The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

But when Boris was appointed governor in 1991, they moved to a dacha in a village created for the Party elite just outside the city— which, much to Zhanna's relief, was no longer called Gorky, or "bitter," but had recovered its pre-Soviet name, Nizhny Novgorod. The village was designed to feel like a piece of heaven that could exist anywhere, so it seemed as if the Nemtsovs had left familiar space and time altogether. Zhanna spent most of her time biking around the village, collecting berries in the lush surrounding woods, and playing with the cat, Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov. Food was no longer an issue of importance, because there was plenty of it. Politics, which had been the subject of animated conversation at the kitchen table, turned into a set of incomprehensible words, which Boris recited like a mantra: "privatization," "investment," "infrastructure." These magic words seemed to transform Zhanna's father into a celebrity. The foreign advisers who flocked to town took up residence in the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, a medieval fortress where Boris now had his office; World Bank economists and Peace Corps advisers were quartered there side by side.¹ Journalists and foreign officials came to see what Moscow was advertising as the Nizhny Novgorod miracle.

"So what, then, is the situation in this ancient city of merchants, a place that has declared itself unabashedly open for business, a genuine enterprise zone where local officials are pushing ahead with real economic reforms faster than anywhere else in the country?" asked a Chicago Tribune correspondent in September 1992. His report was mixed. Nizhny had held the first public auction of grocery stores just five months earlier and had also since privatized 22 percent of the three thousand small businesses in the city. Nemtsov had devised an ingenious plan for solving the most vexing problems of privatizing enterprise: the shops and restaurants were sold free of debt and also free of the obligation to retain old employees—but some of the proceeds from each auction were deposited in a fund for those who lost their jobs as a result. At the same time, the privatization was temporary: in most cases, the new storekeepers could secure only five-year leases, because their businesses were located in large apartment buildings that would not be privatized until the following year. Worse, the storekeepers' ability to do business was impeded by infrastructural obstacles old and new: a Soviet-era trucking monopoly that controlled deliveries, and tax rates that changed from month to month, at one point rising to some 85 percent of profits.

And then there was the American who opened a restaurant only to be denied access to the city's water system, and the hotel whose manager "delights in gouging his foreign guests, barring them from the restaurant and, often, simply refusing to rent them rooms." This happened to be the city's only hotel in a state of reasonable repair, so most of the foreign visitors tried to stay there, opening themselves up to humiliation.² Still, the reporter found one example of spectacular positive change: what had been Municipal Cheese Shop Number 11 was bought by employees at the city's very first auction, cleaned up, restocked, and rechristened Dmitrievsky. It even stopped shuttering for lunch in the middle of the day.

Margaret Thatcher, the retired British prime minister, came to visit in 1993. As she later wrote in her memoirs, rumors of Nemtsov's

commitment to a "radical programme that some called Thatcherism" had reached her back in London:

Nizhny Novgorod's saviour was, I found, frighteningly young (in his mid-thirties), extraordinarily good-looking and gifted with both intelligence and shrewdness (which do not always go together). . . .

The Governor and I took a walk down Bolshaya Pokrovskaya Street. All the stores were privately owned. Every few yards we stopped to talk to the shopkeepers and see what they had to sell. No greater contrast with the drab uniformity of Moscow could be imagined. One shop remains vivid in my memory. It sold dairy produce, and it had a greater selection of different cheeses than I have ever seen in one place. I ate samples of several and they were very good. I also discovered that they were all Russian, and considerably cheaper than their equivalents in Britain. I enthusiastically expressed my appreciation. Perhaps because as a grocer's daughter I carry a conviction on such matters, a great cheer went up when my words were translated, and someone cried,

"Thatcher for President!"³

From that point on, Dmitrievsky's director kept three pictures on her desk: Jesus, Mary, and Margaret Thatcher.⁴