The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Ten days in advance of the scheduled march, on the anniversary of the day when Ukrainian president Yanukovych was deposed, a government-sanctioned march was held in central Moscow. It inaugurated yet another pro-Kremlin youth movement, the Anti- Maidan, with the prevention of a "color revolution" in Russia its sole declared goal.²² About thirty thousand people came, many of them carrying flags and preprinted banners bearing slogans such as "The Maidan Brings War and Chaos." A giant black banner carried by more than a dozen people at once read, in white lettering, "Clean Out the Fifth Column." A single poster, copies of which were carried by dozens of the marchers, featured a black-and-white photograph of Nemtsov in an orange frame. The caption said, "Organizer of the Maidan."²³

zhanna was not planning to go to the march out in the suburbs. She had no use for the euphemism in its name: she wanted to march against the war, or not at all. She was going on vacation to Italy

instead—the first week of March, when it always felt like Moscow winter would never end, was the right time to get away. Raisa would come too—she came to Moscow from Nizhny Novgorod on February 27 to spend the night before they flew out together. On the way home Zhanna stopped by Boris's building and left an envelope containing $10,000 in cash with the doorman. This was money for the report on Putin's war in Ukraine. It was about to go to the printer's.

Zhanna said good night to Raisa at half past eleven, went to her bedroom, and turned off the lights and her phone—she always followed this mental-health rule. Raisa was sleeping in the living room.

Zhanna woke up because Raisa was screaming. Zhanna knew it was her mother screaming, yet it was a voice she had never heard before, a voice of terror. Zhanna must have forgotten to lock the door, there must be an intruder.

Raisa was in the living room alone. She was sitting on the couch screaming. She held her phone in her hand.

"They killed him," she said.

Zhanna turned on her phone and the television. There were text messages and news stories. Her father had been shot on a bridge not fifteen minutes from here. Raisa was having trouble breathing.

"It's okay," said Zhanna. "We'll go there now."

It was pouring rain. She hailed a car.

"Take us to the Moskvoretsky Bridge, please."

"What do you need there?"

"They killed Nemtsov there."

The driver looked at her for the first time. His face, lit by a streetlamp, looked angry.

"What do you care?"

"Well, maybe you don't care that a world-renowned man was just shot to death in the center of Moscow, but he happens to be my father."

The police had sealed off the bridge. Zhanna went from officer to officer, showing her press credentials and her passport. "I'm press. We are family. I'm press." It took forever.

The first person they saw on the other side of the barrier was

Vladimir Kara-Murza, Boris's young friend, a co-organizer of the peace marches who was now working for Khodorkovsky.

"The body is in the ambulance," he said. "I'll follow it to the morgue."

There was no point in driving all over town now.

"We have to think about how to tell Grandmother," Zhanna said to Raisa.

They called Boris's sister and his cousin in Nizhny, and they went to Dina Yakovlevna's house to wait for morning. She was bound to turn on the television or radio as soon as she awoke, and they needed to be there to tell her the news themselves.

"I want to go to Moscow," the old woman said.

The next day Dina Yakovlevna led a march in Moscow. It was not a peace march or a "spring march." It was a march of mourning. Fifty thousand people walked through central Moscow without a permit. They carried Russian flags and portraits of Nemtsov and a giant banner with the words "Heroes Don't Die." No one stopped them.²⁴

there were dozens of unanswered calls on Zhanna's phone. Everyone wanted an interview. She called her own station.

"I want to talk to you first," she said.

"Sure, let's get you on tape," the editor in chief said.

"I want to be live," said Zhanna.

"I can't do that."

She hung up.

She talked to a BBC reporter instead. She said that she held Putin personally responsible for her father's death. She was merely stating the obvious. Boris was killed on a bridge across the Moscow River, with the Kremlin as the backdrop for the murder. The Kremlin was so close that the bridge was under constant surveillance—as any television journalist who had ever tried to film a stand-up there knew: the Presidential Guard would have been on top of them in seconds. But Boris's body had lain on the bridge for at least ten minutes, with no Presidential Guard in sight. Not that it mattered where the killing happened: Putin had been portraying Zhanna's father as a traitor for so long, and as an enemy combatant for the last year—their fears of prison seemed naive now.