The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

After one quarter at the school, Zhanna declared that she was returning to Nizhny Novgorod. Her parents knew better than to argue. Her teacher said, "You are making the biggest mistake of your life." Whatever glorious future she might be forfeiting, as her teacher implied, Zhanna wanted no part of it. She returned to Nizhny Novgorod, took up residence with her grandmother, and resumed studies at her old school.

Back in Moscow, her father was experiencing frustrations and humiliations similar to her own. Around the time of his arrival in Moscow, Nemtsov published a book he had written over the preceding year. The slim volume was called The Provincial, but if the title promised some ironic distance, the book delivered none. It exposed an overconfident young man who was dazzled by his own standing in the world. The book's meaty middle was a series of capsule descriptions of all the famous men—and one woman, Margaret Thatcher—whom Nemtsov had been lucky enough to meet, from Boris Yeltsin to Richard Gere. These included miniature profiles of some of the men with whom Nemtsov would now be working in Moscow, and an unflattering description of their progress so far:

We are living in shapeless times. What reforms are there to talk

about? There have been no real reforms! So consumer prices have

been deregulated. Freedom for all has been declared. What kind of reforms are those? Reforms involve a leash that is being let out gradually, with constant control exercised over the level of tension. You have to be able to tell the difference between freedom and total

lack of oversight!²

Not only was the government neglecting its oversight function, wrote Nemtsov, but it was letting itself be manipulated by the newly moneyed class. He compared their influence to that exerted by the mystic Grigory Rasputin over Russia's last czar in the 1910s.

Russia has always had its official authorities, who had the job titles and the status, and its unofficial ones. There was, for example, Grishka Rasputin. Now we have a sort of group Rasputin. There are many of them, but they are nobodies. Grishka was an extraordinary man who had his talents. You can't really say that about the people

who surround the czar we have today.³

Nemtsov coined two terms: "oligarchs" and "robber-baron capitalism"; the usages stuck.⁴ He conjured a plan for getting the rich in line once he arrived in Moscow. After five years of wielding power effectively in Nizhny Novgorod, he was sure that in his new post getting the federal government's house in order would be a simple matter of will.⁵ He wrote a memo to Yeltsin outlining his program for what he called "nationalizing the Kremlin." The memo explained that the Kremlin—by which Nemtsov and the rest of Russia meant "political authority in the country"—had been privatized in much the same way as shops and oil companies had been, and now had to be reclaimed by its rightful, elected occupants. Nemtsov's "nationalization" involved measures big and small. The oligarchs' Kremlin-issued identification cards, which allowed unrestricted entrance to the fortress, must be taken away, along with their Kremlin-issued license plates and flashing blue lights, which made them exempt from traffic rules. Privatization, going forward, should be transparent, creating a level playing field for all potential investors. The practice of loans-for-shares auctions must be discontinued.

These auctions allowed investors to take possession of large companies by granting them credit guaranteed by a majority of the shares, knowing that the companies would be unable to repay; the auctions themselves were generally organized by the prospective lender.

Yeltsin liked the plan—Nemtsov later wrote that the part about the oligarchs' access privileges must have been particularly appealing to the president because it reminded him of the old Party system of apportioning and regulating perks, a system Yeltsin had once railed against. But as soon as the government tried to implement plans for leveling the privatization playing field, the oligarchs went to war. Nemtsov had misjudged the situation badly: he thought that he could use against the ascendant oligarchs the tools he had honed at home, dealing with old Soviet-style bosses whose power had waned. He had also banked on his authority as a government official, not realizing that in Moscow power was never fixed but always contingent on one's proximity to Yeltsin, and on his favor. The president continued to support Nemtsov's plan in theory, but he grew irritated with the public battles and Nemtsov's lack of skill in handling them.⁶