The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

seryozha read about the planned protest on the Novaya gazeta website but could not go: he was on deadline for an app he was writing. Once he read about what had happened, though, he decided to go to Triumfalnaya the following day. The regime had to be called to order. Seryozha was a realist, and as a realist he recognized that a certain understanding had taken hold in Russia over the last dozen years. It was an understanding Seryozha's grandfather would not have liked, but it was there. Russians had agreed to live under a sort of dictatorship in exchange for stability. But they assumed that it was a soft dictatorship, which could negotiate if the need arose. Seryozha imagined that this was the way it worked in China, or at least this was how the papers made it look: the Communist Party had all the power, but if, say, peasants in some village rebelled, then the local bosses would be removed. Pressure and restrictions were a given, but the exact amounts could be adjusted. Right now, the pressure seemed excessive to Seryozha, and it looked to him like other people thought so too. The blatant election-fixing was insulting, and the Makarov case was just too painful to watch. So it was time for an adjustment. Seryozha imagined Putin saying, not in so many words, "All right, let's see what we can do here. What do you say I keep my billions and you keep your lives as you know them?" Then the state would pull back where it had overstepped. "Stability" would be a word for everyone just being left alone—everyone including Makarov and people who might suddenly find themselves in his shoes. This was

what Seryozha wanted to communicate when he went to Triumfalnaya Square on December 6, 2011.

there was no permit for the protest at Triumfalnaya—permits had to be obtained two weeks in advance, with the observance of all sorts of byzantine procedures. This was just a protest staged by people reacting to what they had seen the evening before. These people seemed to fall into two categories: the diehards who had been roughed up and detained on numerous occasions and who simply felt it was their duty to respond publicly to injustice, and those who had no concept of permits and regulations. Between these two groups was a thin layer of well-informed occasional protesters who weighed their risks every time. They had seen others detained by police, or had been detained themselves, and knew that not having a permit meant that the police felt they had license to be as rough as they wanted to be. Which, after the protest and the attempted march the night before, would probably be very rough.

Neither Seryozha nor Masha knew anything about permits. But Masha had now been to one protest, and she felt she had learned a thing or two. When the police moved in, which seemed to happen instantly, she whipped out her iPhone and started shouting into it in English. The police must have taken her for a foreign correspondent or a tourist—they moved on. Masha ran into a nearby park, which had an American-style diner. One of the first such restaurants in the city, it had catered to expats in the 1990s. Masha ran into the diner and plopped onto the first empty seat she saw, in a booth with three young men who were also just pulling off their coats.

The police were not far behind. They started grabbing people from their seats. Masha repeated the trick that had worked minutes earlier: she turned to the table and started speaking English. The men readily picked up. After the police finished, leaving a dozen shiny red leatherette seats empty in their wake, the group switched back to Russian and did the introductions. Masha's new friends were all second-day protesters like she was. All three had been educated

abroad—Stanford, MIT, and the London School of Economics. This was probably why they had known to seek refuge in the diner.

They did not know what they were supposed to do now. All pulled out their phones. Masha read on Twitter that Elena Kostyuchenko, a young openly lesbian Novaya gazeta journalist, had been detained. The tweet had the address of the detention center where she had been taken. Masha went. There she met a man named Ilya Ponomarev, who told her he was a parliament member from A Just Russia and a protest organizer. Then she met two young women who said they were members of a group she had never heard of. It was called Pussy Riot. Masha liked the name. Masha had been an activist for twenty- four hours, and her social circle had already quadrupled.