The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

after winning the election, Yeltsin again began casting about for a successor. The task was now less symbolic and more urgent. The 1993 constitution dictated that his second term would be his last. Though he could easily have made the legal argument that he had first run for office in a different country, this would have gone against his own principles. And in the autumn of 1996 Yeltsin had multiple-bypass heart surgery, which, combined with the enormous battle he had had to wage to remain in office, must have made him aware of his own vulnerability. At the same time, the 1996 presidential election—the first to have been conducted in post-Soviet Russia—did not convey the sense that the country would now be governed by men chosen on their merits by the public. It had the opposite effect, that of showing that the battle for power in Russia was waged between clans, a war in which victory depended on the effectiveness of mobilization on either side.

Gudkov spent much of his time trying to make sense of this effect, and also of the fact that this description could certainly be applied to the functioning of some Western democracies, most notably the United States. The difference lay in the historical contexts. The Russian clans were direct descendants of the Soviet nomenklatura system. In the five years that had passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, no new institutions for producing leaders, public politicians, or even government bureaucrats had emerged. If anything, the opposite had happened: younger people, like Gaidar and the members of his cabinet, who had come to government from

structures adjacent or tangential to the Party, had been pushed out of government and had mostly gone into private business.¹ Old government, Party, and KGB hands had filled the many voids at all levels of the bureaucracy and had resumed their ascent up the power ladder, as though the end of the Soviet Union had caused just a temporary layoff. Among these old faces, there were just a handful of exceptions—a few elected governors and a couple of prominent generals who had gone into politics—and it so happened that Yeltsin disliked most of them.

That left Boris Nemtsov. His designated-successor status had been suspended after his protest against the war in Chechnya, but now that the war had ended, Nemtsov could be restored to favor. Yeltsin's attitude toward the younger Boris had always been paternal—caring and condescending at the same time—and this made it easier to return Nemtsov to favor. The thirty-seven-year-old Nemtsov was appointed one of two first vice-premiers—the number-three position in the cabinet—and brought to Moscow, with all the media reporting that the appointment was an anointment.

To Zhanna, the move was yet another step in her father's love affair with himself in politics. After he became governor, he had developed a taste for watching himself on television. When he was on the news—as he often was, being an active and supremely popular governor—the whole family had to watch. He teased Zhanna for loving a soap opera called Santa Barbara: he joked that he could be dying and if Santa Barbara was on she would not notice. This made him sound jealous of a television show, but Zhanna was, even more absurdly, jealous of her father's infatuation with his own televised likeness. At the end of the year, the local station usually prepared a two-hour year-in-review special that effectively starred Boris Nemtsov, and he would be glued to the set for the entire two hours. To Zhanna, this was what politics now meant: her father's insatiable taste for himself on the screen. Now this drive was taking the family from the dacha Zhanna loved, from the forest and her bike, to Moscow.

Boris promised that in Moscow they would also live at a dacha in the woods. This was not a lie, but it also was not true. There was a dacha, in an old nomenklatura village, outfitted with dusty, impersonal furniture. Zhanna's school was in the very center of Moscow, and the drive there, even with a cabinet member's traffic privileges, felt interminable. The school, which had once been reserved for the Soviet elite, was now inhabited by the children of the new rich, drawn by the school's reputation for good English-language instruction. The students were the daughters of an aluminum king, a game-show host, a media magnate. Zhanna was thirteen, awkward, and provincial. Her clothes were ordinary, and she knew nothing about luxury brands. She also did not know anything about expensive cars. She did not vacation abroad and had given no thought to a future at some fancy Western school. She did not belong.