Words Will Break Cement Read Online Free PDF Page B

was the past, and they were the future.

TWO
    War
    “ T HEORY WRAPPED ME in an entire climate of description. Theory was simply, shoulder-shruggingly, the only thing that helped me to see what I was and where,” writes the American memoirist Marco Roth. “Part of what Theory promised was an idea that another world was still possible, not in some mythical afterlife, but on this earth, now, that the life around me did not have to be the only one. There was no fixed human nature except to take in and shape what was around us. And almost everything around us was now the result of some sort of human endeavor, like the soy formula I’d been nursed on. We were culture and artificiality and engineering all the way down. What was made could thus be unmade.”
    I recognized that description. And this too: “Semiotics is the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism, hermaphroditism—with sex and power.” This from Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel
The Marriage Plot
.
    Nadya described it as “getting shivers.” This happened to her when she read the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Even in 2007, long after the generation of students who felt they had discovered Theory had grown old enough to write about it wistfully, and long after the humanities had been declared dead in the West, repeatedly, it made her feel like the world was becoming clearer and infinitely more complicated at the same time. It was exhilarating.
    The world outside Moscow State University at the start of 2007 was just as stultifying as the world inside it. Vladimir Putin, once a low-level KGB staffer, was in his eighth year of running the country. His luck showed no sign of running out. The price of oil, which had grown nearly fourfold since 2000, had begun its steepest climb yet: it would nearly double in a year. Russia was flooded with money. Luxury boutiques could not keep goods in stock. Nor could the Bentley dealership that had opened up a block from the Kremlin: the country’s yearly quota of the latest model would be bought up in a matter of days—for cash. Russia’s most popular writers were a man and a woman who authored what barely passed for fiction about the lifestyles of the Russian rich. Each commanded a million dollars a book and they could not keep up with reader demand.
    The liberal right wing—the economic reformers of the 1990s—had started out on and by Putin’s side, then a number of them broke ranks, tried to establish opposition parties, and failed. In the years it had taken them to change their minds, Putin had systematically disassembled the country’s electoral system and taken over all federal and most local television channels, so that there was little left for opposition politicians to work with, or for. The left-wing establishment—the Communist Party and its satellites—was firmly and comfortably in the Kremlin’s pocket. In 2005, chess champion Garry Kasparov, one of Russia’s most respected and beloved men, announced he was giving up chess to take up the cause of toppling the Putin regime. He found himself unable to rent a hall anywhere in the country. He did, however, succeed in hammering together a ragtag coalition that staged a series of street protests called the Marches of the Disagreeable. These dissipated in 2008 after the police started detaining known activists in the days leading up to scheduled protests.
    In December 2006, at the end of Nadya’s first semester in Moscow, more than five thousand people showed up for a March of the Disagreeable, for which a permit had been denied by the authorities. They tried to force their way through a police cordon; more than a hundred people were detained. Four months later, as many as a thousand activists were detained as they left their homes to go to another banned march. Still, about five thousand people showed up and several hundred managed