Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

And then somehow half the building was gone. The light was nuclear, the roar cyclonic — and all of it, all of it, seemed to come several moments after Aleksandr had shattered his clavicle on the ground. Nina staggered out of the store, still wearing her unpurchased shoe. Next to him, the little girl from the ride was missing most of her hand. Her mouth was open in what must have been a howl, and Aleksandr had crept halfway to her, his chest a crucible of pain, before he realized that he could not hear.

His hearing was restored within the day, and the little girl lived, and only one person died that day. They went back to St. Petersburg, and Aleksandr turned on the television to watch what would happen next.

Buynaksk was hit a week later, then Moscow once more, and Volgodonsk — malls, highways, apartment buildings. At the apartments, the timers went off at night to maximize civilian casualties. The government announced the Volgodonsk bombing two days before it happened, which Aleksandr found personally insulting: a government conspiracy, if indeed this was, should at least be executed with more care. “Are you watching this, Nina?” Aleksandr yelled from the couch, and winced. It still hurt to breathe. “Are you paying attention to this at all?”

“What is it, Aleksandr? Do you need more codeine?”

From the couch, Aleksandr’s collarbone healed, but he kept sitting, and he kept watching. He watched the blaming of the Chechens; he watched the commencement of the second Chechen war. He watched the pro-war party sail to the Duma, and Putin — Yeltsin’s invertebrate-smug prime minister, that mere lieutenant-colonel in the KGB — sail to the presidency. He watched the suspension of regional elections.

“Aleksandr.” Nina coughed. “Don’t you think you might like to get out for some exercise?”

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.”