The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Masha got to observe how money worked in the parliament. Members were either wealthy or kept. The state budget gave each parliament member 200,000 rubles a month for a staff of five. That worked out to just over $1,000 a month for each staff member, in a city that now prided itself on being among the world's most expensive. Rich parliamentarians paid their extensive staffs out of their own pockets, while the less rich accepted what they called "sponsorship" money for their aides and press secretaries. They were also likely to have a shadow staff of assistants who did not work or draw a salary but paid the parliament member themselves, in exchange for government credentials.

For Masha's boss, politics was the family business. Ponomarev hailed from Soviet nomenklatura stock: his grandfather was a diplomat and his father's brother was a member of the Central Committee leadership. Ilya himself became active in Soviet politics as a teenager, rising to the post of a city-level functionary in the Young Pioneers organization of Moscow. In the 1990s the entire family, including teenage Ilya, went into private business, to return to politics under Putin. Ilya's mother was an appointed member of the

upper house of parliament, and Ilya himself got a seat in the lower house in 2007 on A Just Russia's list.

In 2006, Ponomarev carried out a textbook preventive- counterrevolution operation when he staged an officially sanctioned gathering of anti-globalism activists in St. Petersburg during a G8 summit there. The Kremlin feared that protests would disrupt the summit but also did not want to stage an obvious crackdown on that occasion. So the police detained activists when they arrived in St. Petersburg by train and transported them to a suburban stadium, where Ponomarev was chairing the forum. Many of those who were delivered to the stadium were not anti-globalism activists at all, and members of Kasparov's United Civic Front were even ejected for chanting anti-Putin slogans, but for all the world to see—if anyone in the world could be bothered looking—St. Petersburg had a stadium full of anti-globalism activists gathering openly and legally, and Ilya Ponomarev was their leader.

On paper, most of Ponomarev's income came from consulting fees from state-funded institutions. In 2011, he declared an income of about $330,000, and in 2012 it went up to about $370,000^ But most of the money that Masha saw was in cash—stacks, piles, and briefcases of it—and it was not going to be reported on any income reporting forms. Ponomarev was surrounded by men Masha never would have taken seriously, especially because they were so impossibly serious themselves about their task: revolution. As far as she could tell, they thought that if they staged one, they would get laid. Some of these men said that they were anarchists, some said that they were hard-core communists, and some insisted that Masha should read a book called A Blow from Russian Gods. She looked it up. It was an antisemitic screed.²

Masha figured that Ponomarev was spending time with these men because the more visible protest activists, knowing his history as a protest spoiler, tried to avoid him. It was either that or Ponomarev was purposefully siphoning off money and energy from the protests, like when he had started a parallel organizing committee back in December. At one point Masha

grew convinced that at least some of the money circulating through the office was coming from the Kremlin. She quit her job in March.

A few days later, a new amendment was proposed to the Law for the Protection of Children from Information That Harms Their Health and Development. This one would ban "propaganda of homosexuality." Now the "pedophile lobby" would finally be vanquished. Ponomarev supported the amendment.

of course masha had not expected that the protests would change the outcome of the presidential election, in which Putin was effectively unopposed. And yet she had. There were many protests in the three months between when she had declared herself an activist and the election. After Bolotnaya there was another rally, even larger than the first one. Then there was the White Ride, when cars decorated with white ribbons circled the Garden Ring, then a march, and then the White Ring, when people stood on the sidewalks of the Garden Ring, encircling the center of town. Then there was the election, which made it all feel useless and embarrassing. The protest held in Moscow on election day felt more like a wake.