The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In 2004, the year after the Georgian revolution, Moscow firmly took control of elections in Ukraine. Russian political technologists flooded Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. Their job was to prevent the election of the pro-Western challenger to the current regime, which Moscow had found agreeable. Three days before the election, the pro- Moscow government staged a parade to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Kiev's liberation in the Second World War (the actual anniversary was nine days later, but they could not wait that long). Putin came, and took his place in the stands next to Leonid Kuchma,

the outgoing president, and Viktor Yanukovych, his handpicked successor, whom Moscow was backing. The Victory Flag—the red flag that Soviet soldiers had placed on the Reichstag in 1945—was brought to Kiev for the occasion.¹⁰ Putin was lending the pro-Moscow Ukrainian candidate his own authority, Russia's chief national myth, and the most important physical symbol of the myth.

None of it worked. Yanukovych lost at the polls. He still claimed victory, but this did not work either: Ukrainians took to the streets. They set up camp in Kiev's central square and refused to disperse, braving the November cold and then the December cold until Ukraine's supreme court stepped in and ordered a revote. Viktor Yushchenko, who positioned himself as pro-Western and entirely independent from Moscow—and who was even married to a Canadian woman—was elected president.

masha found yushchenko unlikable and his anti-Moscow rhetoric personally insulting. She was surprised to discover that she cared so much. "Darn, this is the first time I've been so worked up about other people's elections," she wrote on her blog in November 2004. "I'll say more. This is the first time I've been worked up about any election anywhere."

"It's just that in Russia and in Moscow all the elections of our age have had a foregone conclusion," a friend wrote in the comments.¹¹

This was true. At twenty, Masha had been old enough to vote in just one local, one parliamentary, and one presidential election, and the outcome had been known each time. Putin could not have lost his bid for reelection in 2004; Moscow's mayor, who had been in office since Masha was in primary school, was similarly entrenched; and Putin's United Russia party would, it seemed, be in control of parliament forever. Masha did not even know that she or anyone she knew could be passionate about elections these days—until Ukraine showed her.

All Russia was transfixed by the spectacle in Kiev. The year before, the Georgian revolution had drawn relatively little attention here, but now the Ukrainian revolution made people suspect—or hope for—a

pattern. Could it happen in Russia too? The imagination ignored key differences between the two countries. In Ukraine, for example, electoral institutions had been developing while Putin had eviscerated Russian ones during his first term in office. And in Ukraine there was a functional, independent supreme court to step in to resolve the standoff, whereas the Russian equivalent, the Constitutional Court, had been effectively subsumed by the executive branch.

Boris Nemtsov was inspired by the turn of events in Ukraine. Since losing his parliamentary seat in December 2003, he had been at loose ends. It was the first time he had been defeated in an election since he entered politics in 1990—indeed, he had once been used to landslide victories. He had taken an executive-level job at a bank, well-paying and dull. But now there was Ukraine, with real political battles and actual high-stakes activism. He started shuttling back and forth to Kiev. He took a volunteer position as an adviser to Yushchenko. He wore a scarf the color of the revolution—orange— and spoke in the square on the first day of the protests. A few days later, in a television interview in Moscow, he held up Ukraine as an example for Russia:

In the past, people in Kiev used to look to Moscow. And now an awful lot of Muscovites, and not only Muscovites, Russians in general, will probably be looking to Kiev to see how people are

fighting for their rights, fighting for truth and freedom.¹²

The political technologists who had been dispatched to deal with Ukraine returned to Moscow and explained their failure: it was the Americans' fault. The Americans—by which they generally meant the United States government and George Soros—had been financing and organizing Eastern European revolutions beginning with the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia in 2000, the story went. Then they hit Georgia, followed by Ukraine. Here it was: every fear of the American expansion was confirmed.