The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Bikbov was unusually persistent in studying the sociology that Moscow State University did not want to teach him. He taught himself French and translated Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, a classic of modern sociology, into Russian. He started publishing internationally. He became a professor—not at the sociology department of Moscow State, which was no place for someone like him, but in the philosophy department of Russian Humanities University, a much smaller and far younger institution that did not have its own department of sociology. There he launched his own standing seminar, which, like Levada's seminar in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, served to give young sociologists access to knowledge they were not getting through official channels. Dozens of Moscow State University sociology department students who figured out, soon after matriculating, that the department was, in Bikbov's words, "a commercial enterprise with an extremism complex," came to Bikbov's seminar to learn.

In 2006, Bikbov organized a conference on the sociology of prisons. Two prominent French academics presented, as did Bikbov's seminar participants and several young people who volunteered at Memorial, the organization founded in the 1980s to tell the story of the Gulag. The combination of the subject matter and academics and students and activists in one room proved combustible. The students resolved to demand change at Moscow State's sociology department.²³

For a semester in 2007, students staged a series of protests. "Education at the department is a lie!" proclaimed their first flyer. The flyer claimed that staff faculty were forbidden to do original research: instead, they had to use multivolume textbooks written by the dean, Vladimir Dobrenkov, as the basis for all instruction.

The schedule is full of ridiculous mandatory classes, including religious upbringing!

Outside researchers and faculty are not allowed inside the sociology department. The administration does everything in its power to block students' access, practical knowledge and interesting classes!

The administration conceals information on any talks given [in Moscow] by foreign scholars and bans student exchange with colleges abroad.

The flyer listed some recent incidents at the department, including:

All students were required to read a brochure distributed by the dean's office. Titled "Why Are Russian Lands Being Cleansed," it accused the Freemasons of "starting world wars and initiating the creation of the atomic bomb" and claimed that "the Zionist lobby . . . determined the foreign policies of the United States and Great Britain, holds in its hands the world financial system, including the printing of dollars, practically controls all the leading mass media and means of communication." Russia is called a "righteous nation" and America a "beastly nation" and The Protocols of the Elders of

Zion is quoted earnestly, as a reliable source.²⁴

The protests lasted through the spring, becoming the first sustained and highly public protests in Russia since Putin's "preventive counter-revolution." Such vocal action at the nation's

leading university compelled the presidential administration to respond by commissioning a report on the department. A group of experts concluded that the level of instruction at the department was not up to university standards and that Dobrenkov's textbooks were replete with plagiarism.²⁵

The other side retaliated. A group called the Union of Orthodox Citizens, which counted several well-known politicians among its leaders,²⁶ issued a manifesto in defense of the sociology department: "There is no doubt that a concerted effort to foment an 'orange revolution' at Russia's most important university is what stands behind the actions of radical youths and the students they have conscripted," they wrote. Indeed, the sociology department was to provide a "training ground for a youth 'maidan'"—Ukrainian for "square" but referring specifically to Kiev's Independence Square, the geographic center of the Orange Revolution. This maidan would then spread to other institutions of higher learning. Along with Marches of the Dissenters, and, the manifesto added, "parades of sodomites," the student rebellion "has every chance, come fall, to change the color of Red Square, turning it into an all-Russian rainbow 'maidan.'"²⁷ The statement was perfectly in keeping with the improbable assertion Lyosha had made in his thesis: a chasm was opening up in Russian society along the lines of sexual identity. The specter of gay liberation had emerged as a bogeyman much like the Freemasons, the Zionists, and the American financiers.