The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

the ability to make sense of one’s life in the world is a function of freedom. 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.

George Orwell’s book could not be published in a society that it described, so Soviet readers would not have access to it until 1989, when censorship constraints had loosened sufficiently to enable the country’s leading literary journal to print a translation.13

“Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science.”4 Marina Arutyunyan enrolled

growing nationalist conservatism based on the glorification of some imaginary peasant class’s traditional values.

expected to devise change that would dismantle the hierarchy of levers and might dislodge them. The system resisted change instinctively,

the Soviet ‘socialist’ state is totalitarian because it must not leave the individual any independent space,” wrote Levada.27 This description of totalitarianism echoed Hannah Arendt’s explanation of how totalitarian regimes employ terror: “It substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions.”28 Robbed of his individuality and therefore the ability to interact meaningfully with others, she wrote, man became profoundly lonely, which made him the perfect creature and subject of the totalitarian state.29

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.

nationalism as a retrograde ideology whose adherents were a priori in the wrong, making their opponents, invariably, right. Now he saw the face of ethnic conflicts the world over: no one was in the right.

On July 20, 1991, he delivered an inspired speech at the founding congress of his new movement. He spoke of the painful discoveries that he had made, most of them in the six years since perestroika began: 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.

We have ostracized intellectualism and fostered a regime of the ignorant. . . .

The economy of force in totalitarian societies is achieved through terror. Totalitarianism establishes its own social contract, in which most people will be safe from violence most of the time, provided they stay within certain boundaries and shoulder some of the responsibility for keeping other citizens within the same boundaries.

August 1991 came after the coup failed, when a giant statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, was removed from its pedestal in the middle of Lubyanka Square,

As it was lifted by a crane, the giant monument was revealed to be hollow.

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.

In late 1994, when MMM collapsed, Hoper-Invest also stopped paying out, and the ruble lost nearly a quarter of its value overnight. All three events were to some extent related to something that had happened earlier in the year: the government relaxed its monetary policy and began printing rubles—this was a boon to the pyramid schemes, and it also doomed the ruble to fall.15 Many Russians’ core beliefs were thus confirmed: the government was no more trustworthy than the self-anointed investment kings, and economic hardship and injustice were life’s only certainties.

Newly visible wealth was doubly insulting because it violated aesthetic conventions and because the newly wealthy, unlike the old nomenklatura, had no claim to entitlement: Who were they to be rich?

Stalin personally had signed execution orders for forty-four thousand people, people he did not know and whose cases he had not read, if the cases even existed—he had simply signed off on long lists of names, apparently because he enjoyed the process.4

evidence of specific days on which the fate of thousands was decided. On November 22, 1937, Stalin and two of his closest advisers, Vyacheslav Molotov and Andrei Zhdanov, approved twelve lists submitted by the NKVD, containing 1,352 people who would be executed. On December 7, they signed off on thirteen lists for a total of 2,397 people, 2,124 of whom were to be executed. On January 3, 1938, they were joined by two other top Bolsheviks, Kliment Voroshilov and Lazar Kaganovich, and together they signed off on twenty-two lists with

Stalin’s last wave of terror, euphemistically called “the anti-cosmopolitan campaign.”

Asked, in 1994, which of the major changes of the last five years had brought the country more harm or more good, Russians were lukewarm on freedoms: only 53 percent thought that freedom of speech had been a positive change, and other new freedoms ranked lower. Only 8 percent thought that the breakup of the Soviet Union had been a positive development. Seventy-five percent thought it had caused more harm, and this was the single highest figure in the entire survey, the thing Russians agreed on over any other.

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

totalitarianism robs people of the ability to form opinions, to define themselves as distinct from other members of society or from the regime itself.

Once cable and satellite television took hold a few years later, an entire channel was launched to show Soviet television twenty-four hours a day. It was called Nostalgia, and its logo, shown in a corner of the screen, contained a red hammer and sickle.

tired of thinking about the future. They were drawing their sense of identity from the past, and they were imbuing this past with an additional air of wholesome conservatism.

An element of the nostalgia that was becoming evident by the end of 1995 was the longing for a strong leader, capable of exerting the force for which Homo Sovieticus was ever prepared.

Surveys conducted by Levada’s center showed that Russians wanted three things in this election cycle: an end to economic instability; an end to the war in Chechnya; and the restoration of their country to greatness.

Yeltsin opted to fight directly against the rising wave of nostalgia. His campaign endeavored to drown out Old Songs About the Most Important Things with a barrage of messages, most of them frightening. Cartoons imagined a future under the Communists, with nothing in the refrigerator and only one program on television. A rock star implored his fans to vote for Yeltsin because “I don’t want my country to turn into a communist concentration camp again.” A clip composed of black-and-white footage from the 1918–1922 civil war said, “It’s not too late to prevent civil war or famine.”12

“equal-opportunity capitalism,”

life that required paying a bribe to do anything was a life of daily humiliation,

The totality of his theory and its scientific sheen had to appeal

two attributes made Gumilev’s ideas perfect for the historical moment. His insistence on the essential nature of ethnic groups helped explain the agony of the empire. His geographic determinism fit well with the idea of Russia’s unique destiny, which the Levada survey had shown to be so important for Russians.

one invented by Anatoli Fomenko, a mathematician who claimed that his calculations recast all of world history. In his story, history was shorter and more accessible: in the Middle Ages, the world was a giant empire with Russia at its center; before that, there was hardly anything. Conventional history was fiction, concocted by the Russians-who-ruled-the-world for their own entertainment. Fomenko was a classic conspiracy theorist: he proved his assertions by way of relentlessly logical constructions based on random mathematical assumptions, and he dismissed all contrary evidence as falsification by his enemies.

Karl Popper, the Austrian-British philosopher who created the concept of an “open society.” George Soros, the Hungarian-born American billionaire who was opening foundations and learning institutions throughout the disintegrating Eastern Bloc, had been taken with Popper for decades and included the words “open society” in the names of most of his organizations.

the National Bolshevik Party was primarily an artistic exercise. Dugin took it more seriously as a long-term project, both a political and a philosophical one. After nearly four years of shuttling back and forth to Europe to take part in New Right gatherings, Dugin stopped traveling to concentrate on working in Russia. He penned the party’s manifesto, which read in part: 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. ten IT’S ALL OVER ALL OVER AGAIN AFTER WINNING THE ELECTION, Yeltsin again began casting about for a successor.

You have to be able to tell the difference between freedom and total lack of oversight!2 Not only was the government neglecting its oversight function, wrote Nemtsov, but it was letting itself be manipulated by the newly moneyed class.

True for us today.

the improved fortunes of the Military Insurance Company, which had just secured a lavish new contract with the Federal Security Service, the FSB, where Yeltsin had just appointed a new boss. He was a colonel from St. Petersburg, by the name of Vladimir Putin.

Nemtsov had been sounding the alarm about the Russian state’s mounting debt. The government’s misleading laissez-faire attitude, which masqueraded as freedom, was, Nemtsov believed, simply failure to accept responsibility for an economy headed for implosion.

IN RUSSIA, politics was speeding up. On March 24, 1999, NATO forces began bombing Serbia in response to the Yugoslav army’s actions in Kosovo. Prime Minister Primakov happened to be on his way to the United States when the bombing began. The insult and the injury were on display. Russians had long considered the Orthodox Serbs to be their existential allies. Kosovo was, legally, a part of Serbia—a secessionist, Muslim part—and the parallels to Chechnya were obvious. Primakov was mere hours from arriving in the United States, where President Bill Clinton might at least have paid lip service to consulting him, and not doing so was an affront. Primakov turned his plane around and returned to Russia.

On May 9—a month and a half after the start of the bombing campaign—Red Square saw its first Victory Day military parade in a decade.

According to the results of the 1999 survey, Russians were ever more nostalgic. “Would you prefer that things return to the way they were before 1985?”—before perestroika—drew a clear majority of respondents who agreed: 58 percent, up from 44 in 1994. The proportion of people who viewed the changes of the early 1990s as positive continued to shrink, while the percentage of those who said they could not cope with the changes grew noticeably. The more distant past became ever more appealing: now 26 percent believed that Stalin’s rule had been good for the country, up from 18 percent in 1994. Those who held a negative view of the Soviet dictator were now in the minority.

“The Gray Ones” in the novel are the shock troops of a man who appears to be an interim ruler, someone dispatched by stronger—and darker—forces to clear the land. The Gray Ones wage war on what they see as dangerous liberal ideas and on enlightenment as such. The Gray Ones, and their gray cardinal of a leader, appear inept, and come off as saboteurs rather than statesmen, yet they turn out to have infinite staying power.22

there was Yeltsin out on the porch, in his overcoat and fur hat, with Putin next to him, still wearing only a suit, like a host who has stepped outside for a moment to say goodbye to a departing guest. Yeltsin got into a Mercedes stretch limo and drove off the premises as Putin, flanked by several other men, waved to him from the porch.2

Putin had greatly weakened the power of elected officials by creating federal oversight over governors and giving the federal center the right to fire elected governors; reversed judicial reform; and monopolized national broadcast television in the hands of the Kremlin.

Putin had seen Levada make an inappropriate face at some official function and had taken offense. The new president was getting a reputation for being thin-skinned and vengeful, and the old sociologist, for all his Soviet experience, had never had much of a poker face. The rumor may or may not have been true, and it was ultimately unnecessary for explaining what was happening to the center.

television broadcasts were changing rapidly. The first thing to go was any programming that poked fun at the Kremlin.

“Dogonim i peregonim Ameriku” (“We shall catch up to America and overtake it”)

the new elite came to rely heavily on people who called themselves “political technologists.” They were like Western political consultants magnified to the point of caricature. They created presidents, parties, and platforms from scratch. They employed small armies of people who produced logos and websites, photo ops and miles of political jargon.

part of the technologists’ task was to find and incorporate ideas generated by others. The top political technologist of them all, Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Moscow editor who manufactured Putin’s public persona in advance of his election, found Dugin and promoted his ideas. Dugin had a knack for putting the generalized anxiety of the elite into words, and these words sounded smart. After September 11, he said on television,

“Obedience and love for one’s leader are the traits of the Russian people.”

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.