The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Even Communist ideology was a shadow of its former self, a set of ritually repeated words that had lost all meaning. Lenin had long ago dispensed with most of what Karl Marx had to say, enshrining a few of his selected ideas as überlaw.

To be sure, his idea of democracy was limited: in a letter to Gorbachev he suggested splitting the Communist Party in two—the Socialist Party and the People’s Democratic Party—that would make up an entity called the Communist Union, which would run the country. He proposed creating the office of a president, who would be nominated by the Communist Union and voted by the people for a ten-year term. He argued that all this needed to be done because the Soviet government needed to try to stay ahead of the curve.

As a man who had struggled to educate himself, who had had to teach himself to think, Alexander Nikolaevich was sympathetic to the great number of people resisting change simply because they had never been exposed to anything outside the Party’s dogma. In May 1988 he convinced the Central Committee to approve a concerted effort to restore thought and knowledge to the land. “It has come to the point where the West now has scholars who are better versed in the history of our own homegrown philosophy than we are,” he wrote in the draft of an address to the Central Committee.

Levada’s hypothesis, formed over the course of more than three decades working not only in the Soviet Union but also, in the 1950s, in newly communist China, was that 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.

Politically, on the face of it, things looked anything but hopeful. In August and September the country was shocked by a series of apartment-building explosions that killed 293 people and injured more than a thousand. The government used the bombings as a pretext to launch a new offensive in Chechnya, reigniting the war that had once nearly cost Yeltsin the presidency. This time, though, Gudkov observed that while Russians’ hearts ached for the young men being sent to fight the war, virtually no one seemed to feel sympathy for the civilians in Chechnya, their ostensible countrymen who were once again being bombed. Another thing made this war different from the first Chechen one: this time the Russian offensive was seen as spearheaded by a leader. If Yeltsin came across as desperate and flailing when he began his war in 1994, then his own prime minister, restarting the war five years later, came across as brave, and as a defender of ordinary Russians.

Gudkov and Dubin found that Russians—both the candidates and the voters—believed that political power rightly belonged to bureaucrats, whose chief qualification was experience in the bureaucracy.

Two new political parties appeared just before the election. One, Yedinstvo (“Unity”), was formed by the Kremlin for the express purpose of supporting Putin’s ascendancy to the throne. The other, the Union of Right Forces, was its nominal liberal opponent, but it too supported Putin and the war in Chechnya.

After a few days, Masha figured out that she was part of the hospital’s corrupt survival strategy. Russia had instituted a system of mandatory health insurance, a state-run policy that reimbursed hospitals. But this was a facility that no one would voluntarily choose, so at night, ambulances would deliver policyholders to this hospital in exchange for kickbacks. This was what had happened to Masha. Once she was hospitalized, the doctors placed her under an infectious-diseases quarantine, making it impossible to transfer to another facility.

In 2008, Putin had handed the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev. Putin had served the two consecutive terms the Russian constitution allowed, and did what authoritarian rulers the world over do in such situations: he ceded the post without ceding the power. Putin became prime minister, and Dmitry Medvedev, a longtime member of his staff, became the country’s nominal president. The center of power shifted to the cabinet, now run by Putin. Overnight, the president’s office became ceremonial: Medvedev had only a tiny staff and no practical means to wield the power that was granted to him by the constitution. Still, Medvedev’s office obliged him to maintain a public presence. “For Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, Russian citizens are not voters, but an audience,” Russian journalist Maxim Trudolyubov wrote in 2009. “The big difference between Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev is that they work with different audiences.” Putin played to the majority: middle-aged and older, middle-income and poorer, the broad audience of the television channels. Medvedev addressed the better-educated, better-off minority that had been largely ignored during Putin’s two terms.

According to 2006 figures, wrote Eberstadt, male life expectancy at age fifteen in Russia compared unfavorably with that in Ethiopia, Gambia, and Somalia. Two things appeared to be killing Russians disproportionately: diseases of the cardiovascular system, and external causes, such as injuries and poisoning, including suicide. Eberstadt scrutinized all the usual suspects: poor diet, smoking, lack of exercise, environmental pollution, economic shock and subsequent poverty, and, of course, vodka. But none of these factors explained enough of the problem, and even together they added up to barely half an explanation.

In the fall of 2007, the department cracked down. A half-dozen leaders of the protests were expelled.28 The following June, the department hosted an international conference titled “Societal Norms and the Possibilities of Societal Development.” Dean Dobrenkov opened the conference by warning against the dangers of homosexuality: Issues of virtue and morality have to be at the forefront today. Without that, Russia has no future. . . . How can we talk about the rights of homosexuals and lesbians in light of this? All these attempts to organize gay parades, the introduction of sex education in schools—all of this aims to defile our young people, and we must say a clear and definitive “no” to that! Otherwise, we will lose Russia.29 “All these attempts” referred to a single effort, by a young Moscow lawyer, to force a public conversation on LGBT rights by applying for a permit to hold a Pride march in Moscow. The permit was denied, and the lawyer was taking his case through the courts. The handful of people who showed up for Pride in Moscow in May 2007 were first beaten and then arrested; among the detainees was an Italian member of the European Parliament who had come to lend his support.30 The star of the conference was American Paul Cameron, who urged Russia to learn from American mistakes. “It is the homosexuals who are bringing about a demographic catastrophe,” he said.

In his state-of-the-federation address in April 2005, Putin stressed that Russia had to “first of all acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. . . . Tens of millions of our countrymen ended up outside our country’s borders.”

A chronic state of poverty . . . 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.

It is not enough to fine gays for propaganda to teenagers. We need to ban blood and sperm donations by them, and if they should die in a car accident, we need to bury their hearts underground or burn them, for they are unsuitable for the aiding of anyone’s life.

On March 1, Putin asked the upper house of the Russian parliament to authorize the use of force beyond the country’s borders—and got its unanimous approval the same day. The armed men were already in Crimea by then. The streets of Crimea filled with billboards showing a swastika and barbed wire on the left and a Russian flag on the right, with the caption, “On March 16, we will be choosing between this and this.” That day, at a hastily convened referendum, 96.77 percent of Crimeans voted to join the Russian Federation.

THE HISTORY OF CRIMEA had been as violent as that of any part of the former Soviet Union but perhaps more confusing than that of most of them. From the time the empire first annexed Crimea in 1783, it was a part of Russia for nearly two centuries. In 1944, Stalin ethnically cleansed Crimea: Tatars, who had made up a large part of the peninsula’s population, were deported, as were the local Armenians, Belarusians, and Greeks. This left the ethnic Russians, the only people Stalin trusted in the wake of the Second World War. Then, in 1954, Khrushchev, who had just been installed as Soviet leader, redrew the borders of constituent republics, assigning Crimea to Ukraine. No explanation was offered at the time and none could be found later—at least none that could be convincingly documented.

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.

On April 17, Putin held his annual televised hotline. Before he entered the studio, one of the two hosts set the stage: If things were different, I might have said that this will be yet another conversation, but on this day we have a different country listening to us. Russia is now united with Crimea and the City of Sevastopol.* We have been waiting for this moment for twenty-three long years, ever since the Soviet Union fell apart. For this reason every question today will be either directly related to Crimea or will have a subtext colored by Crimea.29 The show lasted nearly four hours. A lot was said. The annexation of Crimea was placed in line with Russia’s great Second World War victory. Russians who opposed the annexation were condemned as traitors. One such opponent came to the show to make amends. It was Irina Khakamada, who back in 1999 had been one of only two Union of Right Forces founders to oppose Putin’s candidacy for president—Nemtsov had been the other. A month before this show, she had also opposed the annexation. But now she said to Putin: I have come to say the following. Crimea has always needed to have a Russian identity. I have often been to Crimea. . . . They always wanted to be a part of Russia. It happened the way it did, so be it. You are the victor. You really did pull off that operation without firing a single shot.