The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

But what did that mean? Solikamsk began rebuilding a cathedral destroyed by the Bolsheviks. A men's monastery, which had been repurposed as a Soviet jail, reopened as a monastery. Somehow, these events seemed to Lyosha to connect directly to Yeltsin's speech in the glorious St. Petersburg cathedral, under an elaborate dome and

majestic chandeliers to which the camera had panned after the president bowed his head.

Yeltsin's brief speech contained two key messages: the need for national unity and the need for national penitence. Only the unity part had traction, though, perhaps because it had been heard before, paired with "agreement and reconciliation." The ideas of redemption and of accepting the blame for Soviet-era crimes sounded from the national pulpit only once, on that day in St. Petersburg, and they remained suspended somewhere under the beautiful painted dome. Nemtsov, who wrote a detailed memoir of his political career in the 1990s, made no mention of his role as chairman of the commission that identified the remains. Yeltsin, for his part, left the entire subject of the "national idea" out of his memoirs. In a book published in 2000—barely two years after the ceremony—Yeltsin quoted his own speech at the reburial as follows:

For many years we concealed this horrific crime, but the time has come to tell the truth. The Yekaterinburg massacre is one of the most shameful pages of our history. As we bury the remains of these innocent victims, we seek redemption for the sins of our fathers. The blame belongs with those who committed this act of

violence and with those who, for decades, justified their actions

I bow my head before the victims of merciless killing. . . . Any

attempt to change our life through violence is doomed.¹⁸

In this version of the speech, blame was entirely externalized. The theme of shared responsibility, as well as the idea of the historic significance of the moment, was omitted. Both sets of omissions— Nemtsov's and Yeltsin's—showed the extent to which, for both politicians, the symbolic sphere took a backseat to the material. Yeltsin's elisions also suggested that he had thought better of his one attempt to accept, on behalf of his nation, the weight of responsibility for its "century of blood and lawlessness." by the time Lyosha was a teenager, he was familiar with the Soviet film canon—the small number of movies that had been produced in the Soviet Union, and the fact that they kept being shown on television made this possible. He liked the propaganda musicals of the 1930s and 1950s, which he watched with his mother, and the slightly bitter comedies from the 1970s—mild, wink-and-a-smile satires of the Brezhnev era—but his favorites were the films about the Great Patriotic War. He liked all of them: the melodramas from the 1950s, the treacly portrayals of heroism from the 1970s, and the singular 1970s film that carried a heavy undertone of complexity (it was called Twenty Days Without War). Basically, he loved the Great Patriotic War.

So did most Russians. The 1994 survey showed that, after all the upheavals of the 1980s and 1990s, they clung stronger than ever to the one event that seemed to occupy an unambiguous place in the nation's memory. Reading survey responses, Gudkov imagined this war as an ideal vehicle. The vehicle had headlights, which illuminated the Soviet Union's future as a superpower. The vehicle also had rear lights, which cast a beatifying glow on the crimes of the regime that preceded the war. The vehicle's heft conveniently obscured the outsize losses of the Soviet military and the disregard for human life that had made them, and the Soviet victory, possible. What Gudkov could not yet quite imagine were people like Lyosha, born in the year perestroika began but identified entirely with a war that had ended forty years to the day before he was born.

Masha loved the war too. As she entered her preteen years, she and her mother began an asymmetrical argument. Tatiana became more explicit about why they continued to live amid peeling plaster: life in Russia was no kind of life, she said, and it would never be any kind of life. She did not mean that they did not live well, exactly—by this time it was clear that they were some kind of well-off—but she meant that life that required paying a bribe to do anything was a life of daily humiliation, and in protest she continued willfully failing to repaint, re-wallpaper, or buy a washing machine; instead, they gave their washing to a new wash-and-fold place called Diana, which had pickup and drop-off spots all over town. The implication was that

someday they would go somewhere else to live a life worth living, and this life was a life beyond Russia.