The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Masha graduated from high school in May 2000, a month after her sixteenth birthday. She took the Moscow State entrance exams and fell just one point short of full admission to chemistry. In the post-Soviet setup, state universities now had two tracks: tuition-free admission for the top students and paid for those who scored slightly lower. Tatiana could afford to pay for Masha to attend, but she refused, citing a central rule of her own life: "Never put yourself in a situation where you will be the smartest person in the room." Masha would have to push papers at the Military Insurance Company for a year and then try for admission to the tuition-free track again.

In June 2001, she was accepted. This was the beginning of real life, and Masha was starting out with success. Tatiana was now talking about buying an apartment where they would live for the next five or six years, before Masha went off to graduate school abroad. They went to look at some of the more promising apartment towers going up in the neighborhood. Masha said she wanted a bedroom with a view of the Moscow River. They would start apartment- shopping in earnest in the fall, after Masha got some well-deserved rest on the Black Sea. She was going with her aunt; Tatiana was staying in Moscow, at work, where she was now a senior executive in charge of rates.

Masha and her aunt returned on August 25, a week before classes would start. Masha was seventeen, tall and tan, and her hair was the whitest shade of blond it had ever been. That evening Tatiana told her that she had breast cancer, stage IV.

In the months that followed, Masha went to class and Tatiana went to work and to get chemo. Sometimes she went into the hospital. At the end of May 2002, the hospital told her to go home: there would be no more chemo. She lost weight. Then she gained weight, because her liver grew and grew. In mid-June she stopped going to work.

At the apartment, women kept ringing the doorbell, saying they

were faith healers sent by Masha's aunt. Masha's grandmother pushed an inexhaustible supply of books with titles like Cancer Can Be Cured.

Everyone was insisting that Tatiana be baptized. It was a hot summer in Moscow. It got dark late, and cooled down even later. Only at night did Masha get to be alone with her mother, in a sort of peace.

On June 30, Tatiana asked Masha to pick up a morphine prescription at the neighborhood polyclinic, which still, eleven years after the end of the USSR, had a monopoly on prescribing controlled substances, which could be dispensed only to citizens officially residing in the clinic's catchment area.

"It's not time yet," said the doctor.

"Well, when it is time, why don't you just let me know," said Masha.

"Since when are you allowed to speak to me like that?" asked the doctor.

"Since my mother is dying," said Masha.

The doctor called the chief of the polyclinic, who had Masha removed from the premises.

that night, Tatiana fell asleep in the armchair. When it finally got dark, Masha lifted her mother out of the chair and laid her on the couch. She was about to get some sleep herself, on a cot set up in the same room, when a flock of pigeons landed on the windowsill outside. Tatiana said something. Masha got up and turned on the light. Tatiana was staring out the window. Masha picked up and held her mother's body in her arms.

She called her aunt, told her, and put down the phone. She wanted to sit there for a bit and maybe learn to understand what had happened. But her aunt must have gotten on the phone, because an ambulance came, a policeman, then someone from the morgue. They said that Masha had to wake up the neighbors because someone had to witness the removal of the body. It was three in the morning, and Masha felt bad about waking people up, but she was worried that soon it would get hot again and things would start happening to the body. While she was trying to decide what to do, the morgue's driver left. The policeman remained and was now demanding money, a bribe, though Masha could not quite understand what for. She called her aunt again. She came, and so did Masha's grandparents. The body was now cold and the skin had started changing color. It will be hot soon, Masha said.

Her grandfather shouted at her, something about how the smell was the only thing she was worried about, and why was she not crying?

Why was she not crying? Because she needed to be alone to cry, and she also needed a cigarette, she wanted to smoke more than anything in the world right now, but she had only recently turned eighteen and she still did not feel that she could smoke in front of her grandparents.