The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The faces at those cafes were familiar from the protests. Now they had all gone back to their regular lives at television channels, advertising agencies, and, in more than a few cases, in government offices. They were often drunk by the end of the evening too— especially the men from the government offices. One night one of them patted the chair next to him with his pudgy hand: he had something to tell Masha. He said there would be an amnesty— nominally tied to the twentieth anniversary of Yeltsin's constitution, but really intended to make Putin look better in advance of the Sochi Olympics. Amnesties always applied to women, especially if they had small children. So Masha's ordeal would soon be over, he said.

She believed him. Her friends told her it was wishful thinking. They pointed out that Putin was not acting like he cared one bit about improving his image for the Olympics. The women of Pussy Riot were still behind bars—one of them had declared a hunger strike to protest starvation rations and sixteen-hour workdays at her prison colony, and though her open letter had been published the world over,¹

the state appeared willing to let her starve to death. The country's most famous inmate, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was approaching the tenth anniversary of his imprisonment, with no end in sight. And in

September, Russian troops in unmarked uniforms had hijacked a Greenpeace ship flying a Dutch flag in international waters, towed it to the port of Murmansk, and deposited its multinational thirty- person crew in jails there.² Just because the ruthlessness of Russian law enforcement defied the imagination, these friends argued, was no reason to disbelieve its threats—quite the opposite.

"I am not going to prison," Masha took to saying to them, like a mantra. "I am walking between the raindrops and staying dry." It was an idiomatic expression, customarily used in the third person, but that fall she made it her own. Still, that was the fall when she started throwing up blood.

In December, Western leaders began backing out of going to the Sochi Olympics. German president Joachim Gauck was the first to announce his non-attendance, followed by the presidents of Poland, Estonia, and France, and the prime minister of Belgium. Finally, American president Barack Obama chose his delegation. It included no high-level politicians—something that had not happened in almost two decades—but, in a well-calculated affront, did include two openly gay athletes.³ The next day came the amnesty: Masha would not go to prison, the women of Pussy Riot would be released, and so would the thirty Greenpeace activists.⁴

And at the end of his annual press conference, on December 20, Putin made an announcement that no one, including his inner circle, expected: he would release Khodorkovsky.⁵ Within hours, the former oil tycoon was transported out of the prison and out of the country—to Berlin, where his mother lay gravely ill. A clear condition of Khodorkovsky's release was that he would not return to Russia—unless he wanted to be arrested again. With his company and most of his fortune gone, he would have to reinvent himself on foreign soil. He landed in Germany wearing an airport crew jacket that someone had given him en route, to replace his black prison robe.⁶

Masha, on the other hand, was still in her own city, wearing her old clothes. No one was going to transport her to her new life now that she was no longer a full-time defendant in a political trial. What was she supposed to do with herself now?

over her year and a half of living as a de facto political prisoner, Masha had not been paying much attention to the outside world. The most important event in this outside world was the ongoing protest in Ukraine. The president there had backed out of signing a partnership agreement with the European Union, and Ukrainians had been protesting since November. Like the Orange Revolution nine years earlier, the protests united people of vastly different political views. Cosmopolitans who wanted to see their country become a part of the European community came together with nationalists who wanted to break free of Moscow's influence. Once again, protesters occupied the center of Kiev and settled in for however long it was going to take. Just like nine years ago, everyone in Moscow seemed to think of Ukraine solely as Russia's looking glass. A group of more than fifty Russian writers wrote an open letter to the protesters. "We hope that you succeed," it concluded. "For us that would serve as a sign that we in Russia can also win our rights and freedoms."⁷

The Russian parliament unanimously passed a resolution calling for the protesters in Ukraine to disband. Before the vote, the chairman of the parliament's foreign relations committee said that if Ukraine were to sign the association agreement with the European Union, "that would increase the sphere of influence of gay culture, which has become the official policy of the European Union."⁸