The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Lyosha started spending time at Orbita. He came to Solikamsk for all school breaks and some weekends, and he loitered. He met all his friends there, and when they were not available, he went to Orbita alone. Sasha would walk over and ask for a light, but he always did it with a girl on his arm or when Lyosha was speaking to someone else. Technically, they still had not met.

Finally, Lyosha found himself at a birthday party where Sasha was also a guest, and someone introduced them to each other. Sasha asked Lyosha specific questions about his studies and a recent trip Lyosha had taken to a conference in Moscow: Sasha had clearly done as much research on Lyosha as Lyosha had done on him. Lyosha, for his part, already knew that Sasha came from a struggling family, that his parents drank and he had a half-dozen siblings, and that he had tried and failed two or three times to get into Perm Polytechnic. They were, by now, a couple of years into their strange courtship.

They left the party together, with a young woman. They walked her home, and then Sasha walked Lyosha home, explaining that the streets were rough and he himself had such a long way to go to his apartment on the outskirts that the detour made no difference. There was no physical contact: Lyosha was cool, open but not rash. He regretted it the next morning.

Nothing changed after the party. Lyosha still took the bus, five hours each way, to hang out at the mall almost every weekend, and Sasha still asked him for a light. Lyosha finally devised a plan to talk to Sasha alone. He waited at the bus stop outside Orbita until Sasha left work and boarded the bus. Lyosha got on the same bus without being seen—the crowd and the winter darkness made this easy. He got off at Sasha's stop and caught up to him on foot after a short distance.

"Sasha, we have to talk."

Sasha did not seem at all surprised. He did seem to have his answer prepared in advance.

"You shouldn't give in to your fantasies," he said. "Don't believe what people say."

Lyosha poured his heart into a letter and had a mutual friend hand it to Sasha at the mall. Sasha called. This time, he did not tell Lyosha not to believe what people say. He did not even say that he was not gay. All he said was, "I can't," over and over, for an hour and a half.

Lyosha decided that what they needed was to speak in person, not in the mall or in the street, but in private. Sasha just needed to feel safe. Lyosha found a classified-ad newspaper in which people offered apartments for rent by the day. He called, he paid, he picked up the key and called Sasha with the address. He cooked supper and waited. Sasha came.

He said, "I can't."

He said, "I'm sorry. I should not have let this go on. I can't. I hope you can forgive me."

Lyosha said, "Don't ask me to forgive you. I just hope you can forgive yourself."

Lyosha thought it was all too much like a movie, and a very long one: somehow, it took them four hours to say those things to each other. Then Sasha left, and Lyosha left too, because the last thing he wanted now was to spend the night in this apartment.

it was January 2006 when the Sasha story ended. In the three years since his gay life began, Lyosha had had sex with one man, loved two, and had explored the entire range of options available to him: the closet and the gutter. Or at least those were the options available to his gay body and his gay heart. His gay mind could still soar. He decided that he would be gay in the academy.

The following year Lyosha defended his senior thesis, titled "Sexual Minorities as a Political Issue." Getting the topic approved by the department was difficult, but he managed, and then went to Moscow for research. At the Russian State Library, which everyone still called by its old name, the Lenin Library, the repository of every periodical ever legally published in the country, Lyosha saw gay and lesbian magazines from the early 1990s. It turned out that there had once been people who wrote in Russian about gay rights, the movement, legislation, a political agenda. They sounded freer and

better-informed than anyone Lyosha knew now. They seemed to inhabit a public space that Lyosha could barely imagine, to be connected to efforts that trusted their own importance—this was particularly true of a woman named Evgenia Debryanskaya, a lesbian activist so outspoken the whole country seemed to have heard of her back when Lyosha was in first grade. She was now an entrepreneur, like several other activists of old; others had left the country, and a couple had died.