The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

She needed to return to her world. She went back to university. She posted her resume on a new site called job.ru and got calls from two companies. She took a job with the one that imported chemicals for the cosmetics industry, which was taking off because everything was taking off. Thanks to the skyrocketing price of oil, Russia was having a consumer boom on a scale the reformers of the 1990s could not have imagined. Large shiny well-lit shopping malls were opening all over Moscow, stalling traffic, and all of them had one or two makeup department stores stocked with products both real and counterfeit, and vast quantities of chemicals were required to produce them. These chemicals had to be imported, and it was Masha's job to organize the process. She negotiated—she learned to use her English on the phone—and she arranged, and she cleared customs: she learned to give bribes. She also looked stunning at meetings with suppliers, and once she had a drink in her, she could tell jokes in English.

The chemistry department had an unofficial online home called chemport.ru. Among other things, it hosted anonymous reviews of department faculty. This meant a captive audience: undergraduates, graduate students, and professors. This, as far as Masha was concerned, meant that the site should be making money. Anyone who was not making money these days was an idiot. She found the guy who had started the site. His name was Sergei Baronov. He was a graduate student, recently divorced, and therefore living in the dorms. She told him about her scheme: they had to create a subscription service for sales managers for chemical companies. All they had to do was think of a service these people would get in exchange—they were just looking for a way to spend their companies' money. Sergei asked if she knew why countries had given up the gold standard in favor of gold-and-currency reserves. Why? Masha asked—she had a slightly hostile way of asking that she never could quite modulate—and he started explaining. He was not an idiot at all. She liked someone who could tell her something she did not know. As it turned out, he had started his dissertation at a university in Florida and was teaching radiochemistry. They became a couple, and chemport.ru started making money.

Sergei said they should have children. It sounded reasonable. Masha was not exactly in love with him, but they did have a business together. Money was raining down on them, and there was no reason to think it would stop. Other things, though, might be short-lived. By "things," Masha meant people. She was twenty, he was twenty-five, and they might as well have children now. He moved into her pretty apartment. They started trying to conceive, but it did not work. They tried assisted insemination, and that did not work. They gave up, got drunk, and it worked.

When Masha was eight weeks pregnant, the doctor said that the fetus had no heartbeat and handed her a referral for a D&C. She went home, cried her eyes out, and then googled "fetal heartbeat." She went back to the doctor and told her that the heartbeat can show up later than eight weeks.

"What are you, the smartest one here?" asked the doctor.

"Yeah," said Masha.

twelve

THE ORANGE MENACE

boris nemtsov worried that his daughter would not make it in the world. He was convinced that, stern and uncompromising as she was, she would never find a husband. That meant that she would have to be self-sufficient—but as far as he could tell, she lacked ambition. He was right about that: in her lack of ambition, Zhanna was like her mother, but Raisa, unlike Zhanna, was pliant and easy to live with. Boris said that was fine: he did not want his women too smart or too active—except his daughter, who was so headstrong that she needed a Plan B. When she tagged along with him one day to an interview at Echo Moskvy (Echo of Moscow), the big pro-democracy radio station, he had a sudden inspiration.

"Hey," he said to the editor in chief in the overly familiar tone he assumed when the situation called for underscoring his influence. "Why don't you take my girl on as an intern here?"

Why not, indeed. The fact that Zhanna was fifteen, too young legally to work full-time, was of little concern. She had a famous name and she knew people—or, more accurately, many people knew her as her father's daughter. Zhanna was hired. Her job was to call Yeltsin's press secretary and inquire after the president's health. Rather than brush her off rudely, as he would have another reporter, the press secretary dutifully allowed her to record a sentence or two to the effect that the president's health was just fine.

When Zhanna was not calling Yeltsin's press secretary, she was fetching, xeroxing, and performing other typical intern duties. The point was, she was developing a work ethic that would allow her to