The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

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.