The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

this was an investment in her future. Before she learned much, during the first summer she and Raisa spent on Lake Garda, their electricity was shut off because they had not understood the notices. The next-door neighbor came to the rescue, light was restored, and Zhanna and the neighbor became fast friends. Zhanna imagined that someday she might live here. In any case, she and Raisa would be spending their summers here for years to come—this was Zhanna's permanence, her future, even if she continued to work in Moscow.

Other things, besides the Garden Ring flat, ended in 2010 too. Zhanna and Dmitry divorced. She had seen her husband lose interest in other people—his friends and her friends—and go from present to absent like a switch had been flipped. Then she saw his absence happen with her, and she probably should not have waited for him to tell her. But once he did, she moved out that very day. She went to stay at a minihotel—really, a rental room in a converted apartment on a pedestrian street a block from the parliament building where her father no longer worked.

Boris was now a full-time political activist. After he lost office in 2004, everyone, including him, thought that he could have a lucrative career in GR—government relations. He knew everyone, after all, and everyone knew how important it was to know people. The bureaucracy was becoming more powerful by the year, regulations were changing constantly, and someone who could navigate the opaque structures of the Russian government could save a business. Boris took a job as a GR specialist at a bank. But GR required more diplomacy than he could muster. He stuck it out for a year, made a little money, bought his duplex overlooking the Kremlin, and quit.

He teamed up with Kasparov and other people, most of them unknown to the media and the public. In 2008 they cofounded an organization and called it Solidarity, in honor of the Polish anti- Communist resistance from the 1980s. His friends made fun of him. They were men who used to be called oligarchs. Now, under Putin, they had forfeited their political power, and they held themselves up as exemplars of the art and wisdom of compromise. Strategic concessions could save one from landing in jail like Khodorkovsky, or in exile, stripped of your assets. You ceded some access or assets to those whom Putin wanted to advance, gave up a little to retain a lot. If you were smart, these deals were cut in subtle ways, negotiated in indirect language—and the effort enabled Boris's friends to feel clever while yielding to the stronger party. What Boris was doing was precisely the opposite: unsubtle and reckless. They made fun of him for his earnestness and naivete. He laughed along, heartily, because, Zhanna knew, he did not want to appear either naive or earnest.

In October 2009, Boris turned fifty. He put Zhanna in charge of organizing the party. He liked delegating. She liked being put in charge. She rented a restaurant with beige walls, white tablecloths, and plush gray chairs. It looked out on the green lawn of a golf club, like this was not Moscow at all. About 150 people came, the rich and the beautiful crowd. A well-known television journalist, Pavel Sheremet, made a half-hour film called Nemtsov: An Accounting. The title was a takeoff on Boris's latest occupation: he had started compiling and publishing reports. His first one, printed in February 2008, as Putin was winding down his second presidential term, had been called Putin: An Accounting. The slim booklet consisted of nine chapters:

Corruption Is Eroding Russia

The Military, Forsaken

Roads in Disrepair

Russia Is Dying [on depopulation]

The Pension System in Crisis

Corrupt Justice

Stomping on the Constitution [on the elimination of elections and of Russia's federal structure]

The Failure of "National Projects" Everyone Is an Enemy, Except China⁴

The report did not break new ground—most of what it contained had been reported by other people—but taken together, the information added up to a damning picture strikingly different from the Kremlin's

triumphant reports and from the popular picture of a stronger, healthier, wealthier Russia.

Boris's next report was called Luzhkov: An Accounting. It detailed the activities of Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who had turned the megalopolis into a fiefdom. Boris and Solidarity activists handed out the reports near Metro stations. Often they would set up a folding table and Boris would autograph books, writing dedications in sprawling script and basking in the brief moments of the familiar adoration of a crowd.