The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Just a week after the Revolution, Lenin wrote that highly qualified professionals would need to retain their privileged position “for the time being.” While the idle rich had to be stripped of their possessions, the highly trained had to be enticed to work for the new regime. The Marxist principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” was replaced with the more pragmatic approach of paying what the state could pay for extracting the maximum from those with high ability.

The Bolsheviks placed a premium on the “creative intelligentsia,” as it was termed—writers, artists, and, especially, filmmakers—as well as scholars and scientists. Military officers ranked even higher. But most of all, the Bolsheviks valued themselves: privileges and benefits for “political workers” exceeded those of all other groups.

The Soviet privileged were entitled to higher salaries and a set of additional financial rewards; bigger and better apartments; favored access to consumer goods; and certain education and travel privileges.10 The privileges grew in value and scope during the three decades of Stalin’s rule, as did the wealth gap.

Paradoxically, the peculiarities of the Soviet economic system made the borders between differently valued groups of citizens only starker and harder to penetrate.

Because most of the extra compensation for the privileged was non-monetary, and because all of it was centrally administered, members of a given caste were grouped together socially and geographically. Members of the Politburo lived in the same building as other members of the Politburo, procured consumer goods at the same distribution centers, sent their children to the same schools, got treated at the same clinics, were given plots of land on which to build a wooden dacha—a weekend or summer house—in the same area, and took the waters in the same sanatoriums.

Those at the very top, whether out of a sense of shame or a residual longing for the security of a fortress, shielded their lives behind tall solid fences. Alexander Galich, the dissident singer-songwriter, had a song called “Beyond Seven Fences.” Its narrator, an ordinary Soviet citizen, encounters the fences that surround the Communist leaders’ estates and begins to fantasize about what the fences conceal: fresh, untrampled grass, clean air, hard-to-find chocolate-mint candy, birds of different kinds, shish kebab consumed in the security of knowing the fence is guarded, and at night, to top it all off, “they show films about whores.”

On weekends, a black government Volga—the top model among Soviet-made cars—equipped with flashing lights that entitled it to ignore traffic regulations carried Seryozha’s family out of the city. They took Rublyovskoye Shosse, a smooth and narrow road effectively reserved for use by the Soviet elites.

LYOSHA GREW UP not quite at the opposite end of the Soviet class spectrum from Seryozha but at a great, unbridgeable remove. His family, too, had privilege, and Lyosha was aware of this growing up. His grandfather, a collective farmer, had had a local Party career. This would have meant several years of added pay for serving a term in the regional Soviet, a putative legislative body, and, later, some informal privileges of access. When he died in 1978, at the age of sixty or so, he had a bit more than others in the village: he left his family a cow.

Lyosha’s mother, Galina, the fourth-born and the smartest of her siblings, was lucky to get the help. Her older brother had gone to a military college after his compulsory service, but their mother had not had the money to send any of the rest to university or even so much as to help them leave the village.

By the age of thirty-one, Galina was working as the vice-principal of a trade school and seeing the principal of another trade school in town. He was married. She became pregnant and planned to have an abortion. It would not have been her first, and this was normal: in the absence of methods for pregnancy prevention—hormonal contraceptives were unavailable in the Soviet Union and condoms were of abominable quality and in short supply—abortion was a common contraception method.

Galina agreed. She would keep the baby and raise him alone. This, too, was an ordinary path. For decades now, the Soviet Union had been trying, and failing, to recover from the catastrophic population loss caused by the Second World War and the Gulag extermination system. The thrust of the population policies initiated by Khrushchev was to get as many women as possible to have children by the comparatively few surviving men.

The state endeavored to remove any stigma associated with resorting to the help of orphanages, or with single motherhood and having children out of wedlock. Women could put down a fictitious man as the father on the child’s birth certificate—or even name the actual father, without his having to fear being burdened with responsibility.

Galina became the principal at what was called a “correctional school.” The name was misleading: the school was less a correctional facility than the state’s attempt to compensate for any number of things that had gone terribly wrong with its students. Correctional schools were created to serve children deemed incapable of succeeding in mainstream schools.

Galina worked at a correctional school of the most common type—the type for children whose parents failed to take care of them, often because they drank.

Walking through it, as Galina did on her way to and from work six days a week, was considered dangerous; she carried a knife to protect herself. Sometimes she had to take Lyosha with her to the barachnyi district, usually when she was looking for a student who had gone missing.

He also made a mental connection between poverty and the word “suicide,” which Galina used with some regularity when talking about her students. Other words included “pregnancy” and “alcohol” and, later, “drugs.” These were children—older than Lyosha but children nonetheless, she made this clear—who drank, got pregnant, and killed themselves.

A woman who lived one door down drank heavily, and her kids went to the correctional school. Some nights she passed out and the kids were locked out. Those nights, they often slept on Galina’s landing—Lyosha figured they chose it because they knew she would not hurt them.

Perm was 120 kilometers* away, but for how often people went there, it may as well have been a thousand miles. Sometimes, a nice man stopped by and spent time with them. Galina told Lyosha to call him Uncle Yura.

He read The Wreath of Glory, a set of heavy books in red leatherette covers. The giant anthology collected works of fiction and nonfiction, with each volume devoted to one aspect of the war: a book on the defense of Moscow, a book on Leningrad, a book on victory itself.19 He listened to vinyl records of war songs—the great march songs calling on people to rise up, the lyrical ballads about missing loved ones and fighting for them, and the heartbreaking postwar songs about lost comrades.

PERESTROIKA WAS AN IMPOSSIBLE IDEA on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven.

As the man appointed by Gorbachev to think through perestroika, to design it and guide it, Alexander Nikolaevich was confronted daily with the futility of the task. Much of the Party’s leadership rejected change for fear of losing power. Those who appeared to welcome change, like, most notably, the head of the Moscow Party organization, Boris Yeltsin, were ultimately also driven by the desire for power, and this made them unreliable allies.

The media, which were now—in large part thanks to Alexander Nikolaevich’s efforts—granted greater freedom and even encouraged to tackle difficult subjects, were by turns too passive and too conservative, even reactionary.

As a man who had struggled to educate himself, who had had to teach himself to think, Alexander Nikolaevich was sympathetic to the great number of people resisting change simply because they had never been exposed to anything outside the Party’s dogma. In May 1988 he convinced the Central Committee to approve a concerted effort to restore thought and knowledge to the land.

BEFORE THE PLANNED COLLECTION could materialize, journals began publishing previously silenced philosophers. Even Heidegger could now see print. For someone like Dugin, this was a confounding moment. On the one hand, he no longer had to spend his days hunting down copies of banned books or hurting his eyes by trying to read the microfilm projected onto his wooden desktop. On the other hand, his entire life was constructed around just this: fighting his way to difficult ideas, becoming one of the few people in the country to understand them, and continuing his process of self-education, knowing that he had all the time in the world, his hated static world.

Only about fifty of the participants dared sign their names to the new party’s platform.3 It was an outrageous document, which called for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and referred to the Baltic states—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—as “occupied,” demanding that they, along with any other constituent republic that so wished, be allowed to secede from the Union. It abolished the KGB, the death penalty, and the draft. Novodvorskaya and Evgenia would have gone even further—their views were a combination of libertarianism and anarchism, both of which seemed to them, at that point, the ultimate in Western thought—but the rest of the group held them back.

The first political party in the Soviet Union that was not the Communist Party would be called Demokraticheskiy Soyuz, the Democratic Union.

The Italians gave Evgenia her first computer, but then the Radicals, too, kicked her out, for oversleeping on the day of a demonstration in front of the Romanian embassy. She decided that she was more interested in capitalism than in politics and started the Russian Libertarian Party. She also came out as a lesbian—the love that had been fueling her political life was the love of a woman—and launched the first queer organization in the country, the Association of Sexual Minorities (more specific terms of identity, like “gay” or “lesbian,” were not yet familiar to the Russian ear).

In fact, all her views shared a category much more important than the familiar—and therefore suspect—political divisions: they were Western. Before finding Novodvorskaya, Evgenia was briefly involved in an effort called the Group for Trust Between East and West, whose sole agenda was to counter the most basic premise of Soviet propaganda: the idea that the West was a threat.

As for Dugin, who had lost the woman he loved, his son, and his life of intensive open-ended learning, he was bound to look for and find the position that was the opposite of everything. First he drifted into Pamyat (“Memory”), an organization that in the mid-1980s was emerging from the underground. It had long trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to contemporary world-Zionist-conspiracy theories. Now it allied itself with Gorbachev’s perestroika on the one hand and with an imagined Russian nationalist revival on the other.

While official Soviet media pre-glasnost doled out their own regular servings of antisemitism framed as anti-Zionism, the system had generally subdued outright Russian-nationalist voices. Now this lid was lifted and hatred emerged in many stripes, of which Pamyat was the brightest.

After decades of amorphousness underground, Pamyat had acquired a charismatic leader, a former photographer named Dmitry Vasilyev, who railed against all the world at once: the Holocaust was a Jewish conspiracy (Eichmann was a Jew); rock music was a Satanist plot (slowed-down vinyl records sounded out chants to Satan); and yoga was a Western scourge (all the West wanted to do was contaminate Russian culture).

He now found inspiration in the writing of René Guénon, a long-dead Frenchman who had published more than a dozen books on metaphysics. A couple of volumes focused on Hindu beliefs, but he also wrote on Islam, cosmism, and “the esoterism of Dante.” Dugin perceived a coherent worldview in this eclectic collection, or at least a coherent quest: the search for a tradition, or, rather, Tradition.

Modernity was the opposite of Tradition, so the essential tradition Dugin was seeking could be located only by stripping away all views and things contemporary and working backward.

Tyler Durden, is that you?

By using a French philosopher obsessed with Hinduism and Islam to get at this idea of Tradition, Dugin was coming full circle to an earlier, newly forgotten idea held by Russian thinkers who argued that their country should be turned away from Europe and toward Asia.

Dugin himself, meanwhile, found the Tradition he wanted in the Orthodox faith—not in the contemporary church but with the Old Believers, a faction that split off in the seventeenth century and had since attempted to maintain its ways in spite of the modern world.

They had tried to adapt it to Russian, which proved an infinitely difficult task. For one thing, Russian is a thoroughly grammatically gendered language: most first-person statements have a feminine and a masculine form. The MMPI consisted of 566 first-person statements. The first adaptation efforts, therefore, created two versions of the test—one for women and one for men.

The Soviet psychiatrists and psychologists had very little opportunity to test their clinical reality. Now, in the late 1980s, one of them was allowed to include outsiders in his work, turning them into students, collaborators, and testers at once. How were they going to apply this foreign test? The Russian language, gendered or not, was the least of their problems. The test contained statements like number 58: “Everything is turning out just like the prophets of the Bible said it would.” The Soviet person’s reality included no prophets, and no Bible.

By 1989, the original MMPI was being retired in the United States in favor of an updated version, adjusted for changes in American society and clinicians’ understanding of it. The “men” in the elections question became “people,” and Lincoln and Washington were dropped altogether.

Whatever its limitations as a diagnostic tool in the USSR, the MMPI proved invaluable for inspiring trust in psychologists: the strange trick of being able to draw convincing conclusions about someone’s personality—being able to point to such traits as excitability, cynicism, or a proclivity for developing unexplained symptoms of physical illness—on the basis of a series of apparently unrelated questions struck the perfect balance between magic and science.

As the Iron Curtain began to open a crack—a byzantine visa system was still in place, and the activities of visiting foreigners were highly restricted, but some people were now welcome to come in for some reasons—Western psychotherapists began to visit and teach.

It was both bizarre and earth-shattering that Rogers, a founder of humanistic client-centered therapy and the pioneer of nondirective counseling, would be the first major Western psychologist to lecture in the Soviet Union: his approaches rested first on placing the person at the center of things, and, second, on not telling the person what to do.

Rogers proceeded to lead some of the strangest groups he had ever encountered. Following a large lecture at Moscow University, he planned to spend four days working with a group of no more than thirty people. The roughly fifty people who crowded into the room and another dozen who congregated outside the door spent the first day screaming and fighting one another for a spot in the group.

On day two, he noted, “It became evident that many of their personal problems relate to the great frequency of divorce. In this educated and sophisticated group, it is similar to the United States. One woman spoke of the way in which she and her husband had gradually worked toward a better and seemingly more permanent relationship. She was definitely the exception. Nearly everyone else spoke of ‘When I left my first husband’; ‘I have a problem with my child by my second marriage’; ‘If I leave my second wife.’ There was talk of the insecurity and estrangement of children of previous partnerships; the difficulty of maintaining relationships with one’s children when they are at a distance; the interference of ex-wives and ex-mothers-in-law—the whole gamut.”

As people, though, the Russian participants seemed to sadden the great therapist: he and his co-facilitator noted “a certain ‘lostness’ . . . a pervading sense that there should be more to life, a deep despair about ever finding it.”

The psychologists of Moscow were catching a glimpse of the twentieth century’s professional conversation before the last of its great participants were gone. Rogers died in 1987; Satir in 1988; Frankl lived for another decade, but by the time he visited Moscow he was already in his eighties.

This and subsequent documents made it clear that the future All-Union Public Opinion Research Center would not in fact be merely a research institution: it was expected to actively devise and implement strategies for shaping public opinion.21 The choice of overseeing agencies was logical: centrally controlled trade unions and the labor ministry were in charge of the human resource that was all the Soviet people—who, the thinking went, would now be properly monitored and directed.

Levada’s hypothesis, formed over the course of more than three decades working not only in the Soviet Union but also, in the 1950s, in newly communist China, was that every totalitarian regime forms a type of human being on whom it relies for its stability. The shaping of the New Man is the regime’s explicit project, but its product is not so much a vessel for the regime’s ideology as it is a person best equipped to survive in a given society. The regime, in turn, comes to depend on this newly shaped type of person for its continued survival.

This might be the most depressing thing I've ever read.

The successful member of Soviet society, suggested Levada, believed in self-isolation, state paternalism, and what Levada called “hierarchical egalitarianism,” and suffered from an “imperial syndrome.”

Ideology supported these separations by stressing “class enmity,” but keeping one’s social circle small was also a sound survival strategy during the era of mass terror, when excessive trust could prove deadly.

The Soviet state was the ultimate parent: it fed, clothed, housed, and educated its citizen; it gave him a job and gave his life meaning; it rewarded him for doing good and punished him for doing wrong, no matter how small the transgression. “By its very design, the Soviet ‘socialist’ state is totalitarian because it must not leave the individual any independent space,” wrote Levada.