The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

The Soviet regime robbed people not only of their ability to live freely but also of the ability to understand fully what had been taken from them, and how.

The regime aimed to annihilate personal and historical memory and the academic study of society.

Marxism in the Soviet Union had been boiled down to the understanding that people—Soviet citizens—were shaped entirely by their society and the material conditions of their lives. If the work of shaping the person was done correctly—and it had to have been, since by now Soviet society claimed to have substantially fulfilled the Marxist project by building what was called “socialism functioning in reality”—then the person had to emerge with a set of goals that coincided perfectly with the needs of the society that had produced him. Anomalies were possible, and they could fall into one of two categories: criminality or mental illness. Soviet society had institutions to handle both. No other kind of disharmony was conceivable. Inner conflict was not an option. There was really no reason to take up the subject of the psyche.

The demise of Russian psychoanalysis spelled the near-total end of any study of the psyche—in part because psychoanalysis had so dominated psychology and in part because the new state was now rejecting any explanation of human behavior that was not both material and simple. Ivan Pavlov’s straightforward theories of cause and effect fit this approach perfectly; it remained only to condition the entire population, rendering it pliant and predictable.

But the most important thing Levada believed about Homo Sovieticus was this: his was a dying breed. He had been formed by the one-two punch of the Revolution and the Great Terror: the first event brought its ideals and values, and the second taught Homo Sovieticus to conform in order to survive. But now, thirty years after the death of Stalin, the people so shaped were dying off. Their children and grandchildren would be different. That, in turn, would mean that the regime could no longer rely on them to ensure its survival through their behavior. And that would mean that the regime—the USSR as it existed—would collapse.

The survey found the traits Levada had described, and it fleshed out the way Soviet doublethink functioned in daily life. Orwell had described doublethink as follows: To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.34

Homo Sovieticus was not indoctrinated. In fact, Homo Sovieticus did not seem to hold particularly strong opinions of any sort. His inner world consisted of antinomies, his objective was survival, and his strategy was constant negotiation—the endless circulation of games of doublethink.

“One of the outcomes of these deals with the devil,” he wrote, referring to the constant “games” Homo Sovieticus played, “is the disintegration of the structure of personality itself.”

Homo Sovieticus was caught in an infinite spiral of lies: pretending to be, pretending to have, pretending to believe, and pretending not to. The fakery concerned the most basic of facts and the most fundamental of values, and what lay at the bottom of the spiral was an absence: “even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.” The system destroyed the individual and the fabric of society: nothing was possible in the absence of everything, resulting, wrote Levada, in “the falling standards of education, culture, morality, in the degradation of all of society.”

After regime change in its satellites, the USSR began pulling its military, secret police, and political personnel out of these countries. This was a complicated, expensive, and ill-prepared operation that often added homegrown insult to the moral injury of the personnel being decommissioned in a turnaround no one had bothered to warn them about. A KGB agent who was stationed in the East German city of Dresden would later describe the experience as frightful and humiliating.9 The agent’s name was Vladimir Putin.

But Gorbachev, and Alexander Nikolaevich, imagined that the chain reaction would somehow stop at the Soviet border and the “inner empire” would remain intact.

ALEXANDER NIKOLAEVICH had never thought of the USSR as an empire. No one did, not even the Soviet Union’s foes—even when Ronald Reagan called the country “the evil empire,” his emphasis fell solely on “evil,” by which he meant godless.

Reganism is equating evil with godlesness when that is your pulse its easy to make frequent enemies

The Baltic republics, where there was still a living awareness that there had been a life before the Soviets, wanted their independence back.

These people did not want to secede: they wanted an end to the occupation.

Sometimes, reform, as opposed to destruction, looked simply impossible. By late 1989, Alexander Nikolaevich came to the conclusion that the Soviet Union needed to be transformed into a federation, each of whose members would have tangible legislative independence and economic responsibility.23 But he expected patience and trust from the republics.

We have fallen two epochs behind. We have missed the postindustrial era and the information era. As a result, our society is deeply ill. Our souls are permanently empty. We have grown to presume everyone guilty at all times, thus creating hundreds of thousands of guards watching over our morality, conscience, purity of world view, compliance with the wishes of the authorities.

It would not be right to direct this criticism at the millions of ordinary Communists who have been dominated by a caste of Party bosses.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who predicted the Soviet collapse—and the 1991 coup—wrote that a basic paradox would bring the country down: its economy had dead-ended, and to survive economically it would have to reform politically, which would inevitably destroy the state’s entire system. But if, he posited, the country wanted to preserve its political system, it would fail economically.

The loss of the social sciences in the Soviet Union made this inevitable: Soviet society had been forbidden to know itself, and had no native language to describe and define what had happened.

Totalitarian ideology allows no such correction. Hannah Arendt maintained that any ideology can become totalitarian, but for that to happen it needs to be reduced to a single simple idea, which is then turned into a single simple idea from which the ostensible “laws of history” are derived—and enforced through terror.5 What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it. There is no gap between totalitarian ideology and reality because totalitarian ideology contains all of reality within itself.

It was this system of signaling and response that broke down by 1991.

The Party’s signaling system had ceased functioning, and this in turn rendered the ideology no longer hermetic—in effect, no longer totalitarian.

Russia also inherited a constitution that contained virtually no information about the country’s structure, principles, and identity. This was an issue common to all former Eastern Bloc countries, with the exception of East Germany: all they knew about themselves at first was that they were not what they had been.

Compared with life in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Russians were better off—but they felt poor.

He focused on the millions of people who had now traveled abroad: by 1995 nearly 17 percent of adults had been outside Russia. The experience had not made them feel like life had gotten better. They had seen something more devastating than the fact that some of their compatriots were better off: they saw that, beyond the country’s western borders, virtually everyone was better off than virtually everyone in Russia. They had felt themselves to be not just poor individuals but people from a poor country.

The fact that the very rich were vanishingly few exacerbated things. The only thing worse than feeling like a loser was feeling like a member of an entire society of losers. The jealousy rarely manifested as jealousy: before it reached the surface it was usually transformed into a different sentiment—feeling used, feeling angry, feeling fear.

The Soviet state was based on punishment. As Young Pioneers, children were taught to criticize one another and themselves in a group setting, reveling in the details of their shortcomings, the intricacies of blame, the ecstasy of repentance, and the imagined precision of the penalties.

There was a deeper reason Russia did not throw open the door to its secret-police archives. The Eastern Bloc countries that took this step—Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic among them—treated the documents as having been left behind by an occupying power. But Soviet institutions had become Russian institutions after 1991, and soon the Russian bureaucracy began to guard many Soviet secrets like its own.

He would use the army to dislodge the local government. But the Chechen resistance was well armed and possessed of ten times the resolve of the Russian troops, along with familiarity with the terrain and the support of the local population.

What Russians wanted was certainty, a clear sense of who they were and what their country was.

Popper’s ideas represented everything that Russia was now declaring it wanted to be, and the philosopher himself had once suggested a dichotomy: the open society on one hand, and its enemies on the other.

Dugin wanted to be the enemy of the open society. In 1994, Dugin published The Conservative Revolution. In this book, he envisioned a movement that would resist what he called “extremist humanism”—the idea that all humans everywhere have rights—and the concept of a law-based society. He explained that these ideas, imported from the West, were wrong precisely because they were fundamentally foreign to Russians, whose ethnos developed in accordance with its own destiny and whose geography made it the natural enemy of the United States and Britain.

The best and most complete definition of national-bolshevism would be the following: “National-bolshevism is a superideology common to all enemies of open society.” It is not merely one of the ideologies hostile to an open society but specifically its complete conscious total and substantive opposite. National-bolshevism is a worldview that is built on the total and radical negation of the individual and his centrality.26 Neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis had stated it quite so explicitly.

He meant that the country pretended to have entered a new economic age but in reality traded through barter and never fully met any of its monetary obligations. He, too, placed the blame on the unreformed, and politically powerful, core of the command economy: the enormous inefficient companies run by the very Mafia that worried Alexander Nikolaevich. The “robber barons” who concerned Nemtsov were kings of the “virtual economy.”

But this time they did not appear solicitous of their voters: they consistently expressed certainty in their victory, making the election sound like a ritual rather than a contest.

Looking at the data, Gudkov and his coauthor, Boris Dubin, concluded that these two traits of the parliamentary election were symptoms of a single problem: the election had all the trappings of a political contest but lacked the substance of one. Democratic procedure, which had seemed a revolution in itself, was now the political equivalent of the “virtual economy” described by Gaddy—a mask pulled over a structure that refused to change.

America was the very definition of modernity; it was the country that Russia had failed to become.

Dugin had graduated from discussant to headliner, and Eurasianism from a fringe political movement to a universal solution. It offered an alternative view of Russian history, in which a century and a half of Mongol-Tatar rule had been not an age of destruction but, on the contrary, a vital cultural infusion that set Russia on a special path, distinct from Europe’s.

Dugin said that the prince had deemed Europe a threat to humanity. Since then, he explained, things had changed: Europe was not a threat to humanity any longer, but the United States was. “The Western-society project is being forced onto all other nations,” said Dugin. “The Eurasianists will continue to oppose the West as long as the West persists in its pretensions to the universality of its own values, in forcing those values onto people, and in attempting to dominate, whether by means of colonization or by means of neo-colonization, which is what globalization is.”

Twelve years after the end of the USSR, Russia still perceived its former subjects as parts of itself.

In 2004, the year after the Georgian revolution, Moscow firmly took control of elections in Ukraine. Russian political technologists flooded Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.

Their job was to prevent the election of the pro-Western challenger to the current regime, which Moscow had found agreeable.

All Russia was transfixed by the spectacle in Kiev. The year before, the Georgian revolution had drawn relatively little attention here, but now the Ukrainian revolution made people suspect—or hope for—a pattern. Could it happen in Russia too?

The political technologists who had been dispatched to deal with Ukraine returned to Moscow and explained their failure: it was the Americans’ fault.

“By giving a green light to the [Eurasian Youth Union’s] anti-Western xenophobia, the authorities had created opportunities for adherents of more extreme variants of ultranationalism,” writes Horvath. “As the moderate opposition was driven to the margins, ultranationalists gained admission to Russia’s public sphere.”15

“I am seeing Stalin’s mug displayed everywhere, every day, and people are eating it up. It is the face of a nationalist, a chauvinist, a murderer. But we are being told that if we look into it, he wasn’t so bad.”

Why do so many people idealize the past? It’s the “leader principle.”* It’s a disease. It’s a Russian tradition. We had our czars, our princes, our secretaries-general, our collective-farm chairmen, and so on. We live in fear of the boss. Think about it: we are not afraid of earthquakes, floods, fires, wars, or terrorist attacks. We are afraid of freedom. We don’t know what to do with it. . . . That’s where the fascist groups come from, too—the shock troops of tomorrow.

Is the orange revolution possible here? We are not going to be like Ukraine. . . . We still live with a simple trinity. The state is on top, and we keep making it stronger. Society is suspended somewhere beneath the state. If the state so wishes, the society will be civil, or semicivil, or nothing but a herd. Look to Orwell for a good description of this. And the little tiny individual is running around somewhere down at the bottom.

“For Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, Russian citizens are not voters, but an audience,” Russian journalist Maxim Trudolyubov wrote in 2009. “The big difference between Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev is that they work with different audiences.”

This meant that most adult Russian men living in the 1990s and 2000s would not live past age sixty-five.