The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

seven people act as the main characters of this book, making appearances throughout the narrative. I have used a modified Russian convention to refer to them. As anyone who has ever read a Russian novel knows, Russians have numerous names. A person's legal name is the full first name plus a patronymic—a form of the father's name. In contemporary life, however, the name/patronymic combination is generally reserved for formal occasions and for older people. At the same time, most full names have a variety of diminutives that derive from them. Most Russians have a diminutive that was chosen for them in childhood and continue to use it throughout their lives; most, though not all, diminutives derive clearly from their full name, which can be reverse-engineered from the diminutive. For example, all Sashas are Alexanders; most Mashas are Marias. Children are almost always addressed by their diminutive.

In this book, those who first appear in the story as children are called by their diminutive throughout (e.g., Masha, Lyosha). Those who first appear as adults are called by their full names (e.g., Boris, Tatiana). Those who first appear as older people are introduced by their name and patronymic and referred to by these names for the duration of the book. Below is a list of the main characters. Dozens of other people are mentioned in this book; their names are not on this list because their appearances are episodic.

Zhanna (b.1984)

Boris Nemtsov, father Raisa, mother Dmitry, husband Dina Yakovlevna, grandmother

Masha (b. 1984)

Tatiana, mother Galina Vasilyevna, grandmother Boris Mikhailovich, grandfather Sergei, husband Sasha, son

Seryozha (b. 1982)

Anatoly, father

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, grandfather

Lyosha (b. 1985)

Galina, mother

Yuri, biological father

Sergei, stepfather

Serafima Adamovna, grandmother

Marina Arutyunyan, psychoanalyst

Maya, mother

Anna Mikhailovna Pankratova, grandmother Lev Gudkov, sociologist

Alexander Dugin, philosopher, political activist

PROLOGUE

i have been told many stories about Russia, and I have told a few myself. When I was eleven or twelve, in the late 1970s, my mother told me that the USSR was a totalitarian state—she compared the regime to the Nazi one, an extraordinary act of thought and speech for a Soviet citizen. My parents told me that the Soviet regime would last forever, which was why we had to leave the country.

When I was a young journalist, in the late 1980s, the Soviet regime began to teeter and then collapsed into a pile of rubble, or so the story went. I joined an army of reporters excitedly documenting my country's embrace of freedom and its journey toward democracy.

I spent my thirties and forties documenting the death of a Russian democracy that had never really come to be. Different people were telling different stories about this: many insisted that Russia had merely taken a step back after taking two steps toward democracy; some laid the blame on Vladimir Putin and the KGB, others on a supposed Russian love of the iron fist, and still others on an inconsiderate, imperious West. At one point, I was convinced that I would be writing the story of the decline and fall of the Putin regime. Soon after, I found myself leaving Russia for the second time—this time as a middle-aged person with children. And like my mother before me, I was explaining to my children why we could no longer live in our country.

The specifics were clear enough. Russian citizens had been losing rights and liberties for nearly two decades. In 2012, Putin's government began a full-fledged political crackdown. The country waged war on the enemy within and on its neighbors. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, and in 2014 it attacked Ukraine, annexing vast

territories. It has also been waging an information war on Western democracy as a concept and a reality. It took a while for Western observers to see what was happening in Russia, but by now the stories of Russia's various wars have become familiar. In the contemporary American imagination, Russia has reclaimed the role of evil empire and existential threat.

The crackdown, the wars, and even Russia's reversion to type on the world stage are things that happened—that I witnessed—and I wanted to tell this story. But I also wanted to tell about what did not happen: the story of freedom that was not embraced and democracy that was not desired. How do you tell a story like that? Where do you locate reasons for the absences? When do you begin, and with whom?