The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

A dozen years earlier, before Masha was born, Tatiana, then a student, had been told to join the Party. A representative at the university told her that the physics department had been instructed to admit one top student to the Party, and Tatiana was it. At twenty- four, Tatiana was a samizdat-reading Soviet cynic, and joining the Party appeared to her as an opportunistic, morally indifferent option. Her parents surprised her with their principled opposition. "This is not a done thing," they said. The university's Party organization would not take no for an answer: it had quotas to fill. Galina Vasilyevna and Boris Mikhailovich started getting phone calls at work: "Why doesn't your daughter want to join the Party?" The threat was hardly veiled: both Boris Mikhailovich and Galina Vasilyevna were non-Party members working for secret Soviet institutions. Theirs were exceptions of long standing, negotiated thanks to Galina Vasilyevna's father's Party status and Boris Mikhailovich's six-year military service, but they could be revoked. In the end, Tatiana managed to secure her own exception: she had been tutoring a classmate who had entered the department after his military service, as a standing Party member, and with his own exceptions made to the competitive admissions process. The department needed him, he needed Tatiana to continue his studies, and she needed him to make the Party organization leave her alone.

Galina Vasilyevna retired from her space-shuttle job in 1990. Alexander Men, the intellectual priest who had brought her to the Church, was murdered in 1990, but Galina Vasilyevna's spiritual quest had already taken her away from religion, to the TV, where a hypnotist by the name of Anatoly Kashpirovsky was making frequent appearances. As his live shows demonstrated, he had healing powers, so Galina Vasilyevna, like millions of other Soviet citizens, was holding widemouthed glass jars of tap water up to the television set to obtain a healing charge. Masha's grandfather also spent an inordinate amount of time in front of the screen, though he had no use for Kashpirovsky. For the first time in his life, he was interested in something other than his work and his bitter feelings about the Great Patriotic War: politics. He loved what he called "the democrats." This was a relatively small group, no more than 300 out of the 2,249 delegates to the periodic Congresses of People's Deputies of the USSR. It included, most notably, the dissident physicist Sakharov, along with a number of newly politicized academics and professionals and a few unorthodox Communist Party functionaries. Very little united them, except all were able to get behind Sakharov's opposition to the primacy of the Communist Party in Soviet politics and affairs of state. After Sakharov died in December 1989, Boris Yeltsin, the head of the Moscow Party organization, became the sole leader of the "democrats." Boris Mikhailovich loved Yeltsin like he had perhaps never loved anyone. Yeltsin was locked in mortal combat with Gorbachev, who oscillated on reform and would not cede the Communist Party. In 1990, Yeltsin resigned from the Party. Within a year, so did roughly four million other people—more than a fifth of the Party's total membership.⁴

In March 1991, the month Masha was inducted into the Little Octobrists, Gorbachev banned street protests in Moscow, in an effort to silence Yeltsin and his supporters. There were tanks in the streets, but the protests went ahead anyway, and Boris Mikhailovich went with hundreds of thousands of others and chanted "Yel-tsin!" In June, with millions of others, Boris Mikhailovich voted to elect Yeltsin president of Russia—no one was quite sure what this meant, considering that Russia was a part of the USSR, but it was an important part of the struggle.

seryozha's grandfather, Alexander Nikolaevich, did not want to leave the Communist Party. In the end, the choice was made for him. In a couple of years, he had gone from being one of the most powerful men in the Politburo (which numbered between twelve and fourteen members out of the more than four hundred people on the Central Committee⁵) to a pariah within the Party.