The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Vladimir kara-murza, the first person Zhanna saw when she came to the site of her father's murder, survived his poisoning in 2015. He was in a coma for five days. Eventually, he was airlifted to the United States, where he underwent rehabilitation. He returned to work for Khodorkovsky's foundation in Russia. He also made a film about Nemtsov. He screened it in Yaroslavl, the town where Nemtsov had held his last elected post, in February 2017. Less than forty-eight hours later, he was once again hospitalized with total organ failure. The doctors, fortunately, knew how to treat him, and this time the coma did not last as long.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

conversations with two people inspired me to begin work on this book. Chitra Raghavan surely had no idea that her lecture on the psychology of trauma would prompt me to write more than five hundred pages about the aftermath of the Soviet experience. Anand Giridharadas, on the other hand, knew exactly what he was doing when he told me, at our first meeting, that I should go write this book —but I don't believe it occurred to him that I would follow his advice. I thank them anyway.

Research for and much of the writing of the book were made possible by the Carnegie Corporation, where I was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2015-2016.

In the summer of 2016, I was fortunate, once again, to be a guest of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, where I wrote nearly half of the book. I enjoyed the support and intellectual company of other Institute guests and fellows: Anton Shekhovtsov, Mark Lilla, Tatiana Zhurzhenko, and Tim Snyder and Marci Shore.

I am grateful for the generous support of Mal Jones of Up the River Endeavors, and of Vladimir Radunsky, who sent me notebooks when I needed them.

I am grateful to my editor, Rebecca Saletan, who encouraged the unusual structure of the book and didn't blink at the word count until the very end, when she asked me to keep the acknowledgments brief. Team Riverhead made it possible for this book to emerge in certainty and style. Thank you, Jynne Dilling, Al Guillen, Karen Mayer, and Anna Jardine.

I am lucky to have Elyse Cheney and Alex Jacobs as my agents.

I am grateful to the people—friends, family, colleagues, and a few almost unsuspecting near-strangers—who talked to me, argued with me, read parts of the book as I wrote, and otherwise helped me move through the process: Roger Berkowitz, Carol D'Cruz, David Denborough, Robert Horvath, Nicholas Lemann, Istvan Rev, Jack Saul, Vera Shengelia, Cheryl White, and my partner through the last seven books, Darya Oreshkina.

My largest debt, though, is to the protagonists of this book, who allowed me into their lives and engaged with endless hours of my unreasonably detailed questions. Thank you, Maria Baronova, Alexei Gorshkov, Sergei Yakovlev, Zhanna Nemtsova, Marina Arutyunyan, and Lev Gudkov.

NOTES

Lyosha, Masha, Seryozha, and Zhanna—their real names—told me their lives over the course of about a year. I spent hours asking them to recall events and places, conversations, feelings, movies, newscasts, and ideas. I used various sources to corroborate dates, times, and descriptions of, say, television footage, and if contradictions arose, I resolved them (or, in one case, noted the discrepancy between recollection and factual chronology). At the same time, my main interest was in personal perceptions. For this reason, all conversations—unless they were recorded—are relayed as they were recounted to me by just one of the participants (and, in one case, as had been recounted by someone else). Our recollections of conversations are rarely precise, but they are precisely what we live with.

Arutyunyan and Gudkov spent dozens of hours each talking with me for this book. Dugin declined to be interviewed but delegated his right-hand person to talk to me; I also interviewed his other associates and studied his copious writing and lectures.

Beyond these sources, I relied on a wealth of scholarship, both Russian and Western. Sources are noted for all information that does not come from interviews with the principal characters and is not the product of firsthand reporting.

one

BORN IN 1984

Detailed information on Molniya is found on its website: http://www.buran.ru/htm/molnianp.htm, as is information on the space shuttle: http://www.buran.ru/htm/mtkkmain.htm, accessed October 28, 2015.

Steven Merritt Miner, Stalin's Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941-1945 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 33.

Ibid., pp. 32-33.

Ibid., passim.

Yves Hamant, Alexander Men': Svidetel svoyego vremeni (Moscow: Rudomino, 1994), pp. 104-106.