The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

That day, the day the war with Georgia began, the market lost more than 6.5 percent. In another few days, as it continued falling, it became clear that there was no recovery in sight. Western markets were holding steady or growing—despite the unfolding housing crisis in the United States. Oil prices were even. So it was clear that the collapse was a product of the war.³ The market was falling in reverse proportion to Putin's soaring popularity. It was this that made Zhanna say Budushchego net—"There is no future here." This, and the fact that she and Raisa had lost all their money.

Zhanna and Raisa had been a two-person family unit for about six years. On the last day of 2001, that awful year when Zhanna moved to New York and then came home, there had been a phone call. Raisa picked up. The caller introduced herself as Katya Odintsova. Raisa knew who she was—a television personality from Nizhny Novgorod— and she knew what she looked like: long blond hair, long legs. She was about ten years younger than Raisa.

"Do you know?" asked the caller.

"Know what?"

"I have a child with your husband, and I am expecting another."

"So?" asked Raisa.

"So, something must be done."

"Then I suppose you should do something," said Raisa, and hung up. Then she called Zhanna on her cell phone. Raisa was not sure what to do. In her generation and her social circles—among both the slightly bohemian intellectuals of Nizhny Novgorod and the powerful and the rich of Moscow—marriage did not necessarily carry the assumption of fidelity, especially on the part of the men, but indiscretions were supposed to be discreet. The phone call, the fact that there was a first-grader in Nizhny Novgorod who looked like her husband, and the unavoidable conclusion that Boris had been having a relationship for years—all of this broke the unspoken compact. Still, Raisa was proud that she had kept her cool during the phone conversation.

Zhanna, who was seventeen, saw no valor in her mother's reserve, and no two ways to interpret the situation. She rushed directly to her father's office at parliament, barged in, and told him everything she thought of him and his behavior. After she left his office, she realized that she could not remember what she had said, but it had definitely been angry and she had certainly been right. She told her mother to get a divorce. Both of her parents thought it was a bit too radical a

step—her father had no desire to go live with the mother of his other children—but Zhanna had words of principle and conviction where her parents had uncertainty and indecision, so she won.

They separated, though they did not bother legally getting divorced, and her father moved into a rental apartment. He left them the large flat on the Garden Ring and a sum of money. Now this money, which Zhanna and Raisa managed together even after Zhanna got married, was gone. They did not even have the money to pay maintenance on the Garden Ring flat. The only possible solution was to rent it out, but with the economy in the state that it was, who would rent an opulent 185-square-meter four-bedroom apartment in the center of the city?

The answer, as it turned out, was someone who worked at a state bank. During the crisis, government banks took over failing smaller private banks. The process provided many opportunities for the well- positioned employee of a state bank: siphoning off funds was made that much easier by the bureaucratic mess of the takeovers and the panic that surrounded them. A state banker rented the apartment in January 2008 for $3,000 a month. Raisa moved back to Nizhny Novgorod. She and Zhanna split the money, and it was enough for each of them for the time being.

Zhanna had learned a lesson: there was no future here. She was not thinking much about the politics of it—the fact that it was the Kremlin that had sent the market tumbling both times—but she was thinking that hers was a country where this kind of thing would happen again and again. She insisted on selling the apartment once it regained its value. That happened in 2010. Boris—who, unlike Zhanna, was very much talking about the politics of it but still insisted that Russia had a future—tried to convince Zhanna to buy a new place in Moscow. She would not hear of it. She held on to the money until she saw an opportunity: as the Eurozone crisis unfolded, Zhanna dispatched Raisa to explore Greece, Spain, and Italy. Then they both traveled to a village on Lake Garda in Italy, where Boris was on vacation. They decided to invest there. In 2013, Zhanna and Raisa invested the money from the large Garden Ring apartment in a smaller one in the lakeside village. Zhanna started studying Italian—