The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

"Where do I sign up to be an activist!" she announced. It was not a question. "Because what's going on out there is fucked!"

Anastasia said there was talk of another protest being planned for tomorrow, in Triumfalnaya Square.

"I'm going," said Masha, as if she were issuing a threat to Anastasia and her friends.

zhanna watched the protest on television. She knew just how extraordinary this was. She was now working in television herself. When she first became a trader, she started watching RBK, a cable financial news channel. All the traders watched it. The people who worked there were financial geniuses. They could riff off the numbers live, for fifteen minutes on end, and it made Zhanna feel like they knew how the world worked. She wanted to be one of them. When

she studied for her chartered financial analyst exam, it was with an eye to getting a job at RBK. She did. At first everyone was sure that she was there only because she was her father's daughter. She actually overheard one of the executives comment to another that stupid celebrity daughters are not known for passing CFA exams. After a few months, she was allowed to go on air live and riff off the numbers. It made her feel like a genius.

RBK was a financial news channel, but it was still part of the television world, and in this world showing protests on the air was unthinkable. But now there they were on Channel 1, the big state channel. Zhanna felt a pang: Why was she not there?

She knew why. That one experience of running away from the police while her father got arrested had been quite enough. Also, she wanted to get married. This had been Zhanna's goal ever since her divorce, and she pursued it as single-mindedly as she had pursued her job at RBK. She started seeing someone within weeks of the divorce, and it was this man that she intended to marry. She told him about this often, whenever she was not talking about having children together. He was impervious, and she was insistent. But also, he was the kind of man who wanted to be where they were at this moment, at a country club outside Moscow, with the television on, and he was the kind of man who would not take kindly to Zhanna's desire to drop everything to rush to the city to join the protest. Eyes on the prize, she chased the thought away.

Her father was there, in the cold rain. It was his organization, Solidarity, that had secured a permit for the protest—like it had for dozens of protests over the last five years. Those earlier ones had drawn a couple of hundred people—on the good days. So when they applied for a permit this time, anticipating two weeks ahead of time that the election would give reason to protest, they wrote that they expected three hundred people. They were being optimistic, despite the miserable weather and the December wind-down, which had already begun. By Boris's estimate, ten thousand people showed up. The police counted three thousand—still ten times as many as the permit said. One of the skinny bespectacled Solidarity activists, Igor Gukovsky, whose name was on the permit, was fined for the discrepancy and then also jailed for fifteen days for good measure. But his arrest drew little attention, even among the people who had come to the protest, because they had never heard of him. The best- known of the protesters, Navalny and Oborona leader Ilya Yashin, were also sent to jail for fifteen days, as were several dozen other people who had been arrested on Myasnitskaya Street. Altogether, the police had made about seven hundred arrests that night. Probably because the courts and holding facilities could not handle that many people at once, a majority were allowed to go home following a night spent in a standing-room-only cell.²¹