The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Homo Sovieticus was caught in an infinite spiral of lies: pretending to be, pretending to have, pretending to believe, and pretending not to. The fakery concerned the most basic of facts and the most fundamental of values, and what lay at the bottom of the spiral was an absence: “even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.” The system destroyed the individual and the fabric of society: nothing was possible in the absence of everything, resulting, wrote Levada, in “the falling standards of education, culture, morality, in the degradation of all of society.” If the Soviet person was ultimately an absence, then he could not reproduce. “Therefore we can view the Homo Sovieticus as a transient historical event,” concluded Levada. The Soviet man would go extinct, and so would the USSR.