The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

every day after work. It was all Lyosha could do to prevent the other Lyosha from moving in, but for all purposes the other Lyosha now lived in his apartment. The other Lyosha said they were a family. Lyosha said that he was opposed to the traditional model of family, but the other Lyosha said that he was Russian Orthodox. He wore a cross around his neck, and he talked about tradition. What kind of tradition could two gay men have in a country where they were utterly invisible? The kind of tradition in which Lyosha, who was twenty-three, was expected to be in every way the dominant partner to the other Lyosha, who was twenty. Or so the other Lyosha said— even though it was Lyosha who felt dominated.

They argued all the time. These were strange arguments. The other Lyosha simply contradicted everything Lyosha said. Lyosha soon realized that the other Lyosha goaded him to get attention, but he could not restrain himself, because, more often than not, the other Lyosha picked fights about things Lyosha genuinely cared about and understood. The other Lyosha said that he liked Putin.

"How can you like Putin?" asked Lyosha.

"I am just starting out in my career, and Putin's Plan is an appropriate plan," the other Lyosha responded.

The answer seemed nonsensical on every level. First, there was no such thing as Putin's Plan: it was a phrase used during the parliamentary campaign, but there was no book or even flyer that contained whatever plan this might be. It was like every Russian was supposed to know intuitively what Putin's Plan was, like it was divine providence, like it was the natural law of things. And the other Lyosha said it was an "appropriate" plan like it was a thing that actually existed—and had something to do with his career! The other Lyosha worked as an assistant to a liberal member of the Perm legislature, Nikita Belykh, a leader of the Union of Right Forces Party that Nemtsov had founded. Lyosha considered asking the other Lyosha why, if Putin's Plan was so "appropriate," he worked for Belykh, but realized that he did not want to know the answer. He figured that the other Lyosha would say that he worked for Belykh for the money, and what was worse, that would be a lie, because his was an unpaid assistantship: in contemporary Russian, "money" could be the polite

word for "power." Also, the other Lyosha was a member of the pro- Kremlin youth movement Young Russia—the one that had, among other things, laid siege to the Estonian embassy the previous summer. He and his best friend, a young woman, attended the militarized summer training camps at Lake Seligher.

The other Lyosha never ran out of things to argue about. He picked a fight about Gorbachev, whom he hated for destroying the Soviet Union—and kept arguing, even though he was too young to remember even a day of life under Gorbachev. He called Yeltsin "nothing but an alcoholic." During one of their fights Lyosha lost it. He hauled off and hit the other Lyosha.

He could not believe what he had done, and broke up with the other Lyosha on the spot. But, true to his inexplicable self, the other Lyosha seemed to revel in the incident. For months afterward, he bragged to their mutual friends that Lyosha was a "tyrant."

fromm would have found nothing mysterious about the other Lyosha: he was a walking caricature of the authoritarian character, right down to his automatic readiness to worship a thirteenth-century military leader.

Gudkov found nothing mysterious or surprising in the Name of Russia contest. The Levada team had been asking respondents to name "the greatest people who have ever lived" from the beginning of the Homo Sovieticus project. Results had differed only slightly over the years. Stalin had risen steadily—from 12 percent in 1989 to 40 in 2003 (he dropped four percentage points in 2008, which may have been related to the discussion of the supposed hacking of the Name of Russia site). Stalin had not made it into the top five in 1989, but in every subsequent survey he was among the leaders, coming in fourth in 1994 and 1999, and third in 2003 and 2008. Others in the top five were, consistently, Peter the Great, Pushkin, and Lenin. Napoleon and Georgy Zhukov, who commanded the Red Army when it entered Berlin in 1945, made appearances in different years, as did Mikhail Lomonosov, remembered as the country's first scientist, and Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. Putin, who was first named in 2003

by 21 percent of the respondents, by 2008 was at 32 percent, which made him number five among the greatest people who ever lived.²⁹