The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Footage of these signing sessions was in the film, as was footage of Boris walking down streets, Boris showing off his athletic prowess —using an elliptical machine in the exercise room in his apartment overlooking the Kremlin, kite-surfing on an unidentified ocean, and using the pull-up bar at a country house. The house was where his current girlfriend, Irina, was living with his youngest daughter, Sonya. The film showed all the children—there were now four—but omitted the fact that they had three different mothers. The narrator said, "He has a large family, in a good way." At the end, the narrator reneged on the title of the film. It was too early for an accounting, he said. Boris might become president of Russia yet, perhaps in the year 2025.⁵

Boris's rich and powerful friends praised him in the film: he was fun, he was brave, he was honest. They came to the party too. Then, having paid homage that they might have thought of as their debt of friendship, they faded away. Only one of the wealthy—metals mogul Mikhail Prokhorov—came to Boris's fifty-first birthday party, in 2010. Truth be told, these men had been coming around less and less since Boris left his GR job and became a full-time activist in 2005. The fiftieth birthday had been their last and finest effort. Even Mikhail Fridman, the oligarch who used to have tea in the Garden Ring flat's kitchen several times a week—the one who told Zhanna she was crazy when she came home from New York in 2001, because "there is no future here"—had long ago told Boris that being associated with him was "toxic" for his business. No one, he said, would ever believe that he was not the one bankrolling those "accounting" reports.⁶

Zhanna noticed that her father was more comfortable with the activists than he had ever been with the oligarchs. His old friends carried themselves like they owned the world; his new allies managed to look shy and ready for battle at the same time. They wore cheap clothes and always looked slightly disheveled. One worked with severely autistic children. Another was a scientist who had been on the barricades continuously since the late 1980s. Then there was a crowd of skinny young men with spectacles and terrible haircuts. Boris had endless patience for phone calls with them, for detailed and repetitive planning of protests, to which only they showed up. At some point Zhanna understood that what she thought was patience was, in fact, desire. Boris enjoyed the phone calls, the planning, and the tiny, isolated protests. The process of planning and discussion— the same process that she remembered from the political discussions in their Nizhny Novgorod kitchen before Boris became a politician, and the physics discussions that preceded them—engaged and sustained him more fully than did kite-surfing and excellent wine.

on December 31, 2010, Zhanna went to a protest with her father. For a year and a half now, activists had been gathering at Triumfalnaya Square in central Moscow on the thirty-first day of every month that had thirty-one days. They gathered to demand observance of Article 31 of the Russian Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of assembly. Sometimes they got roughed up, sometimes they were detained for several hours. But recently the police had seemed to let up a bit—perhaps because the previous New Year's Eve they had managed to hurt Ludmila Alekseeva, at eighty-two Russia's oldest and best-known activist. This New Year's, the city even issued a permit for the protest, ensuring that it would be calm and uneventful. Alekseeva was planning to come again, wearing a New Year's costume: she would be dressed as Snegurochka.* It was practically going to be a party. Boris suggested that they go together and then continue to Irina's house in the country, the one where he had been filmed flipping his body over the pull-up bar, for a New Year's celebration. Zhanna put a long puffer coat on over a dress and heels,

and so did Angelica, a new friend, an insurance company employee, also newly single, and they went to Triumfalnaya Square.

"Everyone was acting like it really was a party," Boris wrote in his blog later.

Speakers wore red hats, and Alekseeva was in full Snegurochka glory, in a shiny blue embroidered long coat that looked like it weighed more than she did. Her voice shaky, she spoke for only a couple of minutes:

If you think about it, all our constitutional rights have been taken away, with one exception: the right to leave the country and return

That is why it is so important to stand up for Article 31 of the Constitution. That is why it is so important that for the second time in a row we are able to assemble here, in Triumfalnaya Square, undisturbed.

This has been accomplished by those who have been coming here stubbornly on the thirty-first of the month, even though they

knew that the riot police were waiting for them here.⁷