The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

The political technologists who had been dispatched to deal with Ukraine returned to Moscow and explained their failure: it was the Americans’ fault. The Americans—by which they generally meant the United States government and George Soros—had been financing and organizing Eastern European revolutions beginning with the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in Yugoslavia in 2000, the story went. Then they hit Georgia, followed by Ukraine. Here it was: every fear of the American expansion was confirmed.

As the intellectual and the historian among the leaders of the “preventive counter-revolution,” Dugin took ownership of the new holiday. On November 4, 2005, the Eurasian Youth Union led a march through central Moscow. They called it the Russian March. Eurasian Youth activists walked in the vanguard, carrying a banner emblazoned with the words “Russia Against the Occupiers!” The Eurasianists were joined by several other groups, whose slogans were explicitly racist: “We need a Russian Russia!” one speech concluded. “Glory to Russia!” Another declaimed: “How long are we going to put up with this vermin, with all these ‘Latvias,’ ‘Polands,’ and ‘Georgias’? We declare this the day of the people’s anger. Russians, rise up!”14

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 assist in every way in promoting its general acceptance, such party being organized in strictly hierarchical, oligarchical manner, usually under a single leader and typically either superior to or completely commingled with the bureaucratic governmental organization. A technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of control . . . of all means of effective armed combat. A similarly technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of control . . . of all means of effective mass communication . . . A system of terroristic police control, depending for its effectiveness upon points 3 and 4 and characteristically directed not only against demonstrable “enemies” of the regime, but against arbitrarily selected classes of the population.9

The authoritarian character survives by surrendering his power to an outside authority—God or a leader—whom Fromm called the “magic helper.” The “magic helper” is a source of guidance, security, and also of pride, because with surrender comes a sense of belonging. The authoritarian character is defined by his relationship to power: For the authoritarian character there exist, so to speak, two sexes: the powerful ones and the powerless ones. His love, admiration and readiness for submission are automatically aroused by power, whether of a person or of an institution. 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. The very sight of a powerless person makes him want to attack, dominate, humiliate him.

. The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation—and creation is always a miracle—is outside his range of emotional experience.

“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: They are told again and again: the individual is nothing and does not count. The individual should accept this personal insignificance, dissolve himself in a higher power, and then feel proud in participating in the strength and glory of this higher power.22 And for the sadistic side of the authoritarian character, the ideology offered “a feeling of superiority over the rest of mankind” that, Fromm wrote, was able to “compensate them—for a time at least—for the fact that their lives had been impoverished, economically and culturally.”23