The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In protest against her mother's protest, Masha joined the Young Seamen Club, which somehow deigned to accept a girl. The club offered target practice, endless talk of Russian military greatness, and computer-programming lessons, which were the reason Tatiana allowed Masha to join up. As soon as the ice broke at the Khimki Reservoir, a short tram ride from Tatiana and Masha's dilapidated apartment, the Young Seamen would start practice—paddling around the reservoir in small rowboats. They sailed to St. Petersburg to tour a real navy yard, but Masha was excluded because the ship could not accommodate a female.

As the only female Young Seaman, though, Masha was given a ticket to attend the festivities on May 9, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the great victory. World leaders were coming, though this had not been easy to arrange. Yeltsin was facing international criticism for the war in Chechnya, and American president Bill Clinton was wavering as late as March. As a concession, or a lure, Yeltsin promised to forgo a military parade with tanks and rockets in Red Square. Such parades had been conducted before the Second World War to frighten potential opponents and after the Second World War to celebrate victory, but none had been held since 1990. A chapel had even been constructed at the entrance to Red Square in the exact spot where a chapel had stood until 1931, when it was razed to make way for military equipment on parade days. For the half-century jubilee, a parade was planned again, but Yeltsin volunteered to hold it elsewhere, allowing foreign leaders to attend a veterans' procession in Red Square but avoid the military.

Clinton came, as did the United Kingdom's John Major, France's Francois Mitterrand, Germany's Helmut Kohl, and many others—the first meeting of the Allies on Russian soil since 1945, and one of the largest gatherings of dignitaries in Moscow, ever.¹⁹ Military bands from all over the world paraded just next to Red Square, in front of the History Museum, and this was the part of the festivities that Masha got to attend. She thought it was awesome. Even Tatiana

admitted reluctantly that she could see its appeal. Masha, triumphant, clutched an iron-on patch given to her by one of the members of the American brass band.

the history museum, which still told a story that spanned from the Stone Age to the USSR and had left more than a few Little Octobrists with the impression that prehistoric man had developed directly into Lenin, had, on days when there was no Victory Day parade, become a magnet for Russian nationalists of all kinds. Men and occasionally women milled around on its porch, giving speeches aimed at the thousands who filed by daily, convening improvised discussion groups, handing out flyers, and, most important, selling books and periodicals. One came here to buy the journal Nash sovremennik and other publications that advertised themselves as "patriotic." Folding tables buckled under the weight of books on Russia and the Russians, which ranged from works by men who had left on the Philosophers' Ship to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

By far the most prominent and most numerous were books by Lev Gumilev, a prolific ethnographer whose work had been inaccessible to the general public during the Soviet era. Gumilev was the son of Anna Akhmatova, one of the greatest Russian poets of all time, and Nikolai Gumilev, a poet and an officer in the czar's army who was executed by the Bolsheviks. Lev Gumilev was arrested for the first time, briefly, in 1933, when he was barely twenty-one, then again two years later. That time he was held for a couple of months and, upon his release, expelled from the university. In 1938 he was arrested again. He spent the following five years in the Gulag. Almost as soon as he was released, he was conscripted. After the end of the Second World War he was finally allowed to return to his studies, and, at the age of thirty-six, to defend his doctoral dissertation. Then he was arrested again, and sentenced to ten years. He served seven—his release came after Khrushchev condemned Stalin's political prosecutions—and finally obtained his first research position at the age of forty-four. He claimed, however, to have conceived his most important ideas while he was in the camps.²⁰