The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

As far as Masha could tell, everyone at the congress had the same dream: to get onto Khodorkovsky's payroll. Word was, he wanted to bankroll an entire shadow society. Everyone got in line. Masha decided that she wanted no part of what everyone wanted. She actually had a scheduled appointment with Khodorkovsky, but it was at ten in the morning, following a night she had spent drinking, so she canceled. But Khodorkovsky sought her out himself, in the hotel lobby. They talked. She liked him more than she had expected, a lot more. They were oddly alike—and unlike most of the people at the congress. They were both reluctant dissidents. Masha thought Khodorkovsky really wanted to be the establishment—he wanted to be the president, not the president's Enemy Number One. Most people who fight tyrants do not seek power themselves. Khodorkovsky did, and Masha liked this about him. She would have liked to be a general in his army, or at least an official in his administration.

A couple of weeks later Khodorkovsky's people invited her along to the Donetsk region to see what was happening there. It was terrifying. She had liked Donetsk when she was there in another life, two years ago—when Sergey the photographer took her along for the European Cup. The beautiful airport was still here—all of Donetsk was still here, in fact—but in place of the measured traffic of everyday, there was hectic motion now, and clumps of tense, angry, armed men. Here in Donetsk they had not fired a shot yet, but you knew that they would.

In and outside the city, men were building checkpoints, placing flags on them. The men had tremors, which Masha recognized, as any Moscow bar regular would: amphetamines. The men stayed up on speed. Masha talked to men on both sides. They spoke the same language, and they hated each other. Each side thought the other was less than human. Their guns were loaded and had no safety catches.

Masha called her mother-in-law to tell her that she was in Donetsk: the older woman had grown up there. The mother-in-law launched into an anti-Kiev tirade. As far as she was concerned, the new government was made up of Nazis.

Two weeks after Masha left Donetsk, anti-Kiev fighters seized the airport. The Ukrainian army took it back after a day of fighting. Four months later, it was attacked again—and then, after weeks of fighting, it belonged to the separatists. But all that was left were ruins: mountains of rubble, chunks of aircraft, and many dead bodies.³⁷

Masha finally took a job with Khodorkovsky's organization. She would coordinate his work with political prisoners. Her new colleagues at a clandestine office in Moscow were working on a news site and on educational seminars. The seminars, coordinated by Vladimir Kara-Murza, a guy around Masha's age, were innocuous stuff: basic civics education. But because they were backed by Khodorkovsky, the seminars drew too much attention. Local officials shut them down, pressured venues into canceling rental agreements, and even had the power to a venue cut one time. Masha hated the idea that she had now become a professional political prisoner, or at least a political-prisoner professional, but she liked the fight.

the european union, Canada, and several other Western countries followed the United States in imposing sanctions on Russia. They banned certain Russian state companies from financial markets, embargoed exports of high-tech oil equipment to Russia, and banned the sale to Russia of military and dual-use technology. In addition, a number of Russian politicians were effectively declared personae non grata. The road for this kind of personal sanction had been laid by the Magnitsky bill back in 2012—and Masha's new colleague Kara-Murza had been in Washington lobbying for the sanctions back then.

Businesses got nervous. Western investors began pulling out for fear of the sanctions and of the effect of the sanctions. The Russian economy had slowed down precipitously even before the war, but now it seemed to be going into a tailspin. Others were scared too. The World Congress of Families got cold feet about its planned grand gathering in September—the one slated for both the Kremlin and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Everyone, or almost everyone, still came and praised Russia for its brave opposition to the LGBT lobby and talked about the dangers of "gender ideology" and the specter of "demographic winter," but, in apparent deference to the sanctions, the event was billed as Russian-organized and the World Congress name was not used.³⁸ The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church spoke at the opening, as did a vice-speaker of parliament and the minister of culture, among others. John-Henry Westen, a Canadian

right-to-life activist and journalist, gushed in an article: "Imagine a land where life, family, faith, and culture are promoted by the official government. Where large families are treated, not as a blight on the planet, but indeed as the 'future of humanity.'"³⁹