The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

oleg chirkunov, the Perm governor, resigned in April 2012: he had been under attack from state television for some time.¹² The funder of his "cultural revolution" project pulled out of Perm: Gordeev faded from view, having resigned his senate seat and sold his companies. Guelman, the art dealer and former political technologist, continued to run the PERMM, the contemporary art museum. For the White Nights festival in 2013 he organized several shows. One, called Russian Baroque, was shut down by the city when it was discovered that it featured photographs from the 2011-2012 protests. Another show, Welcome! Sochi

2014, satirized the preparations for the winter games. This one was shuttered as soon as it opened. Soon Guelman was fired as director of the museum. A short time later he moved to Montenegro, together with his family and his curatorial projects.¹³

In September 2012, teaching started as usual, except it was harder. Lyosha submitted a chapter to the department's annual. It was called "Queer Identity in Russia and the Discourse of Human Rights." People in the department gave him good notes. Everyone liked it, and Lyosha was happy with it and happy with his colleagues, who were just being good academics, like there was no madness on television.

Then there was a review meeting, and all the same people trashed the paper. They said it was politics, not scholarship. Lyosha said that he would be willing to rework the paper, but consensus was that the paper was beyond repair.

The department chair's recommendations to tone down his research became an order. Lyosha would no longer be allowed to travel to LGBT studies conferences, even if the other side paid for the trip—he was free to travel in his personal capacity, that is, but he should not mention the university. The department had a new grant to study social media. Lyosha was welcome to travel to international conferences under the auspices of this project—all he had to do was change his topic. He did. He started writing about social media. Then he went to conferences in Switzerland and Berlin and delivered papers on "social networks as the new closet." Back in Perm, no one said anything. Except once a friend texted him from a conference: she was sitting next to their department chair, who was complaining that Lyosha was exposing the department to risk. "That's what I get for taking a faggot under my wing," the chair said, and the friend put her phrase in her text message.

It was all true. Lyosha was a faggot, and the chair had had him under her wing. She had been very kind to him. She had cared about him, and she had confided in him. He felt like he had been slapped.

He and Darya still had their gender studies center. They still had the money to hold the annual Gender Aspects of the Social Sciences conference, buy tea and cookies for the participants, and print three hundred copies of the collection of conference papers.

That fall he and Darya were called to a department meeting to talk about the work of the center. They decided that Darya would talk about their work in general and Lyosha would talk about its LGBT aspects. He was better at keeping his cool.

"You and I," said Lyosha, addressing fellow faculty members, "we say that we produce knowledge. LGBT people exist. Their experience is a factor in politics."

No kidding. If you so much as turned on the television, you would get the impression that LGBT people were the only factor in politics. The department listened in silence. It was a horrible, angry and sticky

silence, but they did not say anything and this meant that the gender studies center continued to exist, for now.

Much of the center's work happened outside the university. Darya and Lyosha had long ago agreed that educating the public about gender was part of their mission. Darya maintained a public page on VK.com, the Russian social network that used to be known as VKontakte. This started to get tricky. People were writing hate messages. Some of these commenters were their former students, who were now accusing Lyosha and Darya of propaganda. Every time this happened, Darya wanted to take down their page. The messages did not scare her—she really was fearless—but they hurt. Lyosha talked her down. This was work. They were producing knowledge.