The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

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.

Even though the exact systems of rank and privilege were secret, the basic logic according to which the state doled out goods and comforts in exchange for valued services ruled every person’s life. At the same time, official ideology extolled equality and the state punished those who had, or wanted to have, too much. For Homo Sovieticus this translated into the value of equality within groups—a strictly enforced conformity at one’s station in life.

every Soviet citizen was constantly made aware of his ethnic origin, which was immutable and contained on every document that referred to him. Only members of the single largest ethnic group—the Russians—could occasionally forget who they were.

The antinomies required Homo Sovieticus to fragment his consciousness to accommodate both of the contradictory positions. Levada borrowed George Orwell’s term “doublethink.” Homo Sovieticus, like the characters of 1984, could hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. These beliefs ran on parallel tracks, and so long as the tracks indeed did not cross, they were not in conflict: depending on the situation, Homo Sovieticus could deploy one or the other statement in the antinomic pair, sometimes one after the other, in quick succession.

But the most important thing Levada believed about Homo Sovieticus was this: his was a dying breed. He had been formed by the one-two punch of the Revolution and the Great Terror: the first event brought its ideals and values, and the second taught Homo Sovieticus to conform in order to survive. But now, thirty years after the death of Stalin, the people so shaped were dying off. Their children and grandchildren would be different.

THE TASK OF PROVING that a certain social type existed, was dominant, and would soon die off was so circular that it verged on impossible. But this was not the biggest problem with the study. The biggest problem was that none of Levada’s sociologists had ever done anything like this before.

None of them had been trained in statistical analysis: they would have to train themselves. The lack of computers made the setup look more farcical than tragic. It took them two years to be able to design and implement their study. On second look, the idea that they knew how to design a survey also seemed suspect.

How do you bring up a topic that has never before been discussed? How do you elicit the opinions of people who have not been entitled to hold opinions? How do you have conversations for which there is no language? Gudkov began to think of their group as a geological expedition setting out to determine the makeup of a monolith.

Ask people “what should be done” with certain deviant groups. It was not hard to be a deviant in Soviet society, and many people were—people who listened to rock music, for example (they were generally referred to as “rockers”), and hippies (the term was still in circulation in the late 1980s because there was still a subculture of people wearing long hair and singing to acoustic guitar). Offer respondents a range of options, from “leave them alone” to the Leninist “liquidate.” Gudkov figured that such questions would tease out the limits of tolerance and, more to the point, help measure the levels of underlying aggression.

Homo Sovieticus was clearly opening up to the world, feeling reasonably peaceful toward even the most deviant of groups, like the homosexuals: fully 10 percent believed that homosexuals should be “left to their own devices,” another 6 percent thought they should be “helped” (the questionnaire did not specify what kind of help they should receive), and a third thought that homosexuals should be “liquidated.”32 Considering that homosexual conduct was a crime punishable by up to three years in prison, Gudkov thought this level of aggression was low.

The highest proportion of those who wanted to “liquidate” homosexuals was found in respondents older than fifty and younger than twenty: adults of working age were markedly less aggressive.

What Soviet people were required to believe and proclaim was counterfactual, and the requirement itself was but a mechanism of control, precisely because it contained its own negation. Homo Sovieticus lived a life of constant negotiation with the omnipotent state, and the negotiation itself was both the individual’s sole survival strategy and an instrument of control.

There was a game called “Work,” and one of the most-often-repeated Soviet jokes described it perfectly: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

What made this simple-sounding game instantly complicated was that it was not all pretense: the state indeed controlled the citizen’s fate, and the citizen could be said to owe his continued survival to the state.

The group administered its hundred-question survey to 2,700 people of various ages and backgrounds in different parts of the USSR, and here is what they did not find: people who believed in a radiant communist future, true Marxists, ideologues. The survey provided many opportunities for a true believer to manifest his convictions. But when answering the question “Where do you think a person can find answers to questions that concern him?” only 5.6 percent chose “In the teachings of Marx and Lenin,” which would have been the “correct” answer in a different setting.

Homo Sovieticus was not indoctrinated. In fact, Homo Sovieticus did not seem to hold particularly strong opinions of any sort. His inner world consisted of antinomies, his objective was survival, and his strategy was constant negotiation—the endless circulation of games of doublethink.

Asked to define a festive occasion, for example, respondents over the age of fifty were most likely to name official holidays, beginning with the days of military glory (Soviet Army Day and Victory Day) while the younger ones would say, “when you’ve gotten lucky” or “when you can get together with friends and have a drink.” Asked to describe their greatest fear, the older people would say “war” while the younger ones said “humiliation.”

Levada concluded that the second part of his hypothesis, which held that Homo Sovieticus was dying off, was correct, and that this was inevitable. “One of the outcomes of these deals with the devil,” he wrote, referring to the constant “games” Homo Sovieticus played, “is the disintegration of the structure of personality itself.”

Homo Sovieticus was caught in an infinite spiral of lies: pretending to be, pretending to have, pretending to believe, and pretending not to. The fakery concerned the most basic of facts and the most fundamental of values, and what lay at the bottom of the spiral was an absence: “even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

They were going to spend New Year’s in Poland. Tatiana had been going there for a couple of years: since the stores in Moscow had emptied out completely and tutoring could no longer buy them a semblance of comfort, she had become one of Russia’s first chelnoki—“shuttles,” people who made their living by importing goods in quantities small enough to be carried as personal luggage.

In January, she told Masha that they would never again travel to Lithuania, where they had spent the previous August at the Baltic seaside resort of Palanga. Now, she said, “we” had done something terrible there and the people of Lithuania would forever hate Russians.

Over the decades, the Little Octobrists followed the Party’s broadening trajectory: the organization had started out as small and voluntary, drawing politically motivated children, but by the 1960s all primary school children were inducted, wholesale, in first grade.

the story that made the biggest impression on Masha was the one called “Vase.” In it, little Volodya accidentally breaks a vase while frolicking with his brothers and sisters at their aunt’s house. He then lies about it and suffers pangs of conscience until, two or three months later, he makes a tearful confession to his mother, who then gets him absolved by the aunt. The story, ostensibly based on the recollections of Lenin’s older sister, Anna, adds the apparently fictional detail that the other children had been so busy playing that they had not noticed who broke the vase—this serves to excuse their un-Soviet failure to denounce their little brother to the authorities.

The Chebotarev family did not do the Communist Party. Galina Vasilyevna’s father had been a highly placed Party apparatchik who failed to stand up for his Jewish wife during Stalin’s antisemitic purges of the late 1940s.

A dozen years earlier, before Masha was born, Tatiana, then a student, had been told to join the Party. A representative at the university told her that the physics department had been instructed to admit one top student to the Party, and Tatiana was it. At twenty-four, Tatiana was a samizdat-reading Soviet cynic, and joining the Party appeared to her as an opportunistic, morally indifferent option.

In the end, Tatiana managed to secure her own exception: she had been tutoring a classmate who had entered the department after his military service, as a standing Party member, and with his own exceptions made to the competitive admissions process. The department needed him, he needed Tatiana to continue his studies, and she needed him to make the Party organization leave her alone.

Galina Vasilyevna’s spiritual quest had already taken her away from religion, to the TV, where a hypnotist by the name of Anatoly Kashpirovsky was making frequent appearances. As his live shows demonstrated, he had healing powers, so Galina Vasilyevna, like millions of other Soviet citizens, was holding widemouthed glass jars of tap water up to the television set to obtain a healing charge.

In 1990, Yeltsin resigned from the Party. Within a year, so did roughly four million other people—more than a fifth of the Party’s total membership.

For over a generation before Gorbachev came to power, Politburo membership had generally been a lifetime appointment. When a member died, he was mechanically replaced by a candidate long held in reserve, often scarcely younger than the departed.

Over the next year and a bit, Alexander Nikolaevich oversaw the rapid disintegration of the Eastern Bloc. Historian Stephen Kotkin has called the Bloc the Soviet Union’s “outer empire,” like the “outer party” in Orwell’s 1984.

Initially, the arrangement also included Yugoslavia and Albania, but they wrestled free of Soviet influence in the 1940s and the 1960s, respectively. Each pursued its own leaders’ version of socialism—a freer version of Soviet society in the case of Yugoslavia, and hard-line Stalinism in the case of Albania.

One after another, the Eastern European states allowed protests, which quickly grew massive, and opened borders and attempted some measure of free elections with the participation of rapidly forming parties that were not Communist. Most places, the ruling party sat down with the opposition in what were called “round tables” and then exited the scene peacefully if not gracefully, leaving the ad hoc groups of former dissidents, academics, student activists, and trade union organizers to sort out the mess of turning a Soviet-style state with a command economy and a one-party system into a functioning democracy.

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.

In the logic of perestroika, the pullout from Eastern Europe was inevitable: the “outer empire” was costing the Soviet Union too much, and the continued occupation of these countries could not be justified in the new ideology of openness. But Gorbachev, and Alexander Nikolaevich, imagined that the chain reaction would somehow stop at the Soviet border and the “inner empire” would remain intact.

Czarist Russia had been an empire, and during the civil war of 1918–1922, the Red Army took on a number of different national-liberation armies that were fighting the center more than they were fighting Bolshevism. Large chunks of the empire broke off and established independent nation-states: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine.

At the basis of the affirmative action empire lay the belief that nationalism was a “masking ideology”—the need for national identity would fall away as class consciousness took hold and a stronger, socialist identity developed. National interests would naturally be superseded by class interests. Until that happened, however, national identities and national interests had to be acknowledged—but only insofar as they did not threaten the unity of the Soviet state.

The affirmative action empire was over. All peoples were equal, but the Russian nation was “first among equals.”

This was 1936—about a decade before Orwell’s Animal Farm, with its principle that “some animals are more equal than others.”

In the daily experience of the Soviet citizen, living in one or another constituent republic meant little. Quality of life was determined by individual privilege and, to a lesser extent, by proximity to the center.

Soviet Russia had once declared itself to be the world’s first multiethnic anti-imperial state, yet its practices were imperial.

About a month after Alexander Nikolaevich wrote the letter, the Nagorny Karabakh regional council, until then a ceremonial body, resolved to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia. Two days later, fighting broke out. The Politburo attempted to intervene by removing the head of the Nagorny Karabakh Party organization. Anti-Armenian pogroms broke out in Azerbaijan. Moscow removed Party bosses of both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Each republic voted to consider Nagorny Karabakh its own. Moscow sided with Azerbaijan. More anti-Armenian pogroms followed. Armenia expelled ethnic Azeris. Gorbachev had the Nagorny Karabakh secessionist movement leaders arrested (they were released six months later). Azerbaijan’s Supreme Soviet voted to secede from the USSR. Anti-Armenian pogroms broke out in the Azerbaijan capital, Baku, a large, opulent city—one of the world’s first oil capitals, where Azeris, Armenians, Jews, and assorted others had thrived for over a century. Now ninety Armenians were dead and the rest of the Armenians of Baku became refugees.

The Soviet Union was splitting along all of its seams. Gorbachev, though he may not have followed Alexander Nikolaevich’s recommendations precisely, had been doing nothing but looking for a way out instead of solutions. Organizations that called themselves “popular fronts”—a term coined in Nagorny Karabakh—appeared, one after another, in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as Ukraine and Belorussia. All proclaimed support for perestroika as their goal, but it quickly emerged that their goals did not match Gorbachev’s.

Five days earlier, Alexander Nikolaevich had given perhaps the most difficult interview of his life: he told the Pravda that the pact, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the secret protocols that divided Europe, existed.

Alexander Nikolaevich dealt a blow to the all-important myth of the infallibility of Soviet action in the Second World War, but from the point of view of the Baltics, his revelation was painfully insufficient. In a few months, Lithuania took a declaratory step toward independence: its Communist Party decided to sever ties with the Soviet Party organization. This was a double blow—to the Soviet Union and to the Party.

In the spring of 1990, Estonia and Latvia declared null and void all documents that made them a part of the USSR. In June, the Russian Republic, which now had its own parliament—chaired by Yeltsin—voted to assert “state sovereignty,” though no one knew what that might mean.

By late 1989, Alexander Nikolaevich came to the conclusion that the Soviet Union needed to be transformed into a federation, each of whose members would have tangible legislative independence and economic responsibility.23 But he expected patience and trust from the republics.

Alexander Nikolaevich feared the failure of perestroika perhaps more than anything else. He kept lashing out at the Party’s conservatives for holding the process back, and at times it seemed like Gorbachev had stopped listening to him altogether: all he was doing at any given point was looking for a stopgap measure, a way to balance the teetering union at the edge of a precipice.

The single question citizens of the USSR were asked to consider: “Do you believe it is necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of sovereign republics with equal rights, where the rights and freedoms of people of all nationalities will be fully guaranteed?” It was not clear what the legal and practical consequences would be, or even what the question meant, since, with the exception of the words “renewed federation,” it said the same thing as the existing Soviet constitution. Really, it was not so much a referendum as an opinion poll, with one poorly designed, overburdened question.

The center no longer wielded sufficient power to compel different republics to coordinate efforts and questions on a referendum. There was little basis for concluding that a majority of citizens of the Soviet Union wanted the same thing, but Gorbachev interpreted the results as a mandate to draft a renewed union treaty.

When the tram was passing through a tunnel at Volokolamskoye Roadway, Masha saw two tanks moving in the opposite direction. “Wow! Cool!” said Masha. “Fuck,” said Tatiana.