The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

captain grachev was a lanky guy around Masha's age, with good hair and a lousy haircut. He had been dispatched to Moscow from the prosecutor's office in the Tver region, three hours away, to help investigate the Bolotnoye case. It was apparently going to be big. He told Masha that he had just arrived in Moscow when he was sent to search her apartment.

"When I saw those pink triangles, I thought it was some children's game or something, and put them back," he said. But there was a more experienced Moscow officer there. "He says, 'Are you kidding? That's the LGBT movement.' I was like, 'What's LGBT?' He goes, 'Just take it.'" A few weeks into their frequent meetings Masha and Captain Grachev were so comfortable with each other that Masha asked him why he had not taken the marijuana as evidence from her apartment.

"We didn't even take cocaine from another search," he explained. "That's not what we were there for. They told us to look for political propaganda."

Masha and Captain Grachev were using the informal pronoun to address each other. He even allowed Masha to visit her son at the dacha. Other defendants in her case—she did not know them, but she knew that they existed—were under arrest, and Masha was lucky simply to be restricted to staying in Moscow. She had been unable to go to a friend's dacha on the tenth anniversary of Tatiana's death: she

hated the idea of being alone or with the wrong people that day, but she hated the idea of asking for permission even more. But later she grew more comfortable, and she missed Sasha so much.

Masha's mother-in-law, like Masha's ex-husband, was a chemist. She worked for an applied-science institute that was not high on the academic socioeconomic ladder, which meant that the village where its staff researchers were allotted plots was a fair distance from Moscow, all the way in the Tver region. In fact, the institute ruled over only half the village—the other half belonged to the prosecutor's office. This was how Masha's mother-in-law came to spend her summers next door to a colonel from the Investigative Committee in the city of Konakovo, Tver region. Masha had met the colonel over the course of several summers. Her name was Natalia, she was forty or so, and she took care of her sixty-year-old mother and eighty-year- old grandmother as well as two kids: her own young daughter and a boy Sasha's age, the son of Natalia's sister who had a bad drug problem. Natalia seemed to work like a dog without taking any interest in the substance of her work: she cared only that she had a lot of mouths to feed. When she was not working, she was sleeping. In between, she smoked cigarettes, a habit that she kept secret from her mother and grandmother. Masha was her smoking buddy.

"Hey, you are part of the Bolotnoye case, aren't you?" she asked when they were having a cigarette Masha's first night at the dacha. It was cool and quiet and you could see the stars.

"Yeah," said Masha.

"Who is your investigator?"

"Grachev."

"Ah, Timokha!" Natalia's voice sang with the joy of recognition. "He is one of mine. I had to send three people. It's a big case. He doing his job?"

"Oh, he is doing his job, all right."

"Good. Say hi to him there."

The following morning, when Masha woke up in her loft bed, there were three six-year-old children playing below. She listened to their voices. They were playing with Legos. One of those children is my son and another is the son of the boss of the man who will send

me to prison for two years, she thought. It sounded complicated, but it was so simple: she was passing to another side of existence easily, surrounded by familiar faces all the way.