The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

shoot. The photo of Zhanna in a wholesome white blouse, airbrushed to make the candidate look not quite so ridiculously young, went up on billboards. Her tagline was "Zhanna Nemtsova: The United Candidate." The billboards listed five political organizations that had lent Zhanna their support. All of them were pro-democracy groups at some stage of the transition from the mainstream to the margins.

It was not much of a political platform. Her father was fond of talking about what he called "democratic values," but this seemed hopelessly old-fashioned to Zhanna. Nor did "democratic values" seem to be what concerned the residents of her district in northern Moscow. Zhanna studied conscientiously, meeting with residents and the single long-term local politician who had not been washed out by the wave of Putin's new nomenklatura. Chief concerns here were transportation—the Metro did not reach this far north, and buses were unreliable—and housing stock. Thousands of people were living in dilapidated buildings that had once been planned as temporary.

Boris connected Zhanna with Mikhail Prokhorov, co-owner of the metals giant Norilsk Nickel. Maybe he would want to contribute to the campaign. Prokhorov spent an hour bombarding Zhanna with quiz-like questions designed to draw out her political views. Then he said that he would be willing to give her money if she changed districts. He was bankrolling a ruling-party candidate in southern Moscow, and he would pay for Zhanna to challenge him. He wanted to be entertained. She was indignant. He called Boris and said, laughing, "Your daughter is a socialist."

There was no single moment when Zhanna realized that the game was fixed. By the time the vote came about, she felt like she had always known it. The incumbent, a nondescript man with an unmemorable name, would win because he belonged to Putin's party, United Russia. On election day Olga observed the vote at one of the precincts and saw soldiers bused in to stuff the ballot boxes. This was one way it was done. Another was saturation: the United Russia candidate's name and likeness were everywhere, even if no one really knew who he was. If it had been an honest contest, Zhanna figured she probably would have lost to the Communist Party candidate. As it was, the Communist came in second and Zhanna was third—with 10

percent of the vote, enough to recover her "electoral collateral." Zhanna was proud of this, especially because Boris was. But he said that he had now realized something else: "A name is not enough—a politician has to have a biography. You've got to work."

This is all nothing but strange games, an imitation of democracy. The candidates are copying each other's platforms. You can tell ahead of time what they are going to say. What they are really doing is creating a one-party system, which is the road to authoritarianism. We'll probably see parties that will pretend they are the opposition, or the quasi-opposition, and they will by turn kowtow to the government and criticize it. But their true function will be to prop up the one-party system. If the Bolsheviks had been smarter, they would have done this themselves—created a dozen such little bedbugs that will run up and down the body of society.

alexander nikolaevich yakovlev had never before let himself sound so testy in public. But in April 2005 he had just finished a lecture tour that had taken him across Russia, sapping his will and his wish to sound civil. "We are laying down a nationalist future for ourselves," he told a journalist. The word "nationalist" remained one of the most damning in his vocabulary. "I am seeing Stalin's mug displayed everywhere, every day, and people are eating it up. It is the face of a nationalist, a chauvinist, a murderer. But we are being told that if we look into it, he wasn't so bad."

"Are you sorry that you and Gorbachev did not disband the secret police?" asked the journalist.

Back in the day in the Central Committee we used to pretend that we were in charge. But it was the CheKa,* the KGB who were always really in command. We couldn't even go abroad without their permission. Take me—I was a member of the Politburo. I was watched over by fifteen KGB agents. Two cooks and the housekeeper had the rank of officers

Has the center of power moved from the Kremlin to the FSB?

It was there all along

Why do so many people idealize the past?

It's the "leader principle."* It's a disease. It's a Russian tradition. We had our czars, our princes, our secretaries-general, our collective- farm chairmen, and so on. We live in fear of the boss. Think about it: we are not afraid of earthquakes, floods, fires, wars, or terrorist attacks. We are afraid of freedom. We don't know what to do with

it That's where the fascist groups come from, too—the shock

troops of tomorrow.

Is the orange revolution possible here?