A Year of Living Hopelessly MOSCOW - I feel like I have been attending one wake after another recently. This is strange, because no one has died. At the end of May, I went to an annual awards ceremony for political journalists. Sponsored by a liberal foundation, the event usually draws a familiar crowd of a couple hundred Moscow media personalities. This time, one speaker after another began by talking about Sergei Guriev, Russia's top economist who recently announced he had left the country for fear of arrest. Each of the speakers would say some version "Sergei is not with us today," and add that though his absence was palpable, his influence was still felt or that the principles he promoted were still implemented - or that he would have liked the choice of nominees. It sounded like a wake in every way, except that Sergei Guriev is alive and well in Paris and could watch the ceremony on the Web. The two and a half weeks since that ceremony have brought more news than Russia used to see in months or even years in quieter times. Take just the last week. Parliament passed a law making it a crime, punishable by up to three years in prison, to offend someone's religious sensibilities. It also banned the "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations." More than 25 anti-homophobia protesters were attacked - some brutally beaten while the police looked on - and detained in front of Parliament (I was one of those detained). Another Russian superstar, the chess champion Garry Kasparov, said he would not be returning to Russia for fear of being arrested. The head of the parliamentary committee on family affairs announced that the state would soon work out a way to remove children from families with same-sex parents. One of the few remaining independent publications is folding. Over the weekend, I joined a group of friends in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, for a first wedding anniversary: We had had such a good time at their wedding last year that we decided to make an annual tradition of the Tbilisi sojourn. As the Georgian tradition demands, there were many toasts. The husband, Ilya, said the first one: "It has been a terrible year. But when I look back on it, I realize it was also a wonderful year, because it was a year I spent with Vera. Everyone clinked their glasses. Everyone agreed it had been a terrible year. In fact, most of the toasts that followed picked up the theme of the awfulness and the sadness of the last year. It felt like a wake. But no one had died. None of us in this large group had become seriously ill or, indeed, suffered any misfortune beyond the occasional breakup or lost job. And yet everyone knew what Ilya meant - and everyone agreed with him. It has been a terrible year, the year Russians like us lost hope.