The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Galina’s coworkers had been coming by the apartment to discuss lesson plans: the school year was starting in less than two weeks and history, it seemed, had changed again, so teaching it had to change too.

That afternoon Gorbachev held a press conference in which he said, “I have come back to a different country.” He said that there had been an attempt to return the country to a totalitarian state and it had failed. At some point, Gorbachev had started using the word “totalitarian” to describe the regime that now seemed, finally, to have toppled.

The Soviet Union seemed to exist, but its form was elusive. Yeltsin’s Russian Republic summarily subsumed some of the Union’s governing mechanisms. Yeltsin also plainly strong-armed Gorbachev into canceling some of his first post-coup appointments. Most important, he made Gorbachev appoint an outsider of Yeltsin’s choosing to run the Soviet KGB and then added the dismantling of the agency to the man’s job description.

Only three of Russia’s eighty-nine regions had leaders who had been elected, their posts newly created during perestroika: the mayors of Moscow and Leningrad and the president of Tatarstan. The rest of the regions were still run by Party structures, which were now literally, physically being abandoned.

The union treaty, meanwhile, was crumbling. Gorbachev continued negotiating, but so did Yeltsin. The Russian president pressured the Soviet one finally to recognize the independence of the Baltic states. Even the republics that had seemed to favor the Union before the coup now declared independence. Gorbachev, however, kept trying to convene meetings on the treaty. But Ukraine, the second-largest republic, now boycotted them. Finally, on December 7, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus convened a meeting at which they devised the formal dissolution of the USSR and invented a consolation prize, a vague entity called the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Less than two weeks later, on December 25, Gorbachev addressed his countrymen as president for the last time: “In light of what’s happened, with the foundation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I am resigning my post as president of the USSR.”46 The Soviet Union ceased to exist.

SERYOZHA COULD BE FORGIVEN for being perpetually unable to pin down what had happened to the country in which he was born: much older people, learned observers and passionate participants in the events alike, had similar difficulties. Several narratives finally emerged. Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy has argued that the USSR collapsed because it was an empire in the century that ended empires: the process may have taken longer and looked different from the deaths of other empires because of the peculiarities of Soviet state-building and ideology, but that did not change the forces that pulled the Soviet Union apart.

In other disciplines, University of California at Berkeley anthropologist Alexei Yurchak has also written that the Soviet Union was brought down by its own paradoxes, falling into the gap between the governing ideology and lived reality—a gap that exists and can produce a crisis in any society.

With the exception of Brzezinski, who was a student and theorist of totalitarianism, and Levada, who proposed the Homo Sovieticus model, all these explanations try to make sense of the demise of the USSR in terms imported from very different societies. The loss of the social sciences in the Soviet Union made this inevitable: Soviet society had been forbidden to know itself, and had no native language to describe and define what had happened.

In functioning democracies the contradictions between avowed ideals and reality can be and often are called out, causing social and political change. That does not eliminate the built-in gap, but it has a way of making societies a little more democratic and a little less unequal, in spurts. Totalitarian ideology allows no such correction.

Not only did the Soviet state not consider itself an empire, it claimed to be the opposite of one. That self-concept did not change during the Soviet dismantling or later, when Russia became its own federation of different territories, cultures, and ethnic groups.

To pass, like other empires in the twentieth century, into a post-imperial future, Russia would have had to reform its identity accordingly. But not even Yeltsin, who played perhaps the most important role in taking the Soviet Union apart, thought of it, or of Russia, as an empire.

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.

Sounds fucking familiar.

ONE AREA in which Soviet citizens learned to be hypersensitive to signals was the regulation of private life. The party line on the family kept changing over the course of Soviet history. Right after the 1917 Revolution, marriage was abandoned and the family was willed to wither away. Less than twenty years later, the family was officially redeemed and even consecrated as the “nucleus of Soviet society.”7 In the years immediately following the Revolution, homosexuality was tolerated (but, contrary to myth, not celebrated or even really accepted), but in 1934 it was recriminalized.8 As the pendulum swung back, divorce was made prohibitively difficult, and abortion, legal and common in the 1920s, was outlawed.

The legal shifts demanded that Soviet citizens change not only their behavior but also their very outlook on life—and the social contract dictated that the state send out reasonably clear signals and the population react accordingly. Signals were sent through propaganda in newspapers, movies, and books; through legal changes; and through enforcement, with demonstrative punishment of the few keeping the many in line (the proportion of those being punished to those observing shifted after the death of Stalin, and this solidified the principle of teaching by frightening example). It was this system of signaling and response that broke down by 1991.

The way Gorbachev was zigzagging, the release of all political prisoners did not mean that dissidents would never again be jailed—it was the Democratic Union’s rejection of the KGB’s signals that made the secret police powerless against them.

That month, as the country prepared for the referendum on the Union, Central Committee functionaries were frantically trying to keep the country in check. They banned a women’s forum planned in Dubna, a nuclear-science town a couple of hours outside Moscow, after a newspaper reported that among the young academics now hungrily cramming gender theory, older dissidents who had been publishing underground feminist journals, labor activists focusing on women’s rights, and a dozen foreign dignitaries, there would be two out lesbians from the United States.

The Party’s signaling system had ceased functioning, and this in turn rendered the ideology no longer hermetic—in effect, no longer totalitarian.

In the four months between the feminist forum and the gay festival the government had not shifted its stance on homosexuality or on private life more generally, but between rapid political change and new economic exigencies—every venue needed hard currency—the system of signaling and response, the very social contract of Soviet society, lay in ruins.

In another three weeks, many of the people who had attended the gay festival were in front of the Moscow White House, preparing to push back the tanks. The American activists had given the Moscow gay group a photocopier, and it was now put to work printing Yeltsin’s address to the people.

The coup organizers, in other words, tried to will the signaling system back into existence simply by issuing several decrees—and by placing the country’s president under house arrest, which has to rank near the top in the hierarchy of signals—but the social contract could not be resuscitated.

FOR THE POST-SOVIET INTELLIGENTSIA and Western journalists and politicians, the most important moment in 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, a short walk from the Kremlin, a block from the Central Committee, and right in front of KGB headquarters and the Children’s World department store, which stood kitty-corner to each other. The toppling, mandated by the Moscow City Council, which wanted to beat the jubilant crowds to it for safety reasons, symbolized the simultaneous dismantling of the two pillars of totalitarianism: ideology and terror. As it was lifted by a crane, the giant monument was revealed to be hollow.

In general, they remembered the coup not as the end—or the beginning—of an era, with a strong symbolic finale, but as one in a chain of confusing and exciting and sometimes frightening events that engaged the adults in their lives. Another such event for Lyosha was the murder, later in 1991, of Igor Talkov, a young bearded singer who performed heartrending pop songs of a new patriotism—Russian rather than Soviet.

The August coup looked like only one in a chain of important events from at least one other vantage point: that of Yeltsin. He spent all that year waging his war for Russia. He was fighting on at least two fronts simultaneously, against the Party conservatives, who opposed all reform, and against Gorbachev, who wished to rein in Russia’s and Yeltsin’s own political ambitions.

In the intelligentsia’s mythology, 1991 was the year of Russia’s bloodless revolution. But it was not bloodless: its victims included the three men who died in Moscow in August and the nineteen people killed in Vilnius and Riga in January, and the hundreds who had died in Azerbaijan since 1988 and during the brutal breakup of a demonstration in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1989.

For the remainder of 1991 Yeltsin focused not on destroying the institutions of the Soviet state but on taking them over. He claimed, for his newly independent Russia, the army, the central bank, and the Soviet seat in the United Nations. Wisdom in the West was that this was a good thing: most of the Soviet nuclear arsenal would be in one place, and Russia would not renege on its predecessor’s foreign debt, as the Bolsheviks had done in 1917.

But on closer inspection, the Party ban concerned economic activity—Yeltsin feared, with good reason, that the Party apparatus would siphon off what remained of its wealth. The dismantling of the KGB was actually its partitioning into fifteen constituent parts among the republics of the USSR, which ensured that Russia inherited a functioning Soviet-style secret police.

In several regions, especially Chechnya and Tatarstan, the local leader had been brought to power by a movement for national independence. Elsewhere, like in Yakutia in the far north, home to Russia’s diamond mines, the push to secede was framed in terms of economic self-interest.

The forces pulling at Russia now were eerily similar to those that had torn apart the Soviet Union. There were also new, confounding problems. Russia was a country nearing economic ruin, surrounded by other countries nearing economic ruin. It shared a currency with them and its borders with them were porous, yet Russia held next to no political sway over them.

The legal and political foundations of the new state were not entirely clear. It had a parliament of sorts, the Congress of People’s Deputies, which had been elected in 1990, before Russia declared sovereignty. At its first session, in May 1990, 920 of its 1,068 members belonged to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A year later, only 767 Congress members remained in the Party. But even after Yeltsin banned the Communist Party’s activities, a majority—675 people—maintained their Party affiliation.

There were laws. Like every other former Soviet republic, Russia inherited criminal and civil procedure codes that banned private enterprise in nearly any guise, operations with hard currency, and being unemployed, among other things. Russia also inherited a constitution that contained virtually no information about the country’s structure, principles, and identity.

The peaceful-revolution narrative (which was more accurate in most of the other countries) compelled them to start their new state on the old legal foundation. Their success depended largely on implied political understandings. Countries amended their old Communist constitutions to make them workable, and lived with the resulting patchwork for years.

In the late fall of 1991, Yeltsin scrambled to create a functioning cabinet. He most urgently needed someone to take charge of the economy, which after the coup went from bad to dead.

Russia’s biggest cities, where the military-industrial complex dominated the economy, were hit the hardest, for they had little that could be bartered.

Yeltsin asked Gaidar to figure out how the country was going to survive. Gaidar was the thirty-five-year-old scion of a privileged Soviet family, grandson of two of the country’s most venerated writers and husband of the daughter of a third.* Save for a short stint as an editor, he had worked only at research institutions. He assembled a team of like-minded economists, starting with half a dozen and later adding a few more. All of them were roughly the same age and came from academia. They had no experience in government or administration of any sort, and with the exception of a few recent short trips to the West, they had never seen a market economy outside of a textbook.

In the first few weeks they learned that the situation was even more dire than they had imagined. The country had no currency or gold reserves—most had been spent and the rest appeared to have been plundered. Because consumer goods had been in short supply for years, and also because prices for all goods were set by the government without regard for cost or demand, people had accumulated a lot of unspent rubles—there was no telling exactly how many.

In November 1991, Yeltsin appointed Gaidar his minister of the economy and finance with the rank of vice-premier. Yeltsin decided to run the cabinet himself, without appointing a prime minister—in no small part because no one wanted to accept a suicide mission—and this meant that Gaidar would in effect run the government.

ON JANUARY 2, 1992, the government lifted price controls on consumer goods, with the exception of bread, milk, and alcohol. In a couple of weeks, goods began showing up on store shelves. Within a month, prices had gone up 352 percent and the money that Russians had thought of as savings and Gaidar had thought of as a dangerous cash surplus had been spent.

Gaidar’s reforms may have averted famine and total infrastructural collapse, but the anxiety they produced far exceeded anything that had come before. By the end of the winter, Yeltsin’s honeymoon with the Congress was over.

By the summer, the government discontinued all subsidies of consumer goods, including bread, milk, and alcohol. Inflation stabilized at levels well below hyperinflation. From the point of view of Gaidar and his team, this was success. From the point of view of many Russians, this was unemployment, no longer hidden, as it had been under the old regime, with its pretend work for pretend pay.

By the end of the year, it approved a privatization plan for Russia, according to which every one of the country’s 148 million citizens would receive a voucher that could be turned into shares of any newly non-state-owned enterprise. The Congress generally hated the idea, but agreed to let it proceed.

Russian politics had returned to its pre-coup state: the president and his cabinet, hardly a united front, were in an all-out war with the Congress. The hastily patched and repatched old Soviet-Russian constitution made matters worse because it did not delineate the responsibilities and powers of the branches of government.

The 1991 coup had exposed the collapse of the Soviet social contract. That void had not been filled. Russian citizens still carried Soviet passports with a hammer and sickle on the cover, paid for food with Soviet rubles decorated with profiles of Lenin and the Soviet state seal, and could not even be sure of the name of their country. Was it Russia? The Russian Federation?

On October 3, armed supporters of the Congress stormed the Moscow mayoralty and the federal television center. For a time, TV screens went blank—or, rather, gray—with an announcement in white type: “Broadcasting on Channels 1 and 4 has been disrupted by an armed mob that has forced its way into the building.” Nearly a hundred people died during the attack on the television center. The armed mob, directed by General Rutskoi, went on to storm the Ministry of Communications, the customs office, and other federal buildings.

Masha’s grandfather, who had been such an ardent Yeltsin supporter, had had a political change of heart. He now spent his days reading the emergent ultranationalist press, newly known as the red-brown part of the political spectrum for its combination of Communist and brownshirt fervor.

Evgenia was no longer involved with any political party. Gay activism had also suddenly lost its way after Yeltsin repealed the sodomy law for no reason that had anything to do with actual gays and lesbians in Russia. She decided to boycott the December 1993 election: the idea was, clearly, to create a pliant parliament and to ram through a constitution drafted behind closed doors, and she wanted nothing to do with either.

That passage from a 1993 speech, and many others like it—Zhirinovsky was a prolific speaker—certainly sounded like ultranationalism. But his speeches were both more and less than that. They promised a return to simplicity after years of the soul-searching that perestroika had demanded, and the mind-numbing economic and legalistic debates of the Yeltsin years.

The first episode asked whether it might be true that Hitler had access to “ancient knowledge” that led to the invention of the atomic bomb.

Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democrats were firmly in the lead with 23 percent. Russia’s Choice, the government’s party, led by Gaidar, got 15.5 percent. The Communist Party came in third with 12.4 percent. “Russia, you have lost your mind!” shouted a well-known writer, Yuri Karyakin, who had been invited as a guest commentator. Then he stormed out of the studio.

Nizhny had held the first public auction of grocery stores just five months earlier and had also since privatized 22 percent of the three thousand small businesses in the city. Nemtsov had devised an ingenious plan for solving the most vexing problems of privatizing enterprise: the shops and restaurants were sold free of debt and also free of the obligation to retain old employees—but some of the proceeds from each auction were deposited in a fund for those who lost their jobs as a result.