The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

The Soviet regime robbed people not only of their ability to live freely but also of the ability to understand fully what had been taken from them, and how.

Amalrik had argued that Marxist ideology had never had a firm grip on the country, that the Russian Orthodox Church had lost its own hold, and that without a central unifying set of beliefs, the country, pulled in opposite directions by social groups with different desires, would eventually self-destruct.

A state born of protest against inequality had created one of the most intricate and rigid systems of privilege that the world had ever seen.

The policies dictated that men who fathered children out of wedlock would not be held responsible for child support but the state would help the single mother both with financial subsidies and with childcare: she could even leave the child at an orphanage for any length of time, as many times as she needed, without forfeiting her parental rights. 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.

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. Levada hypothesized a detailed portrait of Homo Sovieticus. The system had bred him over the course of decades by rewarding obedience, conformity, and subservience.23 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.”24 Self-isolation was a key strategy for both the state and the individual: as the Soviet Union sealed itself off with the Iron Curtain, so did the Soviet citizen separate himself from everyone who was Other and therefore untrustworthy.

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.

We have fallen two epochs behind. We have missed the postindustrial era and the information era. As a result, our society is deeply ill. Our souls are permanently empty. We have grown to presume everyone guilty at all times, thus creating hundreds of thousands of guards watching over our morality, conscience, purity of world view, compliance with the wishes of the authorities. We have turned truth into a crime. We have robbed nature to within a breath of its life. We have created crime, queues, rudeness, corruption that goes all the way up from a store’s truck unloader to a government minister. We have ostracized intellectualism and fostered a regime of the ignorant.

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.

What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it. There is no gap between totalitarian ideology and reality because totalitarian ideology contains all of reality within itself.

There was a deeper reason Russia did not throw open the door to its secret-police archives. The Eastern Bloc countries that took this step—Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic among them—treated the documents as having been left behind by an occupying power. But Soviet institutions had become Russian institutions after 1991, and soon the Russian bureaucracy began to guard many Soviet secrets like its own.

In the years between the 1989 and 1994 studies, Russians had grown tired of thinking about the future. They were drawing their sense of identity from the past, and they were imbuing this past with an additional air of wholesome conservatism.

America was the very definition of modernity; it was the country that Russia had failed to become. Here was a sterling example of Soviet-style doublethink: America was attractive and threatening at the same time, worth emulating and eminently hateable.

“By giving a green light to the [Eurasian Youth Union’s] anti-Western xenophobia, the authorities had created opportunities for adherents of more extreme variants of ultranationalism,” writes Horvath. “As the moderate opposition was driven to the margins, ultranationalists gained admission to Russia’s public sphere.”

Totalitarianism takes hold under the conditions of increasing poverty—when a large part of the population has no hope for a better future and projects hope on some extraordinary political measures. Totalitarianism is sustained by maintaining a very low standard of living.

Publishers, who could be destroyed by one big lawsuit or even a few pulped pressruns, were well-advised to exercise an overabundance of caution. With vigilant citizens throwing fits in the stacks in one city after another, bookstores and libraries also had to err on the side of caution.18 Self-censorship was collective hostage-taking in one of its purest forms. It had kicked back in.

Still, there were hundreds of people with records of police detentions, and hundreds who had been captured on Bolotnaya video, and most of them were not arrested. That is how terror works: the threat must be credible yet unpredictable.