The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The director was not yet finished talking when a camerawoman named Alya sent out an all-staff message: "Does anyone have a couch I can sleep on? Looks like I'll have to move." Masha knew that Alya had a kid Sasha's age who was living with Alya's mother—even on her old salary, Alya, who was not originally from Moscow, could afford to rent only a small room in the city. Masha herself had been renting out her two-rooms-plus-kitchen apartment ever since it was raided, and renting a similar one closer to the center. Who said she and Sasha could not share a room? The director general was still talking. Masha waved to Alya across the room and pointed to herself with two thumbs, then messaged: "I've got a spare room. Enough for you and the kid."

A lot of people moved in the next few days. One TV Rain on-air personality was spotted wheeling his belongings down the Garden Ring in a supermarket shopping cart. His cat sat on top of his clothes. Alya hailed a cab over to Masha's. That evening both of them changed their Facebook relationship status to "in a domestic partnership."

the sochi Olympics opened on the day of that staff meeting. Foreign correspondents flooded the social networks with photos of filthy tap water and descriptions of absurd malfunctions in hotels that were still under construction.¹² But the opening ceremony was spectacular, and Russia garnered the highest number of gold medals: thirteen. If Masha had felt less disoriented and besieged, she would have felt more patriotic.

In Ukraine, there was more bloodshed on the Maidan. More than a hundred were now dead, including several government troops. On February 21, over a hundred thousand gathered in the Maidan to mourn the fallen protesters. By evening, the square was threatening to storm government buildings unless the president resigned. President Yanukovych fled the capital, seeking refuge first in eastern Ukraine and ultimately in Russia. The following day, Masha got a phone call from Kiev: one of the Berkut officers from that night in January was calling to let her know that his partner had been killed.

She had interviewed the partner too. It felt strange, almost like she was somehow responsible.

A friend called from Crimea: everyone was there now, and Masha should come. She went. The day after she arrived, she realized that something had changed overnight. The streets were full of armed men in unmarked uniforms. They walked around smiling. Within a few hours, they were joined by ordinary Crimeans, who had come out to take pictures with the men. No one could know for certain, but the sense was, these were Russian soldiers who had come to save the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking Black Sea peninsula from the Maidan. That was what people were saying: "Save us from the Maidan." With men in unmarked uniforms now in the streets, everyone sounded ecstatic and looked radiant.

Moscow journalists, who really were all there, kept filing dispatches that their editors rejected. Moscow had not confirmed that the armed men were under its command, so the journalists' descriptions of what they were seeing could not be published. Masha was not even sure that she was a journalist now—her media career might have ended as soon as it began—and she would be hard-pressed to explain why she was in Crimea. She wrote a column for the American magazine New Republic. It began, "Right now in Crimea, the strangest war I've seen in my 30 years is unfolding."¹³

She had not actually ever seen a war before, but you did not have to have seen one to know that this one was unlike any other.

On March 1, Putin asked the upper house of the Russian parliament to authorize the use of force beyond the country's borders —and got its unanimous approval the same day. The armed men were already in Crimea by then. The streets of Crimea filled with billboards showing a swastika and barbed wire on the left and a Russian flag on the right, with the caption, "On March 16, we will be choosing between this and this." That day, at a hastily convened referendum, 96.77 percent of Crimeans voted to join the Russian Federation.¹⁴

the history of Crimea had been as violent as that of any part of the former Soviet Union but perhaps more confusing than that of most of

them. From the time the empire first annexed Crimea in 1783, it was a part of Russia for nearly two centuries. In 1944, Stalin ethnically cleansed Crimea: Tatars, who had made up a large part of the peninsula's population, were deported, as were the local Armenians, Belarusians, and Greeks. This left the ethnic Russians, the only people Stalin trusted in the wake of the Second World War. Then, in 1954, Khrushchev, who had just been installed as Soviet leader, redrew the borders of constituent republics, assigning Crimea to Ukraine. No explanation was offered at the time and none could be found later—at least none that could be convincingly documented.