The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

“By giving a green light to the [Eurasian Youth Union’s] anti-Western xenophobia, the authorities had created opportunities for adherents of more extreme variants of ultranationalism,” writes Horvath. “As the moderate opposition was driven to the margins, ultranationalists gained admission to Russia’s public sphere.”

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. He used longer-term statistics to demonstrate that 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.

Inspired by the turnout, the organizers turned the World Congress of Families into a permanent organization dedicated to the fight against gay rights, abortion rights, and gender studies. The headquarters of the new organization was in Illinois, but its spiritual center was in Russia, at the sociology department of Moscow State University.

Russia formally abolished krugovaya poruka at the turn of the twentieth century, when modernization seemed to mandate recognizing only individual responsibility before the law.

In 1936, Luigi Sturzo, an Italian priest and politician in exile, identified four key characteristics of the totalitarian state:

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:

The terror was used to enforce the ideology but also to fuel it. Whatever premise formed the basis of the ideology, be it the superiority of a particular race or of a particular class, was used to derive imagined laws of history: only a certain race or a certain class was destined to survive. The “laws of history” justified the terror ostensibly required for this survival.

In addition, 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.

It stood to reason, too, that researchers might overestimate the weight of ideology, because their objects of study were texts, and texts reflected the ideology more than anything else. Intellectuals were always falling into the trap of mistaking the written word for a true mirror of life.

What did not change was the importance of mobilization around whatever the ideology was,

A forced societal consensus, created through a monopoly on mass media, combined with strict censorship.

Gudkov did not include ideology on his list of characteristics of totalitarianism: he had concluded that ideology was essential only at the very beginning, for the future totalitarian rulers to seize power. After that, terror kicked in.

“Nazism never had any genuine political or economic principles. It is essential to understand that the very principle of Nazism is its radical opportunism.”

Gabowitsch concluded that the critique of corruption, and especially Navalny’s narration of it, created the preconditions for protest. Navalny’s term “Party of Crooks and Thieves” supplied the language. Protesters talked about many things being stolen from them—not only money and government services but also votes. Nemtsov put a number on it: he claimed that thirteen million votes had gone missing. The most blatant vote-fix of them all—Medvedev’s handover of power to Putin—could also be framed as a manifestation of corruption.

Then he told Masha that the truth was found in the book Blows from the Russian Gods, the screed that had been recommended to Masha once before. It purported to “uncover the real crimes of the Jews,” who had taken over the world. One subsection was called “The Sexual Traits of the Jews.” It began with homosexuality: “Not only was homosexuality widespread among the ancient Jews but it was known to take over entire cities, such as Sodom and Gomorrah, for example.” The lieutenant told Masha that every soldier in his platoon had received a copy of this book.3

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

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 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.

Shulman was reiterating Juan Linz’s definition of the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, but omitting his distinction between the all-political nature of totalitarianism and the nonpolitical nature of authoritarianism.

The hybrid regime survived by imitating both democracy and totalitarianism strategically in varied measure, she argued.

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

what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power. Consolidating power and resources was relatively simple because these countries had just recently had a Party monopoly on power and a state monopoly on property.

In a mafia state, the small powerful group was structured just like a family. The center of the family is the patriarch, who does not govern: “he disposes—of positions, wealth, statuses, persons.”25 The system works like a caricature of the Communist distribution economy. The patriarch and his family have only two goals: accumulating wealth and concentrating power.

In Putin’s case, his inner circle consisted of men with whom he grew up in the streets and judo clubs of Leningrad, the next circle included men with whom he had worked in the KGB/FSB, and the next circle was made up of men who had worked in the St. Petersburg administration with him.

Violence and ideology, the pillars of the totalitarian state, became, in the hands of the mafia state, mere instruments.

At the end of December, Dugin published an article in which he predicted the fall of Putin if he continued to ignore the importance of ideas and history.26 That is, in Dugin’s view, Putin’s treatment of ideas and history had been so sporadic and inconsistent as to indicate that he thought them unimportant.

Flamboyant and at times effeminate, Milonov read as gay—though, obviously, not to his current audience.

A group of more than fifty Russian writers wrote an open letter to the protesters. “We hope that you succeed,” it concluded. “For us that would serve as a sign that we in Russia can also win our rights and freedoms.”

Here, where neither side ventured, Masha’s heels sank into the snow. The priests, she realized, were praying for life on both sides of the barricades. She knew at that moment that there was a God and that there would be war.

The roomful of officials was responding not as it might have to a leader who had led the country to victory—that chant would have been “Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!”—but, in keeping with the “mafia state” model, as it would to a patriarch who had just given members of his clan a grand gift.

Totalitarian leaders, she wrote, were interested less in the idea itself than in its use as the driver and justification of action.

ANOTHER PERSON TO WHOM Putin’s speech sounded familiar was Dugin. He recognized himself. It had been just over five years since Dugin declared his intention to become his country’s lead ideologue, and it was happening: Putin was using Dugin’s words and his concepts, and he was carrying out his predictions.

This meant that Ukraine was not a nation state. It also meant that its division was preordained—the only question was whether it would be peaceful. There might be war, he had warned back then.

Dugin had spent years waiting for Russia to claim its place as the leader of the anti-modern world.

Russia would not stop at Crimea, he told his contacts: it would help southeastern Ukraine fight against Kiev. Sitting in a tall black leather chair in his home office, with hundreds of books for his backdrop, he would conduct long Skype sessions with Ukrainian activists. “This is only the beginning,” he would say. “Those who think that it all ended with Crimea are very wrong.”

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.”

Dugin was able to say that the events of the last couple of months—Crimea and, now, a war in eastern Ukraine—constituted a Russian renaissance, a “Russian Spring.” “We are starting to feel pride in our country,” he went on. “Russians are beginning to realize that they exist in the world not only as passive objects but as subjects of history.

Dugin wanted Putin to invade Ukraine openly, using regular troops, and to aim for a glorious victory that would expand Russia.

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.

On New Year’s Eve 2015, Alexei Navalny and his brother Oleg were found guilty of defrauding a company whose representative testified that it had not in fact been defrauded.

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.

“America wants to see us weak!” yelled a politician who happened to be the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov, the Stalin-era foreign minister who signed the Soviet-Nazi pact.

Newscasts and morning shows ran cookie-cutter anxiety-producing segments.

Paranoia offered a measure of comfort: at least it placed the source of overwhelming anxiety securely outside the person and even the country.

Richard Spencer, an American married to Nina Kouprianova, a Russian woman who served as Dugin’s English translator and American promoter.