The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Sergei said no. He would not sign the papers to allow her to take Sasha out of the country. That was when she thought, Budushchego net. There is no future.

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WHITE RIBBONS

masha had not been alone in her plan to emigrate. A friend set her sights on Humboldt University in Berlin at the same time. Another friend followed Masha's lead—to be more precise, Masha talked her into applying to Oxford. In May 2011, the first friend left for Germany and the second for England. Masha had one other close friend, but they had a falling-out. When Masha took an accounting of her larger circle of acquaintances, she realized that most of them had left earlier, for graduate or postgradute studies at the famous or not-so- famous universities of the West. Even her ex-husband, Sergei, had done graduate work in America. Now he relented—partly—and told Masha that he would agree to her going abroad to study, and taking Sasha with her, as long as it was temporary. Masha signed up for a sociology summer school in Malta. The school was interesting, the island country was tiny and crowded, and the military planes overhead, on their way to drop bombs on Libya day after day, reminded Masha that there was a big world out there, full of politics, people, and passion—while she had to return to Moscow at the end of the summer. She had no idea what she was going to do there. The only thing she knew was that she would not go back to working as a broker of kickbacks and bribes.

In September, she tried becoming a housewife—a single mother could be one too. Her job was ferrying Sasha to karate, drawing, and violin lessons and the English-language preschool. At karate and drawing the other mothers could spend hours discussing the best container in which to pack lunch for their husbands. At violin, Masha waited alone. The mothers at the English-language preschool were more interesting—several of them were journalists—but the most they would do was chat over a croissant and cappuccino before either disappearing into their laptops or taking off for work, leaving their children for the nannies to collect.

On September 25, the preschool mothers were outraged. The previous afternoon, Putin and Medvedev had made a joint announcement: at the next election, scheduled for March 2012, Medvedev would hand the presidency back to Putin and return to his post as prime minister. "Can you believe this?" the mothers asked one another. "They don't even try to keep up appearances anymore." They meant the appearance of an election. Masha was not exactly shocked. She was devastated. All she could think was, Now everyone is going to leave the country. Every last person.

In the evenings, after Sasha was asleep, Masha hung out with her two closest friends, at Humboldt and Oxford—by Skype. They opened bottles of wine in parallel in front of their web cameras. Masha's friends did their academic work; Masha roamed the Internet.

This was how she learned of the case of Vladimir Makarov. It seemed unbelievable at first. After she read all she could read about it, she knew it was true, but she still found it incomprehensible. In fact, she knew she would never be able to understand it. An innocent man was going to prison for years on charges of molesting his own daughter.

vladimir makarov was a young civil servant. He had moved to Moscow in 2009 to take a job at the transportation ministry. His wife and young daughter joined him once he had fixed up a rental apartment. In the summer of 2010, Makarov's seven-year-old daughter fell off a home climbing wall, fracturing a vertebra. A lab technician thought she saw traces of sperm in the girl's urine sample when she was brought to the hospital by ambulance. A nurse reported it. Later tests of the same sample failed to confirm the results, a physical exam produced no evidence of sexual abuse, and neither the little girl nor her mother nor anyone else gave any testimony that

could be interpreted as confirming the charge against Makarov. Nonetheless, he was jailed, held in pretrial detention for a year, and sentenced to thirteen years behind bars for raping his own daughter.¹

He appealed, and on November 29, 2011, Moscow City Court downgraded the charge from rape to indecent assault and reduced his sentence to five and a half years.² This was probably the worst moment in the whole awful story: by removing the rape charge, the court was disavowing the only basis for the entire case—the supposed finding of traces of sperm in the girl's urine. And still this man, who had done nothing wrong and had already spent a year in jail, would be staying in prison for four more. Why?