The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Even though the protesters belonged to different age groups, Putin had now been in power long enough that a majority of them had spent all or most of their adult lives in the era of supposed "stability." Some of them had expected the Putin era to be like the Soviet past they remembered or imagined, the object of national nostalgia.

According to these memories, that time was slow, predictable, and essentially unchanging. But in Putin's era of "stability," things refused to stay the same. The markets crashed because Putin said or did something. Innocent, randomly chosen people went to prison just because the government had declared a witch hunt against pedophiles. The spectacle of the Putin-Medvedev handoff and the experience of the farcical election served as reminders of how powerless Russian citizens were to affect any aspect of life. The protests were an attempt to renegotiate, to reclaim a little bit of space from the ever-expanding party-state—and it so happened that the party was the one of crooks and thieves.

on December 15, Putin held his tenth annual hotline, a show during which he answered questions from a carefully screened audience and an equally well-screened selection of callers. Even though Putin had not formally been president for the last three years, these shows, starring Putin, had continued on schedule. Seryozha watched as for the first twenty minutes Putin fielded softball questions about the protests. He seemed a little unnerved at first, but then Seryozha thought that might have been wishful thinking on his part. Putin grew more confident as he talked. He even took credit for the protests: his regime had produced many active citizens. He promised to place a web camera at every polling station to assure the public that there would be no fraud during the upcoming presidential election. This was ridiculous: web cameras would be useless against most of the falsification practices. But at least they had forced him to respond. Maybe he was scared, after all.

The show's host had once been a brave young reporter at NTV. Seryozha remembered seeing him at that protest, when everyone found a way to promise never to give up. Now he was ten years older and twenty kilos heavier, sitting behind a desk at a state-channel studio, tense and eager next to Russia's most powerful man. The host read a question from a laptop screen in front of him:

During the protests in central Moscow people put on white ribbons. Those ribbons are almost like the symbol of a looming "color revolution" in Russia. Do you agree with this assessment? . . .

As far as "color revolutions," I think everything is clear. They are an established practice of destabilizing societies, and I think that this practice did not come out of nowhere. We know what happened during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. By the way, some of our opposition activists were in Ukraine at that time and held official positions as advisers to then president Yushchenko. They naturally try to transfer this practice to Russian soil. But to be frank, when I saw, on the screen, that some people were wearing something on their chest, I'll tell you honestly, even though it's inappropriate, but I thought that this was AIDS education, that they had, I'm sorry, that they had pinned contraceptives to their chests. I just couldn't understand why they had taken them out of their wrappers. But

then I got a closer look.²⁹

It got worse. Putin went on to claim that people had been paid to attend the protests and that the "opposition leaders" had humiliated them by calling out, "Sheep, go forth!" But Seryozha barely heard this, because he was already livid—at the obvious reference to Nemtsov, whose work in Ukraine was described as something akin to treason, but more than that, by the stupid condom joke.