The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

When they walked out of the cafe, a couple of young men charged Boris and tried to catch him in a large scoop-net, the kind used for fishing. Boris twisted around and managed to push one of the attackers away. This sort of thing had been happening for at least three years. Back in 2007, in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Boris had turned the weapon against his attacker, a skinny, pimply kid who confessed that he had flown all the way from Moscow to try to humiliate the politician. He would not, however, admit to being a member of one of the Kremlin's youth movements.⁹ In 2010, in Sochi, three young men threw ammonia in his face. In 2011—a few months after the fishing net—it happened again: a toilet was thrown

over the fence onto the roof of his car in Moscow. The police came out but refused to write it up.¹⁰ Zhanna never would have imagined that her father could keep his cool the way he did.

masha said budushchego net

in Moscow, when she left a child neurologist's office. Sasha was four years old, and he was not talking. He had had evaluations, brain scans, and all sorts of tests that involved attaching wires to his blond head and all over his tiny body. The doctors said that his brain did not look good. They said they saw fluid, and the parts that should be small looked large and ones that ought to be large were small. Masha sort of believed them, because it was a fact that Sasha was not talking and this was the reason she had brought him in for tests in the first place. At the same time, she did not believe them. Her son was not just her baby: he was her friend. They did things together, like swim in the pool, and when she asked him for something, he was always happy to do it—even when she jokingly asked him to get her a drink from the open bar at an all- inclusive resort in Turkey. She told everybody about it, not just because it was funny but because it definitively proved that there was nothing wrong with her son's brain. So, mostly, she did not believe the doctors.

And now, this famous child neurologist, whom she had spent months trying to get in to see and whom she was terrified of seeing, leafed through Sasha's chart, full of damning test results and specialists' opinions, examined Sasha, and said, "There is nothing wrong with your child." Then she said, "You are doing everything right. Just keep doing what you are doing. And lose this chart." She handed the thick binder back to Masha.

Masha understood perfectly well what the doctor meant. The pile of diagnoses that had been heaped on Sasha meant that he would never be accepted to a regular school. If Masha did not want him shunted to the mentally disabled track, she had to shred his medical records, bribe someone to make him a pristine but believable new chart, and then make sure that by the time he was about to enter first grade, he was speaking like any other six-and-a-half-year-old.

Or maybe she said budushchego net

a bit later, when Sergei made it clear that he had not signed up for this. A four-year-old kid who could not speak, with all the questions this brought forth from others, and all the exercises and activities that Masha was fishing out of the Internet that were supposedly going to fix this broken boy—Sergei could not take it anymore. He had another woman, and he was going to go live with her now.

Maybe that was not actually when Masha said budushchego net. Maybe that was when she said, "Fine. Alimony." She had a very large sum of money saved up—upward of $100,000—and between that safety net and alimony, she could afford to quit her job and start graduate school in pedagogy. She had a plan: she would become a teacher at a good school. That way Sasha could study there too. Her workday would be short, allowing her to give Sasha the attention he needed.

Over the course of the 2010-2011 school year, Sasha learned to speak, but Masha learned almost nothing—except that Moscow was not the place to learn to work with children, even though she was about to be awarded a degree in this area. Other things she did not see happening in Moscow or in Russia: a new husband—she was nearly twenty-seven and had a child, so this was a foregone conclusion—and a good education for Sasha. She devised a plan that Tatiana would have approved, which was probably one reason it felt self-evident. She would go to Oxford to study educational psychology. Then she would become a science teacher in England. But even before that, Sasha would be in the environment he needed in order to develop. She would be in such an environment too—one where a mother like Masha could ask for help instead of having to falsify her child's medical chart to give him a shot at a future. She took all the required tests, and she placed Sasha in an English-language preschool program: he was speaking well enough now that he could start learning a second language.