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.

Marxist ideology had never had a firm grip on the country, that the Russian Orthodox Church had lost its own hold, and that without a central unifying set of beliefs, the country, pulled in opposite directions by social groups with different desires, would eventually self-destruct.

Not only did the country shield all essential and most nonessential information behind a wall of secrets and lies, it also, for decades, waged a concerted war on knowledge itself.

In the 1980s, social scientists working in the Soviet Union lacked not only the information but also the skills, the theoretical knowledge, and the language necessary to understand their own society. Very few of them were trying, against all odds and obstacles, and these people were groping in the dark.

“Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science.”

Snow-clad is the plain, and the moon is white Covered with a shroud is my country side. Birches dressed in white are crying, as I see. Who is dead, I wonder? Is it really me?1

Sergei Yesenin

A state born of protest against inequality had created one of the most intricate and rigid systems of privilege that the world had ever seen.

While the idle rich had to be stripped of their possessions, the highly trained had to be enticed to work for the new regime.

The Bolsheviks placed a premium on the “creative intelligentsia,” as it was termed—writers, artists, and, especially, filmmakers—as well as scholars and scientists. Military officers ranked even higher. But most of all, the Bolsheviks valued themselves: privileges and benefits for “political workers” exceeded those of all other groups.

The sociologists identified several key areas of negotiation that they called “games.” There was a game called “Work,” and one of the most-often-repeated Soviet jokes described it perfectly: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” There was a game called “Care,” in which “they”—the state—pretended to take care of the citizenry, which pretended to be grateful.

Homo Sovieticus was not indoctrinated. In fact, Homo Sovieticus did not seem to hold particularly strong opinions of any sort. His inner world consisted of antinomies, his objective was survival, and his strategy was constant negotiation—the endless circulation of games of doublethink.

What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it. There is no gap between totalitarian ideology and reality because totalitarian ideology contains all of reality within itself.

Human beings are perhaps born jealous—the emotion stems from a basic survival instinct.

humans play out that which they cannot remember.

The journey is extremely painful, but at the end of it lies freedom.

the apparent vodka paradox: for what it is worth, alcohol may help people adapt to realities that otherwise make them want to curl up and die. Parsons, who called her book Dying Unneeded, argued that Russians were dying early because they had nothing and no one to live for.

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.

TRAUMA IS, as one American theorist has phrased it, “a historical experience of survival exceeding the grasp of the person who survives.”6 It is the experience of having come into contact with a danger so great that it, and the fact of having escaped it, refuse to fit in one’s mind.