seventeen
IN THE MORNING Masha went to church. It was Sunday, the day before Putin’s inauguration. The city was quiet—in the early days of May, Muscovites tend to their dachas, opening them up for the summer. Masha had borrowed an icon from one of the hundreds of people she had met in the last few months. He was a very wealthy man with good connections, one of many such men who were hedging their bets by helping the protests. They wanted to maintain useful relationships no matter who was in power. They gave generously to the online account opened by the protest organizers, so that after the December 10 Bolotnaya rally there was always good sound equipment and beautifully printed banners. This man kept saying to Masha that he would like to do something together—something, she took it to mean, protest-y. So she asked to borrow an icon from his famous collection of sixteenth-century Russian religious art. The man sent an icon and a bodyguard, who in this case was working as an icon-guard.
Masha took the icon and the guard and walked over to the church at the Monastery of the Holy Mandylion, a small and pretty church just by the Kremlin. She was going to engage in a fairly standard Orthodox practice, whereby an icon is brought to church for communal prayer: others pray to it and kiss it, and then it is, some believe, holier when it is returned to its regular home. While this was happening, a photographer, or a few photographers, were to snap pictures, and then Masha would explain what this was: a Prayer for the Constitution, Against Obscurantism.
People were praying. Masha was waiting for journalists to arrive, but they must have been running late. The owner of the icon called to scream at Masha for not warning him that this was an action related to Pussy Riot: in his calculus of hedging, this was too risky. The phone call meant that news of Masha’s action had already leaked. She still did not have a good shot. She would have to consider this an unsuccessful action. Masha felt strangely serene despite her failure and despite being yelled at over the phone. It must be because I’m in church, she realized.
Just then, men in civilian clothing entered. Even the church caretaker recognized them: her lips curled in, changing her expression instantly from blissful to hostile. The men took Masha to the nearest police station, where they started shouting at her.
“You are defending those bitches, those whores who danced naked on the altar with their guitars! You belong with them!”
“Faggots!” Masha shouted in response. “It’s faggots like you who are destroying Russia!”
Masha had worked out this technique over the course of five months and seven detentions. The first few times she found herself at a police station, she had tried to reason with her captors. Then one time she lost her cool and saw that shouting right back at them was much more effective. It destabilized the situation. Police officers did not expect detainees to scream at them, and Russian men did not expect women to scream at them, so the shouting broke their pattern. If she shouted in their language, hurling at them the same sorts of insults that they hurled at her, it worked even better.
They stopped shouting, and released her after three hours—the maximum amount of time they could hold her without booking. This was a relief, because Masha had a lot of work to do for the big march and rally planned for the afternoon.
—
MASHA WAS NOW AN EXPERIENCED, well-known, and occasionally jaded activist. In the winter, she got to observe the workings of the political machine, or what passed for one in Russia. As Ilya Ponomarev’s press secretary, she attended the meetings of A Just Russia in parliament. They were still talking about pedophilia. One of the deputies insisted that they needed to continue to push for chemical castration of convicted pedophiles. Yelena Mizulina, chairwoman of the Committee on the Family, was opposed. The other deputy accused her of caving to the pedophile lobby. She responded that she did more than anyone to protect the children. She had been the driving force behind the Law for the Protection of Children from Information That Harms Their Health and Development. The law had been passed back in 2010, but most of its provisions were going into effect later this year. All media, including books, magazines, and films, would need to be marked with a target age group—to prevent children from consuming harmful information. Now Mizulina was working to extend these restrictions and regulations to the Internet. This, and not chemical castration, was what protecting children was all about, she argued. Masha’s sympathies were with Mizulina at these meetings.
Masha got to observe how money worked in the parliament. Members were either wealthy or kept. The state budget gave each parliament member 200,000 rubles a month for a staff of five. That worked out to just over $1,000 a month for each staff member, in a city that now prided itself on being among the world’s most expensive. Rich parliamentarians paid their extensive staffs out of their own pockets, while the less rich accepted what they called “sponsorship” money for their aides and press secretaries. They were also likely to have a shadow staff of assistants who did not work or draw a salary but paid the parliament member themselves, in exchange for government credentials.
For Masha’s boss, politics was the family business. Ponomarev hailed from Soviet nomenklatura stock: his grandfather was a diplomat and his father’s brother was a member of the Central Committee leadership. Ilya himself became active in Soviet politics as a teenager, rising to the post of a city-level functionary in the Young Pioneers organization of Moscow. In the 1990s the entire family, including teenage Ilya, went into private business, to return to politics under Putin. Ilya’s mother was an appointed member of the upper house of parliament, and Ilya himself got a seat in the lower house in 2007 on A Just Russia’s list.
In 2006, Ponomarev carried out a textbook preventive-counterrevolution operation when he staged an officially sanctioned gathering of anti-globalism activists in St. Petersburg during a G8 summit there. The Kremlin feared that protests would disrupt the summit but also did not want to stage an obvious crackdown on that occasion. So the police detained activists when they arrived in St. Petersburg by train and transported them to a suburban stadium, where Ponomarev was chairing the forum. Many of those who were delivered to the stadium were not anti-globalism activists at all, and members of Kasparov’s United Civic Front were even ejected for chanting anti-Putin slogans, but for all the world to see—if anyone in the world could be bothered looking—St. Petersburg had a stadium full of anti-globalism activists gathering openly and legally, and Ilya Ponomarev was their leader.
On paper, most of Ponomarev’s income came from consulting fees from state-funded institutions. In 2011, he declared an income of about $330,000, and in 2012 it went up to about $370,000.1 But most of the money that Masha saw was in cash—stacks, piles, and briefcases of it—and it was not going to be reported on any income reporting forms. Ponomarev was surrounded by men Masha never would have taken seriously, especially because they were so impossibly serious themselves about their task: revolution. As far as she could tell, they thought that if they staged one, they would get laid. Some of these men said that they were anarchists, some said that they were hard-core communists, and some insisted that Masha should read a book called A Blow from Russian Gods. She looked it up. It was an antisemitic screed.2 Masha figured that Ponomarev was spending time with these men because the more visible protest activists, knowing his history as a protest spoiler, tried to avoid him. It was either that or Ponomarev was purposefully siphoning off money and energy from the protests, like when he had started a parallel organizing committee back in December. At one point Masha grew convinced that at least some of the money circulating through the office was coming from the Kremlin. She quit her job in March.
A few days later, a new amendment was proposed to the Law for the Protection of Children from Information That Harms Their Health and Development. This one would ban “propaganda of homosexuality.” Now the “pedophile lobby” would finally be vanquished. Ponomarev supported the amendment.
—
OF COURSE MASHA had not expected that the protests would change the outcome of the presidential election, in which Putin was effectively unopposed. And yet she had. There were many protests in the three months between when she had declared herself an activist and the election. After Bolotnaya there was another rally, even larger than the first one. Then there was the White Ride, when cars decorated with white ribbons circled the Garden Ring, then a march, and then the White Ring, when people stood on the sidewalks of the Garden Ring, encircling the center of town. Then there was the election, which made it all feel useless and embarrassing. The protest held in Moscow on election day felt more like a wake.
People were talking about emigrating again, but Masha realized that for perhaps the first time in her life she wanted to stay in Russia. It was interesting here—even more interesting than doing a degree in educational psychology at Oxford might be. Not that Sergei would let her take Sasha out of the country to live. But her son was doing well in preschool, and Sergei, now that he was remarried, had resumed his parenting responsibilities. After Masha quit her job at Ponomarev’s office, she and Anastasia went to India on vacation. They lay on the beach in Goa, but Moscow kept pinging. The multimillionaire with the icon collection wanted to start an organization called Russia for All, and wanted Masha to run it. A friend from Solidarity wanted to organize a protest. Everyone wanted to organize a protest, in fact. The big one. The one that would finally make a difference. It seemed there was only one chance left for that: the inauguration.
The city issued a permit for a march and rally on the eve of the inauguration. They would allow protesters to walk down Bolshaya Yakimanka, the street that ran from the giant Lenin monument to Bolotny Island, and then to a rally at Bolotnaya Square.* Udaltsov, the guy who seemed to think he was Lenin, named the protest the March of Millions. People around the country were raising money so they could attend, but this was unlikely to make it large enough to justify the name. And what could the organizers do to make this one count, aside from giving it a grandiose name? As it was, they were having trouble convincing people to speak at the rally. “What’s there to say?” they heard again and again. Two days before the march, five men—Kasparov, Navalny, Nemtsov, Udaltsov, and Yashin—gathered to discuss. Someone suggested staging a sit-in. Nemtsov and Udaltsov shot the idea down. Nemtsov refused to challenge the ethos of the nonconfrontational protest; Udaltsov frowned on the idea of passive resistance.
Masha’s job was to get journalists to the press area in front of the stage. She was good at this: she knew all the reporters, all the reporters knew her, and she had a loud voice. She stood by the stage as people wandered in slowly from the march: there was always this moment of idleness, when everyone was trying to decide whether to stay for the rally or go to a café instead. A few teenagers from the Protest Workshop stationed themselves at the turnout from the street to the island with a couple of megaphones, and shouted out funny rhymed slogans to keep protesters entertained. Then there was commotion to Masha’s right, just where the crowd was meant to turn. It seemed big. Or bad. The volunteers’ two-way radios stopped working. Cellular networks were either jammed or overloaded—the phone was no use. Masha made her way over.
Navalny was sitting on the ground. He was surrounded by journalists with cameras and microphones. This did not suit his purposes. The journalists refused to either sit down or move out of the way. No one could see Navalny’s sit-in, so no one was joining in. Masha looked at her iPhone: it was a little after five in the afternoon. The rally was supposed to start now.
Then there were blows. It did not feel serious—Masha had seen worse back in December—but the riot police had their rubber batons out and blows were landing. A baton reached over the shoulders of people standing behind Masha and hit a woman on the head. The woman slumped and crumpled on the ground. Masha heard herself screaming.
“Call an ambulance!”
She turned around to face a helmeted head.
“Call an ambulance!”
A face behind the glass of the helmet came into focus.
“We don’t have orders,” it said.
Masha started screaming louder.
Someone threw a smoke grenade. How in the world had they managed to bring it in, through the metal detectors, the bag search, and the double cordon? Someone threw another object, which broke on contact with someone else’s shoulder. It was a thermos liner, guaranteed to break into a thousand brittle pieces. Police were pushing from the back and from the sides. In front of Masha, Navalny and several other men, including Nemtsov and Yashin, were sitting on the ground. The woman was lying on the pavement. Masha was pushing back in every direction and screaming like she had never screamed before. The line of riot police parted for a moment and Masha was squeezed out to the other side, as the cops carried the unconscious woman out. The police closed ranks behind her. Masha stood in an emptiness. She was no longer screaming, and it was almost quiet.
Behind Masha, behind a ring formed by the riot police, fighting seemed to continue. In front of her, four rows of interior troops—eighteen-year-old conscripts in gray uniforms—stretched across the bridge that led over the Moscow River to the Kremlin. Behind them, orange street-washing vehicles formed another barrier. They were so afraid of the protesters in the Kremlin apparently that they thought they needed to wage war just to protect themselves. Masha walked toward the interior troops, holding up her iPhone to film them as she got closer.
“Russia has a constitution,” she said to the conscripts. “You are violating it. The orders you’ve been given are criminal. After the Nuremberg trials, generals who gave criminal orders were hanged. And our soldiers hanged German soldiers who had followed criminal orders. That’s what happens to people who commit crimes.”
“Orders are not to be discussed,” said several of the conscripts in unison.
“Oh yes they are,” said Masha. “They are too to be discussed, if they contradict the law of the land.”
“No talking!”
The voice came from Masha’s left. The conscripts visibly clammed up. She was now just a few steps from the front row of soldiers. She stopped and held her iPhone above her head, and kept filming.
“Step forward!” the invisible voice commanded.
The conscripts, arms linked, about 150 across, took a step toward her. Then another. Masha kept talking.
“You are violating your oath. You are just like the czar over there.”
Masha became aware that she was being filmed by someone else, apparently a journalist. She could not see him, but she could hear his voice. He was worried for her. “Don’t,” he was saying. “They won’t understand.”
She kept talking.
“You guys are so young, much younger than I am, though I am not that old yet. You have no idea how frightening it is to live in this country, with that czar that you are guarding now, when you have a child.”
“Step forward!”
“One more!”
Masha still had her arms up in the air, holding the iPhone aloft, and the boys’ shoulders were now brushing her bare underarms. She could feel their titillation. She kept talking. She talked for another four minutes straight. The boys stood still and silent. Finally, a lieutenant came up, a blond guy with a heavy jaw, scarcely older than his soldiers.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Where do you get your information?” Masha asked what seemed at the moment a logical question.
“There,” said the lieutenant, and he nodded at the pavement for some reason. “Television,” he added a moment later.
“Who controls the television?” This was the journalist with the video camera speaking.
“The authorities do,” said the lieutenant.
Masha tried to point out to him that getting information about the authorities from the authorities might not be wise. After a few minutes, he asked the journalist to turn off his camera. Then he told Masha that the truth was found in the book Blows from the Russian Gods, the screed that had been recommended to Masha once before. It purported to “uncover the real crimes of the Jews,” who had taken over the world. One subsection was called “The Sexual Traits of the Jews.” It began with homosexuality: “Not only was homosexuality widespread among the ancient Jews but it was known to take over entire cities, such as Sodom and Gomorrah, for example.” The lieutenant told Masha that every soldier in his platoon had received a copy of this book.3
—
MAY 6 WAS A LONG DAY. It began with being dragged in to the police for praying for the wrong things, continued with an intimate conversation with six hundred interior troops, and went on to another police station, where Navalny and Nemtsov had been taken. Some people from the protest had walked here on their own and were milling around outside. One had a megaphone: the Protest Workshop had bought more than a dozen of them at one point. Masha took the megaphone, fished a copy of the Constitution out of her shoulder bag, and began declaiming, starting with Article 31. She was carried right into the station. Nemtsov and Navalny were in the holding cell, and Masha was instructed to wait outside it, in what might have been called the lobby. She put the Constitution back in her bag, fished out a copy of Time magazine’s “World’s Most Influential People: 2012” issue,4 opened it to the page with Navalny’s picture on it, handed it to him, and told him to look serious. It was a good photograph, with Navalny’s forearm stuck through the bars, his hand holding the magazine, his face somber and a little wistful. She e-mailed it to her boyfriend, who was a photographer with the Associated Press. The following day the picture was published all over the world.5
Maybe the most important thing that had happened to Masha since she became an activist was that she had fallen in love. Sergey was somewhere out there today, documenting the carnage. It went well into the night, when police continued to chase people down side streets. More than six hundred were detained, more than fifty hospitalized, though many more had been injured.6 The day never ended, in fact. Most people were released, and some continued to protest the following day, all over the center of town. Riot police detained people merely for wearing white ribbons. Groups of police in bulletproof vests and helmets chased groups who seemed merely to be strolling through the town, loaded them onto buses, took them to police stations, released them three hours later without booking, and started all over again. Nemtsov was detained while drinking coffee at a sidewalk café; riot police turned over tables in the process.7 Masha spent the day riding around on a kick scooter. She read the Constitution to riot police, got detained, gave interviews, got detained. Meanwhile, in the Kremlin, Putin was inaugurated for his official third presidential term.
—
MASHA WAS IN LOVE. The cat-and-mouse game with the police continued for another couple of weeks. For a few days, people even set up an Occupy-style camp (though without the tents, because that would be illegal), and then that was broken up. And Masha was still in love. She took Sasha to her mother-in-law, who had a dacha a couple of hours outside Moscow, and then she and Sergey went on their first trip together. He was photographing the European Cup, which was held in Ukraine and Poland that year. Masha liked Donetsk, the eastern Ukrainian city where a new stadium had been built for the tournament8 and the airport had been refurbished.9 The city looked like a glossy-magazine version of Europe. Masha had a seat in the fan zone. She had never imagined that she would find soccer mesmerizing, but she did. She told Sergey that she could physically feel the release of testosterone all around her. It was an awesome trip.
—
MASHA FLEW BACK from Poland on June 10, because she was scheduled to attend the summer session of the Moscow School for Political Studies, a gathering of like-minded journalists and social scientists held just outside the city. Masha’s phone rang at eight-fifteen on June 11. It was Nemtsov’s assistant.
“Everyone’s apartment is being searched,” she said. Police had come to Navalny’s, Udaltsov’s, Yashin’s, and other activists’ apartments. They had come to Nemtsov’s, too, but he was out of town.10 Masha had an excruciating hangover. She had told Aishat, the nanny, not to open the door if anyone rang the bell—even though Sasha was at his grandmother’s dacha for the summer, Aishat, who had fled Baku in 1990, when her husband was killed in the pogroms there, always stayed the summer with her employer. Aishat was not picking up. Masha lay on the bed, waves of sleep and nausea floating over her.
Her phone rang again. She did not recognize the number.
“Hello, Maria Nikolaevna. This is Captain Timofei Vladimirovich Grachev from Head Investigative Directorate. You are suspected of inciting, organizing, and participating in a riot. A subpoena has been left at your place of residence, with Baku native Aishat.” He pronounced the nanny’s patronymic and last name: “Who appears to be residing there without proper registration.”
“Go fuck yourself,” said Masha, and hung up.
Aishat still was not answering. Masha lay on the bed some more, then sat up and called the investigator back.
“Look, I haven’t seen any subpoena. I’ll think about whether I want to talk to you after the weekend.” It was the Monday of a long holiday weekend—the next workday was two days away.
It was past noon by the time Aishat picked up. She said she was very sorry: she knew she was not supposed to open the door, but the police were banging on it with something heavy and she thought they might break it down. She was very sorry, but she was quitting. Masha said she was very sorry too and would pay Aishat three months’ severance.
Masha was most concerned that the police had found her stash of pot. As it turned out, they had not taken it. Nor had they taken any of a number of financial documents that would have been sufficient to slap together a case against her. What they did take: fifteen white ribbons, a bag of black round buttons with pink triangles—activists had started wearing them to signify their opposition to the proposed “propaganda of homosexuality” amendment—a copy of Nemtsov’s Putin: An Accounting, and an old laptop where Masha stored Sasha’s study aids and all the photographs she had taken of him since birth. They took printed photographs too: Masha’s pregnancy, Masha’s marriage, and every single photo of Tatiana that Masha had.
—
CAPTAIN GRACHEV WAS a lanky guy around Masha’s age, with good hair and a lousy haircut. He had been dispatched to Moscow from the prosecutor’s office in the Tver region, three hours away, to help investigate the Bolotnoye case. It was apparently going to be big. He told Masha that he had just arrived in Moscow when he was sent to search her apartment.
“When I saw those pink triangles, I thought it was some children’s game or something, and put them back,” he said. But there was a more experienced Moscow officer there. “He says, ‘Are you kidding? That’s the LGBT movement.’ I was like, ‘What’s LGBT?’ He goes, ‘Just take it.’” A few weeks into their frequent meetings Masha and Captain Grachev were so comfortable with each other that Masha asked him why he had not taken the marijuana as evidence from her apartment.
“We didn’t even take cocaine from another search,” he explained. “That’s not what we were there for. They told us to look for political propaganda.”
Masha and Captain Grachev were using the informal pronoun to address each other. He even allowed Masha to visit her son at the dacha. Other defendants in her case—she did not know them, but she knew that they existed—were under arrest, and Masha was lucky simply to be restricted to staying in Moscow. She had been unable to go to a friend’s dacha on the tenth anniversary of Tatiana’s death: she hated the idea of being alone or with the wrong people that day, but she hated the idea of asking for permission even more. But later she grew more comfortable, and she missed Sasha so much.
Masha’s mother-in-law, like Masha’s ex-husband, was a chemist. She worked for an applied-science institute that was not high on the academic socioeconomic ladder, which meant that the village where its staff researchers were allotted plots was a fair distance from Moscow, all the way in the Tver region. In fact, the institute ruled over only half the village—the other half belonged to the prosecutor’s office. This was how Masha’s mother-in-law came to spend her summers next door to a colonel from the Investigative Committee in the city of Konakovo, Tver region. Masha had met the colonel over the course of several summers. Her name was Natalia, she was forty or so, and she took care of her sixty-year-old mother and eighty-year-old grandmother as well as two kids: her own young daughter and a boy Sasha’s age, the son of Natalia’s sister who had a bad drug problem. Natalia seemed to work like a dog without taking any interest in the substance of her work: she cared only that she had a lot of mouths to feed. When she was not working, she was sleeping. In between, she smoked cigarettes, a habit that she kept secret from her mother and grandmother. Masha was her smoking buddy.
“Hey, you are part of the Bolotnoye case, aren’t you?” she asked when they were having a cigarette Masha’s first night at the dacha. It was cool and quiet and you could see the stars.
“Yeah,” said Masha.
“Who is your investigator?”
“Grachev.”
“Ah, Timokha!” Natalia’s voice sang with the joy of recognition. “He is one of mine. I had to send three people. It’s a big case. He doing his job?”
“Oh, he is doing his job, all right.”
“Good. Say hi to him there.”
The following morning, when Masha woke up in her loft bed, there were three six-year-old children playing below. She listened to their voices. They were playing with Legos. One of those children is my son and another is the son of the boss of the man who will send me to prison for two years, she thought. It sounded complicated, but it was so simple: she was passing to another side of existence easily, surrounded by familiar faces all the way.
—
SHE HAD TO REPORT to Captain Grachev’s office twice a week, at ten in the morning. He would name names and ask Masha if she knew the person. If she had the person’s permission, she would say yes. If not, she would say that she did not recall—and often, she did not. Captain Grachev would give her things to look at: “Please familiarize yourself.” Then he would place an object in front of her—like, say, the flag of the Libertarian Party. Why? She did not know, and he probably did not either. Then there was an endless parade of police photographs. Sheet after sheet of typing paper with two or three photographs glued to each. Other people’s bedrooms, desks, closets, letters, pictures, other people’s white ribbons. They belonged to Masha’s co-defendants. The photographs were taken during searches of their apartments. Somewhere else in this building, or across town, a dozen strangers were looking at pictures of Sasha’s bedroom and pictures of pictures of Tatiana. Then there were photographs of all the material evidence recovered at Bolotnaya, the debris of thousands of people under attack: broken cigarette lighters, crushed Bic pens, lost passports that had been stomped upon by a thousand feet. Object after object that had no meaning to Masha, in poor resolution, under a flickering neon light. The point of this is to drown me in senselessness, thought Masha.
Starting on December 20, Masha was required to appear at Captain Grachev’s office daily. She dropped Sasha off at the English-language preschool, had coffee with the journalist mothers, and then they went to work while she went to the Investigative Committee. She was no longer living in the apartment where she grew up. There had been many reasons to get out after the search. One was that a woman from social services had come around and told Masha that she had information that Masha was bisexual and therefore an unfit parent. Another was that the logistics of her life no longer allowed her to live so far from the center of the city. At first she stayed with Sergey, but, of course, Sergey had not signed up for this—the constant surveillance, the telephone harassment, and a girlfriend who could not leave the legal limits of the city. So now Masha was renting an apartment in town.
She was reading the case, one giant binder at a time. It amused her at first, this experience of viewing what had been her life for six months—the protests and the people in them—through the eyes of people who could not comprehend it. Everything seemed sinister to them. They were scared of white ribbons and Twitter. But this got tired fast. The binders kept coming. The drowning sensation intensified. Masha wanted to sign the forms without reading, but the investigator who was in the room with her at all times told her this was not allowed. This guy was a senior lieutenant—one step below Captain Grachev, and a couple of years younger—sent there from Bryansk, in southwestern Russia. Masha’s eyes hurt from reading, so she kept talking with him. He and his wife had been trying to get pregnant for years, and it was not working. Now they were on to IVF, and it still was not taking. Masha had had this experience herself. She tried to reassure the senior lieutenant.
At the end of winter her savings ran out. She went to ask Nemtsov for a job. She needed an employer who could understand her unconventional schedule, and she knew that Nemtsov’s organization was getting some money from an American democracy-building fund. He said that there was not enough money to hire her but he could introduce her to a friend who ran a restaurant chain. Masha was willing to wait tables, but even at a restaurant she could not make her hours work. She posted in an online community for foreign correspondents in Moscow: “I want to work as a fixer.” Many of these people knew her and knew that she spoke English and could get access to anyone and anything. She started getting some work. It was not enough, and friends lent her money too. Once she had watched a few journalists at work, she realized that she could try doing what they did. She started writing for a Moscow city magazine and then for TV Rain, an independent television channel that, since its founding just a couple of years earlier, had assembled an audience of millions even though the channel was available only to cable and satellite viewers.
The trial began on June 2, more than a year after the protest at the center of the case. Masha saw her co-defendants. Ten men, ranging in age from college student to retiree, were squeezed into a plastic aquarium. They stood, holding their hands behind their backs, the way inmates do when they face law enforcement. All of them had spent the last year behind bars. Another co-defendant, eighteen at the time of her arrest, had spent the year under house arrest. Masha felt piercing guilt. How could she have been feeling sorry for herself, feeling like she deserved other people’s sympathy and help, when she had been allowed to walk around and see her child every night this last year?
The trial did not feel that different from the investigation. Masha had seen the women of Pussy Riot on trial a year earlier. That had been bizarre, a veritable witch trial, but it had a dramaturgy to it. This trial had no rhythm, no beginning or end. Most days passed in arguments between lawyers and the judge about admissibility, order of admissibility, and the like. None of it seemed connected to the case, absurd as the case was. The defendants’ charges ranged from “participation in public unrest” to “use of force against authorities,” with potential sentences of up to five years. There were too many defendants and too many lawyers, and they were all too different to be able to coordinate their actions. At first, they tried. When the oldest of the men in the aquarium, Sergei Krivov, declared that he was boycotting the court and refused to answer any questions, the rest of them went silent too. But the next day Krivov broke his pledge without warning.
Journalists soon grew tired of the proceedings—there was nothing to report—and stopped coming. Every so often, Masha would write an outraged Facebook post to the effect that these twelve people had been abandoned, and some journalists and activists would show up for a day or two. Then they would return to their lives.
Sasha started first grade at one of the better public schools in town. Fortunately, the school was on the same Metro line as the court. But then the trial was moved to a courthouse on the outskirts, and the length of Masha’s morning commute tripled.
Everyone referred to it as the Bolotnoye case—the “swampy case.” Exactly. Even the drowning was protracted and amorphous. Masha’s body began to betray her. She developed sores. By November she was throwing up blood. The doctors said they could find nothing wrong with her.