The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

is no future." As though it could indeed be canceled. People said it when a particular vision of the future collapsed. For many people— many more than Arutyunyan realized at the time, when she was reveling in her "freedom to"—the future ended when the Soviet Union collapsed and the narrow hallway disappeared. Others struggled on, but the anxiety caused by uncertainty rendered them incapable of meaningful action. In the early 2000s, with the arrival of Putin, whose simple rhetoric made the world comprehensible again, and with inflation receding under the force of high oil prices, many of these patients felt better. They could function again. They were sure that Putin had something to do with it. "Stability" was the magic word of the day—the opposite of fear and anxiety.

The naughts were a time of stability for Arutyunyan too. In 2005 she became a fully credentialed member of the International Psychoanalytical Association—one of only eleven Russians with that status. The same year, the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society was authorized to be a study group—taking it one step closer to full membership in the world of psychoanalytic societies—and Arutyunyan became its chairperson. For her, too, the future was acquiring more definite contours—but she had never longed for this, and was only now realizing how much of an outsider this made her in Russian society.

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BUDUSHCHEGO NET

"there is no future here," Zhanna said to her mother in the fall of 2008. It had to do with money, and Zhanna and Raisa were, uncharacteristically, fighting, blaming each other for money that had been lost. Money had turned out to be Zhanna's calling. Not in the sense that she wanted to be super-rich. She was like her father that way: they enjoyed good vacations and big parties, and Boris liked his duplex apartment with a view of the Kremlin, and his Range Rover, but compared with his oligarch friends with their yachts and fleets of cars and multistory wine cellars, the Nemtsovs thought of themselves as simple people. Zhanna liked money the way her father liked physics: it made her brain rev up. To make money, you had to be quick and attentive and know when the moment came to bet against majority sentiment. In this sense playing the markets was the opposite of politics, and this was where Zhanna and Boris differed: she liked the one, and he liked the other.

It helped that the work was virtually free of risk. In 2007, when Zhanna went to work for Mercury Capital Trust, the Russian market only grew and grew, and the task was to grow a bit faster than the competition. Zhanna thought about money all the time. She started studying for a chartered financial analyst exam. At the end of 2007, the Russian market reached an all-time high.

In August 2008, Zhanna and Dmitry were on vacation in Thailand. It was late morning there when the markets opened in Moscow. Zhanna would take a look, maybe move a few things around, and go to the beach. On August 8 she saw something that made her think

that a computer somewhere must be broken. The Russian stock market was in free fall.

Zhanna had actually seen the market fall once before, just two weeks earlier. That day, Putin held a meeting in Nizhny Novgorod; the subject was the state of the metals industry. One of the metals moguls was absent, and Putin—now officially merely the prime minister—was not pleased. He said that the Federal Antimonopoly Service should check into the activities of Mechel, the company whose majority owner had failed to show up. "Or perhaps even the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor's Office should look into it," he said. "We have to figure out what's going on." He accused the company of exporting raw materials at below-market prices, causing the state to miss out on tax revenue. Mechel's owner was absent because he had been hospitalized. "Of course, an illness is an illness," said Putin. "But we may have to send a doctor over to him to take care of all his problems."¹

Putin had not singled out a company or an entrepreneur like that since he jailed Khodorkovsky and took his company. Within hours of the threat, the value of Mechel stock on the New York exchange dropped by a third. The following morning, when the Moscow exchange opened, the company continued losing at home. Other companies followed. The Russian stock market reverted to levels at which it had been four months earlier, while the Moscow currency exchange lost nearly two years' worth of growth.²

That had been bad, but Zhanna had figured the market would recover. She even ignored Raisa's advice to unload all metals companies. Now she was ignoring more than that: she knew, in theory, that if the market was in free fall, you had to sell, but she could not believe it was happening. She was not selling. She was just watching the Russian market collapse.