The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

People found ways to circumvent the sanctions, of course. They labeled food products as being something other than what they were or originating somewhere other than where they originated. One could now buy seafood from landlocked Belarus. In the summer of 2015—a year after countersanctions were first introduced—Putin signed a decree ordering the destruction of all foodstuffs deemed to be contraband. The cabinet then published rules dictating that banned foods should be destroyed "by any available means" in the presence of two impartial witnesses and the process must be captured by photo or video. There was talk of crematoria and of mobile incinerators. Some people were taken aback. A government plan to destroy vast quantities of food—edible food, food that was undeniably in demand—would probably be bizarre in any country, but in Russia it might have seemed particularly shocking. This was the country of the man-made famines that had killed millions, the country of the Siege of Leningrad, of the postwar hunger, of the catastrophic shortages of the 1980s, and of the salary arrears and subsistence off tiny plots of land of the 1990s. The president's own mother had nearly died of starvation during the Siege of Leningrad—this had been the obvious subtext of the outrage over TV Rain's tweet—and now the president was ordering the destruction of food. Over a hundred fifty thousand people signed a petition asking the government to give banned products to the poor instead, and a few officials expressed support for the idea.

Then 114 tons of pork were annihilated in Samara, a city on the Volga. The pork had been labeled as Brazilian but was exposed as hailing from the European Union. Twenty tons of cheese in the Orenburg region were next in line. Then there was more pork, this time in St. Petersburg, and three truckloads of illegal nectarines.⁴⁶ Now nothing was too horrible or too bizarre to be believed.

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ZHANNA: FEBRUARY 27, 2015

the sochi Olympics ended on February 23, 2014. The following day, a Moscow court sentenced eight of the Bolotnoye case defendants. Weeks earlier, when the sentencing was scheduled, it had been clear that setting it for the first day when Putin would not be concerned with projecting a temporarily gentler image boded ill. The Bolotnoye case might be the Kremlin's chance to avenge the humiliation of having been forced to release Khodorkovsky.

Only one of the defendants, a nineteen-year-old woman who had already spent more than a year under house arrest, was given a suspended sentence. The rest—seven men, all of whom had been in pretrial detention—were sentenced to between two and a half and four years behind bars.¹ A small crowd gathered outside the courthouse on the day of the sentencing, and there were arrests— police loaded 234 people onto buses and took them away. Later in the day, people began gathering in Manezhnaya Square in the center of Moscow, the same square where thousands had come to protest Navalny's sentence seven months earlier. This time, there were only 432, and they were all arrested.²

Nemtsov was standing on the sidewalk being interviewed by a French television crew when a police officer approached him and said, "Please come to the bus with me." Nemtsov excused himself and followed the policeman. Time was, he would have refused to go, demanded to know on what grounds he was being detained, and made the police work to drag his large body onto a bus. But six months earlier Nemtsov had reentered electoral politics—such as remained in

Russia. Only some mayors and municipal-council members in some cities were still elected directly. Nemtsov had been elected to the city legislature of Yaroslavl, a town of roughly half a million people about two and a half hours' drive from Moscow. He took the job seriously— he was now spending roughly half his time in Yaroslavl, where he had become a public figure. He dove into issues of local corruption and promoted local sports. As an elected official, he could not simply be detained by the police: there was a special court procedure for people like him. So he strolled to the bus, his city-legislature credentials in hand—and found himself arrested.

He and Navalny spent that night in a two-person cell.³ The following day, Navalny was sentenced to seven days' arrest and Nemtsov to ten. Several other activists were sentenced to between one and two weeks. All of them had been found guilty of disobeying police.⁴ The message was clear: with the Olympics over, the crackdown would intensify. Protest would be punished. Nemtsov was a fool to think that any Russian law would protect him.