A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  Aleksandr hated Putin with a hatred that felt personal. When he remembered the others—Brezhnev and the decrepit, staggering parade of geriatrics thereafter—he didn’t remember a feeling so urgent as his hatred for Putin. Putin’s first act in office was to restore the Soviet national anthem. When Aleksandr heard the song again, after a nine-year gap, he saw Elizabeta walking down the aisle, applauded by bureaucrats, and he almost threw up.

  “Aleksandr,” said Nina. “Do you think you’re taking all this a little too seriously?”

  After the bombing—after seeing the little girl’s blue penguin shirt streaked with arterial blood, and after crawling to her across a ruined marble floor—he felt less tolerant of his own life. Nina cajoled him into returning to his old ways, but they didn’t take. The caviar stuck in his throat. The nights out seemed empty. He found himself thinking more and more about Ivan and how Ivan would have lived, if he’d lived. Ivan wouldn’t have spent a decade in strenuous appeasement of the regime. Ivan wouldn’t have spent the budding years of democracy slowly poaching in hot tubs, one indifferent young woman on each arm. Every morning Aleksandr arose and looked at himself in the mirror and tried to remember who he’d been when he’d been brave.

  His friends—his rich friends, who still enjoyed their caviar—told him that if he was so bothered by it all, he should throw his weight behind the fledgling pro-reform movement. He was a national hero, after all, an icon of chess, which was purer than religion and more elegant than sport. He had money. If he had ideas, he might make himself a figure. Did he have ideas?

  He did have ideas, though they were vague—he was pro-business, anti-corruption, pro-transparency, pro–civil liberties. He was a capitalist. He was a realist. But at first he wanted to support an umbrella network of oppositional groups—believing that a robust opposition was the initial and most necessary step—and he started by contacting anyone who was willing to be publicly defiant, including earnest reformers, conspiracy theorists, quacks, and leftist loonies. At early meetings, he’d regularly see pictures of Trotsky fluttering alongside posters quoting Milton Friedman. They called it Alternative Russia.

  “I don’t like them smoking in the house,” said Nina.

  At first, all they did was talk. They agreed that the post-Communist kleptocracy was only marginally better, in some ways, than the teetering incompetence of late-stage Communism—and in other ways, it was perhaps worse. They agreed that the regime’s indifference was so callous that it could hardly be called indifference at all. As time passed, Putin gave them more to talk about. After the bombings came the sailors abandoned on the Kursk, a nuclear submarine that sank quietly in the Barents Sea during Putin’s first summer in office. Later, it was clear from the notes they wrote on their bodies that some of them had lived for days, while the Kremlin insisted that they were already dead, while the offers of help from the Brits and the Norwegians were ignored, while Putin continued his vacation on the beach.

  Then there were the theatergoers in the fall of 2002, dead in a horrifically botched hostage rescue attempt. They’d crawled out gagging from state-issued morphine and died in the snow when the Kremlin didn’t think to call any ambulances. Aleksandr talked about this in Alternative Russia meetings. He also talked about it quite a bit outside them.

  “Stop talking about this stuff all the time,” said Nina. “You’re being morbid.”

  “I’m not morbid. Life is morbid. Reality is morbid. Our governmental system is morbid.”

  “If I hear you refer to our ‘governmental system’ one more time, I’m going to die of boredom.”

  “Please don’t let me stop you.”

  In 2004 came the school siege at Beslan: the children held hostage for days, then killed when the government stormed the school with tanks and thermobaric weapons. A year later, the parents of the dead children went to Moscow to demand their own arrest—they’d voted for Putin, they said, and thus were culpable for the murders of their children.

  Though Aleksandr was keen at calculation—at weighing the consequences of rational self-interest—he could never quite understand any of it. What was in it for the state to watch hundreds vomit and die in the elegant Moscow streets, to let sailors write goodbyes on their bodies and choke to death on their own carbon dioxide? There was ineptitude, yes, but it was hard to believe that was all: it was a murderous apathy that amounted to sadism. It reminded Aleksandr of how, when the infant mortality rate had grown troubling under Communism, the Party had decided to simply subsidize more births.

  Nina came and sat next to Aleksandr on the bed. “It’s sad, Aleksandr. Of course it’s sad. But it’s really none of our business.”

  Then came the string of assassinations. There was Anna Politkovskaya from Novaya Gazeta, who’d survived poisoning and Chechnya only to be shot down in the stairwell of her own apartment building.

  There was the ex-KGB man in London who’d been poisoned with radioactive sushi by men who had disappeared back into the teeming English mists; a man who’d turned colors people should never turn, who’d lain on his deathbed and pointed an accusatory finger back at the East.

  There was a journalist for a Russian business magazine who’d been reporting on Putin’s attempts to illegally sell arms to Syria and Iran by routing them through Belarus. He’d had a son about to enter college and a daughter about to deliver his first grandchild. He’d gone out one day to buy oranges, come home, and thrown himself out his window, according to the official report.

  “Are you seeing this, Nina? Are you reading this stuff?”

  Nina rolled her eyes and flopped over in bed. But Aleksandr was thinking.

  “Stop,” she said. “I can hear you thinking.”

  Over the years, Aleksandr had come to view Putin as erratic and somewhat unpredictable. He wasn’t puritanical; he did not strike out every chord of dissent. He was tolerant, almost magnanimous, when it came to the papers. The token one, Novaya Gazeta, was especially mouthy—even after Anna Politkovskaya’s death—though Aleksandr fully believed that Putin allowed it in order to earn himself a faint glaze of democratic credibility. He liked being able to bring the paper to Brussels and say: See? See what I let them write about me? But Putin did crack down on what counted, and what counted was television. Aleksandr had once spoken at a conference alongside a deeply unpopular economist, and when he watched it on television, the unfortunate man had been digitally removed from existence—there’d been his hands, his ghostly shadow, but his head, his inconvenient words, were gone. And it hadn’t all been puerile hijinks. One time Aleksandr awoke to a peal of shattering glass and the sound of a sickening thud against the floor. Upon investigation, he found a plastic bag containing the oozing conch of a human ear.

  After that, Nina told him to shut down Alternative Russia. Or at least, for the love of God, to move the headquarters out of the apartment.

  “I know you’re doing this because of your involvement with the Party back in the day,” she said. She cupped his face in her hands and leaned toward him. He could see the flickering pulse in her neck. “And I want you to know you don’t have anything to feel guilty for.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “It was the times. It was the times. That’s all over now.”

  “Is it?”

  “You’ve made a nice life for us, Aleksandr.”

  “Nice for whom?”

  She leaned back. “Oh, please. Nice for both of us. You don’t like the apartment? You don’t like your gadgets?”

  “They’re your gadgets.”

  “You are a wealthy man. You are wealthy and you are influential and you are sought after.”

  “By the FSB, maybe.”

  “And if you’re not happy with your life, you have the means to go ahead and change it.” He could feel her radiating misery.

  “That’s exactly what I’m proposing.”

  “Are you having a midlife crisis?”

  “Stop psychoanalyzing.”

  “Is all this because you lost to th
e computer?”

  At this he’d punched the wall, though not hard enough to do damage to either the wall or his hand.

  Nina didn’t flinch. “If you break your hand, you know, the media is going to notice.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m not the only one who psychoanalyzes.”

  “Shut the fuck up, please.” Nina didn’t stop filing her nails. He looked at her, and he marveled at the cognitive dissonance of knowing someone as intimately as he knew Nina—of knowing how her toes looked when her toenails grew too long (though, in fairness, Nina almost never let this happen), and how her coughs echoed in the shower when she was sick, and how her face looked when she was pale and haggard from sleeping—and really, really, not knowing her at all. He thought of times at parties or dinners or out in the world somewhere, moments when he’d glimpse her out of the corner of his eye, caught in light or shadow, and think what a mystery she was—this person who lived in the core of that coiled three pounds of neurons, whatever it was, whoever she was, inscrutable, unreachable, no less mysterious just because Aleksandr didn’t believe in the extraphysical.

  “Clearly, something is bothering you lately.”

  “Ninotchka,” he said. “You are criminally insane, criminally indifferent, if you are not bothered.”

  “I don’t like Ninotchka, you know. It’s patronizing.”

  One thing about Nina: she could still surprise him. Then again, he could still surprise himself, even after all the years of knowing himself (and maybe no one else; maybe no one else, ever).

  Three weeks later, he announced his intention to seek the presidency of the Russian Federation.

  14

  IRINA

  St. Petersburg, December 2006

  On Saturday I took the metro downtown. A terse, tinny voice coming out of the loudspeakers admonished everyone to stay away from Gostiny Dvor, so I knew I was going in the right direction. Aboveground, I encountered a surprising mass: thousands, I think, maybe ten thousand, standing in the square underneath pale yellow buildings that looked like frosted cakes. Red flags snapped against the mass of brown coats, all dense and woolly and dark, like an army of seething otters. A smattering of different flags with their stark Cyrillic—there were ultranationalists, it seemed, radical lefties, Trotskyites. There were the true Communists, sick with their nostalgia. Somebody handed me a flag, and I waggled it mildly. Somewhere behind me, I overheard a low smattering of American English, but when I turned to look—my eyes overflowing, no doubt, with idiot eagerness at finding a fellow traveler—it stopped, and its origins remained mysterious. I looked around but did not see Viktor anywhere.

  On a box, in the center of the crowd, was Aleksandr Bezetov. I’d seen pictures of him, and he looked much the same. So I don’t know why I was surprised. Maybe a part of me imagined he’d have some sort of an aura—the otherworldly signifier of a person with an inexplicable connection to the future or the dead. Instead, he looked even more ordinary than average; he was shorter than I thought he’d be—I thought of his overreliance on head shots—and his nose was an unbecoming red. His breath came in frost-colored puffs as he spoke.

  “My friends,” he said. The teeming crowd ruffled in appreciation at the thrill of such familiar address. “We have no chance of winning.” Miraculously, the crowd cheered.

  I squinted through the wintry mist, the heaving people, the multicolored flags popping like firing guns. I compared this man to the man I’d watched with my father all those years ago. This Bezetov was sturdy around the middle and durable, whereas he’d been thin in that match, cracking his knobby knuckles. But there were the same hooded eyelids, the fleshy nose that was the shape of a rejected potato. The mouth, which looked too lazy and inarticulate for the rigors of the game.

  “There is nothing to be gained by pretending we have a chance of winning,” he said. “To do so would be a lie. We are not running to win.” The crowd cheered more loudly—the red-cheeked, pale-browed young women with those tremendously angled bone structures, the fuzzy-faced men who must have been aging, relatively minor dissidents. On the horizon were reams of police, stern and barrel-chested and not meant to be missed, even though Bezetov surely had a permit for this event.

  “We are running to lose,” said Bezetov. “And in the losing, we are running to be noticed. We are running to be blocked. We are running to be opposed.” The crowd was growing louder; Bezetov’s voice was growing hoarser.

  “We are running to be suppressed,” he shouted. “We are running to be systematically ignored, legally erased. We are running to be assassinated.” The crowd erupted again. “We are running so that when we are … suppressed, ignored, killed, the world will take notice. We are running so that there might be a record. We are running so that there might be a memory.”

  The crowd shouted and waved their flags. A woman behind me issued a coloratura shriek that made me wince. The crowd had a surface-level patina of triumph, but there was a suggestion of submerged mania, too, as though they were just about to produce pitchforks and storm the Bastille. Next to me, a child jumped up and down in one spot. A man careened a woman around, both of them shouting nonsense. A young man stood alone, shivering and smiling so hard that I thought he would break into pieces and go skittering across the square. I pulled out a notebook and pretended to be absorbed in it. I was registering for the first time that I was deeply uncomfortable with outpourings of genuine political emotion.

  At the edge of the crowd, near the podium, stood a woman who was watching Aleksandr and looking bored. She was thin and light and her efficacious manner gave her the air of a business envelope. She looked too indifferent to be in charge but too efficient not to be involved. She had red hair. She was Nina. I crept in her direction—getting one toe smashed by a surprisingly heavy child, getting one breast groped by an old man who looked at the sky when I turned around. When I reached the woman, she looked at everything around me—the shearing sun, the hard-packed snow, the clumps of young men hooting and hurling chips of ice—before I could get her attention.

  “Excuse me,” I said, waving my hand.

  “Yes?” she said. She looked surprised, as though she actually hadn’t seen me standing there.

  “My name is Irina Ellison,” I said. “I was wondering if I could get a meeting with Mr. Bezetov.”

  She looked me up and down with unapologetic frankness, as if she were assessing me for physical fitness and finding me wanting. “And who are you, Irina Ellison?”

  “Nobody,” I said eagerly. Nina’s gaze grew cloudy. “I’m an American lecturer,” I amended. “At a university.”

  She remained silent. Tiny furrows appeared next to her mouth. She looked as if she was sucking very hard on something bitter. “Is that all?”

  “That’s all.” I didn’t know exactly what she meant, but I knew that—absolutely—was all. “Can I get a meeting, do you think?”

  “Probably not. He’s very busy.”

  Nina was turning away from me, her attention drawn by the backfiring of a motorcycle in the square. I should have proposed some research, I realized, some feigned academic pretext for this pursuit. Maybe there would have been some tolerance for that.

  “Please,” I said. “My father and Mr. Bezetov were correspondents.”

  “Then have your father arrange a meeting.”

  “He’s dead now,” I said. “My father.” In English, I always say “passed away,” as a courtesy to whomever I’m talking with. It’s not because I believe that “passed away” is the right term—away to where? one wonders, passed to what? It’s because “dead” feels too confrontational, too vulgar. But in Russian I didn’t know any other word.

  Nina cocked her head toward me, but I couldn’t tell where she was looking. “I’m sorry,” she said. If the edge in her voice was relenting, I couldn’t hear it. “But Aleksandr has corresponded with a lot of different people.”

  She looked behind her at an enormous man with sunglasses who was standing a few feet away. He
gave a slight nod. I had the feeling that I was on the verge of being escorted away.

  “If you could just ask him,” I said. “I came a long way.”

  She inclined her head once more, and abruptly I could see myself in her vision: red-nosed, with messy hair and a bewildered aspect, speaking the kind of American-accented Russian that is alternately viewed as comic, tragic, or an automatic indicator of stupidity.

  “Who’s your customer?” she said finally.

  “My customer?” This had been Nikolai’s question, too, and I wondered if some translational mismatch kept producing this problem.

  The woman pressed her lips together as though dealing with the faked idiocy of an unwilling student. “Whom do you work for?”

  “Nobody anymore.”

  “Anymore?”

  “I had a job at a university,” I said, although for a moment I couldn’t remember if that was true. “This was a while ago now.”

  “I see,” she said, looking at me with an expression of incomprehension. “So you’re a tourist, then?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “Yes.”

  She stared at me hard, then shrugged. “Perhaps it is possible,” she said. “He has Wednesday off. He might have fifteen minutes for you. You will not be alone, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said, although I couldn’t quite sort out in that moment what this meant.

  “Come to this address Wednesday morning, and we will see. Okay? You’ll have to wait. I’m not promising anything.” She slipped me a business card, from which I promptly sustained a paper cut.

  “Okay,” I said. “I can wait.” These days, that was my expert activity, my major accomplishment. I was a champion, grade-A, world-class waiter, unchallenged, unrivaled. I was confident in my waiting abilities.

  “Fine.” She sniffed. “You are an odd young woman.”

  Something about this—the pronouncement of judgment issued by a quasi-hostile European—made me miss Lars so much that I almost started to cry. I rarely cry—finding it an activity I can consider and then reject engaging in, typically for lack of energy—but there are occasional seizures of emotion that grab me at strange moments: in parking lots, in supermarkets, elicited by old couples picking out fruit or little children grabbing at a mother’s dress. The woman looked alarmed.