The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Less than a year after Umland posed this question, Dugin was installed at Moscow State's sociology department. His classes would now be mandatory for department students. The arrangement was profitable all around: Dean Dobrenkov was importing political muscle that accrued to Dugin—no one would touch him now, whatever the official commission might have concluded about his plagiarism and the low quality of education at the department. Dugin, on the other hand, got the intellectual legitimacy and the pulpit he had long been seeking.

compared with moscow state university or, really, any other university in Russia, Lyosha's position in Perm might have looked so privileged as to be unsustainable. A realist would have said that it was only a matter of time before a small oasis like Perm State University's political science department was stomped out, the way all difference in Russia was being stomped out. But an optimist would have said that it was at provincial universities and in small, self-contained spaces of experimentation that Russia's future was being made. Lyosha did not stop being an optimist until he went to Ukraine.

In 2011 he won a competition to take part in a three-year seminar for teachers from post-Communist countries. His track was "Gender, Sexuality, and Power." The seminars were funded by Soros's Open Society Foundations, which were no longer functioning in Russia— but this was a regional program, and the meetings would be in Ukraine. They met for the first time in Uzhgorod, a tiny border town in Western Ukraine, and for the first time, Lyosha was with his people. He was not the queer among academics or the academic among the queers—he was with people who were thinking and talking about the same things he was, and feeling some of the same things too. He was alone only in his epiphany: unlike him, the other participants—Brits, Americans, and Ukrainians—lived and worked with others who were like them. Ukraine, he learned, had thirty- seven registered LGBT groups. The number boggled his mind. He had always thought of Ukraine as Russia's simple provincial cousin, but this country had gender studies and queer studies theorists at several of its universities. And they were not revolutionary explorers like Lyosha: they had teachers. Lyosha had Darya, who was just a couple of years older—a peer, and a friend supportive enough that he sometimes forgot that she was the daughter of a dean, and straight. But then he remembered. The people here had mentors who had studied in the West in the 1990s. Lyosha felt not unlike Arutyunyan had felt nearly twenty years earlier, when she attended the training seminar abroad that delivered her "narcissistic blow." Like her, he saw people standing on the shoulders of their predecessors who stood on the shoulders of their predecessors who stood on the shoulders of giants—while Lyosha stood all alone.

He returned to Perm troubled but inspired: he felt he now had a vision of what his work might become. "I'm glad you are going to these seminars," his department chair told him. "It's like a retreat for you. But when you come back, you should be mindful of where you are." This was her way of broaching the subject of Lyosha needing to refocus his research. The 2012 department annual would not include his paper otherwise.

"There is no future here," Lyosha said to himself. He was not sure what this meant he needed to do now, but he knew that the phrase was true.

what lyosha had seen in Ukraine was, contrary to his expectations, a different culture. Yes, his Ukrainian colleagues spoke Russian, most as their first language, but they had a different educational background, different cultural references, and vastly different political expectations than he did. The Orange Revolution had not brought the change that the revolutionaries had demanded—indeed, Viktor Yanukovych, the once failed pro-Moscow candidate, had finally

been elected president in 2010—but nevertheless, Ukraine had left the Soviet Union.