The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Still, compared with the other Bolotnoye case defenders, Masha was leading a life of glamour. Most of the others had been sentenced to time in prison colonies. Some had been released after serving their two or two and a half years; others remained in prison, and still others were awaiting trial—they had been arrested later. The state continued to add defendants to the five-year-old case.

zhanna was settled in bonn. She had a job with Deutsche Welle, the taxpayer-funded broadcasting service. Like the Russian-language services of the British Broadcasting Corporation and the American Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, DW used to broadcast on short­wave frequencies during the Soviet period, was granted access to AM frequencies under Yeltsin, and lost it under Putin. It was now a Web- based broadcaster with modest audience numbers, but Zhanna became its star interviewer. At DW, no one told her not to delve into politics.

Zhanna started a foundation named for her father. She convened a board that awarded an annual prize to someone who demonstrated courage and determination in fighting the Putin regime. Remarkably, there was stiff competition for the award, and the board argued long and passionately. In June 2017, Zhanna made it public that her father had planned to run for president in 2018—though, she figured, he would have stepped aside if Alexei Navalny had decided to run. Navalny was running now, for what it was worth. For the time being, he was locked up for thirty days after calling for the June 12 protests. He was also facing ever-mounting trumped-up charges of fraud that could land him in prison for years. In an earlier trial, which ended on New Year's Eve 2014—to ensure that most Russians were properly distracted when the verdict was delivered—Navalny was sentenced to house arrest, and his brother, Oleg, to three and a half years in a prison colony. The intention was clear: house arrest looked like a relatively humane measure, so this time there would be no mass protests. Navalny himself would be kept in line by his brother's

sentence: Oleg was a hostage. Navalny refused to play. With his brother's permission and encouragement, he persisted with his investigations. He also refused to recognize his own sentence, because Russian law does not actually provide for house arrest as punishment. He walked the streets. The state asked him to desist, and he refused. The state gave up. And now Navalny was leveraging his ability to keep assembling people in the streets for his freedom—and his life.

In July 2017 a Moscow court sentenced five men to between eleven and twenty years in prison for the murder of Boris Nemtsov. All five were from Chechnya; an ostensible sixth accomplice was killed when the police attempted to detain him in Chechnya. The court spent next to no time trying to determine the men's motives: the prosecution's story seemed to be that they had organized the murder for no apparent reason. Zhanna and her legal team had insisted on summoning highly placed Chechen officials, but these were never interrogated. In the end, the murder would remain effectively unsolved.

Boris's old activist friends—the scruffy lot with whom he worked after he left parliament—maintained a living memorial on the bridge where he was gunned down. The city had declined requests to name the bridge for Nemtsov or to create a permanent memorial there. Instead, every couple of months, and sometimes every few days, city workers descended on it and hauled away the flowers and placards. The next day, time after time, activists replaced them. They kept vigil. Though they were powerless to prevent the removal of the memorial, they made sure that a living friend of Boris was present at the site of his death every minute of every day.

in new york, Lyosha found himself talking about Chechnya all the time. In the spring of 2017, news came that gay men there were being rounded up, interned, tortured, and, in some cases, killed. Chechen and Russian officials laughed off questions about the disappearances. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, LGBT activists refused to believe the reports at first, simply because they seemed too awful to be true, but soon the evidence was overwhelming. Chechnya had taken the Kremlin's anti-gay policies to their logical extreme, making Occupy Pedophilia—the vigilante group of the sort that had haunted Lyosha back in Perm—into a state enterprise. The lucky gay men from Chechnya were those who managed to escape to other Russian cities, to attempt eventually to flee to the West.