The Wily CountryMarch/April 2020 159
public memory, an instance o civil
society in action, and a chance to link an
honest discussion o history with the
new directions o¤ Russian political life.
For a while, the museum did its job,
hosting exhibitions that authorities
sometimes saw as unwelcome provoca-
tions. Then, around 2014, the di¾culties
began. State control supplanted indepen-
dent leadership, and a museum that had
registered criticism o the Soviet regime
yielded to one that celebrated victory in
World War II. It was an emblematic
transition: in Putin’s Russia, either the
institutions o civil society are absorbed
into the regime or they cease to exist.
The second act begins in 2000, when
Putin took power, which Yaa recalls as
“a moment between the abject chaos
and hardship o the nineties and the
routinized, top-down strictures o the
vertical o power that would descend in
the years to come.” Putin bestowed
prosperity with one hand and dished out
repression with the other, not depriving
Russians o their newfound freedoms so
much as forcing those freedoms into
the margins, where they would not
disrupt the government’s hold on power.
Some Russians stood to bene¥t from
the relative stability o early Putinism.
To do so, they had to make their peace
with the Kremlin’s imperatives, assisting
when requested and avoiding criticism
that might have proved destabilizing.
In Yaa’s telling, the system depends
on more than run-of-the-mill opportun-
ism and coercion. He probes the
evolution o the human rights advocate
Heda Saratova, who is not motivated
by money or personal gain but whose
work is made easier by government
support. Over time, she starts to cooper-
ate with Chechnya’s strongman ruler,For more than two decades after the
Soviet collapse, U.S. analysts and policy-
makers saw Russia as predisposed to
mirror the United States in political
economy and culture. Russia, however,
stubbornly refused to do so. In 2014,
when Russian President Vladimir Putin
invaded and annexed Crimea, the
U.S.-Russian divergence was complete.
In the years since, Washington’s anger and
disappointment over Russia’s course
have boiled over, especially after Moscow
meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential
election. According to a view common
among American pundits, Russia has
become a rogue state, an unnatural entity
more akin to a criminal enterprise than a
nation-state. And yet after a long series
o dashed expectations, many still believe
that one day the rogue will vanish and
the “real” Russia will ¥nally emerge. This
is a fantasy. The sober intellectual chore o
U.S. policymakers and Russia watchers
is to understand Russian recalcitrance and
tease out the non-Western trajectory o
this sprawling country on Europe’s edge.
THE STORY SO FAR
Yaa’s book unfolds in three acts. The
¥rst act chronicles a phase o relative
openness in Russian society during the
1990s, when personal freedom was
palpable; both the Soviet past and the
Russian future were bracingly uncer-
tain, both susceptible to interpretation
and reinterpretation. But this period
was shadowed by the chaotic shift from
one form o government to another, in
which executive authority expanded in
direct proportion to the loss o demo-
cratic agency. In a poignant chapter set
partly during this time, Yaa details the
construction o a gulag museum in
Siberia. Opened in 1996, it was a site o