The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Money was what the Kremlin used to defuse the protests of the disenfranchised: pensions were raised dramatically, and Putin declared a new commitment to social-program spending. Then the government cracked down on the young protest organizers, and on civil society in general. A law placing onerous registration and reporting requirements on nongovernmental organizations was passed. Civil society groups fought the law as well as they could, and the United States Congress even expressed concern about the law, in a nonbinding resolution—thereby affirming the Kremlin's view that Russian nongovernmental organizations were agents of Western subversion. In response to the push-back, the legislation was softened slightly: provisions that would have made it impossible for foreign organizations, such as USAID or Soros's Open Society Foundations, to function in Russia were removed. Still, the bill that Putin signed in January 2007 condemned nongovernmental organizations to useless paperwork designed to sap their resources.

The Marches of the Dissenters faced a physical crackdown rather than a paper one. Police began rounding up activists hours or days before a planned march. Those who managed to attend were first beaten by baton-wielding riot police and then detained. Activists braved these battles for a couple of years, but in early 2008 the marches ceased.

As the Kremlin forced out of the public sphere those people and organizations that it saw as threatening, it stuffed the empty space with supporters. Back in the Soviet era, public space had been monolithic, filled with the Communist Party and its age-appropriate subsidiaries. Instead of nongovernmental organizations, it had entities like trade unions run by the state trade union authority. Now political technologists began manufacturing organizations that created an illusion of plurality. The Kremlin instituted its own foundation, which would give grants to organizations of its choosing. In itself, a system of government grants is not necessarily an instrument of repression—many European countries have civil- society sectors that are primarily funded by the state—but the explicit assumption here was that Kremlin-funded groups would do the Kremlin's bidding. Political technologists cranked out youth groups designed to protect the Kremlin, including fighting for it in the streets if it came to that. They had names like Nashi ("Us," as opposed, clearly, to "Them") and the Young Guard, a name borrowed from a mythologized group of Soviet teenage anti-Hitler guerrillas. A group of students in Moscow put out a few issues of a newspaper called Aktsiya

("Action"); the new manufactured groups responded with a newspaper that had offices, a well-paid staff, and a regular print schedule. They called it Reaktsiya

("Reaction"). The new groups had training camps and cool T-shirts, and in some smaller cities they organized dances and other leisure activities for young people where none had been available. They staged street actions, including an unironically named March of the Consenters to counter the March of the Dissenters. Fifteen years earlier, a prominent perestroika politician, historian Yuri Afanasyev, had called this "the aggressively obedient majority."

In this context, Dugin's promise of creating a "total and radical center" began to make sense. He now positioned himself as a leader in the fight against the "orange menace," which he described as part of the Atlanticist plot against Eurasia and even an American jihad against Russia. The Eurasian movement spawned a youth wing, the Eurasian Youth Union, which placed itself in the vanguard of the Anti-Orange Front, an entity that Dugin claimed included twenty-five thousand people. What Russia really needed to prevent an orange revolution, said Dugin, was a new oprichnina, the reign of terror for which Czar Ivan IV was remembered as the Terrible.