The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

*Russian adjectives are gendered: they change form according to the gender of the noun they modify. For example, because the word for "square" in Russian is feminine, it takes the feminine form of the adjective for "swampy": Bolotnaya. The word for "island" is masculine, and thus takes the masculine adjective Bolotny. The word for "case" (as in "criminal case") is neuter, and takes the neuter form Bolotnoye.

*Putin used the phrase budushcheye yesf— an implied response to the more common idiom budushchego net ("there is no future").

*Magyar is referring to the tendency to view the history of these states as having begun with the end of communism.

*The governor happened to be Nikita Belykh, the former Nemtsov ally and Perm legislature member for whom the other Lyosha had worked.

*The teacher was Ilya Kolmanovsky. He was fired from School Number 2, one of Moscow's two schools famous for their outstanding instruction in math and other subjects.

*Valeriy is a common man's name in Russia.

*In the Russian system the rector is the chief executive of a university—roughly the equivalent of the university president in the U.S. system or the vice chancellor in the UK.

*The city of Sevastopol, geographically part of Crimea, was accorded a kind of sovereignty, making its authorities reportable directly to Moscow.

*Mikhail Kasyanov was prime minister of Russia in 2000-2003 but later declared his opposition to Putin and joined forces with Nemtsov. Vladimir Ryzhkov was a former member of the Russian parliament, and a cofounder, with Nemtsov and Kasyanov, of a right-liberal opposition party.

*About thirty miles.

*"Kyiv" is the non-Russified spelling of the name of the city, preferred by independent Ukraine.

_©

Penguin Random House

PENGUIN PUBLISHING GROUP

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