The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Moscow shut down for the interminable winter holidays, but the protests in Kiev continued. Here was an important distinction between Ukraine and Russia: precisely two years earlier, the Russian protesters had retreated after their biggest demonstration, taking their long-planned vacations or simply commencing the customary two weeks of eating and drinking, as though revolutions kept office hours.

Just as the Russians were waking up from their holiday, the Ukrainian parliament passed a series of laws aimed at designating the protests as illegal; some of these were textually similar to the bills passed at the beginning of the Russian crackdown. The protesters prepared to defend themselves. They built barricades, using car and truck tires, stones, pieces of pavement, and ice that they chopped up with axes and loaded into sacks. They armed themselves with hunting rifles, slings, and Molotov cocktails. The first shots were fired on January 22. Two protesters were killed and one wounded.

It seemed that Masha was a journalist now—she was not anything else, and she was cohosting a popular-science show on TV Rain—and, following the amnesty, she was free to travel. She went to Kiev.

She was the last to arrive. Every other Moscow journalist was already there. Everyone knew everyone else, everyone had a routine and a hangout, and everyone was an expert. The lay of the land was uncomplicated: a couple of blocks of government buildings were sealed off and heavily guarded; the main city square—Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), the one referred to simply as the Maidan, was occupied by protesters, as were a couple of adjacent streets. In the rest of the city, life went on as what must have been normal. Everyone spoke Russian. It was hard to believe that this was a different country, especially one where someone had died for its independence from Moscow. Except when Masha was among the protesters, when they stood together, as they did every hour, to sing the Ukrainian national anthem—then she believed, and she very much wanted them to succeed.

All the stories about the Maidan were being written by the self- confident, experienced journalists who had gotten there before Masha. They had cultivated their heroes and their sources among the protesters, and all their stories starred them. The one thing no one was doing was talking to the soldiers who guarded the government— the ones who, everyone said, had fired the shots that killed the protesters the day before Masha arrived in Kiev.

Masha put on heels and makeup. Lots of makeup. She thought of it as war paint. She went to the Maidan, where the barricades constructed of huge old tires had been set aflame. It seemed to her the protesters were trying to make the square look like revolution— the French one, from the movie of Les Miserables.

Not that there had been tires at the time of the French Revolution, but the stench and the flames fit her mental picture. Masha crossed the protesters' barricades.

She was in no-man's-land now, a strip of snow that separated the Maidan's burning-rubber barricades from the government's police- fence barricades. Men in long black robes—Orthodox priests—stood here. Masha saw the giant gray shape of a cross in the snow—the long shadow of a small cross held up by one of the priests in the yellow light of a streetlamp. Here, where neither side ventured, Masha's heels sank into the snow. The priests, she realized, were praying for life on both sides of the barricades. She knew at that moment that there was a God and that there would be war.

"You can't go through," said an officer on the government side. He was wearing riot gear. "You need a helmet."

"What if I'm a journalist?"

"You'll still get yourself killed."

"Don't worry, the bullets won't get me." She had almost said, "I'll walk between the raindrops."

"All right," he said, pulling back a section of the barrier. "But don't go near Berkut. You'll get yourself killed."

Berkut—"golden eagle" in Ukrainian—were the special forces. People on the Maidan said that it was Berkut who had killed people. On this side too, Berkut were clearly known as the killers. Masha recognized them by their black ski masks. She edged closer to Berkut's bonfire. Everyone had a fire, on both sides of the barricades, and everyone had hot tea, and everyone shared both. Even Berkut.

"What's your name?" asked a black ski mask.

"Masha."

"Mine is Sergei too." The mask laughed, showing two rows of large teeth. He had no way of knowing that Masha's husband and the one man she had loved passionately were both named Sergei—he must have meant simply that they were alike because they had unremarkable Russian names. She had come from the other side wearing war paint, he was wearing a black mask, but they came from the same people.