The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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