The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

When Zhanna was about three, conversations around the table at the old wooden house began to change. They shifted away from the anomalous Doppler effect or whatever theoretical issue had been on Boris's mind to the fact that a nuclear-powered heating plant was about to be built in Gorky. Ground had been broken.¹¹ It had been only a year since the catastrophic accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine; the government had tried to keep information about the disaster from getting out but had succeeded only in slowing it down. By now, the magnitude of the loss and danger had seeped in. Dina Yakovlevna, a pediatrician, was badgering her son: "How can you, a physicist, stand idly by when something like that is about to be built within city limits?"

For as long as Zhanna, Raisa, Boris, and even Dina Yakovlevna had been alive, Soviet people had stood idly by while the government willfully put their lives in danger, but something had changed. In 1985, the new secretary-general of the Communist Party—the Soviet head of state—had declared what he called "a new course." He was not the first secretary-general to say those words or even the word perestroika, which means "restructuring," but now something was indeed changing. Dina Yakovlevna went to a rally at which she protested the planned nuclear plant; just a year earlier, a rally that had not been sanctioned by the Party would have been seen as a crime against the state, and participants would have been arrested and tried. Sakharov was allowed to leave Gorky after seven years and move back to Moscow. A physicist, an inventor of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, he had long become a crusader for nuclear safety. Boris went to visit him at his Moscow apartment and recorded an interview in which the great man spoke out against the nuclear plant, and the

interview was published in the city paper Gor'kovskiy rabochiy ("The Gorky Worker"). Sakharov had concluded by saying, "I hope that you succeed in changing the flow of events. I am fully on your side."¹²

In the end, plans for the nuclear-powered plant were scrapped and Boris had found something that engaged him as much or more than physics. The word politika sounded around the table more and more often, eventually joined by the word vybory—"elections."

both masha and zhanna were born in the Soviet Union, the world's longest-lasting totalitarian state, in 1984, the year that in the Western imagination had come to symbolize totalitarianism. George Orwell's book could not be published in a society that it described, so Soviet readers would not have access to it until 1989, when censorship constraints had loosened sufficiently to enable the country's leading literary journal to print a translation.¹³ But in 1969 a journalist named Andrei Amalrik had published—that is, typed up and distributed among his friends—a book-length essay titled Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, arguing that the regime was headed for an implosion.¹⁴ Amalrik, who had already served time as a political prisoner, was arrested, along with a man accused of having distributed the book, and both were sentenced to prison terms. In his closing statement in court Amalrik said, "I realize that trials such as this one are intended to frighten the many—and many will be frightened—but I still think that a process of liberation of ideas has begun and is irreversible."¹⁵ He spent more than three years behind bars, followed by another three of internal exile, and was then forced to leave the Soviet Union. In 1980 he died in a car accident in Spain, on his way to a human rights conference.¹⁶ The Soviet regime lived on, surviving even 1984.

But the very next year, something began to crack. Was it launched by the new secretary-general, Mikhail Gorbachev, when he called for changes and declared glasnost and perestroika? Or was he merely giving voice to the process Amalrik had attempted to describe a decade and a half earlier? Amalrik had argued that Marxist ideology

had never had a firm grip on the country, that the Russian Orthodox Church had lost its own hold, and that without a central unifying set of beliefs, the country, pulled in opposite directions by social groups with different desires, would eventually self-destruct.