The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Gumilev’s intellectual quest could be seen as the essence—or as a caricature—of the fate of the social sciences in the Soviet Union: decades spent working in a hostile environment, isolated from the ideas of others, struggling to invent the wheel in the dark. Working on his own, Gumilev had had to create his own theory of the universe, complete with radiation from outer space. The totality of his theory and its scientific sheen had to appeal to post-Soviet minds, which had just lost another totalizing explanation of the world. 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. Other schools of thought that offered totality and scientific language were also gaining a foothold in Russia. Scientology, for example, was particularly popular among small-business men and bureaucrats in smaller cities. But two attributes made Gumilev’s ideas perfect for the historical moment. His insistence on the essential nature of ethnic groups helped explain the agony of the empire. His geographic determinism fit well with the idea of Russia’s unique destiny, which the Levada survey had shown to be so important for Russians.

This section, more than anything, reminds me of Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master." There was a wave of religious acceptance post World Was II as the returning population -- something like 30% of all Americans had been directly trained and deployed for the war effort -- came back and had to process those experiences. Churches were packed. "New Age" spirituality gained a lot of oxygen. A marriage of Atomic Age, science, and outer space symbols took on spiritual dimensions. "The Master" plays on the wholesomeness imagery of the time period (white WASPyness, in particular); with shattered internal lives; and men filling out the rest of their time after history has nothing left to do with them. The movie doesn't tip its hand on any of these things. That it choses to observe a niche movement, and a marginal figure's deeply personal relationship with the leader of the (growing) cult, as means into the cultural space of the 50s, I think is important. The movie sits in the honeydew glow of the time period but isn't awash in nostalgia for the place. It mostly spends time making direct and earthy observations of human interactions. Some of those humans happen to be talking very earnestly about time travel, fetal retention of experiences, immortal soul knowledge, and intergalactic infiltration. It is really very funny, and it is really very good.