The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In Moscow, some of the more than eight hundred detainees had to spend the night on benches in a precinct courtyard because there was no room for them inside, but the scene in the city that day had been less tragic or frightening than absurd. This year's Russia Day had been turned over to historical reenactments. No particular period had been chosen, but a medieval bent was in evidence. A few kids were wearing red silky costumes vaguely reminiscent of the Young Pioneers' kerchiefs, but most grown men were dressed in chain-mail armor and carried shields and swords. Still, others wore Second World War-era uniforms and milled around barricades made of sand-filled burlap sacks. At one point, a man dressed as a twentieth- century peasant—a costume that in a different context could easily have been taken for hipster getup—climbed a wall of sacks with a sign that said, in English, "Putin Lies." As he climbed, he shouted, in Russian, "Putin is a thief!" When he reached the top, a man in the uniform of the NKVD—the Second World War-era secret police— gave chase up the sacks. The protester tumbled down, into the arms of two other men in period secret-police uniforms, and these men handed him over to two contemporary policemen.

The bizarre spectacle of it all was too much for foreign correspondents, who tried to avoid scenic but incomprehensible shots of knights in shining armor literally shielding a teenage protester from the police. Instead, the reporters focused on the teenagers among the protesters. Everyone seemed to agree that the new face of Russian resistance was barely pubescent: a boy in shorts being tackled by police in riot gear, a girl charging a police line, a paddy wagon full of adolescents. One Russian Facebook user posted a photograph of the teenagers in the paddy wagon with the caption "Russia has a future." He posited that "every mass arrest of young people strengthens youth protest," which, in turn, was sure to bring about the end of the regime.

The poster was Georgy Satarov, a sixty-nine-year-old political scientist. Satarov was the man who, more than twenty years earlier, had been tasked by Yeltsin with articulating the new Russian national idea—and failed. Now he was shifting responsibility to the teenagers. It was yet another iteration of Levada's old concept: the next generation, free of the fear, envy, and doublethink of Homo Sovieticus, would usher in a new era of freedom. The next generation kept getting younger. The first generation of people who had no memory of Stalin's terror had not succeeded in overcoming the

totalitarian legacy; the first post-Soviet generation—those born into perestroika and reared in the 1990s—had been the face of the protests of 2011-2012, but they no longer embodied hope; now it was up to the generation of kids born under Putin.

Masha was amused that a photograph of her being dragged off by police was captioned "Teenage girls among hundreds arrested at Russia protests." She was detained briefly and released—she was still winding her way between drops of rain—and as soon as she got out, she went to work arranging representation for those who had been arrested. She was still doing this work under the auspices of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's organization, but he had cut back on the funding—or, more accurately, he had set limits, while the Russian government was doing the opposite. The number of arrests continued to grow exponentially, and Khodorkovsky's money would not keep up. Fund- raising became a part of Masha's job, and then an increasingly important part. And there was no end in sight; there would be more arrests, more fund-raising, and no possibility of a vacation. She decided to quit. She even announced it in a blog post: she would raise the money, she would make sure everyone who had been arrested on June 12 had representation, she would see those cases through to completion, and then she would quit. She would have another life.

Masha's life as an activist had lasted five and a half years. In 2016, she had run for office—there was an open seat in parliament. There was no hope of winning—even getting on the ballot was an exceedingly difficult task—but Khodorkovsky had the idea that it was important to acquire campaign experience. Masha agreed, but the experience proved more bruising than she could have predicted. She cleaned up her act, quit drinking and doing recreational drugs, and began dressing in button-down shirts and blazers at all times, yet she was still criticized by the very people she was trying to court. The intelligentsia found her language too harsh and cynical. Many of them preferred to vote for a history professor who opposed the war in Ukraine but made no secret of his virulently homophobic views. The history professor did not win, either: not one anti-Putin candidate made a dent in the polls anywhere in the country. Khodorkovsky's

project of creating a shadow society looked much better on paper than it felt in real life.