The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

The system works like a caricature of the Communist distribution economy. The patriarch and his family have only two goals: accumulating wealth and concentrating power.

In Putin’s case, his inner circle consisted of men with whom he grew up in the streets and judo clubs of Leningrad, the next circle included men with whom he had worked in the KGB/FSB, and the next circle was made up of men who had worked in the St. Petersburg administration with him. Very rarely, he “adopted” someone into the family, as he did with Kholmanskikh, the head of the assembly shop, who was elevated from obscurity to a sort of third-cousin-hood. One cannot leave the family voluntarily: one can only be kicked out, disowned and disinherited. Violence and ideology, the pillars of the totalitarian state, became, in the hands of the mafia state, mere instruments. —

THE POST-COMMUNIST MAFIA STATE, in Magyar’s words, is an “ideology-applying regime” (while a totalitarian regime is “ideology-driven”).

The word “values” was new, and it was key. The fledgling ideology now had all its components: the nation, the past, traditional values, an external threat, and a fifth column.

Propaganda of homosexuality is widespread in Russia today: there are gay parades, demonstrations, and television and radio programs in support of same-sex unions that are broadcast on all channels in the daytime. Such widespread distribution of propaganda of homosexual relations exerts a negative influence on the development of a child’s personality, dilutes his concept of the family as a union of man and woman, and practically creates the conditions for limiting a child’s freedom to choose his own sexual preference when he grows up.

Gays were shaping up to be the perfect scapegoat: they were spies, they were bad for the army and dangerous to children, and whatever acceptance they had gained was a mistake made in 1993, under pressure from the West. Banning the gays, or at least shutting them up, was a shortcut to health and power, a rebuke to the West, and a guarantee of a populous and healthy nation.

Russians continued to think of Crimea as their country’s most important resort, and to use it.

Those who had not yet spent a summer there thought that someday they would. It was the universal Russian aspiration. The realization that the all-Russian summer dream could belong to someone else—another country—came rudely in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Putin’s speech laid out Russia’s case for Crimea. His first argument was historical, and it echoed every other historical claim to territory ever made. Putin said that Crimea was the cradle of Russian civilization

In the story that Putin was telling, Russia had recognized the post-Soviet borders that made Crimea a part of Ukraine under duress, because it was too weak to object. Later, under Putin, Russia sacrificed its national interests and deep desires for the sake of peace in the region, and did not contest the post-1991 borders. But after being forcibly moved to another country, without physically moving, the Crimean Russians found themselves citizens of an unstable state: Russians, like other Ukrainian citizens, suffered from the ongoing political and the permanent government crises that have been seizing Ukraine for more than twenty years. This was a reference to both the Maidan and the Orange Revolution, and this was the point where Putin’s speech turned away from Russia and toward America—or,

He had been taught that totalitarian ideology had to include a vision of the future. But this was never a key characteristic of Nazism. Its vision had been archaic, and its promise was simplicity, the return to an imaginary past when laws were instincts and the nation was a tribe.

So maybe this was it. Crimea was Russia’s ideology. This was why it pulled together every theme that Putin had floated before. And judging from the reaction to Putin’s speech, and from survey data, it functioned as an ideology: Crimea mobilized the nation.

Hannah Arendt wrote that an ideology was nothing but a single idea taken to its logical extreme. No ideology was inherently totalitarian but any ideology contained the seeds of totalitarianism—it could become encapsulated, entirely divorced from reality, with a single premise eclipsing the entire world.

Dugin saw Ukraine as inhabited by two distinct nations—the western Ukrainians, who spoke Ukrainian, and the people of the east, a nation that included ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians who were, nonetheless, Russian in language and culture. The two nations, in Dugin’s view, had fundamentally different geopolitical orientations. This meant that Ukraine was not a nation state.

The Western powers introduced sanctions step by step, building on the premise that Putin could be pressured to change his country’s behavior—to avoid even greater damage to the Russian economy. But to a Russia that believed that it was at war with the United States, this gradual ratcheting up of pressure looked like nothing but escalation.

You keep asking me if my father posed a threat to the regime. Of course he did. You have such a two-dimensional view of the world. Look wider. Study the totalitarian regimes of the world. The dissidents are either in exile—look at how many people have left Russia, like Kasparov—or else they are in prison or under house arrest, or they are killed.

It was not just this client who was living in a state of constant anxiety: the entire country was. It was the oldest trick in the book—a constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves. This was not the sort of anxiety that moved people to action and accomplishment. This was the sort of anxiety that exceeded human capacity.

you are left alone with your fear. You can no longer sit still or reason. You regress, and after a while the only thing you can do is scream, like a helpless terrified baby. You need an adult, a figure of authority. Almost anyone willing to take charge will do. And then, if that someone wants to remain in charge, he will have to make sure that you continue to feel helpless. The whole country felt helpless.

By the end of the monologue, the hosts—usually a man and a woman—would be in a panic, screaming that no one was protecting their children from drugs and pedophiles. The format harked back to a Soviet tradition, in which it was always the imaginary “ordinary people” who supposedly begged the Party for ever more restrictive and punitive laws, but its main purpose was to maintain a constant pitch of high anxiety.

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Paranoia offered a measure of comfort: at least it placed the source of overwhelming anxiety securely outside the person and even the country. It was a great relief to belong, and to entrust authority to someone stronger.

Traumatic experiences that affect entire societies could include natural disasters, catastrophic wars, genocide, revolution, and lives spent in a situation of chronic oppression.

If anything, what had driven them out was the fear of the Soviet collapse. They longed to return to their imaginary past, which would have made them Putin voters if they had stayed in Russia. Instead, they became Trump voters.

Chitra Raghavan surely had no idea that her lecture on the psychology of trauma would prompt me to write more than five hundred pages about the aftermath of the Soviet experience.