The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Human beings are perhaps born jealous—the emotion stems from a basic survival instinct. Now it was like Arutyunyan's clients had been stripped to their bare selves and could feel only that most basic, most painful, most burning of emotions. Everyone felt like he had been robbed. The visual symbols of wealth were raspberry-colored sport coats that someone must have glimpsed at a private school abroad—and they, complete with a gold-embroidered emblem on the breast pocket, became the uniform of the emerging flaunting class. The other symbol was the Mercedes. Both signs of extreme wealth, like extreme wealth itself, were so rare as to be almost phantoms, but the mere shadow of a sighting gave rise to furious jealousy. It had never before been acceptable to show wealth. Arutyunyan's mother remembered having studied, at Moscow State University, alongside Stalin's daughter. The first daughter, she said, was the worst-dressed girl in their year, and the chauffeur had always dropped her off two blocks away from the school. Such was the Soviet ethos of demonstrative asceticism, which Zhanna must have absorbed as a toddler, before privilege happened to her. Newly visible wealth was doubly insulting because it violated aesthetic conventions and because the newly wealthy, unlike the old nomenklatura, had no claim to entitlement: Who were they to be rich?

The fact that the very rich were vanishingly few exacerbated things. The only thing worse than feeling like a loser was feeling like a member of an entire society of losers. The jealousy rarely manifested as jealousy: before it reached the surface it was usually transformed into a different sentiment—feeling used, feeling angry, feeling fear.

Some people had good reason to feel fear. The new entrepreneurs, it was said, were murdering one another left and right. For most people, the violence was as much an abstraction as was big money, but the fear of being caught in the cross fire was not entirely unfounded. A friend of Arutyunyan's once stumbled onto a shootout in the street in Moscow in broad daylight. Arutyunyan's office mate, a cognitive behavioral therapist—they rented a small apartment together and took turns seeing clients there—took months to work up the nerve to ask a client, an entrepreneur, to stow his gun in the coat closet when he arrived for his session.

Arutyunyan's first client from the new world of entrepreneurship did not carry a gun. He was, contrary to stereotype, a cultivated young man from a professor's family not unlike Arutyunyan's own. He would not say what exactly he did, but Arutyunyan surmised that it had to do with oil. He sought help because he had started flying into rages. It took only a few sessions—too few, Arutyunyan later realized —to conclude that the rages stemmed from repressed anxiety. Shortly after, the man decided to stop therapy. Getting in touch with his feelings was too risky a proposition. "I am a tightrope walker," he explained. "Imagine what can happen to me if I pause to think." He might look weak. He might even cry. Flying into a rage and, say, beating someone to a pulp was an altogether safer option. Neither Arutyunyan nor the client broached the idea that he could change his line of work to something less evidently dangerous: in the new reality, everyone was assumed to want to be an entrepreneur.

masha's mother had long since stopped importing intimate essentials from Poland. She now made frequent trips to China to buy patent- leather handbags. They looked distinctive and, Masha thought, hideous, but some quirk of fashion fortune made them the "it" bag for Russian women in 1993-1994. Tatiana now had her own kiosk on Kalininsky Prospect, a wide central avenue lined with high-rises that had looked chic in the 1960s. She sold the bags at the kiosk, and also supplied them to other vendors.

There was a day when Masha entered a Metro car and noticed that every woman in it had one of those bags that her mother—and no one else—imported. Every single woman in the subway car. "We must be rich," thought Masha. But the image of what it was to be rich in no way jived with how she and Tatiana lived. They still had their two- rooms-plus-a-kitchen rather than a palace. They washed their clothes by hand in the bathtub. Masha still got bullied at school: for being younger than all her classmates, for the clothes she wore, but most of all, for being somehow different. That would not happen if they really were rich, would it?

PART THREE

UNRAVELING

eight

GRIEF, ARRESTED