The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

weeks she stood in the square, beneath a clock that was counting down the days and hours to the start of the Sochi Olympics. She held a handwritten sign in Russian and English: "Free All Political Prisoners." For the first few days, she was surrounded by dozens of police officers and several paddy wagons—they clearly expected the protesters to return. But then they left, and the woman stood alone. Every day she posted a picture of herself beneath the clock, which was counting days in reverse, as prisoners do.¹

Seryozha knew that he should go, but he did not. He felt the cloud coming back down on him again, heavier than before. All he could think about was that he, Seryozha, was not beyond reproach. If he was not beyond reproach, then he had no right to call on other people to act, like he had the other day. He had to act himself. But acting involved other people, and he had no right to involve them. So he was not acting. Not acting was shameful. The shame about his inaction combined with the shame he now felt about his pride, his unwarranted claims to other people's attention, and this double shame, this shame that kept doubling back on itself, paralyzed him.

The paralysis let up briefly in March. After the occupation of Crimea, the outside world became so loud that it broke through the cloud. Seryozha got in touch with a couple of men he had met at the protests in 2011-2012. Together they printed out and laminated portraits of the more than a hundred men and women who had died in the Maidan. They took them to the Ukrainian embassy and set them in a row along the fence, in a linear memorial.²

A few hours later the police asked the embassy to remove the pictures. They explained that a rally celebrating the annexation of Crimea was happening nearby and there could be trouble. The embassy complied. After that, the cloud descended again.

Seryozha went to see a psychiatrist that spring. He explained what was happening to him. He had no friends. He was not working. Most days, he was not leaving the house. He was a useless, worthless human being.

The psychiatrist prescribed antidepressants. A few days after Seryozha started taking them, he felt no different except that his

whole body itched. At least he was feeling his body—maybe this was a good thing, the beginning of recovery. Then he could think of nothing but the itch. By the time he realized that he needed medical attention, by the time he told a doctor that he felt like his skin was coming off, that he felt like he was dying, he really was dying. He had a condition called toxic epidermal necrolysis, a rare side effect of the antidepressants.³

Some of the damage was permanent. After that, when Seryozha struggled to get out of bed in the morning, it was hard, usually impossible, because of what the depression was doing to him and what the antidepressant drugs had done.

when arutyunyan looked at her clients, she almost found herself missing the early Putin years. For her, that had been a time when things started shutting down—when a world in which, for a decade or more, opportunity had seemed limitless, began closing in. But she had known even then that she was in the minority. Most of her clients craved "stability," whatever that meant. It had all been too much for them for years. Their anxiety had been intolerable: what Arutyunyan had experienced as "freedom from" the constraints of the totalitarian state, many of her clients experienced as "freedom to"— find a way, measure up, do as well as the others. When the first constraints began snapping back into place, to the beat of the "stability" drum, they had felt calmer. One client had finally felt grounded enough to start her own business—something that she had wanted and feared for years. She, and the business, did well for a while. In fact, even now the business was doing well enough. But the client was having panic attacks. So many laws had changed without warning, so many unwritten rules had gone into effect, that she was constantly unsure whether she had missed something. One day, in February 2016, she stepped outside in the morning to discover that overnight all the low-rise commercial buildings on her street—the shops that sold flowers and bread and soda and cigarettes—had been torn down.

Altogether, ninety-seven buildings in Moscow were demolished that night. The city said that their papers were not in order.⁴ But they

had stood there for years, in many cases well over a decade—surely their owners thought their papers were good. The woman's own business rented space in an old-construction high-rise, but what was it that she was missing? She had a strong sense—she got signals—that she should be cultivating connections and giving bribes, but she did not know how and, more to the point, she felt strongly that she should not. The signals she was getting about what was right came into conflict with her own inner sense of what was right. If only the law were clear and permanent and applied to all equally.