The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The visiting foreigners included a young American who seemed to follow Nemtsov everywhere and whom Zhanna liked because he was always cracking jokes. On the whole, though, she resented her father's new job, because he was coming home late and no longer had time to help her with her homework. He asked a physicist friend who often stayed at the dacha to help her instead, but Zhanna found his explanations confusing and unsatisfying. She took to begging Boris to take her to work with him, but soon realized that she hated it: her father's workday seemed to consist of driving from one town or collective farm to the next, stopping every time the car crossed an invisible border between districts and having a full banquet served on a tablecloth spread on the hood of the car. With vodka the most important element of each of these feasts, Zhanna's father's conversation grew duller with each passing hour and dried up completely by mid-afternoon.

In a memoir Nemtsov wrote much later, he explained the origins of his strange banquet habit. When he was first appointed, his deputy, an older and more experienced politician, told Nemtsov that if he wanted to be taken seriously, he would need to drink with every local boss in his region, including the directors of some five hundred factories and the heads of about 750 collective farms. Nemtsov whittled the list down to four hundred and set about the project of sharing a bottle of vodka with each of them. In about a year he realized that his health had deteriorated, his body had become permanently swollen, and he was generally exhibiting the symptoms of alcoholism familiar to most Russians. He also noticed that he had assimilated attitudes typical of the Soviet political establishment, which was suspicious of any man who did not drink.⁵

In some ways, Nemtsov proved more adaptable than his young daughter. She got used to the dacha easily, but she could not make peace with the black Volga, the perennial nomenklatura car, that now took her to school in the mornings. She asked to be dropped off about five hundred yards from the entrance, even though everyone knew she was the governor's daughter and expected her to be chauffeured. And though she liked that her mother no longer had to spend her days struggling to procure food, the way foodstuffs now showed up at their dacha made Zhanna uneasy. At holiday time—New Year's, Victory Day, and the anniversary of the Great October Revolution every November—something frighteningly extravagant, like an entire roasted baby pig, would show up on the doorstep, as though placed there by the invisible and indestructible hand of the Soviet privilege machine.

while zhanna was struggling to accept the cars and roast piglets, Seryozha had woken up one day to their absence. His grandfather still led a political party, still served on commissions—but in 1991, along with the entire Gorbachev establishment, he was rendered irrelevant to the machinery that ran the country. Seryozha's parents divorced that year. His father moved out. Everything was different now.

Seryozha changed schools. His old school was in the neighborhood, and his classmates there were other children from the Czars' Village, plump and blond. Multiple black Volgas pulled up to the building in the morning to deposit them in an environment that, from the start, reminded Seryozha of the way he had seen prison shown in films. During breaks between classes, the children walked around the school vestibule in a circle, in different-sex pairs, holding hands. If a child asked to be allowed to go to the bathroom during class, he was likewise paired with a student of the opposite sex, who had to stand guard outside the lavatory. This system of opposite-sex pairing was one of peer control: that the children could not actually enter the bathroom together ensured there would be no collusion and truancy; making children walk in circles with someone of the opposite sex—someone who, at that age, could not possibly be a friend—bored them into passivity.

Seryozha's new school was in a dilapidated building in the messy center of Moscow. Children did not wear uniforms, march in formation, or in any other way resemble Seryozha's old classmates. School Number 57 had long been an oasis of freethinking in Moscow: it was a math-and-science high school under the old regime, a place where ideological controls were slightly relaxed to facilitate the production of minds useful to the Soviet military-industrial complex. During perestroika, the school was allowed to start offering primary- level education. Seryozha now joined the children who had been the first entering first-graders. Their parents—linguists, writers, and one psychoanalyst—tensed up at the appearance of a child of the nomenklatura who would now be studying alongside their offspring, but grew to accept him, because the times were meant to be changing.