The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

This panic did not last. Within a couple of months, Tatiana was getting paid regularly and they were sending out the wash again. They owed their family's speedy recovery to the improved fortunes of the Military Insurance Company, which had just secured a lavish new contract with the Federal Security Service, the FSB, where Yeltsin had just appointed a new boss. He was a colonel from St. Petersburg, by the name of Vladimir Putin.

for a teacher living in Solikamsk, recovery took much longer. Lyosha's mother, like other teachers she knew, worked for no pay for the entire 1998-1999 school year. Her husband was still drawing a salary at the mine, but it was Lyosha's mother's potato garden that

kept them going. When they were not eating potatoes, it was pasta with sugar—a stomach-fooling dish from Galina's childhood. They forgot about meat for months.

in the summer of 1998, Zhanna agreed to return to Moscow, on one condition: she would go to a regular-people school. Secondary School Number 312 was so regular that students who did not drink and smoke stood out, uncomfortably. But even before school began in September, there came a day Zhanna would always remember.

They were living on the Garden Ring, the wide circular avenue that circumscribed central Moscow. Yeltsin had granted Nemtsov his own apartment there—it was very much the done thing at all levels of government now: a judge would get an apartment from the mayor, a regional legislator from the governor, and a member of the cabinet, like Nemtsov, from the president himself. The difference between this reward system and the old Soviet one of assigning privilege was that the new approach was more personalized and less systematized— each apartment was gifted on its own terms, at the discretion of the boss. Also, unlike the Soviet apartments, which nominally belonged to the state, these new ones became the property of the recipient, whether he stayed in his post for many years or for a few months.

An apartment on the Garden Ring was a mark of privilege and prestige. It was also a very convenient and very uncomfortable place to live: you could get anywhere in the city fast from there, but the Garden Ring itself was so heavy with traffic at all times that one could not even open the front-facing windows, so much noise and filth would burst in. They kept the windows shut, and watched an ever thicker layer of black film coat them on the outside.

But that day in August, Zhanna went up to the window and saw nothing. Where a solid flow of cars should have been, only a few could be seen—they looked like stragglers from some great escape. Something terrible must have happened. Her father had for months been talking about a looming economic crisis. This must be what that looked like.

Nemtsov had been sounding the alarm about the Russian state's mounting debt. The government's misleading laissez-faire attitude, which masqueraded as freedom, was, Nemtsov believed, simply failure to accept responsibility for an economy headed for implosion. Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, looking at the issue through the prism of his own experience as a member of the Soviet leadership, saw the triumph of the group he had found most intractable during the perestroika era. These were the heads of Soviet industry, who, in the central-planning system, held the posts of government ministers, but whom Alexander Nikolaevich called simply the Mafia.¹¹ He believed that they had once again contrived to receive—and loot— giant sums of money. Clifford Gaddy, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., made the radical claim that all of Russia's reforms of the early 1990s had failed to budge the behemoths of the command economy, which continued, in all their illogical and profoundly unprofitable ways, to dominate the Russian economy. All the trappings of the new economy—the supposed market-based prices, the competitive salaries, and the taxes—were, according to Gaddy, nothing but illusions. He called it the "virtual economy," coining the term long before the word "virtual" took on a different and more appealing meaning. He meant that the country pretended to have entered a new economic age but in reality traded through barter and never fully met any of its monetary obligations. He, too, placed the blame on the unreformed, and politically powerful, core of the command economy: the enormous inefficient companies run by the very Mafia that worried Alexander Nikolaevich. The "robber barons" who concerned Nemtsov were kings of the "virtual economy."¹²