The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

“Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as

Now, as the Red Army was liberating its own citizens from Nazi camps, they were condemned as traitors for having allowed themselves to be captured.

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

When the word “totalitarianism” is used in casual Western speech, it conjures the image of a monstrous society in which force is applied to every person at all times. Of course, that would be impossibly inefficient, even for an extremely inefficient state such as the Soviet Union. 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. The boundaries are ever-shifting—Arendt described totalitarian societies as producing a state of constant flux and inconsistency6—and this requires the population to be ever-vigilant in order to stay abreast of the shifts. A hypersensitivity to signals is essential for survival.

people who were flirting with ultranationalist and fascist rhetoric, then Dugin was going to the source. He had grown fascinated with Hitler’s philosophy and system of governance. He produced and narrated a documentary movie series called The Mysteries of the Century: The Mysticism of the Third Reich,

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.

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.

In 1994, Dugin published The Conservative Revolution. In this book, he envisioned a movement that would resist what he called “extremist humanism”—the idea that all humans everywhere have rights—and the concept of a law-based society. He explained that these ideas, imported from the West, were wrong precisely because they were fundamentally foreign to Russians, whose ethnos developed in accordance with its own destiny and whose geography made it the natural enemy of the United States and

Gudkov started thinking that “political party” and “election” were just two more Western terms that could not be used in Russian—except to mislead. A more precise term could be borrowed from Max Weber, whom Levada had had Gudkov study all those years ago. The term was “acclamation,” a process by which the governed affirm a choice already made for

It all fit. The love of power, the focus on Russia to the exclusion of the rest of the world—with an exception made perhaps only for a Napoleon or a Hitler, whose power trumped even their enemy status but who were made relevant by the fact that they had invaded Russia—this and other survey results added up to a totalitarian mind-set. The only consideration that gave Gudkov pause was what seemed like an utter lack of a concept of the future. He had been taught that totalitarianism presupposed the image of a glorious future. But as he researched both Communist and Nazi ideologies, he came to the conclusion that the appeal of the rhetoric in both cases lay in archaic, primitive images: a simple society, a world of “us,” a tribe. Fromm, in fact, rejected the very idea of an image of the future in Nazi ideology and stressed the “worship of the past.”

“They are just doing their jobs,” said Putin, meaning that protesters were working for money—state television channels had by this time aired a series of reports claiming that the protests were bankrolled by the U.S. State Department.

Hannah Arendt wrote that an ideology was nothing but a single idea taken to its logical extreme. No ideology was inherently totalitarian but any ideology contained the seeds of totalitarianism—it could become encapsulated, entirely divorced from reality, with a single premise eclipsing the entire world. Totalitarian leaders, she wrote, were interested less in the idea itself than in its use as the driver and justification of action. They derived the “laws of history” from the single chosen idea and then mobilized the people to fulfill these imaginary laws.