The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In the summer of 2016, the city ripped up the sidewalks again, all over central Moscow. For weeks, it felt like the city was at war with itself. Walking to the store or to the Metro became difficult and unpredictable—people had just formed new routines after the disappearance of the low-rise stores, and now ditches, fences, and dead ends appeared unpredictably in their way, forcing pedestrians to step into the streets, zigzag, and, most important, constantly pay attention. The state of low-level dread became a characteristic of being outside in the city, at any time of day or night.

Finally, more tile was laid down. The city now created a series of bike paths—though these were generally short segments that connected two dead ends. There was a sort of architectural-rendering symmetry and beauty in Moscow's new look. But like a first-year architecture student, someone had forgotten to put trees in these renderings. The city's streets had been stripped of all that had been growing there. Everything was made of stone and right angles. Moscow had acquired the geometry and texture of a graveyard.

Maybe Freud was right about the death drive in the first place. And maybe a country could indeed be affected by it just like a person could. Maybe this energy had been unleashed in Russia. Maybe it was bent on destruction for the sake of destruction, war for the sake of war. Maybe this city and this country were burying themselves alive.

The more Arutyunyan thought about it, the less fanciful the idea seemed to her. Entire civilizations in history had ceased to exist. How had life in them felt in the last decades and days? Russia and the Russians had been dying for a century—in the wars, in the Gulag, and, most of all, in the daily disregard for human life. She had always thought of that disregard as negligence, but perhaps it should be understood as active desire. This country wanted to kill itself. Everything that was alive here—the people, their words, their protest, their love—drew aggression because the energy of life had become unbearable for this society. It wanted to die; life was a foreign agent.

At least, that was what Freud might say. At least Arutyunyan had read him. Future generations of Russians might not be so lucky—if there were any future generations of Russians, that was.

She stubbed out a cigarette and lit another.

EPILOGUE

june 12, 2017, was the twenty-seventh anniversary of Russia's declaration of sovereignty, whatever that had meant. It was the twenty-sixth anniversary of Boris Yeltsin's election as Russia's president. It was a national holiday. For its first decade, the holiday was known as the Day of the Passage of the Declaration of State Sovereignty, but in 2002 the name was changed to Russia Day. The declaration of sovereignty—Russia's first step toward separating itself from the Soviet project—was no longer an event to be celebrated. The holiday had to be depoliticized without sacrificing its spirit of patriotism. Over the years, the festivities employed folk music, pop music, and theater productions on historical topics. In the end, the holiday became a cacophony.

One thousand seven hundred twenty people were arrested on Russia Day 2017—the largest wave of arrests in decades. Alexei Navalny had called them to the streets, and tens of thousands had come out in cities from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, the most geographically widespread protest in Russian history. Most of the detainees were released within hours; many were sentenced to fines and between five and thirty days behind bars; a few would probably face several years in a prison colony. After about a week it emerged that some of the detainees in Moscow had been tortured, and that jailers in St. Petersburg had pumped noxious gas into the cells where protesters were held.