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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Masha Gessen
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January 6 - January 10, 2022
Not only did the country shield all essential and most nonessential information behind a wall of secrets and lies, it also, for decades, waged a concerted war on knowledge itself. The most symbolic, though by no means the most violent, battle in this war was fought in 1922, when Lenin ordered two hundred or more (historians’ estimates vary) intellectuals—doctors, economists, philosophers, and others—deported abroad on what became known as the Philosophers’ Ship (in fact, there were several different ships).
It was 1968, the year of the Prague Spring, when the Czechoslovak Communist Party attempted to split off from the Soviet Union and pursue its own, comparatively liberalized version of socialism.
By the time Stalin died in 1953, Alexander Nikolaevich was a member of the Central Committee.
In 1956, at the twentieth congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the new Party secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, condemned Stalin as an unworthy successor to Lenin, applied to his rule the damning Marxist term “cult of personality,” and disavowed mass arrests and executions.
In 1972, Alexander Nikolaevich published an article titled “Against Ahistoricism.” To those who could fight their way through its turgid Soviet language, the article delivered a radical message of protest against what Alexander Nikolaevich saw as the Soviet Union’s growing nationalist conservatism based on the glorification of some imaginary peasant class’s traditional values.
He returned more than a decade later, to become idea man to the new general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, in his project of reforming the Party and its country.
The main components of perestroika are: A market economy in which market rates are paid for labor. The property owner as the agent of freedom. Democracy and glasnost, which bring with them information accessible to all. A system of feedback.
Gorbachev would indeed become the first president of the Soviet Union.
In the Khrushchev decade, which saw a giant residential construction push, the gap narrowed slightly, but when Leonid Brezhnev came to power in 1964, the old tendency of growing differentiation resumed.
Academics got less, “creatives” less than that, engineers less still.
PERESTROIKA WAS AN IMPOSSIBLE IDEA on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven.
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.
The belief in a paternalistic state, and an utter dependence on it, were bred in Homo Sovieticus by the very nature of the Soviet state, which, Levada wrote, was not so much a complex of institutions, like the modern state, but rather a single superinstitution. He described it as a “universal institution of a premodern paternalistic type, which reaches into every corner of human existence.”26 The Soviet state was the ultimate parent: it fed, clothed, housed, and educated its citizen; it gave him a job and gave his life meaning; it rewarded him for doing good and punished him for doing wrong,
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In the Soviet Union, there had been no public, precisely because there had been no conversation: “One Man of gigantic dimensions” must speak with a single voice, and only when called upon.
The fakery concerned the most basic of facts and the most fundamental of values, and what lay at the bottom of the spiral was an absence: “even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.” The system destroyed the individual and the fabric of society: nothing was possible in the absence of everything, resulting, wrote Levada, in “the falling standards of education, culture, morality, in the degradation of all of society.”
In September of the following year, Gorbachev undertook one of his largest shake-ups of the bureaucracy. He brought in Vladimir Kryuchkov, a top state security officer who came highly recommended by Alexander Nikolaevich. Kryuchkov would now run the KGB.
Politically, it would renounce the vision of the USSR as a unitary state in favor of creating a federation with a clear division of rights and responsibilities between members and the center. Economically, it would set out a clear program of transition to a market system, in which, for the interim period, the state would retain only a third of all property.
We have ostracized intellectualism and fostered a regime of the ignorant.
Today we are living as though in two worlds at once. The old Stalinist world does not want to leave, and it is holding on to everything that can still prop it up.
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.
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.
Dugin also wondered aloud whether it was possible that evidence of the Nazis’ satanic practices had been elided from the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials.
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.
The facts were there—in just two years, Putin had greatly weakened the power of elected officials by creating federal oversight over governors and giving the federal center the right to fire elected governors; reversed judicial reform; and monopolized national broadcast television in the hands of the Kremlin. So while his regime could not yet be called authoritarian, that seemed to be the direction in which it was headed. This transitional state, Lyosha learned, was called an “authoritarian situation”—meaning, authoritarianism could happen here.
He went on to predict that the United States, in the wake of September 11, would abandon its democratic experiment.
In fact, argued Trubetskoy, by “humanity” Germans meant themselves and those who were like them, and their concepts of “universality,” “civilization,” and “progress” were equally solipsistic—or, as Trubetskoy put it, “egocentric.”
“The Western-society project is being forced onto all other nations,” said Dugin.
The political technologists who had been dispatched to deal with Ukraine returned to Moscow and explained their failure: it was the Americans’ fault. The Americans—by which they generally meant the United States government and George Soros—had been financing and organizing Eastern European revolutions beginning with the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in Yugoslavia in 2000, the story went.
Even the few people who stubbornly insisted on reckoning with the past generally chose to focus on one specific period in Soviet history—Stalinism—and one element of the Soviet system: state terror.
The term “totalitarianism” first came into use in the late 1920s, soon after the first totalitarian regimes formed.
There was a specific Russian expression: budushchego net, “There is no future.”
For many people—many more than Arutyunyan realized at the time, when she was reveling in her “freedom to”—the future ended when the Soviet Union collapsed and the narrow hallway disappeared. Others struggled on, but the anxiety caused by uncertainty rendered them incapable of meaningful action. In the early 2000s, with the arrival of Putin, whose simple rhetoric made the world comprehensible again, and with inflation receding under the force of high oil prices, many of these patients felt better. They could function again. They were sure that Putin had something to do with it.
Dugin wanted Putin to invade Ukraine openly, using regular troops, and to aim for a glorious victory that would expand Russia. Indeed, it would be only the beginning of Russia’s expansion. But when this failed to happen, Dugin knew the reason: Putin was being held back by his moderate, fundamentally pro-Western advisers.
