The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The trial began on June 2, more than a year after the protest at the center of the case. Masha saw her co-defendants. Ten men, ranging in age from college student to retiree, were squeezed into a plastic aquarium. They stood, holding their hands behind their backs, the way inmates do when they face law enforcement. All of them had spent the last year behind bars. Another co-defendant, eighteen at the time of her arrest, had spent the year under house arrest. Masha felt piercing guilt. How could she have been feeling sorry for herself, feeling like she deserved other people's sympathy and help, when she had been allowed to walk around and see her child every night this last year?

The trial did not feel that different from the investigation. Masha had seen the women of Pussy Riot on trial a year earlier. That had been bizarre, a veritable witch trial, but it had a dramaturgy to it. This trial had no rhythm, no beginning or end. Most days passed in arguments between lawyers and the judge about admissibility, order of admissibility, and the like. None of it seemed connected to the case, absurd as the case was. The defendants' charges ranged from "participation in public unrest" to "use of force against authorities," with potential sentences of up to five years. There were too many defendants and too many lawyers, and they were all too different to be able to coordinate their actions. At first, they tried. When the oldest of the men in the aquarium, Sergei Krivov, declared that he was boycotting the court and refused to answer any questions, the rest of them went silent too. But the next day Krivov broke his pledge without warning.

Journalists soon grew tired of the proceedings—there was nothing to report—and stopped coming. Every so often, Masha would write an outraged Facebook post to the effect that these twelve people had been abandoned, and some journalists and activists would show up for a day or two. Then they would return to their lives.

Sasha started first grade at one of the better public schools in town. Fortunately, the school was on the same Metro line as the

court. But then the trial was moved to a courthouse on the outskirts, and the length of Masha's morning commute tripled.

Everyone referred to it as the Bolotnoye case—the "swampy case." Exactly. Even the drowning was protracted and amorphous. Masha's body began to betray her. She developed sores. By November she was throwing up blood. The doctors said they could find nothing wrong with her.

PART SIX

CRACKDOWN

eighteen

SERYOZHA: JULY 18, 2013

after may 6, 2012, there was shock, then the fog of the summer and the Bolotnoye arrests—within a few months, more than two dozen people had been charged (their cases were subdivided and they faced trial in smaller groups). It took about six months for the shock to subside and the fog to settle sufficiently for activists to conduct their own investigation of what had happened.

In December 2012, a group of twenty-six people assembled into an investigating committee. They included actors, scholars, a poet, former dissidents, and several journalists. Each was known to be a person of integrity. Their task was to review thousands of pages of documents, including about six hundred eyewitness interviews collected by activists, media reports, amateur and professional video, and the Bolotnoye case itself.

The committee determined that nearly thirteen thousand troops had been assembled in Moscow that day, more than eight thousand of them in and around Bolotnaya Square. This included over five thousand riot police and about twenty-five hundred interior troops; the rest were traffic police or police academy cadets. There were probably three unarmed protesters, at most, for each armed man in uniform. Troops had been brought in from as far away as the Russian Far East.

Unbeknownst to the protest organizers, police had set up a second row of metal-detector frames at the turnoff from the march route to Bolotnaya Square. A large part of Bolotny Island that had been used during past rallies was cordoned off. Between these two measures, the police had created a bottleneck that first slowed the march down and then brought it to a standstill. Speakers could not physically get to the stage. This was why Udaltsov and then Navalny had called for a sit-in.