The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

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

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

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

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

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