The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

survive in spite of her insufferably unaccommodating personality. She started school at nine in the morning, rushed directly from her last class to the radio station to be at work by four, and finished at midnight. It was hell, but she was able to buy herself a black-and-gray cropped cardigan sweater at Benetton. It cost a lot of money, and it was money she had earned.

Then Yeltsin quit—the phone call came on New Year's Eve, a couple of weeks after Boris had won his parliamentary election, when the family was on vacation at a ski resort in France. Soon after, the leadership of his new party, the Union of Right Forces, gathered to discuss their position on the presidential election. Would they field a candidate? Yeltsin's resignation had been timed to render such an attempt futile—he had effectively moved the vote up by four months, to March. The traditional New Year's and Christmas holidays, when no one was in Moscow (except, as it turned out, Yeltsin and Putin), had already bitten another two weeks off the lead time. Putin's popularity rating was sky-high. The rational thing to do under the circumstances, argued former prime minister Gaidar and two other members of the party's leadership, was to fall in line behind Putin. Boris argued that as long as the presumptive president had no political platform—which Putin did not—there was nothing to get behind. He was outvoted.

On March 26, 2000, Vladimir Putin was elected president of Russia, and Zhanna turned sixteen. She was nearly indifferent to both events. In the preceding months, she had quit her job at Echo Moskvy and found ambition. Her life's goal now was to gain admission to an American university. This was not at all what Boris had had in mind when he told her that she needed to be self-sufficient. It would not be a good look for a parliament member to have a daughter studying in America. But he said that he would not stand in her way.

He was not helping her either. Zhanna got all the textbooks and study aids and proceeded in a self-sufficient manner. She got the highest possible score on the Test of English as a Foreign Language and very high SAT scores as well. She was accepted to Fordham University in New York City. She was aiming higher, of course, but now she had a plan: a year or two at Fordham, then she would

transfer to Columbia and finish up there. In August 2001 she said goodbye to the apartment on the Garden Ring and moved to America.

She could not have imagined what it would feel like to be alone in New York City. She was living near the Manhattan branch of the university, amid the skyscrapers of Midtown and next to the edgy neighborhood she learned was called Hell's Kitchen. The only person she knew was the daughter of a Russian oligarch who had just graduated from a New York college and was now working for a consulting company. Her work week averaged eighty hours, and she told Zhanna that this was her future too. Then, within two weeks of Zhanna's arrival, the city's streets filled with cars with blaring sirens, people in respirator masks, panic. Zhanna walked downtown, as far as she could before hitting a police cordon, and saw the second of the two towers crumple. Then there were flyers everywhere, with addresses where people could go to donate blood. Zhanna walked to one of those addresses.

She called her grandmother, the pediatrician. The call would cost ten dollars, maybe more, so she had to make it fast.

"Grandma, tell me quickly, what's my blood type?"

"O negative."

Zhanna hung up. On the other end of the line, Dina Yakovlevna imagined unimaginable things happening to her granddaughter in the city seized by terror. In New York, Zhanna stood in line for four hours to give blood. She was told that hers was a precious, much-needed type of blood and the maximum allowable amount would be drawn. She left the hospital woozy, dragged her body to a deli, and sat there for an eternity, eating herself back to her feet.

She asked Boris not to tell anyone about the blood donation—she could tell over the phone that he was bursting to—but he was so proud of her that he told the story anyway. Komsomolskaya Pravda, the propaganda broadsheet turned tabloid, carried the headline "Zhanna Nemtsova Shed Blood for America."¹

After September 11, the solitude of the foreign college freshman in New York proved intolerable. Zhanna managed another month before she asked Boris to book her a ticket back to Moscow. He was thrilled.

He also pulled some strings to get Zhanna admitted to the Institute of International Relations, home to the children of the nomenklatura headed for careers in diplomacy and international trade. Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that in the wake of the terrorist attacks Zhanna had been shunned by her classmates for being a foreigner.²