The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

It was now clear that even back in 1996, when the contest between Yeltsin and his Communist challenger, Gennady Zyuganov, was filled with desperate rancor, the two candidates' political platforms were interchangeable: both contained vague promises of building a market economy with a human face. Now, in a country united by two waves of strong emotions in one year—first in response to the NATO bombing of Serbia and then, more profoundly, in reaction to the apartment-building explosions and the war in Chechnya—there was no room at all for difference. Two new political parties appeared just before the election. One, Yedinstvo ("Unity"), was formed by the Kremlin for the express purpose of supporting Putin's ascendancy to the throne. The other, the Union of Right Forces, was its nominal liberal opponent, but it too supported Putin and the war in Chechnya. They differed mostly in style, with the Union of Right Forces—which included Nemtsov among its five leaders—appealing to a younger, more educated audience, the same people who had most vocally opposed the first war in Chechnya. In Solikamsk, fourteen-year-old Lyosha was observing this neat nondivision division clearly: his aunts, who had supported the Communists as long as he could remember, were now in favor of Unity, while his mother's more

sophisticated friends donned T-shirts brought to town by the Union of Right Forces; they were emblazoned with the phrase "You Are Right." There was no disagreement among his mother's friends and her family, though, because all of them were positively in thrall to Putin.

Gudkov started thinking that "political party" and "election" were just two more Western terms that could not be used in Russian— except to mislead. A more precise term could be borrowed from Max Weber, whom Levada had had Gudkov study all those years ago. The term was "acclamation," a process by which the governed affirm a choice already made for them.²¹

But Russians were acclaiming not only the candidates chosen for them by the bureaucracy—Putin chief among them—but also themselves, reaching for a sense of belonging, a sense of being with the majority that had been lost with the Soviet Union. What was felt as a void in the early 1990s had gradually been transformed into nostalgia, and now it could be focused on one person. It was precisely Putin's lack of distinction, which had made Gudkov think that he was a temporary figure, that in fact made him the perfect embodiment of the Soviet leadership style. In his person, charisma met bureaucracy.

Gudkov and Dubin included these observations in their article about the December 1999 parliamentary election, which they titled "The Time of the 'Gray People.'" They meant that the distinction between supposedly competing parties was as minor as the difference between gray and black—specifically that the so-called reformers had diluted their agenda to such an extent that they could stand out only against the pitch-black background of total Soviet nostalgia. The headline also contained a literary reference, to a novel called Hard to Be a God, a piece of science fiction by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which the Soviet intelligentsia of the 1980s read and quoted like the Bible. The novel described a future academic-history experiment involving an artificially assembled civilization from the human Middle Ages. "The Gray Ones" in the novel are the shock troops of a man who appears to be an interim ruler, someone dispatched by stronger—and darker—forces to clear the land. The

Gray Ones wage war on what they see as dangerous liberal ideas and on enlightenment as such. The Gray Ones, and their gray cardinal of a leader, appear inept, and come off as saboteurs rather than statesmen, yet they turn out to have infinite staying power.²² Gudkov and Dubin were thinking of no such scenario, though: when they chose the title for their article, they had in mind only the image of gray against black.²³

PART FOUR

RESURRECTION

eleven

LIFE AFTER DEATH

on December 31, 1999, Lyosha, his mother, his stepfather, his aunt, and her son all drove out to the countryside to celebrate New Year's with Lyosha's grandmother. Serafima Adamovna greeted them on the porch. She looked devastated.

"Yeltsin is leaving," she said.

All of them stood there, stricken by this news. They had been abandoned. How was this even possible?

In the house, the television was on. Yeltsin had already announced his resignation, and now the news anchors were talking about it, showing clips of Yeltsin's speech—he looked like he was crying—and other footage that showed that while Lyosha and his family were driving, the country had moved on.