The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

The first edition of Origins was devoted to the roots and causes of totalitarianism, not to describing the resulting state: she wrote the last chapter, “Ideology and Terror,” in 1953.8 That year, another German exile, Carl Joachim Friedrich, speaking at a conference on totalitarianism (at which Arendt was also a speaker), offered a concise five-point definition of totalitarian society:

the mark of a totalitarian ideology, according to Arendt, was its hermetic nature: it explained away the entire world, and no argument could pierce its bubble. Soviet citizens lived inside the ideology—it was their home, and it felt ordinary.

Gudkov decided to propose his own definition of totalitarianism, based on the Soviet experience. It contained seven points:

psychoanalyst Erich Fromm seventy years earlier. Fromm had fled Germany in 1934, and in 1941 he wrote an urgent book called Escape from Freedom, in which he attempted to describe the psychological origins of Nazism, though he was careful to note that “Nazism is a psychological problem, but the psychological factors themselves have to be understood as being molded by socio-economic factors; Nazism is an economic and political problem, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds.”

Fromm divided newfound freedom into two parts: “freedom to” and “freedom from.” If the former was positive, the latter could cause unbearable anxiety: “The world has become limitless and at the same time threatening. . . . By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life.”

Budushchego net—“There is no future here.”

Paneyakh used the term “the Red Wheel” to refer to the force that had plowed Makarov down. The Red Wheel was the title of a trilogy by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in which he described the destruction of the Russian state by the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution. Paneyakh used the term to refer to Russian law enforcement.

As new laws piled up, political discussion, such as it was, centered on the need to protect children: from drugs, from abortions, and, perhaps most important, from pedophiles.

YURI LEVADA HAD THEORIZED that periodic protests did not change the structure of Soviet society. Gudkov had developed this idea further: periodic protests were in fact essential to maintaining the structure of society. No matter how restrictive the Russian regime was in any given period, after a while some tension would accumulate between institutions of authority and society (for lack of a better word—in a country with a nearly absent public sphere Gudkov wished there were a term for “society” that did not immediately call to mind a Western society). This tension represented society’s potential for change. At times like these, argued Levada, society would go from a state of calm to a state of arousal. The regime invariably responded by using force.

Force could be used inside the country, as when people were arrested, institutions shuttered or purged, and laws became more restrictive; or outside the country, when war was waged. The effect was the same either way—society, which had become more complicated, reverted to a radically simplified state: us, them, and our leader, who shoulders all our responsibility and has all our trust.

This was Gudkov’s depressing and, he had to admit, radical idea: the last century could be viewed as a continuity, with periodic bumps of “aborted modernization,” and the society he had been studying his entire adult life had stayed essentially the same. What made this idea radical was that no one wanted to hear it.

Arendt pointed out that both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes conducted periodic purges or crackdowns, which she called “an instrument of permanent instability.” Constant flux was necessary for the system’s survival: “The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop—one which might, after a time, lose its bastard qualities and take its place among the widely differing and profoundly contrasting ways of life of the nations of the earth.” Indeed, she wrote, “The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.”

there was never a more literal illustration of Arendt’s thesis that totalitarian regimes rob their subjects of will: every candidate on the Soviet ballot invariably ran unopposed.

In Russia, the term “hybrid regime” was popularized by Ekaterina Shulman, a young political scientist. She wrote that a hybrid regime is the authoritarian regime in the new historical moment. We know the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes: the former rewards passivity and the latter rewards mobilization. A totalitarian regime demands participation: if you do not march the march and sing the songs, then you are not a loyal citizen. An authoritarian regime, on the other hand, tries to convince its subjects to stay home. Whoever marches too energetically or sings too loudly is suspect, regardless of the ideological content of the songs and the direction of the march.

He had an intense dislike for terms like “illiberal,” which focused on traits the regimes did not possess—like free media or fair elections. This he likened to trying to describe an elephant by saying that the elephant cannot fly or cannot swim—it says nothing about what the elephant actually is.

Magyar developed his own concept: the “post-communist mafia state.”

THE POST-COMMUNIST MAFIA STATE, in Magyar’s words, is an “ideology-applying regime” (while a totalitarian regime is “ideology-driven”).

The fledgling ideology now had all its components: the nation, the past, traditional values, an external threat, and a fifth column.

Strange how that worked: something could be unsurprising and shocking at the same time.

There were only so many ways to say “gay.” The Homo Sovieticus survey had traditionally used the phrase “sexual minorities,” but the advisers were adamantly opposed to it: they thought the term was demeaning. Perhaps more to the point, it dated back to a time before gays became a topic of political conversation in Russia, had fallen out of use, and probably was not the best term to measure current attitudes. “LGBT” would be incomprehensible to most Russians. “Nontraditional sexual orientation” was the term the state used, so it would inevitably frame the question and the answer. By equating “homosexual” with “pedophile” and proposing to burn gay hearts, television had appropriated those terms for the propaganda campaign as well. “Queer” was even more obscure than “LGBT.” They could think of no other way to ask the questions: the Kremlin had hijacked the language.

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.

The point that Dugin had been making for years was that the very idea of universal human values is misleading: the West’s idea of human rights, for example, should not apply to a “traditional-values civilization.” One of Dugin’s best phrases was, “There is nothing universal about universal human rights.”

If the “fifth column” were people like Nemtsov, who Dugin believed were working directly for the United States, then the “sixth column” were traitors to their civilization, not their country.

Russians rushed to dump their currency on durable goods. Car dealerships ran out of inventory and electronics stores ran out of large-screen televisions.

In the summer of 2015—a year after countersanctions were first introduced—Putin signed a decree ordering the destruction of all foodstuffs deemed to be contraband. The cabinet then published rules dictating that banned foods should be destroyed “by any available means” in the presence of two impartial witnesses and the process must be captured by photo or video. There was talk of crematoria and of mobile incinerators. Some people were taken aback. A government plan to destroy vast quantities of food—edible food, food that was undeniably in demand—would probably be bizarre in any country, but in Russia it might have seemed particularly shocking. This was the country of the man-made famines that had killed millions, the country of the Siege of Leningrad, of the postwar hunger, of the catastrophic shortages of the 1980s, and of the salary arrears and subsistence off tiny plots of land of the 1990s.

It was not just this client who was living in a state of constant anxiety: the entire country was. It was the oldest trick in the book—a constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves. This was not the sort of anxiety that moved people to action and accomplishment. This was the sort of anxiety that exceeded human capacity.

Like if your teenage daughter has not come home—by morning you have run out of logical explanations, you can no longer calm yourself by pretending that she might have missed the last Metro train and spent the night at a friend’s house and her phone battery had died, and you are left alone with your fear. You can no longer sit still or reason. You regress, and after a while the only thing you can do is scream, like a helpless terrified baby. You need an adult, a figure of authority. Almost anyone willing to take charge will do. And then, if that someone wants to remain in charge, he will have to make sure that you continue to feel helpless.

What options did this frightening country offer its intolerably anxious citizens? They could curl up into total passivity, or they could join a whole that was greater than they were. If any possession could be summarily taken away, no one felt any longer like anything was truly their own. But they could rejoice alongside other citizens that Crimea was “theirs.” They could fully subscribe to the paranoid worldview in which everyone, led by the United States, was out to weaken and destroy Russia. Paranoia offered a measure of comfort: at least it placed the source of overwhelming anxiety securely outside the person and even the country. It was a great relief to belong, and to entrust authority to someone stronger.

In his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud introduced the idea of a death drive, a destructive force fueled by trauma, which has made survival intolerable. The death drive compelled repetition, an endless return to loss.

After the Second World War, American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who had also trained in psychoanalysis, studied survivors of Chinese internment camps, survivors of the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima, and the doctors who became killers in Nazi concentration camps. His aim was to “identify psychological experiences of people caught up in historical storms,” he wrote.8 He spent a lifetime developing clinical and theoretical approaches to trauma. He described phenomena specific to survivors. He called one “psychic numbing”—a sort of emotional shutdown in response to unconscionable events.9 In his study of Nazi doctors, he identified a psychological principle he called “doubling,” defined as “the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self.”

When familiar social structures stopped functioning, it could be as traumatic as when physical structures collapsed in the case of a natural disaster. Strategies of adaptation that worked under the old order were no longer useful. Therapists working in Kosovo in 2000, for example, discovered that people who had for years been victimized by being told what to do now longed to be told what to do. Liberian refugees in the United States, encouraged by well-meaning American therapists to seek support in their own community, re-created patterns of corruption and exploitation: becoming victims of familiar abuse was indeed comforting.

Or, as Erich Fromm had written of Nazi Germany seventy-five years earlier, “It is fate that there are wars.”

Arendt, writing about Hitler, had described a nostalgia for the First World War, which had satisfied a “yearning for anonymity, for being just a number and functioning only as a cog. . . . War had been experienced as that ‘mightiest of all mass actions’ which obliterated individual differences so that even suffering, which traditionally had marked off individuals through unique unexchangeable destinies, could now be interpreted as ‘an instrument of historical progress.’”16 The concept of historical progress—of perpetual motion—was, in turn, key to Arendt’s understanding of how totalitarianism took hold.

Entire civilizations in history had ceased to exist. How had life in them felt in the last decades and days? Russia and the Russians had been dying for a century—in the wars, in the Gulag, and, most of all, in the daily disregard for human life. She had always thought of that disregard as negligence, but perhaps it should be understood as active desire. This country wanted to kill itself. Everything that was alive here—the people, their words, their protest, their love—drew aggression because the energy of life had become unbearable for this society. It wanted to die; life was a foreign agent.

He was still living in Brighton Beach, the Russian enclave and one of the few neighborhoods in New York City that went to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Lyosha often faced incredulous questions from American friends: How could people who fled the Soviet Union and Putin vote for someone like Trump? But, of course, these were not people who fled totalitarianism. Most of them had arrived around the time the Soviet empire began disintegrating. If anything, what had driven them out was the fear of the Soviet collapse. They longed to return to their imaginary past, which would have made them Putin voters if they had stayed in Russia. Instead, they became Trump voters.