The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Masha was impressed, though. He was an intelligence officer. Soviet intelligence officers were a special breed. Masha had binge- watched films about them when she was sick one time, at her grandmother's apartment. There was the miniseries TASS Is Authorized to Declare, in which a flawless and brilliant KGB officer exposes an American spy in Moscow. The spy's handler, an American called John Glabb, is pure evil: not only does he organize pro- American military coups in small African countries, but he also traffics in heroin, which he packs into the bodies of infants purchased from impoverished families and killed for this purpose. He is also married to the scion of a Nazi fortune.¹⁷ Another film was Dead Season, in which a Soviet intelligence officer working deep undercover captures a former Nazi doctor now working for one of the Western powers. The doctor has developed a potion that turns off individual will.¹⁸

Masha had also read a lot of books of the sort on which these films were based. Her grandmother had an endless supply of them. The glossy jackets had all been lost, so the books were plain brown or gray. The aesthetic uniformity of the outside matched the contents, which reliably delivered a light thrill followed by a sense that all was right with the world. Around eighth grade Masha graduated from the gray and brown books to black hardcovers with red letters, the complete translations of Arthur Conan Doyle in eight volumes. Here the thrill was greater but the moral-satisfaction quotient lower. Masha missed that feeling.

"I hope he is our next president," she said of Putin.

like most people he knew, Gudkov assumed that Putin would be a temporary figure, a placeholder picked by a leader who was feeling disoriented. Unlike most people he knew, though, Gudkov was painfully aware of the expectations most Russians were placing on the country's next president: they wanted a savior, a leader who would be not merely decisive but dominating. Putin hardly seemed suited for that role: he had no history and no presence.

What happened over the next few months looked unbelievable. From August to November 1999 the number of those who answered "Yes" to the question "Do you think that Vladimir Putin is, on the whole, doing a good job?" shot up from 31 to 80 percent, and the number of those who answered "No" dropped from 33 to 12. On a graph, it looked like two vertical lines, a blue one going up and a red one shooting down.¹⁹ It looked like nothing Gudkov had ever seen.

Deeper questioning revealed a process akin to magic. Russia had been in a state that Gudkov could only describe as depression—more a psychological than an economic one. The financial crisis of 1998, coming as it did just when life was starting to seem normal again and when hope had seemed warranted, had plunged people into the darkest darkness—precisely because it crushed the very fragile fresh sprouts of hope. Economically, people regained their footing relatively fast, but emotions did not follow—until Putin came along and eight out of ten Russians miraculously regained hope just by looking at him.

Politically, on the face of it, things looked anything but hopeful. In August and September the country was shocked by a series of apartment-building explosions that killed 293 people and injured more than a thousand. The government used the bombings as a pretext to launch a new offensive in Chechnya, reigniting the war that had once nearly cost Yeltsin the presidency. This time, though, Gudkov observed that while Russians' hearts ached for the young men being sent to fight the war, virtually no one seemed to feel sympathy for the civilians in Chechnya, their ostensible countrymen who were once again being bombed. Another thing made this war different from the first Chechen one: this time the Russian offensive was seen as spearheaded by a leader. If Yeltsin came across as desperate and flailing when he began his war in 1994, then his own prime minister, restarting the war five years later, came across as brave, and as a defender of ordinary Russians. This impression was based primarily on a single utterance Putin made in response to the apartment-building bombings: "We will pursue terrorists wherever they are. At the airport, if they are at the airport. And that means, I apologize, that if we catch them going to the bathroom, then we will rub them out in the outhouse, if it comes to that. That's it, the issue is closed."

A majority saw courage and determination in Putin's phrasing, and this distinguished him from Yeltsin. Some were charmed by his hint at modesty and reason—"I apologize" and "if it comes to that" played to this audience. On the whole, he came off as being one of the people, and yet ready to lead the people.