The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

The Soviet regime robbed people not only of their ability to live freely but also of the ability to understand fully what had been taken from them, and how.

“Coffins” were questions specially designed for the Jewish applicants.

After decades of amorphousness underground, Pamyat had acquired a charismatic leader, a former photographer named Dmitry Vasilyev,

He now found inspiration in the writing of René Guénon, a long-dead Frenchman who had published more than a dozen books on metaphysics.

It was a dense text, parts of which no one but Dugin himself would be able to understand, but it contained one clear proposition: put aside all existing belief systems, all things learned, in favor of what he called “total traditionalism,” a sort of meta-ideology that contained the cosmos. Indeed, it contained so much that it was probably better defined by what it decisively rejected: “the ‘modern world’ as such.”

By using a French philosopher obsessed with Hinduism and Islam to get at this idea of Tradition, Dugin was coming full circle to an earlier, newly forgotten idea held by Russian thinkers who argued that their country should be turned away from Europe and toward Asia.

In 1990 he went to Paris, where he met Belgian New Right thinker Robert Steuckers.

A friend who worked at the Moscow cardiology center told Arutyunyan that a doctor there was teaching a seminar on administering the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.

This description of totalitarianism echoed Hannah Arendt’s explanation of how totalitarian regimes employ terror: “It substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions.”

Robbed of his individuality and therefore the ability to interact meaningfully with others, she wrote, man became profoundly lonely, which made him the perfect creature and subject of the totalitarian state.

But in January 1991, without any formal declaration, he allowed his ministers of defense and of the interior and the head of the KGB to try to retake the Baltics. This was exactly two years after the bloodshed in Baku, on a different edge of the empire. This time, nineteen people died: fifteen in Vilnius and four in Riga.26 This was why Masha’s mother told her they would never be welcome in Lithuania again.

To pass, like other empires in the twentieth century, into a post-imperial future, Russia would have had to reform its identity accordingly. But not even Yeltsin, who played perhaps the most important role in taking the Soviet Union apart, thought of it, or of Russia, as an empire.

The economy of force in totalitarian societies is achieved through terror. Totalitarianism establishes its own social contract, in which most people will be safe from violence most of the time, provided they stay within certain boundaries and shoulder some of the responsibility for keeping other citizens within the same boundaries.

and the social contract dictated that the state send out reasonably clear signals and the population react accordingly. Signals were sent through propaganda in newspapers, movies, and books; through legal changes; and through enforcement, with demonstrative punishment of the few keeping the many in line (the proportion of those being punished to those observing shifted after the death of Stalin, and this solidified the principle of teaching by frightening example). It was this system of signaling and response that broke down by 1991.

The Party’s signaling system had ceased functioning, and this in turn rendered the ideology no longer hermetic—in effect, no longer totalitarian.

The Congress refused to recognize the decree and instead anointed General Rutskoi the country’s new president. Just two years after the coup that finished the Soviet Union, history was repeating itself in a B-movie version.

Even though Yeltsin had spent months considering his move to dissolve the Congress, he was no better prepared than the coup plotters two years earlier. He had no plan of action in case the people’s deputies, in full accordance with the constitution, refused to disband. Worse, his opposition had stronger evident ties to the military, the police, and the KGB than he did.

Nearly a hundred people died during the attack on the television center. The armed mob, directed by General Rutskoi, went on to storm the Ministry of Communications, the customs office, and other federal buildings.

This time, though, the military chose sides, and it picked Yeltsin. By the morning of October 4, tanks had pulled up to the White House.

ARUTYUNYAN NOTICED THAT very soon after the Execution of the White House people began conflating the events of 1991 and 1993.

When I speak of this, I am accused of being a “fascist,” a “Hitler scaring other people.” We have been feared for a millennium. That is our capital.36

They promised a return to simplicity after years of the soul-searching that perestroika had demanded, and the mind-numbing economic and legalistic debates of the Yeltsin years. They were triumphantly anti-political.

The three-part miniseries was broadcast on Russia’s two leading federal channels in the fall of 1993, and Dugin, who was on-screen for minutes at a time, leafing through what looked like archival documents and telling a story of mysticism and world domination, became famous.

He saw evidence of secret-police competitions, formal ones—like when different departments within the NKVD (the precursor agency to the KGB) raced one another to highest number of political probes launched—and informal ones, like when three of the NKVD brass took three thousand cases with them on a train journey, got drunk, and engaged in a speed challenge: Who could go through a stack of cases fastest, marking each with the letter P. They were not reading the cases. The letter P—pronounced r in Russian—stood for rasstrel, “execution.”

Stalin invited an old friend back in Georgia to Moscow for a reunion. They dined and drank—Stalin took pride in his hospitality and his menus, which he personally curated.7 Later the same night, the friend was arrested in his hotel room. He was executed before dawn. This could not be explained with any words or ideas available to man.8

“Courage lies not in a lack of fear but in one’s ability to suppress one’s fear” (a quote from educator Alexei Makarenko),

Those who would “liquidate” the disabled decreased from 25 to 18 percent while those who would “help” the disabled grew from 50 to 56 percent.

The same thing happened with “rockers”: 26 percent wanted to “liquidate” them, up from 20. This issue was a bit of a Rorschach test: no one could be quite sure what “rockers” meant. It had once referred to those who played or listened to forbidden Western music, but the days when the state banned rock music were long over. If there was no marginalized or indeed identifiable group that was called “rockers,” whom were the respondents wanting to “liquidate,” and why?

Only 8 percent thought that the breakup of the Soviet Union had been a positive development. Seventy-five percent thought it had caused more harm, and this was the single highest figure in the entire survey, the thing Russians agreed on over any other.

So what did they see as the innate positive qualities of Russians? This open question elicited, on the basis of 2,957 surveys, three leading qualities: “open,” “simple,” and “patient.” The ideal Russian, it seemed, was a person without qualities. It was clear to Gudkov that this was the blank mirror of the hostile and violent regimes under which Russians had long lived.

Now this hollowed-out person was holding up the emptiness as his greatest virtue. If “open” and “simple” described the undifferentiated nature of a Russian, then “patient,” as Gudkov read the responses, referred to Russians’ tolerance for violence. In contrast to the imaginary European, all of whose qualities described agency, the respondents saw themselves as subjects of a regime that ruled by force. This made it seem that the war in Chechnya, which most of Gudkov’s circle saw as a tragic anomaly, was actually a logical expression of the people’s expectations.

Homo Sovieticus’s central trait—doublethink—was in full display across age groups.

Yeltsin opted to fight directly against the rising wave of nostalgia. His campaign endeavored to drown out Old Songs About the Most Important Things with a barrage of messages, most of them frightening. Cartoons imagined a future under the Communists, with nothing in the refrigerator and only one program on television.

The vehicle had headlights, which illuminated the Soviet Union’s future as a superpower. The vehicle also had rear lights, which cast a beatifying glow on the crimes of the regime that preceded the war. The vehicle’s heft conveniently obscured the outsize losses of the Soviet military and the disregard for human life that had made them, and the Soviet victory, possible.

Ethnos entered everyday Russian speech, as did other concepts of Gumilev’s coinage, such as passionarnost’, a measure of the degree to which an ethnos was initially receptive to radiation and eventually possessed of ethnos-specific powers.

Fomenko was a classic conspiracy theorist: he proved his assertions by way of relentlessly logical constructions based on random mathematical assumptions, and he dismissed all contrary evidence as falsification by his enemies. Fomenko was particularly popular with the exact-sciences crowd, including the chess champion Garry Kasparov, who for a time became a vocal adherent.

lending his theories ever more credibility.24 This was yet another reason for family fights: Masha’s grandmother held forth on ethnogenesis, Masha’s mother screamed at her about the math that proved that everything was something else, and Masha’s grandfather shouted the loudest that all of it was a Jewish conspiracy.

In 1994, Dugin published The Conservative Revolution. In this book, he envisioned a movement that would resist what he called “extremist humanism”—the idea that all humans everywhere have rights—and the concept of a law-based society.

Old government, Party, and KGB hands had filled the many voids at all levels of the bureaucracy and had resumed their ascent up the power ladder, as though the end of the Soviet Union had caused just a temporary layoff.

In a survey conducted by Gudkov’s colleagues, a majority of the respondents—52 percent—said they felt “outrage” at the bombing, and 92 percent said they believed the bombing campaign was illegal. Twenty-six percent said they felt “anxiety,” and 13 percent confessed to feeling “fear.”14 Gudkov sensed that all three emotions—outrage, anxiety, and fear—were stand-ins for “humiliation,”

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.

Elections became a popularity contest in a very small political field, where the leading candidates, by definition, agreed with one another.

Gudkov started thinking that “political party” and “election” were just two more Western terms that could not be used in Russian—except to mislead. A more precise term could be borrowed from Max Weber, whom Levada had had Gudkov study all those years ago. The term was “acclamation,” a process by which the governed affirm a choice already made for them.

Part of this surely had to do with a sort of habitual insensitivity Russians as a society had developed in response to the wars, the terror, the violence, and poverty of its own twentieth century. This insensitivity, in turn, was tied, as both cause and effect, to the lack of social or cultural institutions that help process feelings.

America was the very definition of modernity; it was the country that Russia had failed to become.

Hatred for the United States had become a Soviet political and social tradition. And now Russia’s search for its own traditions infused this hatred with new potency.

The top political technologist of them all, Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Moscow editor who manufactured Putin’s public persona in advance of his election, found Dugin and promoted his ideas. Dugin had a knack for putting the generalized anxiety of the elite into words, and these words sounded smart.

“Individualism and the independence of opinion are traits characteristic of Europe, where we don’t belong,” he said. “Obedience and love for one’s leader are the traits of the Russian people.”

Fifteen years earlier, a prominent perestroika politician, historian Yuri Afanasyev, had called this “the aggressively obedient majority.”

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.