The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The parliamentary elections had taken place the day before. It was the usual setup with four parties: Putin's United Russia, the Kremlin's puppet populists A Just Russia, the Communists, and the Liberal Democratic Party. In parliament the Communists and the so- called Liberal Democrats reliably voted with United Russia while A Just Russia, too small to change any outcome, was occasionally critical of the Kremlin—as it was, for example, in the ongoing campaign to protect children from the imaginary pedophile lobby. Any criticism was better than no criticism, and many of the people whose blogs Masha was reading had voted for A Just Russia. By official count, A Just Russia got just over 13 percent of the vote, or 64 out of the 450 seats in parliament. United Russia would continue to hold more than half the seats, though not quite as many as it had had in the previous parliament.²⁰

The point was not so much the outcome of the election, which had the usual suspects seated in the usual proportions, as this very predictability. The Kremlin did not allow any strangers on the ballot, so the election did not need to be fixed. And still it was fixed. Ballot boxes were stuffed, numbers were doctored, phantom precincts reported, and conscripts were bused in to vote early and often. Not that it even mattered who got into parliament, which existed only to rubber-stamp the Kremlin's policies. But the bad theater of it all, in which you were invited up onstage for a millisecond and not allowed to open your mouth, was insulting. The parliamentary election was also a preview of the election scheduled for March 2012, which would rubber-stamp the reversion of the presidency to Putin.

Masha dressed nicely for the demonstration. This was the first social occasion after three months of her single-mother housewifedom, so she put on heels. It was raining, and the ground in the park where the protest was held quickly turned to gross black mush under thousands of pairs of feet. Masha's heels were sinking. She found herself standing with a group of women wearing fur coats. Maybe they had thought it would be colder and they would stand here, chanting—or whatever people did at these things—for hours. Or maybe they had also dressed up. Whatever, it was now raining on their fur coats. No one was chanting. There were speakers, but they could not hear or see them.

"Do you know what we are supposed to be doing?" asked Masha.

"No idea. This is our first time too," answered the wet fur coats.

Now there was a speaker who was finally loud enough. It was Alexei Navalny. Masha had been reading his blog. He wrote about corruption. Many people did, including Nemtsov, but Navalny had a trick. He dug through publicly available information to expose, repeatedly, exactly two shocking kinds of transactions: the absurd amounts the Russian government spent on the simplest and cheapest things—like, say, toilets; and the real estate and cars that Russian officials owned that they could never afford to buy on their official salary. Masha knew perfectly well how this worked, since until recently she had been a link in the corruption supply chain, but she could not get enough of the blog. Sometimes, though, it made her feel two opposing emotions at the same time: outrage, because this was her tax money that Navalny was talking about, and shame, because the system he was describing had included her. He called this system, the one that determined how Russia functioned, the "Party of Crooks and Thieves."

Navalny led the crowd in a chant of "One for all and all for one," or

he tried to—only a couple of hundred seemed to pick it up, and it died down quickly. Then he shouted, "Let's march to Lubyanka!"

Lubyanka was the square, a fifteen-minute walk away, that had once held the giant monument to Dzerzhinsky and that still housed the headquarters of the FSB as well as the Central Election Commission. Masha was unsure which of those buildings was Navalny's intended destination, but she was certain that she did not want to march. Not in heels. Masha headed toward the Metro, but there were thousands walking in that direction—it would be worse than rush hour. She turned left, onto Myasnitskaya, the street that led to Lubyanka, and realized that she was now a part of Navalny's march. Rather, she was among the people who had intended to be part of the march. These people were being grabbed by riot police, thrown against walls, or tackled to the ground and then dragged along the wet street. Masha pressed her body into a building wall and crept along it to the next side street, then dived in.

There was a text from Anastasia, the friend who had invited Masha to the protest. She was at a cafe that happened to be at the end of this particular side street. Now Masha marched. She barged into the cafe, a low-key hipster joint of the kind she did not even know existed in Moscow.