The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Someone from the Military Insurance Company came, took a look at the family, and said that Masha would need help. The company's logistics director was dispatched to deal with the arrangements. Together with Masha's grandparents and aunt, he organized a memorial service at a church. Masha tried to tell them that this was a bad idea, but she did not know how to explain it. They asked her if she believed in God, and she said that she did but she also loved and respected her mother, who had been an atheist, and they should respect her too. They said Tatiana was with God now.

Somewhere along the way Masha learned that some hours after Tatiana died, a Russian passenger plane had collided with a cargo plane over southern Germany, killing seventy-one people, including more than fifty children.⁴ From that point on, she would tell people that her mother died on the day of the Uberlingen catastrophe. That way the day meant something to other people too.

lyosha applied to the history department at Perm State University. With his silver medal, all he had to do was get a top score on an oral history exam. He pulled what they call a "ticket"—a card with a topic printed on it:

The Battle on Ice and Soviet Culture of the 1920s and 1930s

Lyosha talked. He knew his subject, but he sensed that he did not do as well as he should have. His score was five/four when what he needed was five/five.

So much for the history department. The political science department was examining applicants the next day. He called his mother, and she said that he would find political science boring. But he could not go back to Solikamsk. He carried his application over to political science and went to the library to study for another oral exam.

He went about studying in the most stubborn and counterproductive way possible, and he knew it. He wanted to figure out what he had been missing during the exam he had just taken. He pulled out Mikhail Pokrovsky's Russian History Beginning in Ancient Times, a classic tome, and started reading. He knew this was the book he should have referenced, just as he knew it was too late to fix the omission.

The examiners were the same two professors as the day before. Lyosha pulled his ticket, turned it over, and read:

The Battle on Ice and Soviet Culture of the 1920s and 1930s

"Do you have anything to add?" asked one of the examiners.

Lyosha did. He got a five/five. He would be studying political science.

Political science turned out to have its own language, which made Lyosha understand things differently—both the events he was now witnessing and ones he had largely ignored when his body and mind were overwhelmed with other concerns two years earlier, on the Black Sea. In that time, as he now read in an article by Moscow political scientist Olga Kryshtanovskaya, Putin had reshaped the government and now a quarter of all top posts were held by military officers. Kryshtanovskaya wrote that this was called a militocracy.⁵ Back in the dorm, talking to young women who were his new friends,

Lyosha said, "Putin reminds me of some sort of miniature military dictator." The women agreed.

When he said "miniature," Lyosha did not really mean Putin's size —more the general sense that whatever frightening words his new books offered, the phenomena they were describing did not feel quite real. Lyosha, for one, did not have the sense of living in a military dictatorship, or a military anything, or any kind of dictatorship. He was a student at a very politically liberal department, where instructors ridiculed Putin mercilessly, as though engaged in some sort of competition for the wittiest put-down. The facts were there— in just two years, Putin had greatly weakened the power of elected officials by creating federal oversight over governors and giving the federal center the right to fire elected governors; reversed judicial reform; and monopolized national broadcast television in the hands of the Kremlin. So while his regime could not yet be called authoritarian, that seemed to be the direction in which it was headed. This transitional state, Lyosha learned, was called an "authoritarian situation"—meaning, authoritarianism could happen here.