The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Because. Ella Paneyakh, an American-educated Russian sociologist who had for years been studying law enforcement, wrote a piece she titled "And Now the Most Frightening Thing of All Has Happened." It began, "And as is its habit, disaster struck where we least expected it." Paneyakh used the term "the Red Wheel" to refer to the force that had plowed Makarov down. The Red Wheel was the title of a trilogy by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in which he described the destruction of the Russian state by the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution. Paneyakh used the term to refer to Russian law enforcement. Her point was that it, too, was an inexorable disaster.

It has forgotten what it's like to encounter resistance. It lacks a built-in function for compromise, retreat, even for saying something like "released upon a closer examination of the evidence." All the mechanisms that could have been employed for this purpose have long since rusted out for disuse. In fact, the

machine's only possible response to resistance is a crackdown.³

Makarov was doomed as soon as he was first suspected, falsely, of having sexually abused his daughter. His attempts to fight the charges—he asked for further tests, mounted a thorough defense, and then appealed his sentence—only made the law-enforcement machine pursue him harder.

This was not a new mechanism. Law enforcement and the courts had functioned this way for a long time—in fact, they had functioned this way in the Soviet era, and the system was never dismantled, only temporarily weakened in the 1990s. But for most of the post-Soviet period, the punitive force had been applied almost exclusively to a few clearly defined groups of people: entrepreneurs engaged in property disputes, select politicians (who were also, more often than not, entrepreneurs engaged in property disputes), and radical political activists. In other words, people risked being crushed by the Red Wheel only after they ventured into the public realm. What had changed now, wrote Paneyakh, was that "the state has once again found the time, means, and energy to insert its tentacles into a person's private life—a lot deeper than the average person . . . is prepared to let it." The process had been under way for some time, but most Russians had not noticed—in part because they had grown accustomed to feeling separate from the state.

While they were not paying attention, the state had begun regulating what people ate and drank, often introducing seemingly arbitrary rules for political reasons, like when it had banned wine imports from Georgia or sprats from Latvia. The regulating agency invariably justified its decisions by the need to protect the population from potentially dangerous products.

The parliament had been discussing restricting abortion. It had hardened drug laws to the point where pain relief had become virtually inaccessible, even for people with documented severe pain. Roughly half of more than a million inmates of Russian prisons were serving time for drug offenses, because even a minuscule amount could land one behind bars. As new laws piled up, political discussion, such as it was, centered on the need to protect children: from drugs, from abortions, and, perhaps most important, from pedophiles. Masha could not remember when she had first heard about the pedophile menace—it seemed like background noise that had always been there.

lyosha had been watching for years as the idea of the pedophile threat took shape. He had written about it in his undergraduate thesis. Prominent Perm factory owner and politician Igor Pastukhov, a United Russia member, was first accused of raping a sixteen-year- old boy in 2003. Soon after, the charges were dropped and the politician's accuser seemed to vanish. But a second teenager came forward in 2005. Rumor in Perm had it that another powerful local businessman had manufactured the case to discredit Pastukhov. But Lyosha met young men who told him that it had happened to them too: Pastukhov's people were in the habit of hunting down very young men in and around cruising areas and either luring or, if that failed, forcing them into cars and delivering them to Pastukhov and his friends, who raped them.