The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

This time there were no riot police—only a couple hundred protesters and a few dozen police who looked bored and peaceful. Minutes after Alekseeva left, most of the participants were still milling around, chatting in that way people do when they want to make an event feel more substantial than it has seemed. The riot police appeared out of nowhere, and charged the crowd. Zhanna grabbed Angelica's hand and they ran—first just a few yards, to hide behind a kiosk, and then, after Zhanna peeked around it and saw the police tackling people to the ground and dragging them into prisoner transports, they ran like they did not know they could run. They covered a kilometer and a half—the distance to the next Metro station —in five minutes. How had they managed this, in heels?

They took the Metro back to Zhanna's new temporary rental apartment. Zhanna called Irina to tell her that Boris had been detained and they would not be coming. It turned out that Dmitry, Zhanna's ex-husband, was there at the party, with his new girlfriend.

Irina had apparently planned some sort of grand family reunion. Now Zhanna was relieved that she was ringing in the New Year lying on her bed, watching the news on television to see if they would report on the protest. They did not.

Boris rang in the New Year in solitary. After two days, he managed to smuggle out a handwritten note:

The cell is a concrete box about 1.5 meters [5 feet] wide and 3 meters [9 feet] long. It has no windows, no bed or mattress. It's just a concrete floor, and nothing else.

I have been charged, absurdly, under Article 19.3 of the Administrative Code, for supposedly disobeying police orders. It carries a maximum sentence of 15 days in jail

The authorities have a problem, though: there is a video recording of my arrest, in which you can see the police doing as they wish, ignoring everything: the law, the holiday, and the fact that we had a permit for the protest. I know that they are just trying to scare us. They are trying to scare the opposition, and my family. This was the first time my daughter Zhanna had joined the protest, and that makes me very proud.

I know that the regime is scared. It's furious, and it doesn't know what to do with the opposition. It's scared, it's flailing, and it's bringing shame to itself and to Russia. We have no right to give up now. We will not give up.

Happy New Year, my friends!

Boris was brought to court on January 3. Everyone in Russia was on vacation—it was the dead week between New Year's and Orthodox Christmas, when everything, including the stock exchanges and all banks, shut down—but one judge, a woman about Zhanna's age, had to come to work. Zhanna came, of course, and Angelica came too, even though the experience of it all, and now the sight of activists sitting on the floor in the hallway—chairs had been removed to discourage their presence—was unlike anything Angelica could imagine, even now that she was witnessing it. There seemed to be a

general chair crisis in the courthouse: there was only one chair at the defense table, and Boris, who had spent three days inside the concrete cube, now spent four hours standing up, because his defense attorney was elderly and entitled to sit. The judge called more than a dozen witnesses and ignored their answers, and then read out her sentence, speaking so fast and so softly that no one could understand. Boris got fifteen days' jail time.

Zhanna went home to cook for her father. She wanted to spoil him, so she made the fanciest dish she could imagine: chicken sauteed with prunes. But when she brought it to the detention center the next day and an oddly friendly starstruck policeman brought her father down to the lobby to hang out with her, Boris confessed that jail made him want simple stuff: peasant food—meat and potatoes— and junk-food sweets from the Soviet era.

When his sentence was over, Zhanna came to get Boris, bringing with her a change of clothes, and they went directly out to dinner. She listened to his stories about jail. He had spent two weeks in a cell with five other men, three of them violent offenders with long sentences and two who had been picked up for misdemeanors. He had turned all of them on to politics.⁸ He was laughing now, reveling in his new hero status. Zhanna told him that she was no hero. She was never going to go to another protest as long as she lived. She would still support his work, of course. She said that from now on she would pay to have his reports published.