The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Putin had long been speaking about an external threat to Russia. Most recently he had mentioned it in the wake of the siege of a school in Beslan, a town in the Russian Caucasus, where more than three hundred people—most of them children—had died in September 2004. Less than two weeks after the attack, for which Chechen terrorists were held responsible, Putin announced new sweeping changes to Russia's political system. Governors would from now on be appointed rather than elected. All the seats in the lower house of parliament would from now on be apportioned to political parties based on their percentage of the vote nationwide (before the announcement, half the seats had been distributed among parties while the other half went to popularly elected representatives of 225 territorial districts). Putin explained that these measures would consolidate political institutions, creating the cohesion needed to protect the country from external threat—of which the school siege was the unlikely example. Like most of his earlier reforms, these measures affected formal political institutions and had consolidation as their aim. But to counter the perceived threat of an American-run, Soros-sponsored popular revolution, the Kremlin needed to focus on the public sphere, which it needed to mobilize for the preservation of the regime. A few years later, Australian political scientist Robert Horvath coined a term to describe this process: "preventive counter- revolution."¹³

as if to affirm the Kremlin's fear of a revolution, mass protests broke out in cities across Russia in the winter of 2005. Tens of thousands of people were protesting a new series of measures called the "monetization of entitlements," whereby people who received public assistance—women over fifty-five, men over sixty, early retirees, and the disabled—would no longer have access to unlimited public transportation and other in-kind benefits but would receive fixed sums of money instead. This was a cost-cutting measure, and aid recipients perceived, accurately, that despite what they were told, the money was not equivalent to the value of their old benefits. They were losing assistance that, for many, was essential for survival.

The Kremlin had not expected this backlash. The protests were the stuff of nightmares. The protesters were the elderly and the feeble, and the state could not use force against them even when they were blocking roadways, as they did in cities across the country, or when they set up tents in the streets, as happened in St. Petersburg.

Nor were the retirees the only people protesting. A slew of youth organizations seemed to appear out of nowhere. Some were radical, like the National Bolshevik Party, which had been rejuvenated by an influx of young people all over the country; they were demonstrating alongside or on behalf of the pensioners. Others were youth spin-offs or splinter groups of conventional political parties; these tended to model themselves, aesthetically, on Otpor ("Resistance"), the Yugoslav youth movement that had been instrumental in toppling Milosevic. They staged small guerrilla-theater actions.

Finally, chess champion Garry Kasparov, one of the best-known people in the entire country, announced that he was quitting the sport to devote himself to political struggle. He formed an organization called the United Civic Front, an umbrella coalition that could unite the pensioners, the Otpor imitators, and the National Bolsheviks and their ilk, simply because they all opposed Putin and the authoritarian regime he was building. Together, they staged marches, which they called the Marches of the Dissenters.

It was during the Ukrainian elections that Masha had started blogging on livejournal.com, a platform that in America was popular among teenagers but in Russia was spontaneously repurposed to become a rudimentary social network (though the term was not yet in use). By spring 2005, Masha had her bearings on the network and was reading and talking to several people involved with the youth political groups. She went to a couple of meetings of Oborona ("Defense"), a group formed by a young man named Ilya Yashin. Oborona was designed to resemble Otpor in every way, including the sound of its name. Then Sergei objected: he did not want his wife involved with political hoodlums. By the end of the year, Masha was pregnant, and she complied.

Only a small number of people took part in the protests or even knew about them. With the exception of the National Bolsheviks,

who had created a wide network of local activists, each of the youth groups counted just a handful of active members. The protesting pensioners were relatively numerous. But Russians who did not desperately need state assistance were mostly occupied with their own lives, which were very, very good. Thanks to skyrocketing oil prices, in 2005 Russia entered its sixth year of unprecedented economic prosperity.