The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

“As the time passed, Marx’s successors revealed a tendency to present his teachings as a finite and all-inclusive concept of the world, and to regard themselves as responsible for the continuation of all of Marx’s work, which they considered as being virtually complete,” wrote Yugoslav Marxist dissident Milovan Djilas. “Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science.”

traitors for having allowed themselves to be captured. Alexander Nikolaevich went to the railroad station to see the cattle cars carrying these inmates from the Nazi camps to the Soviet camps, and he saw women who went there in the hopes of seeing their missing men, if only for a second, and he saw hands throwing crumpled-up pieces of paper out of the cattle cars—these contained their names and addresses and the hope that someone would let their loved ones know they were alive.

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.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his Liberal Democratic Party.35 Its platform, and Zhirinovsky’s public statements, were anything but liberal or democratic. The Western media called him an ultranationalist. Russians were more likely to see him as either a clown or a truthsayer.