The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Gudkov had decided that he needed to take time out of analyzing survey results to write about something else: a concept. The concept was totalitarianism. The word had not been used much in the last decade. It had been thrilling, in the late 1980s, to hear Soviet leaders—first Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev and then Gorbachev himself—start using the word to describe the Soviet system. These had been moments of epic honesty and openness. But then, after the Soviet regime appeared to have collapsed into a pile of dust, the word became instantly irrelevant: totalitarianism had ended, and the topics of the day were reforms, the economy, and the new system Russia was assumed to be building. Even the few people who stubbornly insisted on reckoning with the past generally chose to focus on one specific period in Soviet history—Stalinism—and one element of the Soviet system: state terror. But since the Levada studies continued to show that Homo Sovieticus was thriving and reproducing and the initial hypothesis about the withering of Soviet institutions had long been debunked, it seemed like a good idea to return to thinking about the nature of the system that had produced the institutions and the man.