The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

she had to report to Captain Grachev's office twice a week, at ten in the morning. He would name names and ask Masha if she knew the person. If she had the person's permission, she would say yes. If not, she would say that she did not recall—and often, she did not. Captain Grachev would give her things to look at: "Please familiarize yourself." Then he would place an object in front of her—like, say, the flag of the Libertarian Party. Why? She did not know, and he probably did not either. Then there was an endless parade of police photographs. Sheet after sheet of typing paper with two or three photographs glued to each. Other people's bedrooms, desks, closets, letters, pictures, other people's white ribbons. They belonged to Masha's co-defendants. The photographs were taken during searches of their apartments. Somewhere else in this building, or across town, a dozen strangers were looking at pictures of Sasha's bedroom and pictures of pictures of Tatiana. Then there were photographs of all the material evidence recovered at Bolotnaya, the debris of thousands of people under attack: broken cigarette lighters, crushed Bic pens, lost passports that had been stomped upon by a thousand feet. Object after object that had no meaning to Masha, in poor resolution, under a flickering neon light. The point of this is to drown me in senselessness, thought Masha.

Starting on December 20, Masha was required to appear at Captain Grachev's office daily. She dropped Sasha off at the English- language preschool, had coffee with the journalist mothers, and then they went to work while she went to the Investigative Committee. She was no longer living in the apartment where she grew up. There had been many reasons to get out after the search. One was that a woman from social services had come around and told Masha that she had information that Masha was bisexual and therefore an unfit parent. Another was that the logistics of her life no longer allowed her to live so far from the center of the city. At first she stayed with

Sergey, but, of course, Sergey had not signed up for this—the constant surveillance, the telephone harassment, and a girlfriend who could not leave the legal limits of the city. So now Masha was renting an apartment in town.

She was reading the case, one giant binder at a time. It amused her at first, this experience of viewing what had been her life for six months—the protests and the people in them—through the eyes of people who could not comprehend it. Everything seemed sinister to them. They were scared of white ribbons and Twitter. But this got tired fast. The binders kept coming. The drowning sensation intensified. Masha wanted to sign the forms without reading, but the investigator who was in the room with her at all times told her this was not allowed. This guy was a senior lieutenant—one step below Captain Grachev, and a couple of years younger—sent there from Bryansk, in southwestern Russia. Masha's eyes hurt from reading, so she kept talking with him. He and his wife had been trying to get pregnant for years, and it was not working. Now they were on to IVF, and it still was not taking. Masha had had this experience herself. She tried to reassure the senior lieutenant.

At the end of winter her savings ran out. She went to ask Nemtsov for a job. She needed an employer who could understand her unconventional schedule, and she knew that Nemtsov's organization was getting some money from an American democracy-building fund. He said that there was not enough money to hire her but he could introduce her to a friend who ran a restaurant chain. Masha was willing to wait tables, but even at a restaurant she could not make her hours work. She posted in an online community for foreign correspondents in Moscow: "I want to work as a fixer." Many of these people knew her and knew that she spoke English and could get access to anyone and anything. She started getting some work. It was not enough, and friends lent her money too. Once she had watched a few journalists at work, she realized that she could try doing what they did. She started writing for a Moscow city magazine and then for TV Rain, an independent television channel that, since its founding just a couple of years earlier, had assembled an audience of millions

even though the channel was available only to cable and satellite viewers.