The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

People were talking about emigrating again, but Masha realized that for perhaps the first time in her life she wanted to stay in Russia. It was interesting here—even more interesting than doing a degree in educational psychology at Oxford might be. Not that Sergei would let her take Sasha out of the country to live. But her son was doing well in preschool, and Sergei, now that he was remarried, had resumed his parenting responsibilities. After Masha quit her job at Ponomarev's office, she and Anastasia went to India on vacation. They lay on the beach in Goa, but Moscow kept pinging. The multimillionaire with the icon collection wanted to start an organization called Russia for All, and wanted Masha to run it. A friend from Solidarity wanted to organize a protest. Everyone wanted to organize a protest, in fact. The big one. The one that would finally make a difference. It seemed there was only one chance left for that: the inauguration.

The city issued a permit for a march and rally on the eve of the inauguration. They would allow protesters to walk down Bolshaya

Yakimanka, the street that ran from the giant Lenin monument to Bolotny Island, and then to a rally at Bolotnaya Square.* Udaltsov, the guy who seemed to think he was Lenin, named the protest the March of Millions. People around the country were raising money so they could attend, but this was unlikely to make it large enough to justify the name. And what could the organizers do to make this one count, aside from giving it a grandiose name? As it was, they were having trouble convincing people to speak at the rally. "What's there to say?" they heard again and again. Two days before the march, five men— Kasparov, Navalny, Nemtsov, Udaltsov, and Yashin—gathered to discuss. Someone suggested staging a sit-in. Nemtsov and Udaltsov shot the idea down. Nemtsov refused to challenge the ethos of the nonconfrontational protest; Udaltsov frowned on the idea of passive resistance.

Masha's job was to get journalists to the press area in front of the stage. She was good at this: she knew all the reporters, all the reporters knew her, and she had a loud voice. She stood by the stage as people wandered in slowly from the march: there was always this moment of idleness, when everyone was trying to decide whether to stay for the rally or go to a cafe instead. A few teenagers from the Protest Workshop stationed themselves at the turnout from the street to the island with a couple of megaphones, and shouted out funny rhymed slogans to keep protesters entertained. Then there was commotion to Masha's right, just where the crowd was meant to turn. It seemed big. Or bad. The volunteers' two-way radios stopped working. Cellular networks were either jammed or overloaded—the phone was no use. Masha made her way over.

Navalny was sitting on the ground. He was surrounded by journalists with cameras and microphones. This did not suit his purposes. The journalists refused to either sit down or move out of the way. No one could see Navalny's sit-in, so no one was joining in. Masha looked at her iPhone: it was a little after five in the afternoon. The rally was supposed to start now.

Then there were blows. It did not feel serious—Masha had seen worse back in December—but the riot police had their rubber batons out and blows were landing. A baton reached over the shoulders of

people standing behind Masha and hit a woman on the head. The woman slumped and crumpled on the ground. Masha heard herself screaming.

"Call an ambulance!"

She turned around to face a helmeted head.

"Call an ambulance!"

A face behind the glass of the helmet came into focus.

"We don't have orders," it said.

Masha started screaming louder.

Someone threw a smoke grenade. How in the world had they managed to bring it in, through the metal detectors, the bag search, and the double cordon? Someone threw another object, which broke on contact with someone else's shoulder. It was a thermos liner, guaranteed to break into a thousand brittle pieces. Police were pushing from the back and from the sides. In front of Masha, Navalny and several other men, including Nemtsov and Yashin, were sitting on the ground. The woman was lying on the pavement. Masha was pushing back in every direction and screaming like she had never screamed before. The line of riot police parted for a moment and Masha was squeezed out to the other side, as the cops carried the unconscious woman out. The police closed ranks behind her. Masha stood in an emptiness. She was no longer screaming, and it was almost quiet.