The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

in the morning Masha went to church. It was Sunday, the day before Putin's inauguration. The city was quiet—in the early days of May, Muscovites tend to their dachas, opening them up for the summer. Masha had borrowed an icon from one of the hundreds of people she had met in the last few months. He was a very wealthy man with good connections, one of many such men who were hedging their bets by helping the protests. They wanted to maintain useful relationships no matter who was in power. They gave generously to the online account opened by the protest organizers, so that after the December 10 Bolotnaya rally there was always good sound equipment and beautifully printed banners. This man kept saying to Masha that he would like to do something together—something, she took it to mean, protest-y. So she asked to borrow an icon from his famous collection of sixteenth-century Russian religious art. The man sent an icon and a bodyguard, who in this case was working as an icon-guard.

Masha took the icon and the guard and walked over to the church at the Monastery of the Holy Mandylion, a small and pretty church just by the Kremlin. She was going to engage in a fairly standard Orthodox practice, whereby an icon is brought to church for communal prayer: others pray to it and kiss it, and then it is, some believe, holier when it is returned to its regular home. While this was happening, a photographer, or a few photographers, were to snap pictures, and then Masha would explain what this was: a Prayer for the Constitution, Against Obscurantism.

People were praying. Masha was waiting for journalists to arrive, but they must have been running late. The owner of the icon called to scream at Masha for not warning him that this was an action related to Pussy Riot: in his calculus of hedging, this was too risky. The phone call meant that news of Masha's action had already leaked. She still did not have a good shot. She would have to consider this an unsuccessful action. Masha felt strangely serene despite her failure and despite being yelled at over the phone. It must be because I'm in church, she realized.

Just then, men in civilian clothing entered. Even the church caretaker recognized them: her lips curled in, changing her expression instantly from blissful to hostile. The men took Masha to the nearest police station, where they started shouting at her.

"You are defending those bitches, those whores who danced naked on the altar with their guitars! You belong with them!"

"Faggots!" Masha shouted in response. "It's faggots like you who are destroying Russia!"

Masha had worked out this technique over the course of five months and seven detentions. The first few times she found herself at a police station, she had tried to reason with her captors. Then one time she lost her cool and saw that shouting right back at them was much more effective. It destabilized the situation. Police officers did not expect detainees to scream at them, and Russian men did not expect women to scream at them, so the shouting broke their pattern. If she shouted in their language, hurling at them the same sorts of insults that they hurled at her, it worked even better.

They stopped shouting, and released her after three hours—the maximum amount of time they could hold her without booking. This was a relief, because Masha had a lot of work to do for the big march and rally planned for the afternoon.

masha was now an experienced, well-known, and occasionally jaded activist. In the winter, she got to observe the workings of the political machine, or what passed for one in Russia. As Ilya Ponomarev's press secretary, she attended the meetings of A Just Russia in parliament.

They were still talking about pedophilia. One of the deputies insisted that they needed to continue to push for chemical castration of convicted pedophiles. Yelena Mizulina, chairwoman of the Committee on the Family, was opposed. The other deputy accused her of caving to the pedophile lobby. She responded that she did more than anyone to protect the children. She had been the driving force behind the Law for the Protection of Children from Information That Harms Their Health and Development. The law had been passed back in 2010, but most of its provisions were going into effect later this year. All media, including books, magazines, and films, would need to be marked with a target age group—to prevent children from consuming harmful information. Now Mizulina was working to extend these restrictions and regulations to the Internet. This, and not chemical castration, was what protecting children was all about, she argued. Masha's sympathies were with Mizulina at these meetings.