The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Nemtsov had insulted the oligarchs by calling into question their legitimacy and their talents, and now he wanted to take away their political influence and their prospective wealth. They owned the media. They often used it to fight one another, but now they united against him. Moscow journalists ridiculed him for the same reasons the rich girls at her school bullied Zhanna: his cluelessness about clothes and cars. He had worn white trousers to the airport on a hot summer day to greet the president of Azerbaijan, who had arrived for a state visit. This disgraceful breach of protocol was shown on television over and over.⁷ As for cars, Nemtsov was lobbying to require that the government use only Russian-made cars to chauffeur its bureaucrats around. By this time, the officials in Moscow were used to Mercedes-Benz S-Class cars, and Nemtsov was portrayed as not only ignorant about cars but also possibly corrupt, because the Volga, for which he was lobbying, was made in Nizhny Novgorod. One of the country's most popular television anchors, Sergei Dorenko,

reported that Nemtsov had taken part in a sex party with strippers hired for the occasion—and failed to pay them.⁸ Nemtsov later wrote that after a few years Dorenko told him that he himself had hired the sex workers to defame Nemtsov on camera.⁹

Nemtsov's nationwide popularity rating, which had been around 50 percent when he arrived in Moscow, dropped to an undetectable level.¹⁰ He was no longer the president's heir apparent.

in 1995, Masha's mother quit the retail business. She stopped shuttling back and forth and importing the hideous Korean handbags. With the money she had made, she bought a dacha on the Istra River, northwest of Moscow, and went back to college. She wanted to use her mind again, but physics was clearly never going to bring her any money. Someone had told Tatiana about a new field called "actuarial science"—it was new for Russia, that is: the market was ushering it into existence, but very few people were qualified to work in this area. Tatiana figured that with her background in statistical physics, she could succeed, fast. Then, through her studies, she met a man from the Military Insurance Company, and he gave her a job.

Like so many new businesses, the Military Insurance Company was born out of a combination of a new need and old resources and access. Tatiana's new bosses were retired military brass, and they created a company from expertise and connections: much of their business early on exploited legal loopholes to allow clients to use what appeared to be payments on insurance policies to avoid paying taxes. Some of their business was actual insurance, though, and Tatiana's newly acquired actuarial skills proved invaluable. The retired colonels liked her. It was as alien an environment as any she had ever encountered, but they were kind to her and to Masha, who spent some time around the office that Tatiana never seemed to leave.

Tatiana had not exactly changed her view on the subject of a future in Russia—she had simply adjusted her expectations by one generation. She herself would never make a life elsewhere, but her daughter would. To that end, she not only secured a decent and stable

income but spent most of her money on tutors for Masha, whose job it now was to gain admission to Moscow State University and later parlay that degree into a ticket to graduate school abroad.

Then, one day in August 1998, Tatiana's bank card stopped working. All the money they had in the world was in that account. The word was "default." Russia had stopped paying its bills, and this meant that the ruble tumbled, prices skyrocketed, panic set in, people ran to the banks to get their money, and the banks cut off clients' access to their own accounts. In several cases, this still could not keep the banks from collapsing.

Masha's tutoring had to be suspended, as did the sending out of the wash. But what really frightened Masha was the prospect of having to go without sanitary pads. She had recently started menstruating, and Tatiana had told her that back in the USSR, they had had to use cotton during their periods (she omitted the fact that even cotton was not reliably available). What if Masha's next period came before Tatiana could get cash, and Masha had to resort to cotton? What if "default" meant that sanitary pads would disappear from the stores altogether? The thoughts were too much to bear. Someone they knew, who worked for Procter & Gamble, had just been paid in products—toothpaste and pads—and Masha convinced her mother to barter something, anything, for an industrial-size box of maxipads.