The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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