The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

the remains of Czar Nicholas II, his wife, and three of their daughters, which were interred in St. Petersburg in 1998, were exhumed in 2015 at the request of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Church, it was said, wanted to know whether the remains of two more people, found separately, also belonged to the czar's family. These had been found in 2007 and had been positively identified by geneticists as belonging to the czar's only son and one of his daughters. The Church, however, insisted on a comparative study of all remains. Once that was completed, there would certainly be a new burial ceremony, which would erase the memory of the earlier one and of Yeltsin's speech, the one time a Russian leader apologized for the atrocities of the Soviet regime. But nearly two years after the exhumation, the remains were still unburied, perhaps because 2017 was the centennial of the Russian Revolution and neither the Church nor the Kremlin could find a way to handle the symbolism.

mikhail prokhorov, the oligarch who once suggested to Zhanna that he could fund both her and her electoral opponent in order to watch the race, made a few other attempts to dabble in politics. The Kremlin kept showing him his place, and he kept not getting the message. Finally, when the print arm of a news outlet he owned—RBK, Zhanna's old workplace—published an investigative piece on Putin's daughter's lucrative real estate concession in Moscow, Prokhorov was forced not only to sell RBK but to divest from Russia entirely. He moved to New York, where he had for several years owned the Brooklyn Nets basketball team.

mikhail fridman, the oligarch who said Zhanna was insane for returning to Moscow and who later stopped seeing Boris in order to protect his own status, continued to run a successful bank in Russia. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the name of his bank, Alfa, surfaced twice in stories about alleged Russian meddling. One report claimed that the Trump campaign had established a back channel for communicating with Alfa-Bank—though a later report said there might be an innocuous explanation. Then Alfa came up again, in an unverified intelligence dossier published by BuzzFeed. Fridman sued BuzzFeed for libel.

nikita belykh, the member of the Perm legislature who had employed the other Lyosha, was appointed governor of the Kirov region while Dmitry Medvedev was president. For a few years, he enjoyed the reputation of Russia's only pro-democracy governor. In June 2016, Belykh was arrested during a sting operation at a bar in Moscow. He was accused of accepting bribes. He was still in pretrial detention a year later.

pavel sheremet, the television journalist who made a film for Nemtsov's fiftieth birthday, moved to Kyiv.* Soon after Nemtsov's murder, Sheremet launched a show on Ukrainian television. In July 2016, Sheremet was assassinated by a car bomb in Kyiv.

vladimir makarov, the young civil servant accused of molesting his own daughter, served his five-and-a-half-year sentence. He repeatedly applied for parole and was denied. He was released in 2016. The European Court of Human Rights refused to hear his case, demonstrating that the accusation of pedophilia was the perfect persecution vehicle. Many more people have been brought up on child-sex-abuse charges since. In 2017, Memorial activist Yuri Dmitriev, who had discovered the sites of numerous Stalin-era mass executions, was arrested on child-pornography charges.

ilya ponomarev, the parliament member who employed Masha during the protests, was accused of embezzlement. He fled the country, living for a time in California before settling in Ukraine.

all of the prominent organizers of the 2011-2012 protests faced a stark choice between exile and prison—or worse. Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion, moved to New York after he was threatened with criminal charges in 2013. Sergei Udaltsov, the radical-left organizer, was serving four years behind bars. Nemtsov was dead. Only Ilya Yashin and Navalny were still functioning out in the open. In the spring of 2017, Navalny lost most of the vision in one eye when an attacker threw acid at him.

the moscow school for political studies, where Masha was on that Russia Day weekend she got a phone call about a search at her apartment, was declared a foreign agent and was forced to cease operations.

nemtsov's assistant olga shorina, who called Masha that day, left the country. She lives in Bonn and helps Zhanna run the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom.

marat Guelman, the gallerist and political technologist who ran the contemporary art museum in Perm, left Russia in 2013 and settled in Montenegro, where he now runs a contemporary arts festival. He might have thought that Montenegro, with a total population of less than a million, was a backwater destination, but in 2017 it emerged that Russia had been plotting a coup there—because Montenegro wanted to join NATO.