The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

It was precisely Putin’s lack of distinction, which had made Gudkov think that he was a temporary figure, that in fact made him the perfect embodiment of the Soviet leadership style. In his person, charisma met bureaucracy.

They asked her if she believed in God, and she said that she did but she also loved and respected her mother, who had been an atheist, and they should respect her too. They said Tatiana was with God now.

The wave of intense hatred with which Russians had reacted to NATO’s Kosovo bombing campaign of 1999 had died down within a few months, returning the country to a sort of baseline level of anti-American sentiment, but now Gudkov was seeing it return, incongruously, in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Initially, the polls showed, Russians had reacted with sympathy and compassion, but very soon those feelings gave way to something else: the search for a way to blame the Americans themselves for the tragedy.

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.

In 2004, the year after the Georgian revolution, Moscow firmly took control of elections in Ukraine. Russian political technologists flooded Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. Their job was to prevent the election of the pro-Western challenger to the current regime,

AS IF TO AFFIRM the Kremlin’s fear of a revolution, mass protests broke out in cities across Russia in the winter of 2005. Tens of thousands of people were protesting a new series of measures called the “monetization of entitlements,” whereby people who received public assistance—women over fifty-five, men over sixty, early retirees, and the disabled—would no longer have access to unlimited public transportation and other in-kind benefits but would receive fixed sums of money instead.

Money was what the Kremlin used to defuse the protests of the disenfranchised: pensions were raised dramatically, and Putin declared a new commitment to social-program spending. Then the government cracked down on the young protest organizers, and on civil society in general.

What Russia really needed to prevent an orange revolution, said Dugin, was a new oprichnina, the reign of terror for which Czar Ivan IV was remembered as the Terrible.

“Are you aware,” she asked, “that there are no lesbians in Russia?” “I’ve also heard,” said Lyosha, “that there was no sex in the Soviet Union. Yet you are here.”

The country’s population had been declining for half a century. People were having fewer children and dying earlier. Male life expectancy was among the lowest in Europe—by the early 1990s, it was in the mid-sixties—and it would stay at that level for a decade and a half.

American economist Nicholas Eberstadt has written extensively about Russian demographics. A chapter in his book on the Russian population crisis is titled “Russia’s Ominous Patterns of Mortality and Morbidity: Pioneering New and Modern Pathways to Poor Health and Premature Death.” He showed that no modern country had ever seen people die at the same rate in peacetime.

Two things appeared to be killing Russians disproportionately: diseases of the cardiovascular system, and external causes, such as injuries and poisoning, including suicide.

Vodka and other alcohol played an important role in the high rates of cardiovascular, violent, and accidental deaths—but not a large enough role to explain the Russian demographic predicament. In fact, while vodka was the most popular explanation, it was also the most contradictory. Some studies actually showed that Russian drinkers lived longer than non-drinkers.

Parsons, who called her book Dying Unneeded, argued that Russians were dying early because they had nothing and no one to live for. Eberstadt also ultimately concluded that the explanation had to do with mental health.

what Russians were calling a “demographic crisis” had in fact been going on for decades—birthrates and life expectancy had been falling for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Only two periods stood out as exceptions to this trend: Khrushchev’s Thaw and Gorbachev’s perestroika, the brief spells when Russians anticipated a better future. The rest of the time, it seemed, Russians had been dying for lack of hope.

The graduate, Alexandre Bikbov, did what Moscow State students had done back in the Soviet period if they wanted to learn: he educated himself,

In Estonia’s reading of history, however, what the Soviets considered liberation was actually occupation. Estonia based its post-Soviet laws and policies on the premise that the country had been illegally occupied between the years of 1940 and 1991—first by the USSR in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, then by Nazi Germany, and then by the USSR again. Among other things, this meant that only people who had been Estonian citizens before 1940 and their descendants automatically became citizens of independent Estonia; all others—presumed occupiers and their descendants—would have to pass Estonian language and history exams to become citizens.

The message to Georgia—and any other post-Soviet country that might have wanted to follow its example—was, If you try to ally with NATO, you will lose lives and territory and will be assured NATO limbo in perpetuity.

BOTH OF THE THINGS that happened to Seryozha that day were examples of what Yuri Levada had once termed “collective hostage-taking,” what was once known as krugovaya poruka—literally, “circular bail.” For centuries, entire communities could be held responsible for taxes owed or crimes committed by any individual. If a resident failed to pay taxes, the property of any of his neighbors could be seized. The threat transformed all members of a given community into enforcers, but not in accordance with codified law—they had to devise their own means of ensuring compliance.

Krugovaia poruka, which is often translated as “solidarity,” is, to the Russian ear, a neutral or even positive term, used to urge Soviet children to study harder and be better little Communists. This may be why Levada chose the more jarring term “collective hostage-taking” to refer to one of “the most potent instruments of coercion and intimidation used by the Soviet state.” Even after the Great Terror passed, it kept the overwhelming majority of the population passive by the understanding that any action could endanger a larger group.

For Arendt, the key characteristics of a totalitarian state were ideology and state terror. The substance of the ideology, to the extent that ideology has a substance, was unimportant: any ideology could become the basis of a totalitarian system if it could be encapsulated and coupled with terror. The terror was used to enforce the ideology but also to fuel it.

Back at the beginning of the Reformation, wrote Fromm, the individual gained the ability to determine his own path—and at the same time lost his sense of certainty in place and self. 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 authoritarian character survives by surrendering his power to an outside authority—God or a leader—whom Fromm called the “magic helper.” The “magic helper” is a source of guidance, security, and also of pride, because with surrender comes a sense of belonging.

There was a specific Russian expression: budushchego net, “There is no future.” As though it could indeed be canceled. People said it when a particular vision of the future collapsed.

In fact, the machine’s only possible response to resistance is a crackdown.

The Kremlin did not allow any strangers on the ballot, so the election did not need to be fixed. And still it was fixed. Ballot boxes were stuffed, numbers were doctored, phantom precincts reported, and conscripts were bused in to vote early and often. Not that it even mattered who got into parliament, which existed only to rubber-stamp the Kremlin’s policies. But the bad theater of it all, in which you were invited up onstage for a millisecond and not allowed to open your mouth, was insulting.

Russians had agreed to live under a sort of dictatorship in exchange for stability. But they assumed that it was a soft dictatorship, which could negotiate if the need arose. Seryozha imagined that this was the way it worked in China, or at least this was how the papers made it look: the Communist Party had all the power, but if, say, peasants in some village rebelled, then the local bosses would be removed. Pressure and restrictions were a given, but the exact amounts could be adjusted.

Bikbov found that they were also not particularly angry. They liked to joke, and they loved a good funny banner, like I DIDN’T VOTE FOR THESE ASSHOLES, I VOTED FOR THE OTHER ASSHOLES,

Then again, those old enough to remember the fall of the Soviet Union remembered that the regime had seemed eternal until one day it did not.

If one viewed the period of perestroika and the first post-Soviet year as a period of societal “arousal,” then the show of force occurred in 1993, when Yeltsin shelled the parliament building. It had the effect one would expect: society felt radically simplified, Yeltsin affirmed his role as leader—though the Russian vozhd’ or even the German Führer was really the word Gudkov had in mind—and, as always happens in times of radical simplification, nationalism flourished.

Wars were almost as good as crackdowns because they discredited anyone who wanted to complicate things. 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.

If one of the features of a totalitarian regime is that it politicizes every aspect of life, then protest that strove to be apolitical was an appropriate response.

“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.”

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.