The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

And then there was the American who opened a restaurant only to be denied access to the city’s water system, and the hotel whose manager “delights in gouging his foreign guests, barring them from the restaurant and, often, simply refusing to rent them rooms.” This happened to be the city’s only hotel in a state of reasonable repair, so most of the foreign visitors tried to stay there, opening themselves up to humiliation.

WHILE ZHANNA WAS STRUGGLING to accept the cars and roast piglets, Seryozha had woken up one day to their absence. His grandfather still led a political party, still served on commissions—but in 1991, along with the entire Gorbachev establishment, he was rendered irrelevant to the machinery that ran the country. Seryozha’s parents divorced that year. His father moved out. Everything was different now.

During breaks between classes, the children walked around the school vestibule in a circle, in different-sex pairs, holding hands. If a child asked to be allowed to go to the bathroom during class, he was likewise paired with a student of the opposite sex, who had to stand guard outside the lavatory. This system of opposite-sex pairing was one of peer control: that the children could not actually enter the bathroom together ensured there would be no collusion and truancy; making children walk in circles with someone of the opposite sex—someone who, at that age, could not possibly be a friend—bored them into passivity.

So rigid and cruel were the divisions these ten-year-olds created that one day their teacher canceled a regular biology class in order to teach them the plot of Lord of the Flies. Everyone was deeply impressed, and nothing changed in the way the class dynamics operated.

Seryozha’s mother, who taught at Moscow State University, could not have made ends meet on her salary (which, in the past, had been largely irrelevant because the nomenklatura distribution system had provided a safety net). Unlike other professors, though, she had their large Czars’ Village apartment, and she took a boarder, a Belgian man.

Now she brought home leg quarters, each of them nearly as large as a whole chicken. She said that these were “Legs of Bush” and then explained that Bush was the name of the American president and he and Gorbachev had struck an agreement to send to Russia the dark-meat parts of chickens, which Americans happened to dislike.

But the Soviet Union had no money to pay for the grain and the chicken quarters, so in December 1990 President Bush arranged for loans to the Soviet Union, and this ensured that the dark meat of chickens, in Russia, bore his name for years after his presidency ended.

It was the drinking families in Lyosha’s building that seemed to hit the point of utter despair. Some were hunting stray dogs to eat them. The kids who used to sleep on Lyosha’s landing were trying to make their own money. The two brothers, aged about five and six, were serving local teenage boys, who paid them a ruble, then ten rubles at a time, for performing oral sex on them. There was little you could buy with that.

Like any pyramid scheme, MMM collapsed. It happened in the summer of 1994. People who had handed over their savings to the company numbered in the millions. When the founder of MMM was arrested for tax evasion, hundreds of these investors camped out in front of the company’s headquarters in Moscow demanding his release and the return of a company in which they continued to have faith. In Solikamsk, nine-year-old Lyosha was devastated: he realized he was in love with Lyonya Golubkov, who was now gone from TV.

In the early 1990s, Lev Gudkov was trying to make sense of Russians’ emerging relationship to wealth. Adjusting expectations was a traumatic process, he found, one that opened up chasms between generations.

Most Soviet citizens had hoped that they, or their grown children, would be able to graduate from a room in a communal apartment to a one-room-plus-a-kitchen apartment of their own, and then to two rooms and a kitchen. With luck, they would eventually add a dacha and a Soviet-made Fiat. No one except the elites dreamed of palaces or Volgas—and the elites were safely hidden from view by their seven fences and seven locks.

Later, two American economists who mined Russian statistical data came to the same conclusion: in the course of the 1990s, average living space increased (from sixteen to nineteen square meters per person), the number of people traveling abroad as tourists more than tripled, the percentage of households that owned televisions, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and washing machines increased, and the number of privately owned cars doubled.13 Compared with life in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Russians were better off—but they felt poor.

True, some of the screens shielding the structural inequalities of Soviet society had been lifted, allowing people to observe others being rich—if only because, with most of the old secret distribution centers closed, the rich were now much more likely to do their shopping in plain view.

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.

Happiness and wealth belonged to the Other. Asked if they thought they earned more or less than other people of comparable skill and experience, two-thirds of respondents answered “less”—a statistical impossibility that doomed Russians to jealousy.

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.

Envy was what you felt when someone had more money than you did. Jealousy was what you felt when you thought that the money was or should be yours.

It stood to reason that the distinction was lacking in contemporary Russian: for three generations everything had been said to belong to everyone, and having more was said to be shameful. Jealousy was the only relevant emotion.

It had never before been acceptable to show wealth. Arutyunyan’s mother remembered having studied, at Moscow State University, alongside Stalin’s daughter. The first daughter, she said, was the worst-dressed girl in their year, and the chauffeur had always dropped her off two blocks away from the school.

The fact that the very rich were vanishingly few exacerbated things. The only thing worse than feeling like a loser was feeling like a member of an entire society of losers. The jealousy rarely manifested as jealousy: before it reached the surface it was usually transformed into a different sentiment—feeling used, feeling angry, feeling fear.

The new entrepreneurs, it was said, were murdering one another left and right. For most people, the violence was as much an abstraction as was big money, but the fear of being caught in the cross fire was not entirely unfounded. A friend of Arutyunyan’s once stumbled onto a shootout in the street in Moscow in broad daylight.

She was a well-educated, well-rounded psychoanalyst, no longer a beginner, so she had a phrase to call what she experienced when she started at the new program: it was a narcissistic blow. She observed masters at work, and she realized that she could not work half that well—not because the instructors were innately so much more talented or intelligent but because they stood on the shoulders of their predecessors, who stood on the shoulders of their predecessors, who stood on the shoulders of giants.

The post-Soviet psychoanalysts lacked the central qualification of their profession: they had not themselves gone through analysis. A number of psychoanalysts in Germany, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands began taking on the role of analyst and supervisor for the Russians, who would travel to their supervisors’ cities for a few weeks at a time to undergo analysis, while their own patients were on hold, to return and pick up their work and receive supervision over e-mail.

The language of her sessions was English, the mother tongue for neither analyst nor patient. Sometimes the work of expressing feelings in a language to which these feelings were foreign seemed impossible. Other times, Arutyunyan was grateful for the task of simplification and explication English forced upon her: it made obfuscation more difficult.

Arutyunyan often left her clients in Moscow at the least opportune moment in their own analytic processes and then compounded the problem by returning in a changed and vulnerable state.

LYOSHA’S MOTHER ENCOURAGED HIM to enter a citywide history essay contest. It was the sort of thing she did—she was, after all, a history teacher, and she expected her only son to do much better than she had, just as she had done so much better than her own illiterate-peasant mother.

Except Lyosha had hardly any family and certainly no history. He did not even carry the family name anymore: when his mother married Sergei, in December 1991, she had changed Lyosha’s last name from Misharin to Gorshkov, and his patronymic from Yurievich to Sergeevich, as though Lyosha had always been his new stepfather’s son.

When Serafima was eighteen, a young man from a neighboring village decided to make her his. In Galina’s telling, his resolve was unilateral and final. He was Russian. He moved Serafima to his village, where she was hated for being a German and a Catholic. Her new husband was an atheist and a Communist, but his own mother was Russian Orthodox, and she refused to accept Serafima as her daughter-in-law in the absence of a church wedding.

In 1941, Serafima’s husband went off to war to fight the Germans, and Serafima herself, left alone with a small baby—her first son—went from being an outcast to being the enemy. Her own brother-in-law came around, drunk, in the middle of the night, to smash all her windows, screaming, “German!”

As for Galina, said Lyosha’s grandmother, she had been lying to him when she told him that his father lived in Perm. Lyosha’s father was right there in Solikamsk—he was “Uncle Yura,” who had stopped visiting when Lyosha’s stepfather came on the scene.

Lyosha was no Alexei Sergeevich Gorshkov or even Alexei Yurievich Misharin: he was Alexei Klauser. He won the history essay contest.

The archives confirmed that Lyosha’s great-grandfather had, in the language of the authorities, “been repressed.” As for Lyosha’s great-grandmother, her file had been misplaced and no information was available.

. If the Nazi Holocaust exterminated the Other, the Soviet terror was suicidal. The self-inflicted nature of Soviet terror has complicated the circulation of three energies that structure the postcatastrophic world: a cognitive striving to learn about the catastrophe; an emotional desire to mourn for its victims; and an active desire to find justice and take revenge on the perpetrators.

Before perestroika, dissident historians had been trying to do the work of learning in the near-complete absence of information. Even after mass terror ended with the death of Stalin, even after Nikita Khrushchev chose to speak out about the terror, he first doctored the information and then made the redacted story secret.

When Mikhail Gorbachev, as Party leader, looked at some of the secret archives for the first time in the 1980s, he felt shock, disgust, and disbelief—not only because of what had been done but because it had been done by his own Party and in its name.

In 1989, Gorbachev made Alexander Nikolaevich chair of a newly created Rehabilitation Commission, in charge of reviewing archival documents and clearing the names of those who had been unjustly punished in the Stalin era.

But what he saw when he studied the archives during perestroika made his stomach turn. He saw that 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.

He saw evidence of secret-police competitions, formal ones—like when different departments within the NKVD (the precursor agency to the KGB) raced one another to highest number of political probes launched—and informal ones, like when three of the NKVD brass took three thousand cases with them on a train journey, got drunk, and engaged in a speed challenge: Who could go through a stack of cases fastest, marking each with the letter P.

He saw 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 2,547 names, 2,270 to be executed.

There were too many such dates and figures to make them commemorative or otherwise meaningful.

If you let it sink in that there is no reason, that they were doing it “just because,” that killers killed just because it is their job to kill, then your heart, though no bullet has pierced it, will be torn apart, and your mind, in its intact shell of a head, will grow shaky.

Alexander Nikolaevich ultimately concluded that the terror could not be understood. The explanations offered by his colleagues and any number of historians—that Stalin was mentally ill, that he suffered from paranoid delusions—explained nothing. The tyrant had had any number of his relatives, and the relatives of his wives, executed.

The Soviet state was based on punishment. As Young Pioneers, children were taught to criticize one another and themselves in a group setting, reveling in the details of their shortcomings, the intricacies of blame, the ecstasy of repentance, and the imagined precision of the penalties.

1989, its first year in existence, the Rehabilitation Commission reviewed about 280,000 court cases and cleared 367,690 names.10 This was, by Alexander Nikolaevich’s estimate, about 2 percent of the job.

From what he could tell now that he had full access to existing documents, casualties of mass terror numbered about twenty million. That was just Stalin’s part of it: more people had died in the collectivization campaign that preceded his rise to power, and the punishment machine had continued to work, albeit at a greatly reduced pace, after Stalin’s death.

This meant that Yeltsin’s 1991 decree halting all economic activity of the Communist Party turned the commission into a nongovernmental organization with no funding, and Alexander Nikolaevich into its unpaid coordinator. He decided to ensure that the documents to which he had access were at least published.

The first volume, on a failed 1921 military rebellion against Bolshevik rule, was published in 1997. Seryozha began helping too, first with the typing, then with some of the more complicated tasks.

By law, information about mass terror had to be publicly available: Yeltsin had issued a decree to that effect in June 1992.13 Early on, even some of the dissident historians had favored a cautious approach. Some of what they had glimpsed in the archives, they argued, could not be released to the public without further analysis.

Take, for example, a report submitted by a little-known writer on her much more famous friend. The report’s author wrote that the other woman had praised Stalin in superlative terms. It appeared likely that the lesser-known writer had made the claim—and, indeed, had agreed to be an informant—solely to protect her friend from suspicion and persecution. But if the document were released uncritically, it might sully a great writer’s name.

Something similar had happened in Poland, where the secret-police archives turned up a dossier on Lech Wałęsa, founder of the Solidarity movement, Nobel laureate, and the country’s first post-Communist president. If the dossier was to be believed, Wałęsa had been a paid secret-police informant. Wałęsa’s stature and popularity outweighed the damage the dossier could have done, but the paper trail continued to haunt him for years.14