The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Lyosha was granted asylum status in the spring of 2017. In the nearly three years that he had been in the United States, he had not been able to find a job in his field—academic positions, even temporary ones, turned out to be prohibitively difficult to come by— but he had learned English and become an increasingly visible activist. He was named co-president of RUSA LGBT, an organization of Russian-speaking queer people helping new asylum seekers. Eventually, he found a job at an AIDS nonprofit.

He was still living in Brighton Beach, the Russian enclave and one of the few neighborhoods in New York City that went to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Lyosha often faced incredulous questions from American friends: How could people who fled the Soviet Union and Putin vote for someone like Trump? But, of course, these were not people who fled totalitarianism. Most of them had arrived around the time the Soviet empire began disintegrating. If anything, what had driven them out was the fear of the Soviet collapse. They longed to return to their imaginary past, which would have made them Putin voters if they had stayed in Russia. Instead, they became Trump voters.

They were also blatantly and sometimes aggressively homophobic. Though many of the new queer asylum seekers rented apartments in Brighton Beach, they lived their gay lives in Manhattan. Lyosha, on the other hand, decided to organize Brighton Beach Pride. In May 2017, about three hundred people marched along the boardwalk from Coney Island, chanting against homophobia in both Russian and English.

seryozha has not responded to my messages and phone calls since June 2015.

the levada center was deemed a "foreign agent" and fined for not registering as one. The center added a line at the bottom of its website, saying that Levada had been "forcibly added to the registry of noncommercial organizations acting as foreign agents." At first, Lev Gudkov panicked. How were researchers going to continue their work if they had to introduce themselves to potential respondents as "foreign agents"? But it ended up being less of an impediment than Gudkov had thought. He realized that for some people, the "foreign agent" designation had become something of a badge of honor. Potential respondents did not appear to be put off by the designation. In June 2017 the center finished analyzing its "most outstanding person of all time in the entire world" survey. Joseph Stalin came out on top, as he had in the previous survey, in 2012. For the first time ever, Putin took second place, sharing it with Pushkin.

in 2015, the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society advanced to the status of a "component society" within the International Psychoanalytic Association. There were now twenty-three psychoanalysts who were full members and thirty more who were candidates—essentially, psychoanalysts in training who could work with patients. That made for fifty-three psychoanalysts—one for more than every two hundred thousand Muscovites.

In 2016, Arutyunyan's son, Dmitry Velikovsky—the child who once thanked his parents for having raised him in an oasis—became one of three Russian journalists who worked on the Panama Papers, the giant trove of information on offshore accounts. The most surprising story in the Russian part of the Papers concerned cellist Sergei Roldugin, one of Putin's closest friends from his university days, who had apparently amassed a fortune—or was safeguarding it for someone else. In the spring of 2017, Dmitry was among the more than four hundred journalists from around the world who shared a Pulitzer Prize for their work on the project. In Russia, however, the story had barely made a ripple and was soon forgotten.

In the spring and summer of 2017, the sidewalks (and much of the

pavement) in central Moscow were ripped up again, for the third year in a row, to be replaced with ever more perfectly laid geometric tiles that had so reminded Arutyunyan of tombstones. The city also announced a plan to raze between four and a half and eight thousand buildings, including many structurally sound and architecturally interesting ones, and replace them with high-rise developments.

alexander dugin enjoyed a period of international fame of sorts as a Putin whisperer: for a couple of years some analysts and journalists believed that he was the mastermind behind Putin's wars. Dugin continued to insist that he had great influence but negligible power. Still, his star rose ever higher in unexpected ways. With the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the neo-Nazi movement known as the "alt-right" gained public prominence, as did its leader Richard Spencer, an American married to Nina Kouprianova, a Russian woman who served as Dugin's English translator and American promoter.