The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

We are not going to be like Ukraine. . . . We still live with a simple trinity. The state is on top, and we keep making it stronger. Society is suspended somewhere beneath the state. If the state so wishes, the society will be civil, or semicivil, or nothing but a herd. Look to Orwell for a good description of this. And the little tiny individual is

running around somewhere down at the bottom.¹⁷

This was Alexander Nikolaevich's last major interview. He died in October 2005, a few weeks short of his eighty-second birthday. His son continued to work with the documents Alexander Nikolaevich had been publishing. Forty-three books had come out, but many more remained to be compiled and edited. This project, too, had become a source of frustration for Alexander Nikolaevich, because a new kind of response had become prevalent: people were writing letters saying that the stories told by these documents could not possibly be true. But the books had to continue coming out, especially because many of the documents had once again been made inaccessible in the archives.

Seryozha, though, felt that he no longer had an obligation to help. With his grandfather gone, he was free to go anywhere he wanted. He picked Ukraine. There was a girl there, and Kiev happened to be the place everyone wanted to live now.

after losing her election, Zhanna reverted to the state of having no ambition. This was fine: she was newly married, and with Dmitry's income she did not need to work.

Everyone around her was making money and then more money with that money. Her father and her mother, separately, had started playing the market; her mother proved particularly good at it. Dmitry was the vice-president of a bank, and most of his friends were in finance. After watching them for about a year, Zhanna decided to try for herself. She got a job at an investment firm, and learned to buy and sell. Making money was the easiest thing in the world. All the Russian market did was grow, and finding the stocks that would grow fastest was a fun game.

Starting in 1999, the growth curve of oil and gas prices had roughly the same shape as the curve of Putin's popularity rating in fall 1999: a vertical straight line. The Russian economy did not become more efficient—in fact, if anything, it became less efficient—but it grew sharply nonetheless. The "virtual economy" problem described by Clifford Gaddy was not solved: about half of Russian industry continued to lose value. But these companies were not represented on Russia's tiny stock market, which was dominated by oil and gas companies—so the stock market grew and grew. By 2005, the oil and gas rents far exceeded the needs of the federal budget, which allowed money to be deposited in a reserve fund, which, in turn, could be used in an emergency—like when the fires of the pensioners' protest had to be put out.—

masha gave birth to a boy in September 2006. They named him Alexander, Sasha for short. When the baby was five days old, Masha started hemorrhaging. She was taken to a hospital by ambulance. A burly nurse examined her—it hurt more than giving birth had, and Masha screamed.

"I bet it didn't hurt when you were fucking!" shouted the nurse.

Masha spent the next two weeks in one of the worst hospitals in a city full of bad hospitals. Her roommates numbered between three and five, placed on sagging metal cots in a room with no dividers. The hospital had only the most rudimentary medicines and equipment that dated back to the middle of the twentieth century. One of Masha's roommates had a pregnancy that had become nonviable at twenty-six weeks, but the drugs used to induce labor were ineffective or insufficient and she lay in the room for days, struggling to give birth to her dead baby.

After a few days, Masha figured out that she was part of the hospital's corrupt survival strategy. Russia had instituted a system of mandatory health insurance, a state-run policy that reimbursed hospitals. But this was a facility that no one would voluntarily choose, so at night, ambulances would deliver policyholders to this hospital in exchange for kickbacks. This was what had happened to Masha. Once she was hospitalized, the doctors placed her under an infectious- diseases quarantine, making it impossible to transfer to another facility.

Back at home, something strange happened to Sergei. Instead of doing what any normal husband would do in this situation—asking his mother or Masha's grandmother to come and take care of the baby—he bonded with his son. When Masha came home, she got the sense that Sergei was now more of a parent than she was. He let her join in, and they stayed home for the next year, mothering their baby and running their website.

After that Masha went to work for a distribution company. This was a bit of a misnomer: the line of business she entered probably should have been called "corruption facilitation."