More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Masha Gessen
Read between
November 22 - December 31, 2022
According to 2006 figures, wrote Eberstadt, male life expectancy at age fifteen in Russia compared unfavorably with that in Ethiopia, Gambia, and Somalia.
Another scholar of Russian demographics, American anthropologist Michelle Parsons, suggested an explanation for the apparent vodka paradox: for what it is worth, alcohol may help people adapt to realities that otherwise make them want to curl up and die. Parsons, who called her book Dying Unneeded, argued that Russians were dying early because they had nothing and no one to live for. Eberstadt also ultimately concluded that the explanation had to do with mental health.
Only two periods stood out as exceptions to this trend: Khrushchev’s Thaw and Gorbachev’s perestroika, the brief spells when Russians anticipated a better future. The rest of the time, it seemed, Russians had been dying for lack of hope.
In the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center designated the World Congress a hate group.
BACK AT THE SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT at Moscow State, students received a steady diet of ultraconservative rhetoric—and nothing else. “As a graduate of the department, I can tell, based on my own experience, that the education students received there could never stand up to either academic or practical scrutiny,” a 1996 graduate said in a 2007 interview.
The goal of the Center for Conservative Studies is to become the center of development of conservative ideology in Russia. . . . We also need to train a conservatively minded academic and government elite, there is no reason to hide this fact. They must be conservative ideologues. And we must place people in power and in positions of authority in the academy.
He had always thought of Ukraine as Russia’s simple provincial cousin, but this country had gender studies and queer studies theorists at several of its universities.
WHAT LYOSHA HAD SEEN in Ukraine was, contrary to his expectations, a different culture. Yes, his Ukrainian colleagues spoke Russian, most as their first language, but they had a different educational background, different cultural references, and vastly different political expectations than he did.
In his state-of-the-federation address in April 2005, Putin stressed that Russia had to “first of all acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. . . . Tens of millions of our countrymen ended up outside our country’s borders.”
The message to Georgia—and any other post-Soviet country that might have wanted to follow its example—was, If you try to ally with NATO, you will lose lives and territory and will be assured NATO limbo in perpetuity.
Even after the Great Terror passed, it kept the overwhelming majority of the population passive by the understanding that any action could endanger a larger group. “A moral predicament in which reasonable action runs counter to the well-being of ‘one’s own kind’ is in itself unreasonable and immoral,”
In 1936, Luigi Sturzo, an Italian priest and politician in exile, identified four key characteristics of the totalitarian state: (a) Administrative centralization is carried to extremes—the suppression not only of all local autonomy . . . but also of the autonomy of all public or semi-public institutions, charitable organizations, cultural associations, universities. . . . The independence of the legislature and judiciary has completely disappeared, and even the government is reduced to a body subordinate to a leader, who has become dictator under the euphemisms of Duce, Marshal, or
...more
(b) The Party is militarized. Either it dominates the army or the army allies itself with the prevailing power and the two armed forces cooperate or amalgamate. The youth of the country is militarized, collective life is felt to be military life,
(c) Everyone must have faith in the new state and learn to love it. From the schools up to the universities conformity of feeling is not enough; there must be an absolute intellectual and moral surrender, a trusting enthusiasm, a religious mysticism where the new state is concerned. . . . A whole new moral environment must be created in addition to the work of the school. Hence the official textbook, the state inspired and standardized newspaper, the cinema, the wireless, sports, school societies, the grant[ing] of prizes, are not only controlled but are directed toward an end—the worship of
...more
(d) It is impossible for the totalitarian state to allow economic freedom to either capitalists or workers. There is no room for free trade unions or free employers’ associations. Instead there are state syndicates or corporations, with no freedom of action, controlled and organized within the state and for the state.6
Hannah Arendt’s three-volume The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951. For Arendt, the key characteristics of a totalitarian state were ideology and state terror. The substance of the ideology, to the extent that ideology has a substance, was unimportant: any ideology could become the basis of a totalitarian system if it could be encapsulated and coupled with terror. The terror was used to enforce the ideology but also to fuel it. Whatever premise formed the basis of the ideology, be it the superiority of a particular race or of a particular class, was used to derive imagined laws
...more
That year, another German exile, Carl Joachim Friedrich, speaking at a conference on totalitarianism (at which Arendt was also a speaker), offered a concise five-point definition of totalitarian society: An official ideology, consisting of an official body of doctrine covering all vital aspects of man’s existence, to which everyone in that society is supposed to adhere at least passively. . . . A single mass party consisting of a relatively small percentage of the total population (up to 10 per cent) of men and women passionately and unquestioningly dedicated to the ideology and prepared to
...more
They added a sixth point to Friedrich’s earlier list: a centralized, controlled economy.
They did not feel like helpless victims, but they did not feel like fanatics either. They felt normal. They were members of a society. The parades and various other forms of collective life gave them a sense of belonging that humans generally need.
he wrote a book called Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, in which he suggested the following three differences: in authoritarian regimes, the boundary between state and society was not diminished; authoritarian regimes had mentalities rather than ideologies; authoritarian regimes, unlike totalitarian ones, had low levels of societal mobilization.
The symbiosis of Party and state . . . Society is organized in a strictly hierarchical way. It is constructed from the top down. . . . Society is thus turned upside down:
forced societal consensus, created through a monopoly on mass media, combined with strict censorship. This creates the conditions for chronic mobilization of the population, always prepared to carry out the decisions of the party-state. . . . The subjects’ attention is focused predominantly on events inside the country, which is isolated from the outside world; hence the sense of exceptionalism, a focus on “us,” and a powerful alienation barrier, a refusal to know or understand events “on the other side.”
State terror, carried out by the secret police, special services, extrajudicial paramilitary structures
The militarization of society and the economy . . . The activities of mobilizational structures that pierce society from top to bottom, from all educational institutions . . . to sporting clubs etc. . . . are intended less to prepare the population for battle against an external enemy than to systematically train the population . . . to carry out any and all of the regime’s initiatives, because the “leader knows best.”
A command, distributive economy and the concomitant chronic, inevitable shortages of goods, services, information, etc. . . . Shortages are not mere deficits but also a way of organizing society
A chronic state of poverty . . . Totalitarianism takes hold under the conditions of increasing poverty—when a large part of the population has no hope for a better future and projects hope on some extraordinary political measures. Totalitarianism is sustained by maintaining a very low standard of living.
A static population, strict limits on both vertical and horizontal social mobility except that which is carried out by the state for its own purposes.
What should the Russian system be called, then? It was no longer the totalitarian regime it had been, but after disassembling some of its totalitarian institutions—like the Party-state or total militarization—it had started re-creating them, or something that resembled them.
They had seen fascism rise to power in a functioning democracy, and they wanted their knowledge to serve as warning.
Power fascinates him not for any values for which a specific power may stand, but just because it is power. Just as his “love” is automatically aroused by power, so powerless people or institutions automatically arouse his contempt.
Another key trait of the authoritarian character is his longing for and belief in historical determination and permanence:
The authoritarian character worships the past.
Periods of great social and economic upheaval had the ability to make the authoritarian character dominant in society and to carry an authoritarian character to the top.
“Nazism never had any genuine political or economic principles. It is essential to understand that the very principle of Nazism is its radical opportunism.”21 What Nazi ideology and practice did have, according to Fromm, was ritual that satisfied the audience’s masochistic craving:
IT MAY BE MORE ACCURATE to say that the Soviet system offered not a vision of the future but the ability to know one’s future, much as tradesmen did in feudal times, and to make very small-scale, manageable decisions about the future.
but taken together, the information added up to a damning picture strikingly different from the Kremlin’s triumphant reports and from the popular picture of a stronger, healthier, wealthier Russia.
Russians had agreed to live under a sort of dictatorship in exchange for stability. But they assumed that it was a soft dictatorship, which could negotiate if the need arose.
The humor, Bikbov concluded, served a dual purpose. On the one hand, it defused the feeling of having been violated: one is less of a victim if one can laugh about it. It also signaled that the protesters were not dangerous.
He suggested that part of the answer lay in the ritual of elections, which had been painfully violated. In other words, it was precisely the obscene manner of the rigging, not the fact of it, that caused the outrage—like
Even though the protesters belonged to different age groups, Putin had now been in power long enough that a majority of them had spent all or most of their adult lives in the era of supposed “stability.”
In November, laws on espionage and high treason were amended so that their wording reverted to that of the 1930s, when thousands of people were executed on trumped-up charges.
They signaled that the Kremlin was in charge, that strict order was being reconstituted. They also seemed to signal to the people of Russia that it was time for them to become enforcers.
To survive, publishers—especially the publishers of children’s books, who risked running afoul of the new Law for the Protection of Children from Information, had to stop publishing books for which they might get dragged into court.
With vigilant citizens throwing fits in the stacks in one city after another, bookstores and libraries also had to err on the side of caution.18 Self-censorship was collective hostage-taking in one of its purest forms. It had kicked back in.
Constant flux was necessary for the system’s survival: “The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop—one which might, after a time, lose its bastard qualities and take its place among the widely differing and profoundly contrasting ways of life of the nations of the earth.”
“The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.”
Zakaria emphasized the distinction between democracy, a way of selecting governments through free and open elections, and liberalism, the political project of safeguarding individual freedoms. The two did not necessarily go together.
The obvious issue with the idea of “illiberal democracy” was that, once a democratically elected government began curtailing freedoms, it was unlikely to continue having truly free and open elections—even if, technically, elections occurred at regular intervals.
a hybrid regime is the authoritarian regime in the new historical moment. We know the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes: the former rewards passivity and the latter rewards mobilization. A totalitarian regime demands participation: if you do not march the march and sing the songs, then you are not a loyal citizen. An authoritarian regime, on the other hand, tries to convince its subjects to stay home. Whoever marches too energetically or sings too loudly is suspect, regardless of the ideological content of the songs and the direction of the march.
A mafia state, in Magyar’s definition, was different from other states ruled by one person surrounded by a small elite.
