate his work with political prisoners. Her new colleagues at a clandestine office in Moscow were working on a news site and on educational seminars. The seminars, coordinated by Vladimir Kara-Murza, a guy around Masha's age, were innocuous stuff: basic civics education. But because they were backed by Khodorkovsky, the seminars drew too much attention. Local officials shut them down, pressured venues into canceling rental agreements, and even had the power to a venue cut one time. Masha hated the idea that she had now become a professional political prisoner, or at least a political-prisoner professional, but she liked the fight.

the european union, Canada, and several other Western countries followed the United States in imposing sanctions on Russia. They banned certain Russian state companies from financial markets, embargoed exports of high-tech oil equipment to Russia, and banned the sale to Russia of military and dual-use technology. In addition, a number of Russian politicians were effectively declared personae non grata. The road for this kind of personal sanction had been laid by the Magnitsky bill back in 2012—and Masha's new colleague Kara-Murza had been in Washington lobbying for the sanctions back then.

Businesses got nervous. Western investors began pulling out for fear of the sanctions and of the effect of the sanctions. The Russian economy had slowed down precipitously even before the war, but now it seemed to be going into a tailspin. Others were scared too. The World Congress of Families got cold feet about its planned grand gathering in September—the one slated for both the Kremlin and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Everyone, or almost everyone, still came and praised Russia for its brave opposition to the LGBT lobby and talked about the dangers of "gender ideology" and the specter of "demographic winter," but, in apparent deference to the sanctions, the event was billed as Russian-organized and the World Congress name was not used.³⁸ The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church spoke at the opening, as did a vice-speaker of parliament and the minister of culture, among others. John-Henry Westen, a Canadian

right-to-life activist and journalist, gushed in an article: "Imagine a land where life, family, faith, and culture are promoted by the official government. Where large families are treated, not as a blight on the planet, but indeed as the 'future of humanity.'"³⁹

With the sanctions in place, the forum took on added importance for the Kremlin. Some of the Western guests were elected officials in their countries—and however marginalized their parties might be, they had the potential to disrupt the process of imposing and extending sanctions. So far, even Russia's closest European allies, such as Hungary, had joined the sanctions, but eventually the monolith would have to crack. Here too Dugin had a chance to wield his influence, capitalizing on his contacts with far-right parties in Greece, Finland, France, Austria, and, especially, Italy.⁴⁰ He was able not only to be a guest—he continued to lecture abroad even as he seemed to devote all his energies to eastern Ukraine—but also to play host. He invited some of his most daring foreign friends to the Donetsk region in June 2014, to show them how history was made, and to fantasize about a future Greater Russia.⁴¹

The Western powers introduced sanctions step by step, building on the premise that Putin could be pressured to change his country's behavior—to avoid even greater damage to the Russian economy. But to a Russia that believed that it was at war with the United States, this gradual ratcheting up of pressure looked like nothing but escalation. By the end of the summer Putin responded with sanctions of his own: Russia banned the import of foods from Western countries. Kremlin media estimated that the ban applied to $9 billion worth of imports— the message was that hostile foreign countries would lose this amount of money while Russian food producers would benefit.⁴² What actually happened was that food prices grew 10 percent in a single month while the range of food available at supermarkets dropped noticeably. Most cheeses disappeared, for example. Russia once again became a place where food made the best gift: visitors or travelers returning from the West invariably came bearing cheese.

Gudkov made a chart that contained just two curves: Putin's approval rating and the Levada Center's consumer perceptions index.

The index was derived from answers to five questions: (1) How has your family's economic situation changed in the last year? (2) How do you expect it to change in the next year? (3) Do you expect the next twelve months to be good or bad for the country's economy as a whole? (4) What about the next five years? (5) Is now a good or a bad time to make large purchases, such as furniture, a television, a refrigerator?⁴³ They had been tracking the index since 1995, and had been asking the current set of questions since 2008. Soon after Putin's approval rating headed vertically up, the consumer perceptions index began its descent. The economic slowdown had been evident before the Olympics, then there had been a brief moment of optimism, but two months after the invasion of Ukraine, the decline became precipitous.⁴⁴ By the spring of 2014, layoffs were epidemic. The ruble, which had held steady for more than a dozen years, began losing ground against the dollar. Sanctions weakened it, the countersanctions pushed it further down, and in the fall of 2015 declining oil prices sent it tumbling. In December, after the ruble spent a day acting like a yo-yo and finally settled 11 percent down against the dollar, Russians rushed to dump their currency on durable goods. Car dealerships ran out of inventory and electronics stores ran out of large-screen televisions.⁴⁵

Gudkov studied his divergent curves. Putin's popularity stayed steady at the anomalously high level that was apparently no longer anomalous. The consumer perceptions index kept declining. This was impossible. Eventually, these curves would have to break and head toward each other.

Or not. Gudkov himself had once added poverty to the definition of totalitarianism: he had come to the conclusion that scarcity was essential for the survival of a totalitarian regime. So perhaps in a case of recurrent totalitarianism, a totalitarianism that was being created from below at least as much as it was being imposed from above, the state and society were cooperating in creating a sense of scarcity.

People found ways to circumvent the sanctions, of course. They labeled food products as being something other than what they were or originating somewhere other than where they originated. One could now buy seafood from landlocked Belarus. In the summer of 2015—a year after countersanctions were first introduced—Putin signed a decree ordering the destruction of all foodstuffs deemed to be contraband. The cabinet then published rules dictating that banned foods should be destroyed "by any available means" in the presence of two impartial witnesses and the process must be captured by photo or video. There was talk of crematoria and of mobile incinerators. Some people were taken aback. A government plan to destroy vast quantities of food—edible food, food that was undeniably in demand—would probably be bizarre in any country, but in Russia it might have seemed particularly shocking. This was the country of the man-made famines that had killed millions, the country of the Siege of Leningrad, of the postwar hunger, of the catastrophic shortages of the 1980s, and of the salary arrears and subsistence off tiny plots of land of the 1990s. The president's own mother had nearly died of starvation during the Siege of Leningrad—this had been the obvious subtext of the outrage over TV Rain's tweet—and now the president was ordering the destruction of food. Over a hundred fifty thousand people signed a petition asking the government to give banned products to the poor instead, and a few officials expressed support for the idea.

Then 114 tons of pork were annihilated in Samara, a city on the Volga. The pork had been labeled as Brazilian but was exposed as hailing from the European Union. Twenty tons of cheese in the Orenburg region were next in line. Then there was more pork, this time in St. Petersburg, and three truckloads of illegal nectarines.⁴⁶ Now nothing was too horrible or too bizarre to be believed.

twenty-one

ZHANNA: FEBRUARY 27, 2015

the sochi Olympics ended on February 23, 2014. The following day, a Moscow court sentenced eight of the Bolotnoye case defendants. Weeks earlier, when the sentencing was scheduled, it had been clear that setting it for the first day when Putin would not be concerned with projecting a temporarily gentler image boded ill. The Bolotnoye case might be the Kremlin's chance to avenge the humiliation of having been forced to release Khodorkovsky.

Only one of the defendants, a nineteen-year-old woman who had already spent more than a year under house arrest, was given a suspended sentence. The rest—seven men, all of whom had been in pretrial detention—were sentenced to between two and a half and four years behind bars.¹ A small crowd gathered outside the courthouse on the day of the sentencing, and there were arrests— police loaded 234 people onto buses and took them away. Later in the day, people began gathering in Manezhnaya Square in the center of Moscow, the same square where thousands had come to protest Navalny's sentence seven months earlier. This time, there were only 432, and they were all arrested.²

Nemtsov was standing on the sidewalk being interviewed by a French television crew when a police officer approached him and said, "Please come to the bus with me." Nemtsov excused himself and followed the policeman. Time was, he would have refused to go, demanded to know on what grounds he was being detained, and made the police work to drag his large body onto a bus. But six months earlier Nemtsov had reentered electoral politics—such as remained in

Russia. Only some mayors and municipal-council members in some cities were still elected directly. Nemtsov had been elected to the city legislature of Yaroslavl, a town of roughly half a million people about two and a half hours' drive from Moscow. He took the job seriously— he was now spending roughly half his time in Yaroslavl, where he had become a public figure. He dove into issues of local corruption and promoted local sports. As an elected official, he could not simply be detained by the police: there was a special court procedure for people like him. So he strolled to the bus, his city-legislature credentials in hand—and found himself arrested.

He and Navalny spent that night in a two-person cell.³ The following day, Navalny was sentenced to seven days' arrest and Nemtsov to ten. Several other activists were sentenced to between one and two weeks. All of them had been found guilty of disobeying police.⁴ The message was clear: with the Olympics over, the crackdown would intensify. Protest would be punished. Nemtsov was a fool to think that any Russian law would protect him.

while nemtsov was locked up, Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms invaded Crimea. Nemtsov wrote a short blog post and had it sent to Echo Moskvy, the radio station where he was a regular on the air and had his own blog on the website. Echo sent a message back: he needed to tone down the post. Specifically, they wanted him to remove the phrases "fratricidal war," "mentally unstable secret-police agent," and "the ghoul feeds on the people's blood." Nemtsov refused and put up the post on his Facebook page instead.

Putin has declared war on Ukraine. This is a fratricidal war. Russia and Ukraine will pay a high price for the bloody insanity of this mentally unstable secret-police agent. Young men will die on both sides. There will be inconsolable mothers and sisters. There will be orphaned children. Crimea will empty out, because no one will vacation there. There will be billions, tens of billions of rubles taken from the old and the young and thrown into the fire of war—and then even more money will be needed to support the thieves in power in Crimea. He must see no other way to hold on to power.

The ghoul feeds on the people's blood. Russia will face international isolation, the impoverishment of its population, and political crackdowns. God, what have we done to deserve this? And how long

will we continue to put up with it?⁵

The same day, six people came to Manezhnaya Square and unfurled a banner that said "For Your Liberty and Ours." It was a double quotation: a Polish slogan adopted in the nineteenth century by Russian supporters of Poland during its struggle for independence, it had been used again in 1968, by the seven dissidents who came to Red Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. All seven had been arrested then, and sentenced to prison terms and Siberian exile. This time, the six protesters were arrested as soon as they unfurled their banner.⁶ Later that day more people went to Manezhnaya and others went to the Defense Ministry building—no one really knew where to go, in no small part because Nemtsov, Navalny, and several of the activists who had for years taken care of the where and the when and of getting the word out were in jail. By the end of the day, 362 people had been arrested.⁷ This was the day the parliament approved use of force abroad and Nemtsov and other Russians who were paying attention realized that their country had started a war with Ukraine.

There was also a hastily organized march in support of the invasion—the parliamentary newspaper described it as a march "in support of the people of Ukraine and against the provocateurs who have usurped power in Kiev."⁸ Pro-Kremlin youth organizations advertised for participants on social networks:

RALLY AND CONCERT, 500 RUBLES FOR 1 HOUR

Rally connected with current events in Ukraine. Meet up at 15:00 at Pushkinskaya Metro station, in the center of the hall. 50 young people needed. Apply here with two photographs, name, last name, age, and phone number, or call 89104465285, ask for Maxim. Cash

payment upon completion.⁹

The ad spoke more to the youth movements' standard organizing practices than it did to the need to pay people to celebrate the occupation. The outpouring of joy was massive and genuine. Zhanna felt it happening all around her. Everyone had lost their minds. Zhanna experienced political outrage—political passion even. She had never felt it before, not even when her father was arrested on New Year's Eve 2009, certainly not when she was running for office. All these years, her support for her father's causes had been intellectual: she had agreed that he was right on the merits of his arguments, and even that was not true all the time. But now she felt like she was staring into an abyss. How could people—intelligent people like her grandmother or the people she worked with—not understand that war would bring disaster? How could people whose opinions on the economy she respected not understand that the economy would now go from sluggish to death-bound? She realized, quickly, that they too felt gripped by passion, and that passion had nothing to do with intelligence. She also realized that refusing to share her nation's joy made her a pariah at her office and in her country.

She wanted to talk to her father about it, but he was in jail again. She brought him food. It was a newly renovated jail building this time, with shiny slippery tile floors and plastic window frames, and, as it turned out, bizarre food rules: tomatoes were allowed but cucumbers were banned.

She talked to him as soon as he was released.

"We have to leave," she said. "This country is finished."

He listened.

"I want to quit my job," she said. "What's the point of debating the future of the gas monopoly when the country itself has no future?"

"Don't quit," he said. "Find another job first."

"I want to go to Ukraine."

"Then go."

Zhanna went to Kiev, knocked on all the doors of all the television stations and found nothing. Boris suggested that he could call Petro Poroshenko, his friend who was now running for president in Ukraine, and ask him for help in finding a job for Zhanna.

"Though it wouldn't be a good look for me, to have you living in

Ukraine," he added. Now that Russia was at war with Ukraine, his ties to that country, and to the Orange Revolution, were mentioned ever more frequently. He had become the very image of a traitor.

"No, don't call," said Zhanna. It was not because of what he had said about his reputation—she was worried about hers. She had worked too hard to be seen as her own person.

"Then you have to keep doing your job at RBK as long as they'll let you."

RBK belonged to former metals magnate Mikhail Prokhorov, a friend of Boris's who had himself dabbled in politics. He was the one who had once offered to bankroll Zhanna's campaign while also funding her opponent. Prokhorov tried to at least appear independent of the Kremlin, so his media outlets took more freedoms than most. Zhanna had a job in journalism in which she was not forced to broadcast outright lies—this was a luxury. Soon, Zhanna and her father both knew, having a job at all might feel like a luxury.

as soon as Boris and the other Solidarity activists were released from jail, they filed for a permit to hold a peace march. About fifty thousand people came on March 15—a stunning turnout. If the polls were right and only 1 percent of Russians opposed the war, then in Moscow, nearly all of this opposition would seem to have come out for the march. On the other hand, perhaps the polls reflected the fact that only members of the die-hard, risk-everything opposition were willing to express a dissenting opinion anymore, even to a survey taker. Boris marched at the very front, in the middle of a row of people holding a banner that said "Hands Off Ukraine." Behind them, many of the signs said "For Your Liberty and Ours."

Nemtsov was the first speaker at the rally. He talked not so much about Ukraine as about Putin.

He is a sick man. . . . But he is not merely a sick man: he is also a cynical and dishonest man. He has occupied Crimea because he

wants to rule forever!¹⁰

Zhanna went to the march—the first time she had joined her father in the streets since she had found herself running away from police that New Year's Eve back in 2009.

A few days after the march, Nemtsov heard that he would be charged in the Bolotnoye case. Considering what had happened to the other protest leaders, he was not surprised. Udaltsov was in jail; Navalny had escaped prison only because thousands had taken to the streets, but now he was facing new trumped-up fraud charges; Kasparov had left the country after being threatened with prosecution. Boris told Zhanna that he wanted to talk.

"I don't know if I could survive a ten-year sentence," he said. "I'm fifty-five, you know."

He worked out every day. He windsurfed. He loved pictures of himself at the beach. He wore tight blue jeans and white shirts unbuttoned to show off his pecs. His last two or three girlfriends had been younger than Zhanna—Zhanna, in fact, appreciated the current one, a long-legged, dirty-blond-haired young woman from Kiev, for never inserting herself into grown-up conversations, like the one they were having now.

"I'll always support you," said Zhanna. Family could make the difference between surviving in a Russian prison and not.

"You'll lose your job."

"You know I don't care."

"In that case, if they lock me up, will you mention it live on air?"

"You got it."

on march 26, the fourteenth anniversary of Putin's first election, Zhanna turned thirty. Boris called her in the morning.

"I'm sorry I can't come tonight," he said. "I'm in Israel. Will you come visit me?"

Zhanna bawled. They had never missed each other's birthdays. They always had big parties. "I think this is the last time I have a party," she told Raisa. Everyone else came, and everyone noticed Boris's absence, but no one asked about it.

Zhanna flew to Tel Aviv the following week. Boris picked her up at the airport looking like Al Pacino in The Godfather, when his character had the permanent black eye. Except Boris had two.

"I had the bags under my eyes removed," he explained. "I needed a doctor's note."

He was referring to the Yaroslavl city legislature's mandatory attendance policy. But what was he thinking? That he could be here on indefinite medical leave? That the Investigative Committee would change its mind about the probe if he waited them out? Was he planning to stay in Israel?

He said he was staying. He also complained about not feeling at home in Israel. Zhanna said she agreed. It was too dense, too hot, and too humid.

"There are other countries," she suggested. "With better weather."

Her father said nothing.

They walked on the beach, and he talked about his life as though he needed to sum up his accomplishments. He seemed old— something he had never seemed before. He did not seem like a superhero. He kept suggesting they go shopping. He wanted to buy her things. She demurred.

Before she left, he told her not to tell anyone where he was. He was not hiding: he was hiding the fact that he was not in Russia. Zhanna told no one. Even when her boss asked her directly if her father was in Israel, she said, "What are you talking about?"

Zhanna's grandmother knew he was abroad, of course, and she was thrilled. To ensure that he stayed abroad, she decided to publish an open letter to her son on the Echo Moskvy website. She sent it to Boris's cousin to arrange publication. The cousin sent it to Zhanna. Zhanna sent it to Boris.

I have only one thing to ask you, to beg of you—you can call it my will and testament, if you like. Don't go to prison. It will do no one any good. I mean the people who love you and people of good will in general.

How was Dina Yakovlevna suggesting that he avoid prison? She was a woman born and reared in the Soviet Union, so she could not openly recommend emigration: for most of her life, emigres were condemned as traitors to the Soviet cause. Still, everyone would know that when she begged him not to go to prison, she was asking him to emigrate. Since this was an open letter, she addressed the obvious concern, that her son, were he to emigrate, would be perceived as unpatriotic.

I would like to add that my father, Boris's grandfather, was, from a young age, a member of the Bolshevik party, a sincere believer in Leninism, and he personally saw Lenin speak. He was later honored by the Soviet Union in retirement, so he was a most honorable man. Boris's ill-wishers fail to understand that all his thoughts and actions are driven by honesty and his love for Russia. These are not just words. By the way, this is something that he shares with Putin: a love of Russia.

When Crimea joined Russia, I was euphoric like everyone else. I thought justice had triumphed. I talked about it with my son-in-law, and we both came to the conclusion that Putin had secured his place in history. We are simple people. We didn't know how this was all going to turn out. We didn't see the flip side of the coin.

But now I realize. I think that maybe Putin isn't so thrilled with all of this himself anymore. My daughter says that maybe his advisers weren't all in favor of this scenario. Some of them are probably smarter than others.

Getting back to Boris now. I remember reading in some newspaper that Khodorkovsky was asked, "How did you, being such a smart man, end up in prison when you could have avoided it?" And Khodorkovsky said, "There are smart men and then there are wise men."

Borya, please be wise.

Love, your mother, 16 April 2014

Boris was livid. The idea of being addressed through an open letter by his own mother, the naive attempt to manipulate his will and his image by appealing to Soviet concepts of honor, but most of all, the comparison to Putin—the assertion that they had their love of Russia in common—made him incensed. Still, Zhanna felt that he railed excessively that day on the phone. He seemed to be overreacting a lot these days.

Around the same time, a former socialite who was now an anchor on TV Rain tweeted, "Turns out Nemtsov is in Israel. Probably not returning to Russia, because of criminal probe."¹¹ When they discussed this on the phone, Boris sounded hurt: he had thought this woman was his friend.

He was a terrible emigre: his heart was not in it. The successful ones ran to save their children or their fortunes. He was running to save his life, but his life was in Russia.

A few days later he went to Khodorkovsky's congress in Kiev, and from there he flew to Moscow. He took a selfie at the airport and posted it on Facebook with a reference to the TV Rain anchor's two- week-old tweet. He was back.¹²

boris was on borrowed time now, so he worked twice as furiously. He published a report on corruption and fraud in the lead-up to the Sochi Olympics. The report focused on, among others, Vladimir Yakunin, head of the Russian railroads monopoly and a key funder of Russian Orthodox "traditional values" activism. His wife ran an organization called Sanctity of Motherhood and was a fixture of World Congress of Families gatherings. Born in 1948, Yakunin had been a KGB officer in Soviet times. He had been a member of the Putin clan since the 1990s.¹³ Nemtsov's focus, however, was not on Yakunin's life but on the business he had done in Sochi, including a contract to build a forty-eight-kilometer* stretch of highway at a cost of more than $50 billion. Nemtsov was certain this was a world record. He called this chapter "The Most Expensive Project of the Most Expensive Olympics in History."¹⁴ That spring Yakunin started dragging Nemtsov into court: he sued him for libel, demanding 3 million rubles—the equivalent of nearly $100,000 when the suit was first filed but worth only about half that amount by the time the case was finally on the docket late the following winter.¹⁵

Nemtsov also began assembling a report on Putin's war in Ukraine. It would include proof of the use of Russian troops in both Crimea and eastern Ukraine. It would include body counts, which the Kremlin had classified. It would include proof that the missile that shot down a Malaysian Airlines plane in July 2014, killing 298 people, was fired from a Russian-made launcher located on territory controlled by Russians and the Ukrainian separatists they backed. It would include information about peace negotiations held in Minsk in the fall of 2014—like the fact that Russia appended its signature (it was represented by Moscow's ambassador to Ukraine, Mikhail Zurabov) to the accords reached there, thereby acknowledging that it was a party to the conflict.—

Nemtsov led a second peace march in Moscow on September 21, 2014—about twenty-five thousand people came.¹⁷ That day one of the buildings along the route featured a two-story-tall square banner bearing the words "March of the Traitors." Beneath images of the U.S. flag and the White House, the banner showed the faces of six people —two writers, a rock musician, and three activists, including Nemtsov.¹⁸ At least half of these people were spending all or most of their time outside Russia. Nemtsov's face had appeared on a similarly large poster that had been hung on a building in the center of the city back in April, when he was in Israel. That one was captioned "The Fifth Column. Aliens Among Us." The group was almost entirely different, but Nemtsov's face was a constant.¹⁹ He appeared again in January 2015, on the largest banner yet—this one covered three and a half stories of a high-rise apartment building. "The fifth column insisted on sanctions against their own country. By supporting sanctions, they are causing incomes to fall and prices and unemployment to grow." A quote from Nemtsov's blog appeared next to his face: "The sanctions that have been imposed may destabilize the country. Putin will be facing a crisis and chaos in Russia."²⁰

On New Year's Eve 2015, Alexei Navalny and his brother Oleg were found guilty of defrauding a company whose representative testified that it had not in fact been defrauded. Alexei was sentenced to three and a half years of house arrest—the authorities were apparently trying to avoid another mass protest—but Oleg got three and a half years in prison. He was a hostage now.²¹

With Navalny sentenced, Udaltsov in prison, and Kasparov and Ponomarev in exile, Nemtsov was now the only one of the prominent protest organizers left walking around Moscow (and Yaroslavl). After the winter holidays, he began organizing a third march, timed for the anniversary of the invasion. This time he could not get a permit to march in the center of the city. Nor could he get much support, even among fellow activists, for the march itself. His allies argued that Russians were now concerned more with their own economic problems than with the war. Nemtsov compromised on both counts: the march would be held on the outskirts of the city—an hour's Metro ride from the center—and it would be called "The Spring March Against the Crisis."

Ten days in advance of the scheduled march, on the anniversary of the day when Ukrainian president Yanukovych was deposed, a government-sanctioned march was held in central Moscow. It inaugurated yet another pro-Kremlin youth movement, the Anti- Maidan, with the prevention of a "color revolution" in Russia its sole declared goal.²² About thirty thousand people came, many of them carrying flags and preprinted banners bearing slogans such as "The Maidan Brings War and Chaos." A giant black banner carried by more than a dozen people at once read, in white lettering, "Clean Out the Fifth Column." A single poster, copies of which were carried by dozens of the marchers, featured a black-and-white photograph of Nemtsov in an orange frame. The caption said, "Organizer of the Maidan."²³

zhanna was not planning to go to the march out in the suburbs. She had no use for the euphemism in its name: she wanted to march against the war, or not at all. She was going on vacation to Italy

instead—the first week of March, when it always felt like Moscow winter would never end, was the right time to get away. Raisa would come too—she came to Moscow from Nizhny Novgorod on February 27 to spend the night before they flew out together. On the way home Zhanna stopped by Boris's building and left an envelope containing $10,000 in cash with the doorman. This was money for the report on Putin's war in Ukraine. It was about to go to the printer's.

Zhanna said good night to Raisa at half past eleven, went to her bedroom, and turned off the lights and her phone—she always followed this mental-health rule. Raisa was sleeping in the living room.

Zhanna woke up because Raisa was screaming. Zhanna knew it was her mother screaming, yet it was a voice she had never heard before, a voice of terror. Zhanna must have forgotten to lock the door, there must be an intruder.

Raisa was in the living room alone. She was sitting on the couch screaming. She held her phone in her hand.

"They killed him," she said.

Zhanna turned on her phone and the television. There were text messages and news stories. Her father had been shot on a bridge not fifteen minutes from here. Raisa was having trouble breathing.

"It's okay," said Zhanna. "We'll go there now."

It was pouring rain. She hailed a car.

"Take us to the Moskvoretsky Bridge, please."

"What do you need there?"

"They killed Nemtsov there."

The driver looked at her for the first time. His face, lit by a streetlamp, looked angry.

"What do you care?"

"Well, maybe you don't care that a world-renowned man was just shot to death in the center of Moscow, but he happens to be my father."

The police had sealed off the bridge. Zhanna went from officer to officer, showing her press credentials and her passport. "I'm press. We are family. I'm press." It took forever.

The first person they saw on the other side of the barrier was

Vladimir Kara-Murza, Boris's young friend, a co-organizer of the peace marches who was now working for Khodorkovsky.

"The body is in the ambulance," he said. "I'll follow it to the morgue."

There was no point in driving all over town now.

"We have to think about how to tell Grandmother," Zhanna said to Raisa.

They called Boris's sister and his cousin in Nizhny, and they went to Dina Yakovlevna's house to wait for morning. She was bound to turn on the television or radio as soon as she awoke, and they needed to be there to tell her the news themselves.

"I want to go to Moscow," the old woman said.

The next day Dina Yakovlevna led a march in Moscow. It was not a peace march or a "spring march." It was a march of mourning. Fifty thousand people walked through central Moscow without a permit. They carried Russian flags and portraits of Nemtsov and a giant banner with the words "Heroes Don't Die." No one stopped them.²⁴

there were dozens of unanswered calls on Zhanna's phone. Everyone wanted an interview. She called her own station.

"I want to talk to you first," she said.

"Sure, let's get you on tape," the editor in chief said.

"I want to be live," said Zhanna.

"I can't do that."

She hung up.

She talked to a BBC reporter instead. She said that she held Putin personally responsible for her father's death. She was merely stating the obvious. Boris was killed on a bridge across the Moscow River, with the Kremlin as the backdrop for the murder. The Kremlin was so close that the bridge was under constant surveillance—as any television journalist who had ever tried to film a stand-up there knew: the Presidential Guard would have been on top of them in seconds. But Boris's body had lain on the bridge for at least ten minutes, with no Presidential Guard in sight. Not that it mattered where the killing happened: Putin had been portraying Zhanna's father as a traitor for so long, and as an enemy combatant for the last year—their fears of prison seemed naive now.

There was a funeral. Pavel Sheremet, the journalist who had made the film for Nemtsov's fiftieth birthday, emceed the memorial service. They miscalculated and had to cut it short—not everyone who had come to pay respects had been able to enter the building by the time the funeral procession left for the cemetery.

Zhanna and Raisa did go to Italy, but the BBC found her there again, and this time Zhanna said even more. Russian police had arrested a Chechen man, a police officer, for Boris's murder. But she said that she had no trust in any Russian investigation.

You keep asking me if my father posed a threat to the regime. Of course he did. You have such a two-dimensional view of the world. Look wider. Study the totalitarian regimes of the world. The dissidents are either in exile—look at how many people have left Russia, like Kasparov—or else they are in prison or under house

arrest, or they are killed Anyone who thinks differently poses a

threat to a totalitarian regime. . . .

Are you afraid to return to Russia?

Not really, I'm not. I'm going back.

Did your father's murder change your views of—

You know, I was always a pessimist, but this turned my whole world upside down. Not that I had any illusions. But I certainly didn't think that it's possible at all—I still can't believe that they killed my father. I don't consider myself an activist. But I am an honorable person and I love my father very much, and I want everyone to know the truth. And the truth is what I'm saying—that we'll never get the truth from the authorities in Russia. But I just want to say that what I'm saying now means that the authorities will now view

me as an activist. That's all I have to say.²⁵

Zhanna did return to Moscow. She figured it was a matter of time before she lost her job—the people at RBK were surely just waiting for an excuse to cut her loose.

Boris's friends—the activists who had been by his side for the last ten years, in Solidarity, at marches, and in jail—set up a memorial on the bridge. After the first time the authorities removed the flowers and Russian flags, they set up a round-the-clock vigil. Vladimir Kara- Murza was one of the half-dozen people who went there every day, to stand in memory and on guard.

In late May, the University of Bonn invited Zhanna to give a talk in memory of her father. She woke up in a slightly worn German Modernist hotel on the three-month anniversary of Boris's death. She read the news. Vladimir Kara-Murza had been hospitalized with multiple organ failure as the result of an unknown toxin. So this was how it worked. The famous got a bullet in the heart and the less famous got poison in their tea.

The hotel, it turned out, had a monthly rate. She could stay there while she looked for an apartment. The family who ran the hotel restaurant spoke Italian—she could communicate with them, even if she knew no one else in this town. It did not occur to Zhanna to go anywhere else. Bonn was quiet and clean and safe, as good a place as any. She was never going back to Russia.

twenty-two

FOREVER WAR

after the protest following Navalny's sentencing in July 2013—after several of the best hours he could remember, when he and the people all around him were doing what had to be done, asking no one's permission to do it—after the police finally dispersed the crowd, Seryozha found himself standing in the square across the street from the Bolshoi Theatre. Everyone was gone. Some people had been loaded onto police buses. Most had gone home. A few had settled in at nearby bars. The night was warm, and the terrace bars on the pedestrian mall around the corner were serving Cuba Libres. Seryozha still felt the spot where a policeman's baton had poked at his back as he and his little group were pushed along the sidewalk, away from the protest site. He still felt hoarse from shouting out to other protesters when he wanted them to break away from the cops, then double back and take their stand again. Too few of them had heard him. He went home.

The next day, after Navalny had been released from prison, Seryozha read on Facebook that a woman had gone back to the square to continue the protest. He knew her—not well, but he knew her name and he had often gone to a cafe she managed. She kept writing the same thing on her page, calling on people to come and stand with her, to refuse to leave until all charges against Navalny were dropped and until the Bolotnoye prisoners were released. She wrote comments on her friends' pages—she had a lot of friends—demanding that they come and join her. Sometimes they did, for an hour or two, and then they went back to their lives. She stayed. Every day for three

weeks she stood in the square, beneath a clock that was counting down the days and hours to the start of the Sochi Olympics. She held a handwritten sign in Russian and English: "Free All Political Prisoners." For the first few days, she was surrounded by dozens of police officers and several paddy wagons—they clearly expected the protesters to return. But then they left, and the woman stood alone. Every day she posted a picture of herself beneath the clock, which was counting days in reverse, as prisoners do.¹

Seryozha knew that he should go, but he did not. He felt the cloud coming back down on him again, heavier than before. All he could think about was that he, Seryozha, was not beyond reproach. If he was not beyond reproach, then he had no right to call on other people to act, like he had the other day. He had to act himself. But acting involved other people, and he had no right to involve them. So he was not acting. Not acting was shameful. The shame about his inaction combined with the shame he now felt about his pride, his unwarranted claims to other people's attention, and this double shame, this shame that kept doubling back on itself, paralyzed him.

The paralysis let up briefly in March. After the occupation of Crimea, the outside world became so loud that it broke through the cloud. Seryozha got in touch with a couple of men he had met at the protests in 2011-2012. Together they printed out and laminated portraits of the more than a hundred men and women who had died in the Maidan. They took them to the Ukrainian embassy and set them in a row along the fence, in a linear memorial.² A few hours later the police asked the embassy to remove the pictures. They explained that a rally celebrating the annexation of Crimea was happening nearby and there could be trouble. The embassy complied. After that, the cloud descended again.

Seryozha went to see a psychiatrist that spring. He explained what was happening to him. He had no friends. He was not working. Most days, he was not leaving the house. He was a useless, worthless human being.

The psychiatrist prescribed antidepressants. A few days after Seryozha started taking them, he felt no different except that his

whole body itched. At least he was feeling his body—maybe this was a good thing, the beginning of recovery. Then he could think of nothing but the itch. By the time he realized that he needed medical attention, by the time he told a doctor that he felt like his skin was coming off, that he felt like he was dying, he really was dying. He had a condition called toxic epidermal necrolysis, a rare side effect of the antidepressants.³ Some of the damage was permanent. After that, when Seryozha struggled to get out of bed in the morning, it was hard, usually impossible, because of what the depression was doing to him and what the antidepressant drugs had done.

when arutyunyan looked at her clients, she almost found herself missing the early Putin years. For her, that had been a time when things started shutting down—when a world in which, for a decade or more, opportunity had seemed limitless, began closing in. But she had known even then that she was in the minority. Most of her clients craved "stability," whatever that meant. It had all been too much for them for years. Their anxiety had been intolerable: what Arutyunyan had experienced as "freedom from" the constraints of the totalitarian state, many of her clients experienced as "freedom to"— find a way, measure up, do as well as the others. When the first constraints began snapping back into place, to the beat of the "stability" drum, they had felt calmer. One client had finally felt grounded enough to start her own business—something that she had wanted and feared for years. She, and the business, did well for a while. In fact, even now the business was doing well enough. But the client was having panic attacks. So many laws had changed without warning, so many unwritten rules had gone into effect, that she was constantly unsure whether she had missed something. One day, in February 2016, she stepped outside in the morning to discover that overnight all the low-rise commercial buildings on her street—the shops that sold flowers and bread and soda and cigarettes—had been torn down.

Altogether, ninety-seven buildings in Moscow were demolished that night. The city said that their papers were not in order.⁴ But they

had stood there for years, in many cases well over a decade—surely their owners thought their papers were good. The woman's own business rented space in an old-construction high-rise, but what was it that she was missing? She had a strong sense—she got signals—that she should be cultivating connections and giving bribes, but she did not know how and, more to the point, she felt strongly that she should not. The signals she was getting about what was right came into conflict with her own inner sense of what was right. If only the law were clear and permanent and applied to all equally.

If only the law were clear and permanent and applied to all equally, Arutyunyan's job would be easier. She would guide her client to understand that her fears were projections—which they were, by definition, yet how was she to draw the line between the woman's fear of a collision with her superego and her fear of a collision with Russia's so-called law enforcement? The client's world did not just feel unpredictable: it was unpredictable by design.

It was not just this client who was living in a state of constant anxiety: the entire country was. It was the oldest trick in the book—a constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves. This was not the sort of anxiety that moved people to action and accomplishment. This was the sort of anxiety that exceeded human capacity. Like if your teenage daughter has not come home—by morning you have run out of logical explanations, you can no longer calm yourself by pretending that she might have missed the last Metro train and spent the night at a friend's house and her phone battery had died, and you are left alone with your fear. You can no longer sit still or reason. You regress, and after a while the only thing you can do is scream, like a helpless terrified baby. You need an adult, a figure of authority. Almost anyone willing to take charge will do. And then, if that someone wants to remain in charge, he will have to make sure that you continue to feel helpless.

The whole country felt helpless. You could see it if you turned on the television, which Arutyunyan rarely did. Everyone on television was screaming all the time. There were debate shows—this was what they were called, that is—in which two or more people ostensibly

representing two sides of an issue yelled at each other for an hour and a half at a time. "America wants to see us weak!" yelled a politician who happened to be the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov, the Stalin-era foreign minister who signed the Soviet-Nazi pact. "What is Russia supposed to do?" yelled back his nominal opponent, whose side was supposed to argue for peace with the United States but who was only there to project anxiety. While both debaters yelled in fear, the moderator, who wore all black to every show, yelled in order to scare the participants and the audience.⁵

Newscasts and morning shows ran cookie-cutter anxiety- producing segments. A news report would focus on the dangers of drugs, or of sexual predators. Then a person introduced as an activist would enter the studio and explain that the government was not doing enough to confront the danger. There should be the death penalty for drug dealers! Pedophiles should be castrated! By the end of the monologue, the hosts—usually a man and a woman—would be in a panic, screaming that no one was protecting their children from drugs and pedophiles. The format harked back to a Soviet tradition, in which it was always the imaginary "ordinary people" who supposedly begged the Party for ever more restrictive and punitive laws, but its main purpose was to maintain a constant pitch of high anxiety.

What options did this frightening country offer its intolerably anxious citizens? They could curl up into total passivity, or they could join a whole that was greater than they were. If any possession could be summarily taken away, no one felt any longer like anything was truly their own. But they could rejoice alongside other citizens that Crimea was "theirs." They could fully subscribe to the paranoid worldview in which everyone, led by the United States, was out to weaken and destroy Russia. Paranoia offered a measure of comfort: at least it placed the source of overwhelming anxiety securely outside the person and even the country. It was a great relief to belong, and to entrust authority to someone stronger. The only thing was, belonging itself required vigilance. One had to pay attention: one day Ukraine was where the important war was being fought, the next day it was Syria. In the paranoid worldview, the source of danger was a

constantly moving target. One could belong, but one could never feel in control.

trauma is, as one American theorist has phrased it, "a historical experience of survival exceeding the grasp of the person who survives."⁶ It is the experience of having come into contact with a danger so great that it, and the fact of having escaped it, refuse to fit in one's mind. Freud first wrote about trauma in the context of survivors of the First World War and then again as he struggled to understand the Nazi persecution of Jews. In his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud introduced the idea of a death drive, a destructive force fueled by trauma, which has made survival intolerable. The death drive compelled repetition, an endless return to loss. Many of Freud's followers later rejected the idea of the death drive, and Freud himself, in his later work, broadened the concept to include outwardly directed aggression. But some later scholars focusing on trauma linked the idea of the death drive to the high rate of suicide among survivors of concentration camps or the Vietnam War.⁷

After the Second World War, American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who had also trained in psychoanalysis, studied survivors of Chinese internment camps, survivors of the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima, and the doctors who became killers in Nazi concentration camps. His aim was to "identify psychological experiences of people caught up in historical storms," he wrote.⁸ He spent a lifetime developing clinical and theoretical approaches to trauma. He described phenomena specific to survivors. He called one "psychic numbing"—a sort of emotional shutdown in response to unconscionable events.⁹ In his study of Nazi doctors, he identified a psychological principle he called "doubling," defined as "the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self."— He described what he believed to be a specifically twentieth-century experience: that of "lifelong immersion in death."¹¹

Lifton's work began a conversation about trauma experienced not only by individuals but by groups, including entire societies, which in some cases passed their experience of surviving the unimaginable from generation to generation. Like people, societies could fragment in response to trauma, could go numb, perhaps, as Nicholas Eberstadt suggested when he looked for an explanation for Russia's excessive death rates—an entire society could become depressed. If Eberstadt had been trained as a psychoanalyst rather than an economist, he might even have considered that an entire society could be seized by the death drive.

Traumatic experiences that affect entire societies could include natural disasters, catastrophic wars, genocide, revolution, and lives spent in a situation of chronic oppression. In cases where the trauma was extended in time—as with ongoing oppression or state terror— change, even apparently positive change, wrought further trauma. When familiar social structures stopped functioning, it could be as traumatic as when physical structures collapsed in the case of a natural disaster. Strategies of adaptation that worked under the old order were no longer useful. Therapists working in Kosovo in 2000, for example, discovered that people who had for years been victimized by being told what to do now longed to be told what to do. Liberian refugees in the United States, encouraged by well-meaning American therapists to seek support in their own community, re­created patterns of corruption and exploitation: becoming victims of familiar abuse was indeed comforting.¹²

Arutyunyan's mentors had frowned on the word "trauma"—too much of a wastebasket. The word would make it seem as if people were passive recipients of whatever happened to them, and as if terrible things on the outside produced predictably terrible results on the inside. This sort of thinking was antithetical to psychoanalysis, which Arutyunyan had, after all, chosen because it saw the many and varied conflicts that raged inside a person's psyche all on their own. Arutyunyan had met psychoanalysts who really believed that all of a person's fears and anxieties were always projections, that nothing was external. She wished she could think that way herself.

A British analyst once said that he preferred depression brought on by big bad events to depression that was apparently spontaneous: tragedy increased the chances of recovery. Too bad this logic held only in cases when you could expect the big and bad to end.

in october 2015, Putin convened his annual meeting of international scholars and journalists who specialized in Russia. This year, the gathering was held in Sochi, where facilities built for the 2014 Winter Olympics had fallen into disuse. A month earlier, Putin had flown to New York to address the seventieth General Assembly of the United Nations. He proposed forming an international antiterrorist coalition "like the anti-Hitler coalition."¹³ The offer, in other words, was to join forces in fighting ISIS in exchange for Russia's unhindered reign in Ukraine and elsewhere in the region—just like participation in the anti-Hitler coalition had allowed the Soviet Union to keep the spoils of its earlier alliance with Hitler. When the United States snubbed the offer, Russia began bombing Syria. Now Putin convened international guests for a discussion titled "Societies Between War and Peace."

"Peace, a life at peace, has always been and continues to be an ideal for humanity," he said. "But peace as a state of world politics has never been stable." In other words, peace was an anomaly, a fragile state of equilibrium that, he said, was exceedingly difficult to sustain. The advent of nuclear arms helped, he said, by introducing the specter of mutually assured destruction, and for a while—from the 1950s through the 1980s—"world leaders acted responsibly, weighing all circumstances and possible consequences." This was a variation on the usual Soviet nostalgia rhetoric: casting the Cold War as the golden era of world peace.

In the last quarter century, the threshold for applying force has clearly been lowered. Immunity against war acquired as a result of two world wars, literally on a psychological, subconscious level, has

been weakened.¹⁴

He went on to blame this state of affairs on the United States and to justify Russian intervention in Syria, but the key point of his speech was that only at war could his Russia feel at peace. Or, as Erich Fromm had written of Nazi Germany seventy-five years earlier, "It is fate that there are wars."¹⁵ Arendt, writing about Hitler, had described a nostalgia for the First World War, which had satisfied a "yearning for anonymity, for being just a number and functioning only as a cog. . . . War had been experienced as that 'mightiest of all mass actions' which obliterated individual differences so that even suffering, which traditionally had marked off individuals through unique unexchangeable destinies, could now be interpreted as 'an instrument of historical progress.'"¹⁶ The concept of historical progress—of perpetual motion—was, in turn, key to Arendt's understanding of how totalitarianism took hold.

Russia's official rhetoric was evolving in full accordance with Gudkov's diagnosis of "recurrent totalitarianism." Following this inexorable logic, in September 2016, the justice ministry classified the Levada Center itself as a foreign agent. Gudkov had been expecting this for months, and he knew it spelled the end of his life's work. The law on "foreign agents" required organizations to identify themselves as such in all communications with the public. How would Levada sociologists ever conduct a survey again if they had to present themselves as "foreign agents"?¹⁷

years earlier, Arutyunyan's son, who was born in 1980, told his parents that he had realized they had raised him "in an oasis." The home where he had grown up—Arutyunyan's grandmother's giant Academy of Sciences flat, where four generations had now lived—had been largely shielded from the privations of the 1980s, the fears of the 1990s, and even from much of the sense of shutting down that pervaded the 2000s. These days, though, Arutyunyan found it difficult to stay in her oasis.

Not only had the country changed politically—now the city around her was changing physically. The low-rise stores and cafes had been razed, eliminating the eye-level urban environment that had appeared

in the 1990s. The city returned to its totalitarian scale. In Arutyunyan's neighborhood, the streets were eight lanes wide, the sidewalks could fit twelve people across, and the buildings had archways seven stories high. In the absence of the low-rise stores, people once again became mere specks.

Then the city ripped up the asphalt on the sidewalks throughout central Moscow and replaced it with pavement tiles. The first freeze showed that the ice that formed on these tiles stayed smooth and clear, unlike most of the ice on asphalt. People fell. Some days, the streets looked like scenes from slapstick comedy. Pedestrians kept slipping and falling, and slipping and falling. It was hard not to laugh, even as people were breaking arms and hips all around you. Then it was time to marvel at the regime's insistence on turning its own metaphors literal: it was determined to break its people.

In the summer of 2016, the city ripped up the sidewalks again, all over central Moscow. For weeks, it felt like the city was at war with itself. Walking to the store or to the Metro became difficult and unpredictable—people had just formed new routines after the disappearance of the low-rise stores, and now ditches, fences, and dead ends appeared unpredictably in their way, forcing pedestrians to step into the streets, zigzag, and, most important, constantly pay attention. The state of low-level dread became a characteristic of being outside in the city, at any time of day or night.

Finally, more tile was laid down. The city now created a series of bike paths—though these were generally short segments that connected two dead ends. There was a sort of architectural-rendering symmetry and beauty in Moscow's new look. But like a first-year architecture student, someone had forgotten to put trees in these renderings. The city's streets had been stripped of all that had been growing there. Everything was made of stone and right angles. Moscow had acquired the geometry and texture of a graveyard.

Maybe Freud was right about the death drive in the first place. And maybe a country could indeed be affected by it just like a person could. Maybe this energy had been unleashed in Russia. Maybe it was bent on destruction for the sake of destruction, war for the sake of war. Maybe this city and this country were burying themselves alive.

The more Arutyunyan thought about it, the less fanciful the idea seemed to her. Entire civilizations in history had ceased to exist. How had life in them felt in the last decades and days? Russia and the Russians had been dying for a century—in the wars, in the Gulag, and, most of all, in the daily disregard for human life. She had always thought of that disregard as negligence, but perhaps it should be understood as active desire. This country wanted to kill itself. Everything that was alive here—the people, their words, their protest, their love—drew aggression because the energy of life had become unbearable for this society. It wanted to die; life was a foreign agent.

At least, that was what Freud might say. At least Arutyunyan had read him. Future generations of Russians might not be so lucky—if there were any future generations of Russians, that was.

She stubbed out a cigarette and lit another.

EPILOGUE

june 12, 2017, was the twenty-seventh anniversary of Russia's declaration of sovereignty, whatever that had meant. It was the twenty-sixth anniversary of Boris Yeltsin's election as Russia's president. It was a national holiday. For its first decade, the holiday was known as the Day of the Passage of the Declaration of State Sovereignty, but in 2002 the name was changed to Russia Day. The declaration of sovereignty—Russia's first step toward separating itself from the Soviet project—was no longer an event to be celebrated. The holiday had to be depoliticized without sacrificing its spirit of patriotism. Over the years, the festivities employed folk music, pop music, and theater productions on historical topics. In the end, the holiday became a cacophony.

One thousand seven hundred twenty people were arrested on Russia Day 2017—the largest wave of arrests in decades. Alexei Navalny had called them to the streets, and tens of thousands had come out in cities from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, the most geographically widespread protest in Russian history. Most of the detainees were released within hours; many were sentenced to fines and between five and thirty days behind bars; a few would probably face several years in a prison colony. After about a week it emerged that some of the detainees in Moscow had been tortured, and that jailers in St. Petersburg had pumped noxious gas into the cells where protesters were held.

In Moscow, some of the more than eight hundred detainees had to spend the night on benches in a precinct courtyard because there was no room for them inside, but the scene in the city that day had been less tragic or frightening than absurd. This year's Russia Day had been turned over to historical reenactments. No particular period had been chosen, but a medieval bent was in evidence. A few kids were wearing red silky costumes vaguely reminiscent of the Young Pioneers' kerchiefs, but most grown men were dressed in chain-mail armor and carried shields and swords. Still, others wore Second World War-era uniforms and milled around barricades made of sand-filled burlap sacks. At one point, a man dressed as a twentieth- century peasant—a costume that in a different context could easily have been taken for hipster getup—climbed a wall of sacks with a sign that said, in English, "Putin Lies." As he climbed, he shouted, in Russian, "Putin is a thief!" When he reached the top, a man in the uniform of the NKVD—the Second World War-era secret police— gave chase up the sacks. The protester tumbled down, into the arms of two other men in period secret-police uniforms, and these men handed him over to two contemporary policemen.

The bizarre spectacle of it all was too much for foreign correspondents, who tried to avoid scenic but incomprehensible shots of knights in shining armor literally shielding a teenage protester from the police. Instead, the reporters focused on the teenagers among the protesters. Everyone seemed to agree that the new face of Russian resistance was barely pubescent: a boy in shorts being tackled by police in riot gear, a girl charging a police line, a paddy wagon full of adolescents. One Russian Facebook user posted a photograph of the teenagers in the paddy wagon with the caption "Russia has a future." He posited that "every mass arrest of young people strengthens youth protest," which, in turn, was sure to bring about the end of the regime.

The poster was Georgy Satarov, a sixty-nine-year-old political scientist. Satarov was the man who, more than twenty years earlier, had been tasked by Yeltsin with articulating the new Russian national idea—and failed. Now he was shifting responsibility to the teenagers. It was yet another iteration of Levada's old concept: the next generation, free of the fear, envy, and doublethink of Homo Sovieticus, would usher in a new era of freedom. The next generation kept getting younger. The first generation of people who had no memory of Stalin's terror had not succeeded in overcoming the

totalitarian legacy; the first post-Soviet generation—those born into perestroika and reared in the 1990s—had been the face of the protests of 2011-2012, but they no longer embodied hope; now it was up to the generation of kids born under Putin.

Masha was amused that a photograph of her being dragged off by police was captioned "Teenage girls among hundreds arrested at Russia protests." She was detained briefly and released—she was still winding her way between drops of rain—and as soon as she got out, she went to work arranging representation for those who had been arrested. She was still doing this work under the auspices of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's organization, but he had cut back on the funding—or, more accurately, he had set limits, while the Russian government was doing the opposite. The number of arrests continued to grow exponentially, and Khodorkovsky's money would not keep up. Fund- raising became a part of Masha's job, and then an increasingly important part. And there was no end in sight; there would be more arrests, more fund-raising, and no possibility of a vacation. She decided to quit. She even announced it in a blog post: she would raise the money, she would make sure everyone who had been arrested on June 12 had representation, she would see those cases through to completion, and then she would quit. She would have another life.

Masha's life as an activist had lasted five and a half years. In 2016, she had run for office—there was an open seat in parliament. There was no hope of winning—even getting on the ballot was an exceedingly difficult task—but Khodorkovsky had the idea that it was important to acquire campaign experience. Masha agreed, but the experience proved more bruising than she could have predicted. She cleaned up her act, quit drinking and doing recreational drugs, and began dressing in button-down shirts and blazers at all times, yet she was still criticized by the very people she was trying to court. The intelligentsia found her language too harsh and cynical. Many of them preferred to vote for a history professor who opposed the war in Ukraine but made no secret of his virulently homophobic views. The history professor did not win, either: not one anti-Putin candidate made a dent in the polls anywhere in the country. Khodorkovsky's

project of creating a shadow society looked much better on paper than it felt in real life.

Still, compared with the other Bolotnoye case defenders, Masha was leading a life of glamour. Most of the others had been sentenced to time in prison colonies. Some had been released after serving their two or two and a half years; others remained in prison, and still others were awaiting trial—they had been arrested later. The state continued to add defendants to the five-year-old case.

zhanna was settled in bonn. She had a job with Deutsche Welle, the taxpayer-funded broadcasting service. Like the Russian-language services of the British Broadcasting Corporation and the American Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, DW used to broadcast on short­wave frequencies during the Soviet period, was granted access to AM frequencies under Yeltsin, and lost it under Putin. It was now a Web- based broadcaster with modest audience numbers, but Zhanna became its star interviewer. At DW, no one told her not to delve into politics.

Zhanna started a foundation named for her father. She convened a board that awarded an annual prize to someone who demonstrated courage and determination in fighting the Putin regime. Remarkably, there was stiff competition for the award, and the board argued long and passionately. In June 2017, Zhanna made it public that her father had planned to run for president in 2018—though, she figured, he would have stepped aside if Alexei Navalny had decided to run. Navalny was running now, for what it was worth. For the time being, he was locked up for thirty days after calling for the June 12 protests. He was also facing ever-mounting trumped-up charges of fraud that could land him in prison for years. In an earlier trial, which ended on New Year's Eve 2014—to ensure that most Russians were properly distracted when the verdict was delivered—Navalny was sentenced to house arrest, and his brother, Oleg, to three and a half years in a prison colony. The intention was clear: house arrest looked like a relatively humane measure, so this time there would be no mass protests. Navalny himself would be kept in line by his brother's

sentence: Oleg was a hostage. Navalny refused to play. With his brother's permission and encouragement, he persisted with his investigations. He also refused to recognize his own sentence, because Russian law does not actually provide for house arrest as punishment. He walked the streets. The state asked him to desist, and he refused. The state gave up. And now Navalny was leveraging his ability to keep assembling people in the streets for his freedom—and his life.

In July 2017 a Moscow court sentenced five men to between eleven and twenty years in prison for the murder of Boris Nemtsov. All five were from Chechnya; an ostensible sixth accomplice was killed when the police attempted to detain him in Chechnya. The court spent next to no time trying to determine the men's motives: the prosecution's story seemed to be that they had organized the murder for no apparent reason. Zhanna and her legal team had insisted on summoning highly placed Chechen officials, but these were never interrogated. In the end, the murder would remain effectively unsolved.

Boris's old activist friends—the scruffy lot with whom he worked after he left parliament—maintained a living memorial on the bridge where he was gunned down. The city had declined requests to name the bridge for Nemtsov or to create a permanent memorial there. Instead, every couple of months, and sometimes every few days, city workers descended on it and hauled away the flowers and placards. The next day, time after time, activists replaced them. They kept vigil. Though they were powerless to prevent the removal of the memorial, they made sure that a living friend of Boris was present at the site of his death every minute of every day.

in new york, Lyosha found himself talking about Chechnya all the time. In the spring of 2017, news came that gay men there were being rounded up, interned, tortured, and, in some cases, killed. Chechen and Russian officials laughed off questions about the disappearances. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, LGBT activists refused to believe the reports at first, simply because they seemed too awful to be true, but soon the evidence was overwhelming. Chechnya had taken the Kremlin's anti-gay policies to their logical extreme, making Occupy Pedophilia—the vigilante group of the sort that had haunted Lyosha back in Perm—into a state enterprise. The lucky gay men from Chechnya were those who managed to escape to other Russian cities, to attempt eventually to flee to the West.

Lyosha was granted asylum status in the spring of 2017. In the nearly three years that he had been in the United States, he had not been able to find a job in his field—academic positions, even temporary ones, turned out to be prohibitively difficult to come by— but he had learned English and become an increasingly visible activist. He was named co-president of RUSA LGBT, an organization of Russian-speaking queer people helping new asylum seekers. Eventually, he found a job at an AIDS nonprofit.

He was still living in Brighton Beach, the Russian enclave and one of the few neighborhoods in New York City that went to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Lyosha often faced incredulous questions from American friends: How could people who fled the Soviet Union and Putin vote for someone like Trump? But, of course, these were not people who fled totalitarianism. Most of them had arrived around the time the Soviet empire began disintegrating. If anything, what had driven them out was the fear of the Soviet collapse. They longed to return to their imaginary past, which would have made them Putin voters if they had stayed in Russia. Instead, they became Trump voters.

They were also blatantly and sometimes aggressively homophobic. Though many of the new queer asylum seekers rented apartments in Brighton Beach, they lived their gay lives in Manhattan. Lyosha, on the other hand, decided to organize Brighton Beach Pride. In May 2017, about three hundred people marched along the boardwalk from Coney Island, chanting against homophobia in both Russian and English.

seryozha has not responded to my messages and phone calls since June 2015.

the levada center was deemed a "foreign agent" and fined for not registering as one. The center added a line at the bottom of its website, saying that Levada had been "forcibly added to the registry of noncommercial organizations acting as foreign agents." At first, Lev Gudkov panicked. How were researchers going to continue their work if they had to introduce themselves to potential respondents as "foreign agents"? But it ended up being less of an impediment than Gudkov had thought. He realized that for some people, the "foreign agent" designation had become something of a badge of honor. Potential respondents did not appear to be put off by the designation. In June 2017 the center finished analyzing its "most outstanding person of all time in the entire world" survey. Joseph Stalin came out on top, as he had in the previous survey, in 2012. For the first time ever, Putin took second place, sharing it with Pushkin.

in 2015, the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society advanced to the status of a "component society" within the International Psychoanalytic Association. There were now twenty-three psychoanalysts who were full members and thirty more who were candidates—essentially, psychoanalysts in training who could work with patients. That made for fifty-three psychoanalysts—one for more than every two hundred thousand Muscovites.

In 2016, Arutyunyan's son, Dmitry Velikovsky—the child who once thanked his parents for having raised him in an oasis—became one of three Russian journalists who worked on the Panama Papers, the giant trove of information on offshore accounts. The most surprising story in the Russian part of the Papers concerned cellist Sergei Roldugin, one of Putin's closest friends from his university days, who had apparently amassed a fortune—or was safeguarding it for someone else. In the spring of 2017, Dmitry was among the more than four hundred journalists from around the world who shared a Pulitzer Prize for their work on the project. In Russia, however, the story had barely made a ripple and was soon forgotten.

In the spring and summer of 2017, the sidewalks (and much of the

pavement) in central Moscow were ripped up again, for the third year in a row, to be replaced with ever more perfectly laid geometric tiles that had so reminded Arutyunyan of tombstones. The city also announced a plan to raze between four and a half and eight thousand buildings, including many structurally sound and architecturally interesting ones, and replace them with high-rise developments.

alexander dugin enjoyed a period of international fame of sorts as a Putin whisperer: for a couple of years some analysts and journalists believed that he was the mastermind behind Putin's wars. Dugin continued to insist that he had great influence but negligible power. Still, his star rose ever higher in unexpected ways. With the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the neo-Nazi movement known as the "alt-right" gained public prominence, as did its leader Richard Spencer, an American married to Nina Kouprianova, a Russian woman who served as Dugin's English translator and American promoter.

the remains of Czar Nicholas II, his wife, and three of their daughters, which were interred in St. Petersburg in 1998, were exhumed in 2015 at the request of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Church, it was said, wanted to know whether the remains of two more people, found separately, also belonged to the czar's family. These had been found in 2007 and had been positively identified by geneticists as belonging to the czar's only son and one of his daughters. The Church, however, insisted on a comparative study of all remains. Once that was completed, there would certainly be a new burial ceremony, which would erase the memory of the earlier one and of Yeltsin's speech, the one time a Russian leader apologized for the atrocities of the Soviet regime. But nearly two years after the exhumation, the remains were still unburied, perhaps because 2017 was the centennial of the Russian Revolution and neither the Church nor the Kremlin could find a way to handle the symbolism.

mikhail prokhorov, the oligarch who once suggested to Zhanna that he could fund both her and her electoral opponent in order to watch the race, made a few other attempts to dabble in politics. The Kremlin kept showing him his place, and he kept not getting the message. Finally, when the print arm of a news outlet he owned—RBK, Zhanna's old workplace—published an investigative piece on Putin's daughter's lucrative real estate concession in Moscow, Prokhorov was forced not only to sell RBK but to divest from Russia entirely. He moved to New York, where he had for several years owned the Brooklyn Nets basketball team.

mikhail fridman, the oligarch who said Zhanna was insane for returning to Moscow and who later stopped seeing Boris in order to protect his own status, continued to run a successful bank in Russia. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the name of his bank, Alfa, surfaced twice in stories about alleged Russian meddling. One report claimed that the Trump campaign had established a back channel for communicating with Alfa-Bank—though a later report said there might be an innocuous explanation. Then Alfa came up again, in an unverified intelligence dossier published by BuzzFeed. Fridman sued BuzzFeed for libel.

nikita belykh, the member of the Perm legislature who had employed the other Lyosha, was appointed governor of the Kirov region while Dmitry Medvedev was president. For a few years, he enjoyed the reputation of Russia's only pro-democracy governor. In June 2016, Belykh was arrested during a sting operation at a bar in Moscow. He was accused of accepting bribes. He was still in pretrial detention a year later.

pavel sheremet, the television journalist who made a film for Nemtsov's fiftieth birthday, moved to Kyiv.* Soon after Nemtsov's murder, Sheremet launched a show on Ukrainian television. In July 2016, Sheremet was assassinated by a car bomb in Kyiv.

vladimir makarov, the young civil servant accused of molesting his own daughter, served his five-and-a-half-year sentence. He repeatedly applied for parole and was denied. He was released in 2016. The European Court of Human Rights refused to hear his case, demonstrating that the accusation of pedophilia was the perfect persecution vehicle. Many more people have been brought up on child-sex-abuse charges since. In 2017, Memorial activist Yuri Dmitriev, who had discovered the sites of numerous Stalin-era mass executions, was arrested on child-pornography charges.

ilya ponomarev, the parliament member who employed Masha during the protests, was accused of embezzlement. He fled the country, living for a time in California before settling in Ukraine.

all of the prominent organizers of the 2011-2012 protests faced a stark choice between exile and prison—or worse. Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion, moved to New York after he was threatened with criminal charges in 2013. Sergei Udaltsov, the radical-left organizer, was serving four years behind bars. Nemtsov was dead. Only Ilya Yashin and Navalny were still functioning out in the open. In the spring of 2017, Navalny lost most of the vision in one eye when an attacker threw acid at him.

the moscow school for political studies, where Masha was on that Russia Day weekend she got a phone call about a search at her apartment, was declared a foreign agent and was forced to cease operations.

nemtsov's assistant olga shorina, who called Masha that day, left the country. She lives in Bonn and helps Zhanna run the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom.

marat Guelman, the gallerist and political technologist who ran the contemporary art museum in Perm, left Russia in 2013 and settled in Montenegro, where he now runs a contemporary arts festival. He might have thought that Montenegro, with a total population of less than a million, was a backwater destination, but in 2017 it emerged that Russia had been plotting a coup there—because Montenegro wanted to join NATO.

Vladimir kara-murza, the first person Zhanna saw when she came to the site of her father's murder, survived his poisoning in 2015. He was in a coma for five days. Eventually, he was airlifted to the United States, where he underwent rehabilitation. He returned to work for Khodorkovsky's foundation in Russia. He also made a film about Nemtsov. He screened it in Yaroslavl, the town where Nemtsov had held his last elected post, in February 2017. Less than forty-eight hours later, he was once again hospitalized with total organ failure. The doctors, fortunately, knew how to treat him, and this time the coma did not last as long.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

conversations with two people inspired me to begin work on this book. Chitra Raghavan surely had no idea that her lecture on the psychology of trauma would prompt me to write more than five hundred pages about the aftermath of the Soviet experience. Anand Giridharadas, on the other hand, knew exactly what he was doing when he told me, at our first meeting, that I should go write this book —but I don't believe it occurred to him that I would follow his advice. I thank them anyway.

Research for and much of the writing of the book were made possible by the Carnegie Corporation, where I was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2015-2016.

In the summer of 2016, I was fortunate, once again, to be a guest of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, where I wrote nearly half of the book. I enjoyed the support and intellectual company of other Institute guests and fellows: Anton Shekhovtsov, Mark Lilla, Tatiana Zhurzhenko, and Tim Snyder and Marci Shore.

I am grateful for the generous support of Mal Jones of Up the River Endeavors, and of Vladimir Radunsky, who sent me notebooks when I needed them.

I am grateful to my editor, Rebecca Saletan, who encouraged the unusual structure of the book and didn't blink at the word count until the very end, when she asked me to keep the acknowledgments brief. Team Riverhead made it possible for this book to emerge in certainty and style. Thank you, Jynne Dilling, Al Guillen, Karen Mayer, and Anna Jardine.

I am lucky to have Elyse Cheney and Alex Jacobs as my agents.

I am grateful to the people—friends, family, colleagues, and a few almost unsuspecting near-strangers—who talked to me, argued with me, read parts of the book as I wrote, and otherwise helped me move through the process: Roger Berkowitz, Carol D'Cruz, David Denborough, Robert Horvath, Nicholas Lemann, Istvan Rev, Jack Saul, Vera Shengelia, Cheryl White, and my partner through the last seven books, Darya Oreshkina.

My largest debt, though, is to the protagonists of this book, who allowed me into their lives and engaged with endless hours of my unreasonably detailed questions. Thank you, Maria Baronova, Alexei Gorshkov, Sergei Yakovlev, Zhanna Nemtsova, Marina Arutyunyan, and Lev Gudkov.

NOTES

Lyosha, Masha, Seryozha, and Zhanna—their real names—told me their lives over the course of about a year. I spent hours asking them to recall events and places, conversations, feelings, movies, newscasts, and ideas. I used various sources to corroborate dates, times, and descriptions of, say, television footage, and if contradictions arose, I resolved them (or, in one case, noted the discrepancy between recollection and factual chronology). At the same time, my main interest was in personal perceptions. For this reason, all conversations—unless they were recorded—are relayed as they were recounted to me by just one of the participants (and, in one case, as had been recounted by someone else). Our recollections of conversations are rarely precise, but they are precisely what we live with.

Arutyunyan and Gudkov spent dozens of hours each talking with me for this book. Dugin declined to be interviewed but delegated his right-hand person to talk to me; I also interviewed his other associates and studied his copious writing and lectures.

Beyond these sources, I relied on a wealth of scholarship, both Russian and Western. Sources are noted for all information that does not come from interviews with the principal characters and is not the product of firsthand reporting.

one BORN IN 1984

Detailed information on Molniya is found on its website: http://www.buran.ru/htm/molnianp.htm, as is information on the space shuttle: http://www.buran.ru/htm/mtkkmain.htm, accessed October 28, 2015.

Steven Merritt Miner, Stalin's Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941-1945 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 33.

Ibid., pp. 32-33.

Ibid., passim.

Yves Hamant, Alexander Men': Svidetel svoyego vremeni (Moscow: Rudomino, 1994), pp. 104-106.

Jennifer Utrata, Women Without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2015), pp. 126-127.

Olga Kryshtanovskaya, Anatomiya rossiyskoy elity (Moscow: Zakharov, 2005), p. 180, http://www.telenir.net/politika/sovetskii_soyuz_poslednie_gody_zhizni_konec_sovetskoi_ accessed October 28, 2015.

Anya von Bremzen, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing (New York: Crown, 2013), pp. 166-167.