The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The other Muscovite who came to Perm was Marat Guelman, an art dealer turned political technologist. He had played a key role in creating Putin's public image in 1999-2000, and he had stayed an insider. But with the near-extinction of electoral politics, political technologists were no longer in demand. The market for Russian art, too, collapsed during the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Perm, where life and real estate were cheap and the regime was friendly, offered

Guelman a perfect Thaw-style cultural-political-economic opportunity. The three men pooled their—and the region's—influence and money in the hope of multiplying both. They promoted what they were doing unironically as a "cultural revolution." Their avowed goal was to have Perm chosen as a European Cultural Capital, a title bestowed by the European Union but available to cities that are not located in a European Union member country. The title would bring tourism to the city and money and fame to the men.

Gordeev invested, and Guelman curated. A museum of contemporary art opened in a hastily renovated old river port. An experimental theater followed, and a rejuvenated opera theater. At the center of it all stood a summer festival, an entire month of exhibits, performances, and panels that reached far beyond the arts into media and economics. Almost every night, police cars with flashing lights escorted buses ferrying dozens of visiting dignitaries from the Perm airport, where they had been delivered on a chartered plane from Moscow, to newly renovated hotels. The festival, called White Nights, was "overwhelming by design," wrote American anthropologist Douglas Rogers, who spent twenty years studying Perm.

At the center of White Nights in Perm was a fenced-in Festival Village erected in front of the Regional Administration building on Perm's esplanade. Just over three hectares in size, the Festival Village included two small and one large outdoor stages for concerts and other performances; numerous alleys for small shops and displays; two restaurants and two cafes; and a Festival Club for nearly fifty planned discussions and presentations. In order to cope with inevitable summer muddiness, boardwalk-style walkways were constructed to funnel crowds from space to space; they were repainted white nearly every night. Booths arranged alongside these walkways provided spaces where folk artisans and other culture producers could display and sell their wares, and the grassy spaces between the walkways hosted small-scale performances and exhibitions, from clowns to blacksmiths. Everywhere there were nooks and crannies—many of them in two massive towers at one end of the Festival Village—where little exhibits or performances sprang up. Most stunningly to many observers, there was even a "festival beach": a large circular pool, suitable for dozens of children at a time, erected within a raised platform that could accommodate hundreds of sunbathers. Showers and changing rooms were located

in a sandy area beneath.⁹

It was as if the entire city was, without changing location, transported from its eerie everyday identity as a former military- industrial city closed to outsiders to some shiny Europe of the imagination. In exchange, Europe would someday put Perm on its map—as a capital, no less. This frantic ambition was contagious, especially because Chirkunov and his people made it clear that their vision reached beyond the arts: the governor promised to forge a new "economy of the intellect, where we will create not with our hands but with our heads."¹⁰

The university, too, developed a vision of itself as a European institution. Lyosha knew that he fit in it well. His own vision was that he would soon be running Russia's only LGBT Studies program. For now, he and Darya, the friend who had been teaching the one gender studies course, launched a gender studies center. It helped that Darya's father was the dean of another department at the university. Darya and Lyosha got some funding for hosting conferences and publishing the proceedings. Their publications had no official status in the university, but this meant that they did not have to face an academic-review board.

Lyosha was lucky. He had heard that a legal scholar in Novosibirsk had not been allowed to defend her dissertation on LGBT rights.¹¹ In 2010, Lyosha presented at a conference at Moscow State University. His paper was titled "Gender Gaps in Political Science." Only one person—a professor from St. Petersburg—had a question for him.

"Are you aware," she asked, "that there are no lesbians in Russia?"

"I've also heard," said Lyosha, "that there was no sex in the Soviet Union. Yet you are here."

When the conference collection was published in book form, his paper was omitted.

people did not say those sorts of things at Moscow State—not what Lyosha said to the professor from St. Petersburg, nor what he had said in his paper. The social sciences here sounded very different.