The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

in april 2014, Lyosha was getting ready to go to work when he got a message from a friend, an administrator at the university: "Lyosha, what is this? Yuri Gennadyevich has brought it to the rector's attention."*

Lyosha clicked on the link. It was a VK post called "What Is Perm Thinking? Propaganda of Sodomy at Perm State Research University." The post went on to describe the gender studies center and ended with a call to action:

How long can this abominable situation go on? Avowed enemies of the Motherland and of morality are using our money to corrupt students in every sense of the word. When will we put an end to this?

Draw community attention to this! Write to the Perm [State] University rector; file complaints with the police! We are Russian patriots! Victory will be ours!

Photos of Darya and Lyosha were pasted below.²⁹

"You are going to have to leave," said Stas that evening. Lyosha already had a ticket to New York: he had liked it so much the previous year that he wanted to resume that vacation. He started living on two tracks. On one, he submitted his lesson plans for the coming fall semester. He took part in worrying about further budget cuts and lamenting the fact that the state had no interest in political science anymore. On the other track, he was wrapping up research and friendships. The telephone threats continued. Yuri Gennadyevich kept calling too, asking, "Why don't you ever come and see me?"

In May, Stas threw a birthday party for Lyosha and invited all his friends. No one had done this for him before. In June, they packed up Lyosha's stuff. In July, they drove out to Solikamsk to drop off many of his things and tell his mother that he was leaving.

"What are you going to do there?" asked Galina.

"I like that boy," said Lyosha's aunt. "I hope you bring him around again."

Wouldn't you know it: they had finally accepted him.

STAS GAVE LYOSHA $18,000.

"It's an investment in my future," he said. "I plan to retire in America. You go and get things ready."

It was enough to pay a year's rent in Brighton Beach, where apartments were cheap and the landlords spoke Russian and did not care if you had a credit history. There were many Russian queers in the neighborhood—mostly men around Lyosha's age, single and in couples. All of them had fled Russia in the last year. Everyone had a

story, and they taught Lyosha how to package his into an asylum claim and how to find a lawyer, and how to apply for a work permit when the time came. Then Lyosha helped teach people who came after him.

In August, he wrote to the department: "I had no choice but to leave the country."

The chair responded with a perfectly mixed message: "Did you stop to consider what kind of trouble that would cause here? Now I have to find someone to take over your teaching load. I always knew you were going to do it. I wish you luck."

Then he heard from Darya and another friend: Yuri Gennadyevich had been calling people in for talks, grilling them about Lyosha. The words "foreign agent" were said. Also, they had figured out that the person who wrote that "What is Perm thinking?" post was someone who had attended the Soros-funded seminars in Ukraine with them.

Then he heard from the department chair again: "We have informed the administration that you are obtaining postgraduate education in the United States. Kindly conform to this story."

lyosha started putting together his asylum case. He wrote to a close friend, a former student, who had gotten a phone call from the FSB in the spring of 2013.

"Whom do you have in your department at the university who engages in the propaganda of homosexuality?"

"Are you kidding me?" she had responded. "I graduated a million years ago."

Now Lyosha messaged this friend asking if she would put this story in an affidavit.

"Dear Lyosha," she wrote in response. "I don't know what you are talking about. I never got any such call, and you should be aware that libel is a criminal offense."

Lyosha mentally crossed another friend off the list. The rate of attrition was staggering. He still had Andrei in Geneva, and Stas, who had moved to Moscow. For a while, he continued to correspond with Darya. She had shut down the gender studies group on VK. "I have no

desire to continue to do gender studies," she wrote. About eight months after Lyosha left the country, they just did not seem to have anything left to talk about.

twenty

A NATION DIVIDED

in the fall of 2013, Masha spent her days in court and her evenings at cafes and bars, sometimes working on foreign reporters' assignments or on her own, often not. She was almost always angry and often, by the end of the evening, drunk. There were many arguments that she remembered only because her throat felt scratchy in the morning.