The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Whether one focused on debt, on the remaining influence of the Soviet economic lobby, or on the imaginary nature of the new Russian economy, these critics—who included a number-three member of the cabinet—agreed that the situation was untenable and the government was in denial. Nemtsov had been proposing monetary reform, which would have included dropping the value of the ruble—thereby perhaps making the entire monetary system a little less "virtual"—but these proposals were rejected. Instead, Russia borrowed more and more heavily, to prop up the currency. The debt became a pyramid, which collapsed in August 1998. This was "default"—a word Boris Nemtsov read on the newswires and Zhanna heard on the radio. Russia stopped servicing its debt, the people went into a panic, the banks stopped giving out cash, and cars stopped running up and down the Garden Ring.

Nemtsov wanted to resign from the cabinet but Raisa said, "You were not the one who defaulted, and you shouldn't be the one who resigns." Yeltsin said something essentially similar: he fired much of the rest of the cabinet, but kept Nemtsov. But, weakened politically by the crash, Yeltsin could not hope to push a premier of his own choosing through parliament. A seventy-year-old veteran of the foreign intelligence service who embodied the crumpled-gray-suit ethos of the Soviet bureaucrat, Yevgeniy Primakov, was finally confirmed to run the government. Nemtsov resigned: there was nothing he was going to be able to do in a Primakov cabinet.

Time slowed instantly. After New Year's, the family flew to America. They stayed at Harvard for a month. Nemtsov lectured on the Russian economy, arguing that it was in need of a profound restructuring and a deep cleansing.¹³ The family was given a room in a university residence hall. It had cracking plaster on the ceiling, creaky bunk beds, and, as it turned out, bedbugs. Boris complained, and a professor set them up in his own apartment, which he was not using. Zhanna was allowed to attend classes at a nearby private school in Cambridge. She was happy. Things were better than they had been in years. After Harvard they went to New York, where the slow, intimate life of temporary exiles continued.

back in russia, politics was speeding up. On March 24, 1999, NATO forces began bombing Serbia in response to the Yugoslav army's actions in Kosovo. Prime Minister Primakov happened to be on his way to the United States when the bombing began. The insult and the injury were on display. Russians had long considered the Orthodox Serbs to be their existential allies. Kosovo was, legally, a part of Serbia —a secessionist, Muslim part—and the parallels to Chechnya were obvious. Primakov was mere hours from arriving in the United States, where President Bill Clinton might at least have paid lip service to consulting him, and not doing so was an affront. Primakov turned his plane around and returned to Russia.

The following day, Masha's class had a field trip to the Lev Tolstoy Library on Lev Tolstoy Street. They had recently read Lev Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, at the end of which Anna's love, the endlessly desirable Vronsky, volunteers to fight on the side of the Serbs against the Ottoman Empire. As they walked down Lev Tolstoy Street, the tenth-graders discussed the NATO bombings of Serbia. It was an outrage, they agreed, a betrayal, and practically an American attack on Russia. For Masha, this was a moment when the two most authoritative and passionate voices in her head—the one of the militarized sailing club and the one of her cinephile mother—finally came together in a single fervor. The Americans were bombing Masha's Serbian brethren in the land of the great director Emir Kusturica.

In a survey conducted by Gudkov's colleagues, a majority of the respondents—52 percent—said they felt "outrage" at the bombing, and 92 percent said they believed the bombing campaign was illegal. Twenty-six percent said they felt "anxiety," and 13 percent confessed to feeling "fear."¹⁴ Gudkov sensed that all three emotions—outrage, anxiety, and fear—were stand-ins for "humiliation," the sense that Russia's loss of status in the world had just been shoved in the country's face. Primakov's dramatic sulk over the Atlantic had reinforced this sentiment.