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. The regime aimed to annihilate personal and historical memory and the academic study of society. Its concerted war on the social sciences left Western academics for decades in a better position to interpret Russia than were Russians themselves—but, as outsiders with restricted access to information, they could hardly fill the void. Much more than a problem of scholarship, this was an attack on the humanity of Russian society, which lost the tools and even the language for understanding itself. The only stories Russia told itself about itself were created by Soviet ideologues. If a modern country has no sociologists, psychologists, or philosophers, what can it know about itself? And what can its citizens know about themselves? I realized that my mother’s simple act of categorizing the Soviet regime and comparing it to another had required an extraordinary measure of freedom, which she derived, at least in part, from having already decided to emigrate.

I looked for Russians who had attempted to wield them, in both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The cast of characters grew to include a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, and a philosopher. If anyone holds the tools of defining the elephant, it is they. They are neither “regular people”—the stories of their struggles to bring their disciplines back from the dead are hardly representative—nor “powerful people”: they are the people who try to understand. In the Putin era, the social sciences were defeated and degraded in new ways, and my protagonists faced a new set of impossible choices. As I wove these stories together, I imagined I was writing a long Russian (nonfiction) novel that aimed to capture both the texture of individual tragedies and the events and ideas that shaped them. The result, I hope, is a book that shows not only what it has felt like to live in Russia over the last thirty years but also what Russia has been in this time, what it has become, and how.

All who were thinking about the Soviet Union, inside the country and outside, shared two handicaps: they had to base their conclusions on fragmentary knowledge and phrase them in language inadequate for the task. 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. The most symbolic, though by no means the most violent, battle in this war was fought in 1922, when Lenin ordered two hundred or more (historians’ estimates vary) intellectuals—doctors, economists, philosophers, and others—deported abroad on what became known as the Philosophers’ Ship (in fact, there were several different ships). The deportations were framed as a humane alternative to the death penalty. Future generations of intellectuals were not as fortunate: those deemed disloyal to the regime were imprisoned, often executed, and almost always separated from their chosen discipline.

While the arms race spurred the Soviet government to rejuvenate and nurture the exact sciences and technology, there was nothing—or almost nothing—that could motivate the regime to encourage the development of philosophy, history, and the social sciences. These disciplines atrophied to the point where, as a leading Russian economist wrote in 2015, the top Soviet economists of the 1970s could not understand the work of those who had preceded them by a half century.

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.

THE PHRASE A RUSSIAN INTELLECTUAL is probably most likely to use when talking about the early 1980s is bezvozdushnoye prostranstvo—“airless space.” The era was stuffy like the Russian izba, a log cabin, when its windows are caulked for the winter: it keeps out the cold, but also the fresh air. The windows will not be opened even a crack until well into spring, and as time goes on, smells of people, food, and clothing mix into one mind-numbing undifferentiated smell of gigantic proportions. Something similar had happened to the Russian mind over two generations of Soviet rule. At the time of the October Revolution, the Russian intellectual elite had been both a part of and a partner to the European conversation about God, power, and human life. After fifty years of purges, arrests, and, most damaging, unrelenting pressure on what had become an isolated thought universe, the Russian intellectual landscape was populated by barely articulated ghosts of once vibrant ideas. Even Communist ideology was a shadow of its former self, a set of ritually repeated words that had lost all meaning.

Yup. This is how it happens.

“As the time passed, Marx’s successors revealed a tendency to present his teachings as a finite and all-inclusive concept of the world, and to regard themselves as responsible for the continuation of all of Marx’s work, which they considered as being virtually complete,” wrote Yugoslav Marxist dissident Milovan Djilas. “Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science.”

Mmmmm. 😬

For the first two years at the psychology department, Arutyunyan was in hell. Endless hours were devoted to a subject called Marxist-Leninist Philosophy. This was a clear case of propaganda masquerading as scholarship, and while the young Arutyunyan might not necessarily have phrased it this way, she cracked the propaganda code. She developed a simple matrix on which any philosophy could be placed and easily appraised. The matrix consisted of two axes on a cross. One ran from Materialism (good) to Idealism (bad) and the other from Dialectics (good) to Metaphysics (bad). The result was four quadrants. Philosophers who landed in the lower left quadrant, where Metaphysics met Idealism, were all bad. Kant was an example. Someone like Hegel—Dialectics meets Idealism—was better, but not all good. Philosophical perfection resided in the upper-right-hand corner of the graph, at the pinnacle of Dialectical Materialism. Arutyunyan shared this matrix with several classmates, and now they had Marxist-Leninist Philosophy down.

This is really useful.

There was a subject called Anthropology, but this area of study in its Western understanding was disallowed in the Soviet Union, so the course would more accurately have been called Theory of Evolution. It included the study of genetics, banned for decades but recently redeemed, and this was interesting. Physiology of Higher Nervous Functioning featured human brains in formaldehyde, which were brought in for every class and set on each table. Arutyunyan was too squeamish to use her finger—gloves, in short supply all over the country, were not an option—so she stuck it with a pen, earning the professor’s wrath. “You are damaging the brain!” he bellowed.

Holding an actual human brain is one of the oddest things someone can do. I can endorse avoiding it entirely.

Marxism in the Soviet Union had been boiled down to the understanding that people—Soviet citizens—were shaped entirely by their society and the material conditions of their lives. If the work of shaping the person was done correctly—and it had to have been, since by now Soviet society claimed to have substantially fulfilled the Marxist project by building what was called “socialism functioning in reality”—then the person had to emerge with a set of goals that coincided perfectly with the needs of the society that had produced him. Anomalies were possible, and they could fall into one of two categories: criminality or mental illness. Soviet society had institutions to handle both. No other kind of disharmony was conceivable. Inner conflict was not an option. There was really no reason to take up the subject of the psyche.

This is such a deeply strange way of having to navigate around your world. Some of it overlaps to the west, but it just seems a little tilted.

In 1914 the society became a full-fledged institute, with teaching and research functions. Then the narrative on the site becomes suddenly depersonalized: “During the years of acute ideological struggle for the construction of a Marxist psychology, the institute’s leadership changed.” In fact, the institute itself was abolished in 1925. Six years later, the university shut down all departments dedicated to the humanities and social sciences. Ten years after that, the humanities returned, but psychology was now subsumed by the department of philosophy. Only in 1968 did the Soviet government recognize psychology as a discipline in which degrees could be awarded—and the country’s leading university resumed, at least on paper, the study and teaching of the psyche—after a break of nearly half a century.6 The new students could hardly have known that less than a century ago Russian thinkers had been reading Nietzsche and arguing with him, or that Lou Andreas-Salomé, who popularized the great philosopher’s ideas in Russia and broke his heart, was a native of St. Petersburg. She went on to become one of Sigmund Freud’s early and close students and to work as a psychoanalyst in Germany almost up until her death in 1937, at the age of seventy-five, but her ties to Russia had been severed by the Revolution nearly twenty years earlier.

The demise of Russian psychoanalysis spelled the near-total end of any study of the psyche—in part because psychoanalysis had so dominated psychology and in part because the new state was now rejecting any explanation of human behavior that was not both material and simple. Ivan Pavlov’s straightforward theories of cause and effect fit this approach perfectly; it remained only to condition the entire population, rendering it pliant and predictable. Etkind writes of a psychoanalyst in Odessa who installed a portrait of Pavlov on the flip side of a likeness of Freud that hung in his office: Pavlov would face visitors during the day, when an official might happen by, and Freud greeted his clandestine psychoanalysis patients in the nighttime.

When Arutyunyan was a student at Moscow State University, Leontiev’s course represented the sum total of psychological theory taught in the first few years. His lectures were boring, painful, and infuriating. It made Arutyunyan angry that Leontiev’s theory recognized only the conscious part of being human, leaving no room for metaphysics. Leontiev taught by feeding his students uncatchy phrases that summed up counterintuitive theories. One such mantra was “shifting motive onto the goal.” For instance, if the student’s goal is to pass his exam and he develops interest in the subject matter, then his motive will have shifted onto his goal. This never seemed to happen for Arutyunyan.

This sounds awful.

Gradually, Arutyunyan and some of her classmates discovered that the space around them was not entirely airless. Russian architecture, created as it was for a very cold climate, contains a peculiar invention called the fortochka. It is a tiny window cut inside a larger pane. Even when windows have been sealed for the long winter, the fortochka can remain in use, being opened regularly to allow air to circulate. The Soviet university, as it turned out, had its fortochkas, and the way to learn was to hunt for them and then to stick your whole face in them and breathe the fresh air as though one’s lungs could be filled up with reserve supplies.

Hm.

Another fortochka was Alexander Luria, who lectured in the clinical psychology specialty. Luria had served as chairman of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in the 1920s,19 had survived by going into neurology, and had become a great storyteller of the mind. Across a generation, an ocean, and the Iron Curtain, he managed to inspire Oliver Sacks, who considered Luria his teacher in the art of the “neurological novel.”20 The most important fortochka of all was found in the university library, which contained the spetskhran, a restricted-access collection to which a resourceful student or researcher could gain access. The spetskhran contained Freud’s case studies. It was the most compelling, most engrossing, most mind-shattering thing Arutyunyan had ever read. Only years later, long after the last of the old Russian psychoanalysts had died, did she realize that what tied all the fortochkas together was not just that they gave her new knowledge and that they contrasted markedly with the mind-numbing recitations that filled the university, but that they all saw and described human beings the way she wanted to understand them.

WHAT WAS ARUTYUNYAN GOING TO DO with all the knowledge she was hoarding? Being able to apply one’s theoretical expertise was an unimaginable luxury in the airless space—if one was a psychologist or social scientist, that is, rather than a rocket one. Intellectuals aspired to and prized luxuries of a different order: an unburdensome job in a nontoxic environment that left time for thinking and breathing some fortochka air. This was a lot to want, and getting it required luck, brains, and connections. Arutyunyan, both of whose parents were sociologists, got a job at the Institute of Sociology, and this was virtually a dream setup.

A cautious excavation began after the Second World War. The Institute of Philosophy in the Soviet Academy of Sciences was allowed to acknowledge the existence of a discipline called “sociology.” The primary context in which the word appeared was criticism of Western sociological theories, which provided scholars with an excuse for studying them.

Haha.

Levada was frighteningly intelligent, unabashedly passionate, and most important, he had mastered the art of thinking out loud during a lecture. He suggested that the peculiarities of everyday life in the Soviet Union could be observed, examined, and understood. In one lecture, for example, he analyzed a short story in which collective-farm workers are sitting around waiting for a Party meeting to start, complaining about their unreasonably demanding bosses and terrible work conditions. Then the meeting commences and the workers take turns lauding their collective farm’s accomplishments and boasting of their own contributions to the Soviet cause. Once the meeting is over, they go home, where they return to complaining of their senseless work and miserly pay. Levada showed that the public-private behavioral divide, instantly recognizable to all his listeners, could be understood not just as hypocrisy but as a social and cultural institution.

This is really well observed.

Within two years, it was all over. Levada’s problems began after he published his university talks in two tiny books titled Lectures on Sociology. The books passed the censors, who allowed a thousand copies out into the world, but once they were published, they were condemned for not relying on concepts of historical materialism in all their statements, and, worst of all, for “allowing for ambiguous interpretations”—in other words, for being the opposite of dogma, forcing listeners and readers to think.28 Levada publicly admitted his mistakes but was still stripped of one of his advanced degrees and eventually forced to resign from the Institute. All his staff lost their jobs.

Jesus. That's nuts.

WESTERN VISITORS to the Soviet Union who lucked into Moscow’s insular intellectual circles were usually taken with the luxurious sense of timelessness in which they existed. With careers almost entirely lateral and ambitions, if they ever existed, generally shelved, people like Arutyunyan, Gudkov, and even Dugin seemed to study solely for the sake of learning, rarely even entertaining the possibility that theory could be put to work in any way.

Arutyunyan held a doctorate in philosophy by now, but her first client was disappointed to discover that he had just paid top-shelf rate for a meeting with a skinny young woman. She showed him her degree. He still wanted his money back because he had come for help talking sense into his teenage son but the boy had taken off on the way to the appointment.

Mmm. 😣

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev was a strange Communist bird. Raised in rural central Russia outside the city of Yaroslavl, he first learned of the Party as the all-powerful monster that punished the needy and the hungry: women in his village were jailed for digging potatoes out of the already frozen soil of collective farm fields, where they had been abandoned after a poorly managed harvest.

This is a strong image.

Alexander Nikolaevich was struggling, in a way he could not yet put into words, with the idea of what—and who—was and was not Soviet. Yesenin, who had so eloquently written about his love of Russia and his childhood in its beautiful and impoverished countryside, was somehow not Soviet. Now, as the Red Army was liberating its own citizens from Nazi camps, they were condemned as traitors for having allowed themselves to be captured. Alexander Nikolaevich went to the railroad station to see the cattle cars carrying these inmates from the Nazi camps to the Soviet camps, and he saw women who went there in the hopes of seeing their missing men, if only for a second, and he saw hands throwing crumpled-up pieces of paper out of the cattle cars—these contained their names and addresses and the hope that someone would let their loved ones know they were alive.

Still, he remained, in increasing contrast to most of the nomenklatura, a thinker. In 1972, Alexander Nikolaevich published an article titled “Against Ahistoricism.” To those who could fight their way through its turgid Soviet language, the article delivered a radical message of protest against what Alexander Nikolaevich saw as the Soviet Union’s growing nationalist conservatism based on the glorification of some imaginary peasant class’s traditional values.3 “Political exile” to Canada was his punishment for publishing it.4 He returned more than a decade later, to become idea man to the new general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, in his project of reforming the Party and its country. In December 1985, Alexander Nikolaevich authored a document that proposed radical change: The main components of perestroika are: A market economy in which market rates are paid for labor. The property owner as the agent of freedom. Democracy and glasnost, which bring with them information accessible to all. A system of feedback.5

The stores here were better stocked, even though they were affected by the shortages. The buildings were better designed and constructed.7 The air was better than anywhere else in the city: the neighborhood in the west of Moscow contained less industry and more parks than any other.8 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.

Hm. 😕

The Marxist principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” was replaced with the more pragmatic approach of paying what the state could pay for extracting the maximum from those with high ability. Over the next few years, the list of those whose labor the state valued most highly was established, as were the mechanisms of compensation. 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.

A bunch of the cultural items of this time are held up favorably the world over. Our modern film language is a blending of Eisenstein (Soviet) and Pabst (American) in a really direct way. It's not even simplifying by much to say: international commercial cinema has two dads. These two dudes.

“The leadership of the Soviet Communist Party has, from its early days, been profoundly elitist in its attitudes,” Mervyn Matthews, a British scholar of Soviet society, wrote in the 1970s. “It has regarded itself as an enlightened band which understands the march of history and is destined to lead the Russian people—indeed the whole world—to communism. In daily life it has always ensured for itself and its close associates privileges commensurate with these awesome demands.”

Ah. There is the rub.

Paradoxically, the peculiarities of the Soviet economic system made the borders between differently valued groups of citizens only starker and harder to penetrate. Taxation was minimal, and redistribution of wealth was not its goal.

Members of the Politburo lived in the same building as other members of the Politburo, procured consumer goods at the same distribution centers, sent their children to the same schools, got treated at the same clinics, were given plots of land on which to build a wooden dacha—a weekend or summer house—in the same area, and took the waters in the same sanatoriums. The same was true for members of the Academy of Sciences, who had their own special infrastructure, and for members of any of the “creative unions,” such as those of the writers, artists, or cinematographers.

Hm. Suspicious.

Galina agreed. She would keep the baby and raise him alone. This, too, was an ordinary path. For decades now, the Soviet Union had been trying, and failing, to recover from the catastrophic population loss caused by the Second World War and the Gulag extermination system. The thrust of the population policies initiated by Khrushchev was to get as many women as possible to have children by the comparatively few surviving men. The policies dictated that men who fathered children out of wedlock would not be held responsible for child support but the state would help the single mother both with financial subsidies and with childcare: she could even leave the child at an orphanage for any length of time, as many times as she needed, without forfeiting her parental rights.

Wow.

Women could put down a fictitious man as the father on the child’s birth certificate—or even name the actual father, without his having to fear being burdened with responsibility. “The new project was designed to encourage both men and women to have non-conjugal sexual relationships that would result in procreation,” writes historian Mie Nakachi.18 When Galina’s son was born on May 9—Victory Day—1985, she gave him her own last name, Misharina, and the patronymic Yurievich, to indicate that his father’s name was Yuri. Lyosha’s full official name was thus Alexei Yurievich Misharin.

The leaders of many of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics were becoming lax in monitoring and containing nationalist forces: for decades the country had prosecuted local nationalist activists as enemies of the state, but perestroika loosened talk of self-determination in the Baltic republics, Ukraine, Georgia, and even in places that were nominally part of the Russian republic within the USSR. It was beginning to pull the country apart, creating tension and instability when the USSR could least afford it.

The public, to the extent that Alexander Nikolaevich could track what the public was thinking, also seemed torn between inappropriate passivity and equally inappropriate action: those who began speaking out seemed invariably to choose extreme positions, whether they were speaking in favor of democratization or in favor of cracking down to preserve the Soviet order. Alexander Nikolaevich took to calling all of them “extremists.”

Hm. That will do it.

In May 1988 he convinced the Central Committee to approve a concerted effort to restore thought and knowledge to the land. “It has come to the point where the West now has scholars who are better versed in the history of our own homegrown philosophy than we are,” he wrote in the draft of an address to the Central Committee. “Twentieth-century Western philosophy contains a number of ideas that are avidly debated in books, at conferences, and so on. But many of these ideas were originally articulated by our thinkers. This is not surprising, for the tension [his italics] of the spiritual quest in Russia in the years leading up to the Revolution exceeded that of any European country.” Alexander Nikolaevich suggested creating a team of five or six editors who would put together a library of Russian philosophers, between thirty-five and forty volumes that would include works by depublished nineteenth-century thinkers as well as those who had sailed on the Philosophers’ Ship. He compiled his own list of thirty-nine thinkers to be restored to the Russian canon. And if this went well, he wrote, then books on history and economics (which he still called “political economy”) could follow. The Central Committee said yes.

BEFORE THE PLANNED COLLECTION could materialize, journals began publishing previously silenced philosophers. Even Heidegger could now see print. For someone like Dugin, this was a confounding moment. On the one hand, he no longer had to spend his days hunting down copies of banned books or hurting his eyes by trying to read the microfilm projected onto his wooden desktop. On the other hand, his entire life was constructed around just this: fighting his way to difficult ideas, becoming one of the few people in the country to understand them, and continuing his process of self-education, knowing that he had all the time in the world, his hated static world. If the world was no longer static, and if the knowledge was no longer banned, who was Dugin now?

Novodvorskaya would later write that Evgenia was not so much anti-Soviet, like Novodvorskaya herself, as un-Soviet.6 Evgenia was having the time of her life—she was engaged, she was performing, she was admired, and she was also in love. She was having such a good time, in fact, that she was proving too much even for the Democratic Union, which kicked her out for talking out of school, often while drunk.

I know that crowd -- God help them.

The Italians gave Evgenia her first computer, but then the Radicals, too, kicked her out, for oversleeping on the day of a demonstration in front of the Romanian embassy. She decided that she was more interested in capitalism than in politics and started the Russian Libertarian Party. She also came out as a lesbian—the love that had been fueling her political life was the love of a woman—and launched the first queer organization in the country, the Association of Sexual Minorities (more specific terms of identity, like “gay” or “lesbian,” were not yet familiar to the Russian ear).

That is amazing.

Before finding Novodvorskaya, Evgenia was briefly involved in an effort called the Group for Trust Between East and West, whose sole agenda was to counter the most basic premise of Soviet propaganda: the idea that the West was a threat. Even in Alexander Nikolaevich’s rhetoric, if not necessarily in his thinking, this premise appeared inviolate: almost any time he wrote a letter or gave a speech on the state of things in the Soviet Union, he made note of Western efforts to undermine the country and Western plots to sabotage perestroika itself. So if one strove to be, first and foremost, un-Soviet, as Evgenia did, one did well to embrace any number of political positions, from libertarianism to pacifism, one more Western than the next. Gay rights, the legalization of drugs, and the abolition of the death penalty, the lifting of all state controls in favor of the reign of the unfettered free market—everything fell naturally into line.

Soviet internationalist rhetoric was just one of the aspects of hollow ideology that were being deflated. While official Soviet media pre-glasnost doled out their own regular servings of antisemitism framed as anti-Zionism, the system had generally subdued outright Russian-nationalist voices. Now this lid was lifted and hatred emerged in many stripes, of which Pamyat was the brightest. The Soviet leadership was either unsure about how best to react or unwilling to react, but Alexander Nikolaevich raged privately and publicly.

After decades of amorphousness underground, Pamyat had acquired a charismatic leader, a former photographer named Dmitry Vasilyev, who railed against all the world at once: the Holocaust was a Jewish conspiracy (Eichmann was a Jew); rock music was a Satanist plot (slowed-down vinyl records sounded out chants to Satan); and yoga was a Western scourge (all the West wanted to do was contaminate Russian culture).

I feel like some bad things are falling into place here.

Dugin’s book about Guénon was published in Russia in 1990, among many books—some of them better-written, but few by a better-read person—that attempted to find a metaphysical, esoteric, supernatural, or, on the contrary, ultrarational, mathematically argued way of explaining all of life and the world, which had so suddenly become so complicated. Dugin himself, meanwhile, found the Tradition he wanted in the Orthodox faith—not in the contemporary church but with the Old Believers, a faction that split off in the seventeenth century and had since attempted to maintain its ways in spite of the modern world.

That seems kind of national socialist; keep some eyes on this fella.

The successful member of Soviet society, suggested Levada, believed in self-isolation, state paternalism, and what Levada called “hierarchical egalitarianism,” and suffered from an “imperial syndrome.”24 Self-isolation was a key strategy for both the state and the individual: as the Soviet Union sealed itself off with the Iron Curtain, so did the Soviet citizen separate himself from everyone who was Other and therefore untrustworthy. Ideology supported these separations by stressing “class enmity,” but keeping one’s social circle small was also a sound survival strategy during the era of mass terror, when excessive trust could prove deadly.

He described it as a “universal institution of a premodern paternalistic type, which reaches into every corner of human existence.”26 The Soviet state was the ultimate parent: it fed, clothed, housed, and educated its citizen; it gave him a job and gave his life meaning; it rewarded him for doing good and punished him for doing wrong, no matter how small the transgression. “By its very design, the Soviet ‘socialist’ state is totalitarian because it must not leave the individual any independent space,” wrote Levada.27 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.”28 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.

This is important.

Even though the exact systems of rank and privilege were secret, the basic logic according to which the state doled out goods and comforts in exchange for valued services ruled every person’s life. At the same time, official ideology extolled equality and the state punished those who had, or wanted to have, too much. For Homo Sovieticus this translated into the value of equality within groups—a strictly enforced conformity at one’s station in life. This was what Levada termed “hierarchical egalitarianism.”

the Soviet person’s wonderful life was a function of the very size of his country. On the other hand, every Soviet citizen was constantly made aware of his ethnic origin, which was immutable and contained on every document that referred to him. Only members of the single largest ethnic group—the Russians—could occasionally forget who they were. “So Homo Sovieticus is by his very nature, genetically, frustrated, faced with the impossible choice between an ethnic and a superethnic identity,” wrote Levada.31 The antinomies required Homo Sovieticus to fragment his consciousness to accommodate both of the contradictory positions.

But the most important thing Levada believed about Homo Sovieticus was this: his was a dying breed. He had been formed by the one-two punch of the Revolution and the Great Terror: the first event brought its ideals and values, and the second taught Homo Sovieticus to conform in order to survive. But now, thirty years after the death of Stalin, the people so shaped were dying off. Their children and grandchildren would be different. That, in turn, would mean that the regime could no longer rely on them to ensure its survival through their behavior. And that would mean that the regime—the USSR as it existed—would collapse. This was a far cry from what the trade union authority, the labor ministry, and the Central Committee had in mind, but this was what Levada wanted his team now to prove: that Homo Sovieticus conformed to his description and that the phenomenon of Homo Sovieticus was bound to an older generation, which would mean that Homo Sovieticus would soon cease being the dominant social type in the Soviet Union, which would mean the end of the Soviet Union itself.

In the Soviet Union, there had been no public, precisely because there had been no conversation: “One Man of gigantic dimensions” must speak with a single voice, and only when called upon. How do you bring up a topic that has never before been discussed? How do you elicit the opinions of people who have not been entitled to hold opinions? How do you have conversations for which there is no language?

Homo Sovieticus was clearly opening up to the world, feeling reasonably peaceful toward even the most deviant of groups, like the homosexuals: fully 10 percent believed that homosexuals should be “left to their own devices,” another 6 percent thought they should be “helped” (the questionnaire did not specify what kind of help they should receive), and a third thought that homosexuals should be “liquidated.”32 Considering that homosexual conduct was a crime punishable by up to three years in prison, Gudkov thought this level of aggression was low. More than 20 percent of respondents wanted to “liquidate” rockers, and nearly 8 percent wanted to “liquidate” alcoholics. But then a whopping 27 percent wanted rockers to be left alone, and more than 50 percent wanted to see alcoholics get help. In the absence of any data that could be used as reference, the researchers concluded that these results reflected a trend toward greater tolerance. The highest proportion of those who wanted to “liquidate” homosexuals was found in respondents older than fifty and younger than twenty: adults of working age were markedly less aggressive.

Homo Sovieticus lived a life of constant negotiation with the omnipotent state, and the negotiation itself was both the individual’s sole survival strategy and an instrument of control. 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. What made this simple-sounding game instantly complicated was that it was not all pretense: the state indeed controlled the citizen’s fate, and the citizen could be said to owe his continued survival to the state. In this sense, the game of “Complicity” was similar: Homo Sovieticus pretended to participate in the affairs of the state, and this made him complicit in everything the state did. The game of “Agreement,” on the other hand, was a straightforward negotiation: pledging support for the state bought the citizen a modicum of privacy (and privacy was often the first thing dissidents were forced to sacrifice). The game of “Consensus” was a corollary of “Agreement”: it allowed Homo Sovieticus’s private self to be indifferent to and even dismissive of the state—as long as the public, collective citizenry demonstrated its loyalty to and enthusiastic support for the state.

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. But the researchers saw hope. Younger people seemed less “Soviet.” Asked to define a festive occasion, for example, respondents over the age of fifty were most likely to name official holidays, beginning with the days of military glory (Soviet Army Day and Victory Day) while the younger ones would say, “when you’ve gotten lucky” or “when you can get together with friends and have a drink.” Asked to describe their greatest fear, the older people would say “war” while the younger ones said “humiliation.” Asked to name the most significant event of the twentieth century, the older respondents most often said “victory in the Great Patriotic War” while the younger ones mentioned Stalinist Terror more often than anything else.