The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

in august 2000, Lyosha went to the Black Sea coast with his mother. They spent their days at the beach, which was so crowded that they had to get there early to find a place to throw down a towel on the sand, and their evenings in the kitchen of a rented apartment, eating sickly sweet local grapes and listening to the radio. The news was as slow as the southern air, until something inconceivable happened. According to the radio, a Russian nuclear submarine, the Kursk, had sunk off the coast of Murmansk. Some of the crew were still alive, but trapped at the bottom of the Barents Sea. The radio was saying that Russian rescue crews could not get to the submarine. The radio was also saying that Norway had offered to help but Russia had declined. The radio was saying that President Putin had decided not to interrupt his vacation in Sochi.

The days slowed even more. In the fog of his sleepless nights and his circular daydreams, Lyosha kept imagining the sailors, boys a few years older than he was, at the bottom of the cold sea, waiting for help that could not get to them, and the president—the little man to whom Yeltsin had handed his office—somewhere quite near here, lying on a stretch of the Black Sea beach that was pristine and uncrowded, reserved for Putin's uninterruptible vacation.

Thinking about all this was a relief, because Lyosha's thoughts before the submarine disaster had been even worse. Something had happened to Lyosha his first day at the beach. When he saw other boys, teenagers like himself or young men, dressed, like he was, in only a pair of small black bathing trunks, he felt heat shoot excruciatingly through his body and a thrilling invisible shiver set in. It happened every day after that first time. The thoughts it brought were unthinkable. I am a pervert, he thought. I am sick. I am the only person in the world who feels this way. Now these awful phrases floating in his mind mixed with images of the sailors dying at the bottom of the sea.

Rationally, Lyosha knew that there were homosexuals in the world. In seventh grade his class had made a weekly visit to a family- planning center where a psychologist talked to them about things their parents did not. The program was funded by American billionaire George Soros, the school had a contract with the center, and parents of the seventh-graders had to sign consent forms to allow their children to attend. The psychologist happened to be the mother of Lyosha's friend, a girl with whom he shared a desk in every one of his classes. She was as unpopular as he was, not just with other children but also with teachers, who seemed to suspect her of being smarter than they were. Lyosha, for his part, had somehow earned the nickname "faggot" among fellow students. One day at the center, the psychologist said that in addition to "heterosexual" families there were also "homosexual" ones. The idea was sudden, exciting, and as foreign as Soros, the American billionaire.

The following year—eighth grade—an older girl stormed into their class one day and asked loudly, "Did you know you had a prostitute in your grade?" She explained that thirteen boys had locked the girl in

question in a cellar and had taken turns having intercourse with her. "She couldn't get out," said this accuser, "and she liked it." Over the course of the next few days, the story was recounted many times, as the male participants boasted of their roles in it. Their victim stayed out of school for a few weeks, and when she returned, she and Lyosha became friends. They were now a group of three: the Faggot, the Prostitute, and the Snob.

As they got older, some of their classmates seemed to develop respect for their intelligence and their ability to learn, explain, and argue about things. In tenth grade—the penultimate year of high school—Lyosha studied harder than ever before, because this seemed the only way to chase away the thoughts that had begun tormenting him in August on the Black Sea. Toward the end of the school year, he was elected class president: whatever some of his classmates thought of him, whatever led them to call Lyosha "faggot," they agreed that he was the best person to represent their interests before the school administration.

In May 2001, toward the end of tenth grade, Lyosha and his two friends were hanging out at the playground behind his building. They were too old for playgrounds, of course, but in the absence of other public spaces all young people in Solikamsk hung out in playgrounds, especially when the weather was good. A girl strolled by—she was one of the kids who used to sleep in Lyosha's stairway, except she was not a kid anymore. She called out to someone else who happened to be walking by, a man of about thirty. He sauntered over. She pointed at Lyosha.

"Faggot," she said.