The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The man took a short running start and kicked Lyosha in the lower back. Then again. His eyes were crazy, empty and furious at the same time, and Lyosha knew that he was about to be beaten to death.

Lyosha's stepfather happened to come out on the balcony just then. This gave him a clear view of the playground.

"Get out of here," barked the girl.

Lyosha ran.

At the emergency room he was told that there was bleeding and that he now had a condition called a "floating kidney"—literally, one

of his kidneys was no longer securely attached by surrounding tissue. The pain was excruciating, and to relieve it—and to avoid surgery—he would have to stay in bed for two weeks. Lyosha's mother wanted to go to the police, but Lyosha was terrified that the reason for the beating would then be revealed. Because if he had to explain what had happened to him, he would have to say, "I am gay."

"I am gay," he said to himself. He had learned the word from films on the cable channel. The beating convinced him that the word applied to him.

There was a new counselor at school, a recent college graduate who had made it clear that she wanted to be Lyosha's friend. He dialed her number now, from his sickbed, while his mother and stepfather slept in the next room. Lyosha's courage ran out once she picked up the phone, though. They stayed on the line for five hours, alternating between filler chatter and awful silences.

"Is this about something illegal?" she asked.

"Drugs?" she asked.

"Are you trying to tell me that you are gay?" she asked.

"I am gay."

She was fine with it—more than fine. Lyosha was suddenly spilling his thoughts and feelings, and she sighed and laughed in all the right places. He was even able to talk to her about sex, or what he imagined sex to be. After that, he told his cousin, who was now a military- school cadet. The cousin said that he could not accept the homosexual lifestyle but he still loved Lyosha.

Lyosha decided not to tell his two school friends, but even so, things did not look nearly so desperate as they had a year ago, on the Black Sea. He had stopped being afraid of his stepfather since the time Sergei got drunk and nasty and Lyosha hit him over the head with a kitchen stool. He had only one year of high school left. After that, he would leave Solikamsk for good and go to university. He studied harder than he ever had before, entering every conceivable student competition to maximize his chances of university admission.

By May 2002, it was clear that Lyosha would be graduating with a silver medal, a scholastic distinction that would entitle him to skip general-knowledge university entrance exams: he had to sit only for

the exam in whatever subject he chose to study. On the eve of graduation, Lyosha bleached one half of his bangs. At the breakfast table, his stepfather, wearing his perennial wife-beater undershirt, took a break from making his disgusting eating noises to ask:

"Are you a faggot or something?"

"None of your business," said Lyosha.

after graduation, one of the boys in the class threw a party at his parents' dacha, and about fifteen people went. They danced and drank. By five in the morning, a couple of the guests had passed out in an alcoholic stupor. The rest gathered in the kitchen to eat ice cream. Lyosha stood up and said, "I am gay."

"Why?" asked one of the girls. She seemed upset.

"I knew it," said someone else.

Then the conversation moved on. Lyosha had his high school diploma. In five days' time he would go to the mayor's office to pick up his silver medal. He would be out of there.

Then it dawned on him that there was no turning back. Soon enough, the news of his coming out would spread through town. His life now depended on getting into university.

masha wanted a career in the military. There were a few problems with this, of which Tatiana's shock and horror at the idea was perhaps the least. Masha wanted to be an officer in an army that was not the Russian army but a glorious army of some strong and proud country. She sometimes thought of herself as a sort of extraterritorial patriot: given a country, she would be proud, and given a uniform, she would serve. Instead, she was given Russia, which filled her heart with despair and her mind with the idea that life was not worth living.

With an empty mind like that, Masha would never get into university, said Tatiana. By "university" she meant Moscow State, where everyone in the family had gone. Everything else was not really higher education. And everything that was not the sciences was not really knowledge. Meanwhile, Masha was barely passing chemistry. She started cramming, and discovered that she actually liked chemistry. She declared her intention to apply to the chemistry department of Moscow State. This would be a lot better than a military academy, said Tatiana, if only Masha had a prayer of getting in.